Richard is a Marine veteran who was subject to 4 IED explosions and concussions in Iraq, his best friend being killed next to him, a traumatic brain injury, and post traumatic stress. He came home dealing with a lot and the arts ultimately saved his life. Richard felt called to bring this secret weapon of healing to his fellow veterans and this year alone his nonprofit CreatiVets will serve over 800 veterans!
Hey, everybody, it's still Courtney with an army of normal folks. And we continue now with part two of our conversation with Richard Casper. Right after these brief messages from our general sponsors, let's return to Richard on his service in a mounted infantry unit in a rock.
First, I went to two seven Marines, which is an infantry unit. And I get there and I start working up. I pause because I had the whole story with Harley too. I read my Harley cross Country. That's a pretty awesome story. I have an old soul, you know. I was like nineteen with a Harley. All my friend had crowdra guess, but I took that to California with me. There's a hilarious story in that, me and my buddy's driving across. I did twenty three hours straight at that thing. I wasn't supposed to. But anyways, so I get there.
Did you show up with crotchrot?
No? I was, I was going.
Ty three hours on a Harley and you weren't glded.
Nope.
I was still young and you have still thoughts.
Yeah, yeah, And so I get to the basis. So this is a straight up infantry unit, like they they just went to Afghanistan, they just got back and they're starting to do their train up and so they look at my yeah, yes, date like the damn supposed gown on the Marine Corps, and they approached me. After about two or three months training up with them, they say, hey, there's an issue. You're not going to be able to go to Iraq with us because we don't leave for Iraq until like January or February of two thousand and seven. And it looks like you get out in June of two thousd and seven, you'll be getting out when we're over there, so you can't come with us. And I was like, okay, well can I transfer somewhere? Like can I go to another unit that's deployed soon? And so they ended up sending me the first tanks because they had a toe unit, which is pretty much I went from ground infantry and mounted infantry. So toes are just in humbies like scouting ahead like they have toes and scouts and we have a shot of toe I don't think in Iraq since the initial invasion. So they're mounted with Mark nineteen's and fifty cows and used to become mounted infantry, and so I went over there with about.
Mounted infantry, meaning riding around in Humby's with machine guns mounted on top and that kind of yep.
And so we still get out, we do missions.
Yeah, you roll up, you get out, you do yep.
So a lot of it, yeah, and a lot of it was like EOD clearance, where we'd either help do security for some people. Mainly our our whole job was to secure the supply lines. So MSR Mobile was like the biggest highway that ran through Iraq with all these trucks coming on it. So we would constantly every single day just drive up and down it, make sure nobody's putting in IDs clear and id's. If we find them, we call them EOD. We do these side missionsd EOD like explosive device people that take a take a part of the bombs.
So there's a crap job.
Oh yeah yeah, hurt Locker. That movie was about EOD, right yeah, yeah yeah.
And so in my body does that have those big gloves and hoods on and they literally go and how many of those guys get blown up?
Well, uh, that's the thing. On Volentine's Day, you know, my coming up. One of my best friends well, not my best friend, but he was. He's one of those good, good people, didn't drink. Has a twin brother, phenomenal guy named Dan Hansen. After infantry went eod and then ended up dying two thousand and eight during on Valentine's Day, I got the call saying he died because he was disarming a bomb and it went off on him. So a lot enough, But it is a crap job to like one. But it's such a rogue job too, to be like, I'm gonna put on the suit that most likely will never protect me, and I'm gonna go in there and try to disarm this bomb so nobody else gets hurt.
And so you're out there in these finding these things.
Yep, and I found four for sure.
What does that mean?
I was blown up four times?
So how do you laugh?
Because, I mean, being blown up is a crazy experience.
But okay, we'll stop. Yeah, So this is a part that I think is really important for people to grasp before we go to the rest of your life. Yeah, after literally twenty five years of Afghanistan, the First Rock, Second Rock, I really, unfortunately think the public is desensitized to all of it. I mean, you can only see on CNN or Fox, or the empty movies that have been made about it, American serviceman service people on patrol and bombs going off and see pictures of destroyed humbies that hit a roadside. It's called an IUD, right, I AD before you start saying, well, that's just what happens, and you forget that that's a twenty one, twenty eighteen, nineteen twenty one, twenty two, twenty three year old kid inside that thing. And I think we get a sensitized to what quote getting blown up is. Can you walk me through your whole first experience and let our listeners understand what that really is?
Yeah? And so for me because I talk about it now for a living, and so it's easy, and I remember like dealing my own traumas, like going over it and being like, how do you explain it in a short form and be okay with it by the bay of time. It's just like I was blown up four times? Like how much do you want to know about it?
I want I want people to know because I want them to understand. Trauma is an overused word. Oh yeah, I mean we've got people that get talked too bad in the breadline of All two and Kroger, and they're traumatized. That's not trauma. That may piss you off. That may trigger some things that make that's not trauma. Yeah, getting blown up, that's got to be traumatic. Oh yeah, So just tell me about the day the first explosion went off. When you're in a humbye.
So the first time I got hit, it was November seventeen through eighteenth. I know because I had like the medical records.
How old are you?
I'm thirty nine now, but I was at the time.
Now were you well?
Because I did the Camp David thing, I was probably twenty one how many people in four of us?
So it is.
And there's a driver yep, so there was a driver. Actually was that the fifth one? Yeah, there's a driver and then what they call a vehicle commander, which is the in the passenger seat of the vehicle. And then there's a gunner who's like poking his head out of the humphy.
What the machine gun on? Yeah? Which is what fifty caliber?
It depends where you're at. So ours was a fifty cow. But then some are mark nineteens would shoot the grenades.
And then some are these are heavy duty guns.
Yeah, summer saws, which are light light machine guns. And I was the dismount at the time, so I was in the back left passer seat, right behind the driver.
What happened to the back right passenger seat. Oh, it's where the gunner hands sit down if he needs to.
Know there's still like there's a little thing in the.
So you don't put the guys in these things. You put for him.
Usually always four fifth if there's a squad leader, so Eric Kormack, So the squad leader always got a corman with them, so that would be the only one run around with five if there was in ours, it was like that's where you put your packs, your emerise everything else. You get stuff back there.
So there's four of you in this humvy yep. Another question I got, and I really want this to be I want a visual picture. Yeah. I remember reading early on that the American Humbies were not doing a good job protecting service members on these things, and you guys were actually plating them up yourself on base. Was that going on.
The first Yeah, the first part of the war, they were By the time we got to us, they still weren't super effective. We still have to put like sand bags and stuff on the floor to protect the bottom because the bottom wasn't protected at all. But we still had like the first I think it was the first generation armor where the doors still had like bulletproof glass and a little outfitting, but it was only the doors, so it wasn't the V shaped bottoms. But yeah, the ones that came in tyrack, a lot of them didn't have doors on them, so they were just like no doors, just humvy riding around, just getting vehicles out there as quick as possible. And then slowly they started building that building. Oh yeah, now they have like the V bottom ones that are like six feet off the ground and like to shape the blast like they actually did the research and were like, let's build equipment that would.
Hand So you're in the first generation kind of protective of up armored.
Yeah we're still you're.
Putting sandbags on the floorboard.
Yeah, well by that time we could like I was not well. I had to put a vest and stuff under my because I couldn't. I already had to break my seat because so when I became vehicle commander a few months or like a month after this incident, I didn't fit with my helmet on and my MVG's on top of that. So I had to break the passenger seat thing and I shoved like a rod back there, so I was like lean back and then I have to be like like just to put my MVG's on, Like I had to ride low in that thing. And so yeah, it was hard for me.
It's not built for right, So these things are not especially well built. They're packed full of four guys with some rations and the empty seat probably got sandbags on the floor or bulletproof vests on the floor. You guys are trying to protect yourself and you're out there trying to find bombs so your supply lines can get through unfettered. Yep, all right, this day, that's the picture of going down the road.
Yeah. So since I was a dismount in this one, I don't remember as much as when I was vehicle commander because I was up front watching the other three blasts. By this time we got hit. And the only thing I really remember about this one because I didn't pass out on this hit. But when the bomb goes up, you don't hear the bomb. You just see a flash of light and you kind of like come to. It's a really weird moment because I think the explosion is so loud that you kind of like don't register it. That was like the first one, but then there was so much debris instead of it almost felt like the vehicle was on fire because all that dust and smoke, because as you imagine it blows up, there's like a vacuum that's created. And I ended up tearing cartilage in my chest just because my mouth was open. So the overpressure of it in the cabin of the vehicle, because you know where the gunner's at, there's a hole, so air rushes in there, and I guess it rushed down my lungs and expanded my lungs to a point that torque cartilage in my chest. Like that's how bad the blast was. But when we get out of it, and this is another misconception, it's like where you see people like me and you're like, you don't have a brain injury, you don't look injured, and it's like it takes a toll. Those things protected the shrapnel from coming in, but it didn't protect the concussion from coming in and all this other stuff that happened. And so everyone on that team was there was a few concussions. They didn't actually give me a concussion on that one. They just had a torque cartilage and all that. But you're just going to this little on base medical like Corman and saying like, hey, here's what happened to me, and they either sign off on it or they don't sign off on it. But that one I don't remember near as much.
As what happened to the other three guys.
The other one, so they were just concussed. It wasn't we get back in the vehicle the next day and just go to work.
What did you run over it? Or was it near you? And they remote that one.
I can't remember which what it was because the other three I remember again since I was, I mean, I could have been sleeping. I might have been sleeping on that one. But the other three being a being vehicle committed, tell me about or I didn't remember because the blast was so.
You tore cartilage from the concussion going down your throat.
Yeah, because I didn't know. I got out almost like I was fine, because after a blast, you get out and you look around the truck as if it feels safe, you get out. Usually vehicle pulls up next to you, so in case snipers come, and so like you go assess your damage what you can do after you pull up a little bit. And so I remember pulling up and kind of like walking back and forth and just being like, why's my chest shirt? So bit like out of all my body, like why is my chest shirt? And I just kept on like kind of like breathing in and just being like what what is wrong? And I just kind of everyone's like, hey, is everyone good in the trucks. Wilder came over. I was like, yeah, my chest hurts a bit, but that's it, and we just go back on control like a little bit, but not much. It was mainly my chest that I was I was really suffering with and everything. Everyone's ears were ringing. But because we were able to change out the tire, it blew out the tires, but it didn't the it didn't go through the block, so the humpy was still functioning, and so we just put the new tires on there and just kept rolling. But about thirty minutes in, they said, hey, we're gonna go back to base just to check the whole chess thing. And they checked on it and that's when they said it was I don't know what the name someone out there does castro finchitis or something like that, where I tored cartilage in my chest. But the second blast, it was there was a marine that was a vehicle commander of the first vehicle, and so we run around with four humvees with the squad leader like roughly in the third humby. The lead vehicle commander controls our route like we're going up MSR mobile, and he chooses where we turn round points because you imagine if you turn around the same spot, that's where they're going to plant an id on your turnaround, and so you have to like choose where you're going no other direction. He'd been in two seven he was what two seven Marine two that came over. He's lost so many people and been in so many battles that he was like chewing through his leather gloves and as anxiety was getting so bad as being the lead vehicle commander, so I took over for him, and that's when I got hit three more times. And that's where like I could I remember a lot more because I was in the front seat. But that first blast that happened was it was they call him like if you hear the term one thirty or one five to five. It's the size of the shell, like a shell that would be in a tank that you shoot out, like one five to five African was like the big shell. One thirties were still pretty big. And if you google like one thirty shell military shell, you'll see how big these things are. But they'll stack these and wrap them up and put a detonator on instead of blown up like two of these on your vehicle, and they'd either.
One five to five shells about the size of like a like a it's similar. It's not as fat, but it's about same in volume as a like a propane gas tank for your grill.
One thirty is more like a I think a propane The one fifties a little bit, a little bit even larger.
It is thinner, so imagine a bomb that big. And then they wrap three or four and yeah.
But the one thirty is is more like the propane tink because it's like a lot bulky or two. And so they two they've been two of those wrapped up with each other. And when I say we were blown up this one, there's only one that was directly underneath us. The other two were just to the side.
Of us.
So this one was only a car length away from us when it blew up on our vehicle, and that one, that one hurt, And that one was where they talked about my brain injury. Was like, your body moves, but your brain stays in the same spot when it's a cussion that big, and so the brain knocking against the walls what causes a lot of that damage. But that was the same way where it's like it blows up and you're just like where am I, and you just taste burnt dirt. It's weird that you just taste burnt dirt in your mouth, and it's just you're just yelling if everybody's okay, and you're trying to figure out what's happening, and you need to move up, and you hear the radio and it's just all chaos. So it's so hard to remember those impacts. But the second one was where I got out of the truck after we assessed the situation, and I remember walking around and I just kept checking my leg because I felt like I had trappedelled it. It was one of the things where you know your keys, you like check your pocket and then magically they're gonna appear a five minutes later, so you check your pocket again. I was like do I have And I'm like looking, is there any blood blood coming out my leg I was like no, and my legs got hurt, like they just hurt so bad, such a sharp pain in them, and I was like, what is this? And then I kept checking and kept checking. It kind of like dissolved, but the endorphins of like, cause it was the blast that made them hurt so bad, But coming out of it was like coming out of anything else where. It released a bunch of endorsements. You kind of like I have a high after being blown up. It's a really weird thing that happens. But none of my other body parts hurt. But that's like a testament to like our chest gear that we had and everything else. Like my body hurt a little bit, but nothing like my legs did. And that's like one distinct thing I kept remembering because it's like a.
Big all that concussion just going against.
Your legs yep, and so just it was and it was my right one, which was the side that it was on, and so it was It's crazy because again everyone's like were you knocked out? People who were knocked out usually know because it's a very long time. But I think there's a lot of those where you see it in real time in boxing where someone gets hit and they kind of go down but they come right back to it. They were knocked out, but they hit the ground coming back and back up and everyone's like, were you knocked out? I was like, honestly, don't know. It's just you instantly react when you are conscious again. When you're blown up, you're just not in a good space obviously, and.
One of these things ends up with a guy right next to you being killed. We'll be right back.
November. I was blown up the first time and talk about these are the old Humbies where the where the gunner sits, the metal only comes up to about like you know, belly button high, and you're just sitting in there. This is the time where Army had like automated fifty calves, Like you could be sitting inside the Humby and have like almost like a video game fifty cows so you're not exposed. The Marine Corps with the hand me downs, we still had like the metal in no way, so your legitimate just popped out of there.
You're literally on top your torso is above it.
Yeah, the whole thing is visible. And so anytime we come up to something we think is ID, we corded it off. So we're on this like ginormous highway three lanes this way, three lanes this way, with like medium in the middle, and so we see it as we're driving up. First vehicle we drive up, we're like, hey, ID in the road, and we go off to left, go through the dirt, go get a better view of it. And I still have video footage of me like filming it just to make sure, like get in like the thirty two x zoom on my little JVC camera that I had with twenty gigabytes of data in there hard drive, and I'd zoom in and I was like, okay, that looks two fake. So typically if it was a very fake, it meant like someone was checking out how we operate, like how do we set up, Like how's this unit specifically set up? Usually for a future attack, so like testing it out. So honestly, I didn't think. I didn't have a high sense of like something bad it's gonna happen. I was like, Okay, this is them testing what we're doing. And so I go cording off on the left side. So I'm facing now traffic, and this is a very trafficked road of just trucks and trucks and they hate obviously being backed up. And so now we have a humbie. I'm facing the traffic that's coming at me the humphie, and the other side is just still pointed away in case someone wants to come across, but they're protecting anybody from coming that way. Then the other two of Humbhi's courting the other side of the road, so off make sure nobody comes. We have this little area secured, and that's when we call EOD to come in with a little like we have a robot too, a very small one that we can first drive up to it to test out see how fake this thing is, and if we have any thought that it's real, we have to call it EOD. We usually do it anyways, just call them. So while we were waiting for them to come out, and I'm like videoing this thing, and I even like get out of my truck because we're far enough away from it, but I get out of my I had to pee. Most people are like, where do you go bathroom? Like we just pee on the tire and so I get out and for some reason, and I typically never did this, I was like, I'm gonna make myself a hard target. And I'm like peeing, but I'm swaying, just like because the idea is, if there's a sniper, why are they gonna take the shot on the guy who's swaying back and forth kind of thing. Just be a hard target. And then there's a time too where I got my camera and I was getting back in the truck and I was like, oh, I'm going to get back in the truck just in case the sniper's out there. And I closed my door, set it down, and now there's a tattoo on my arm that you could see that has like angel wings and a cross, and it was only at the time it was these angel wings in a cross with no and there was a little thing here but no name in here. And so my gunner at the time, Luke Epsen, before we even went to war, I got this tattoo, like right before we left. He's like, why do you have that sash open with no name on it? I was like, all right, I designed this tattoo and I wasn't sure, like I'm probably gonna honor one of my family members who dies or something like that, someone close to me. But I just I loved the design of this and just wanted to show my faith and everything. And he's like, uh, would you put me on my arm if I died? I was like, no, you're a boot like that. So it was like that big brother little brother thing. I always gave him crap and he ended up being my gunner throughout the time that we were there, built an awesome relationship. He was a back home his dad's like his dad's a deacon now, but they were largely Catholic Christian faith and he kind of lost his faith before that. But I used to listen to even though you were't supposed to listen to music, I'd have Christian music and country music always playing. And so one cool thing before he passed, he said that he was like, he's like, I'm actually glad you're playing that because it brings me back to my roots and back home and all that stuff, and I feel like I found faith again kind of thing. And so, but go back to that time where we were sitting there and I shut the door and then some cars start creeping up. So every This is the problem with the military and the media whole thing, like starting to Vietnam, when I mean, it was good that people went over there to like for one unjust thing. So the military they're like, hey, stop this, we're watching. But then it got so oversaturated, and like you said, it not only desensitizes people, it puts rules in a place that probably shouldn't be there when you have your best intentions. So the actual rules like the roes or what you cut rules of engagement for if a vehicle starts approaching the first step, he has these little flags. He waves the flags. So if the vehicle keeps coming, he's supposed to now pop a flare, because we had little flares in there. If the vehicle keeps coming, he's supposed to shoot in the air. If the vehicle keeps coming, he's supposed to shoot at the ground in front of them. The vehicle keeps coming, he's supposed to shoot into like the top left windshield. And then they keep coming, try the engine block and it finally they keep coming, You shoot them.
Does that do all that in about four seconds?
Yeah, And that's the issue with it. But it was because if someone died and the media just portrayed it as like, oh, this innocent person was killed. It was like, well, they were going. We had to react to it because they were coming at us, and sometimes it was a mistake, but the other times it wasn't. So he keeps and all I see is his feet next to me, because legitimy imagine like you're in a truck with like the center council. Imagine someone just putting their feet right there next to you, and like every time you try to put your elbow up, you hit his leg and you're like, oh, hey, be cause they're just sitting there in that little swing that they're sitting in. And so I could see based off of where his feet are or how high or how low he's in the gun. If he like sits all the way back, he has to actually like duck into the vehicle to not be seen by people. And so I was like, Luke, you might as well get down while we're here, because just case sniper's Like I still didn't think there was a big threat, but I was like, just in case, And so I see his feet like scoop scoop a little further into the truck. But then is his feet go backwards. I'm like, Luke, I was like, you want to end up on my arm, don't you. He's like it'd be an ar RuView on your arm, Corporal Casper. But he just kept getting back up to like he just wanted to. He didn't want to do the escalation. He just kept on waving the flag. I was like, they're gonna keep kind of pushings, like there's nobody running just and then ten minutes later you shot and killed right beside me, and so he fell down into that and we tried to work.
Yeah it was not the cars, but nope, so was the whole idea to put this thing in the ground so they could stop you and get shots at you.
Yep. And so that means that they had eyes on me, like just knowing that I was sitting there being a hard target that time. And then even I had my door open when I was filming because where shot came from. As I was filming the propane tank that had to be within view of where the sniper was, so he might have he might have been just locked in on me for a little bit, being like.
So, do you have guilt that he got it and you didn't not?
I mean I'm more of guilt because I could have actually made him get down. But again, he's a good marine doing his job and it's not like we're both fought for it. But if I was just like, I could have been one of leaders. You're just like, no, get in and get in. Like if I would have had hard details that there was a sniper in the area, I would have had him locked in there. And so that's where that that guilt comes from.
If our listeners were here, they would see that Luke is now on that tattoo yep.
And so I went to Texas where he's from Kingwood and close his tattoo shop was Humble Humble, Texas, and I got his name as close as I could do his hometown.
See, that's not what getting blowed up sounds light to a decent stats public. That's personal. What did you know he's dot immediately?
No, And here's a good thing that going out was he didn't even know he was shot. And so that's the one comfort I could I brought to his family, was uh, because when he shot, he just I just said, Luke, are you hit? And he said, I don't know and he fell into the truck. So that was the only comfort I could bring to his family that he didn't know, and that's a comfort that brings to me too, that they didn't suffer suffer. And so when they pulled him out, I still had the bullets because it went through his armpit and threw both of his lungs and embedded into his arm. And I had it in my pocket for a while because we had to put in a little plastic bag for investigation, and so I had the like that took his life. He got on the chop We didn't know he's dead still because they're working on him. They had two corman on him at the time. Another army unit heard that someone was shot and they came and two people working on him. They got him on the chopper. We went off to try to find the dude, couldn't find anybody, and then they called us back to base and that's when they told us that he passed away.
What happens when you hear that, Oh my gosh.
It's just for a split second, everyone just breaks down. But then you realize that there's no days often more, and we just I just had to put someone else in the gun the next day and go out there and act like we didn't hate everybody and just go to work. So his best friend was there too, that was with him when he died. Now he's in the gun where his buddy just died, and I'm got to control everyone and be like, okay, let's go and patrol tomorrow.
Money gonna sound like a horrible question, but I can't. I can't not ask it. Who cleans the truck up?
We do? We do that, we clean the truck up? We do?
You're cleaning your buddy's blood out of that truck.
Yeah, so you're to I didn't have to vehicle commander, and that's selfish of me, but I was just like, you know, clean the vehicles and so what.
Happens when people loose limbs and stuff? Same game.
Yeah. So there's actually an incident the sugar factory for two seven where the guys that I served with. This is the deployment I didn't go on, but when they came back from where there's an id set off at a door that instantly killed ten marines and they had all the guys get up and they had three different black bags, one with green tape, one blue tape, one with red tape. So if you found a body part you put in the red tape. Blue was gear and green was gun, and so.
You're picking up their friends parts.
Yeah, we written songs about that. It's crazy to think that this is what they're mentally holding on to that people don't see. It's like nobody else does. There's no cleaning crews. There's no like investigative crew to come in and like clean, swab and do all that stuff and then have a profane, a trained professional coming and swee everything. It's the people who run it.
So the kid that's sitting in that gun the next day when you're going out, he knows Louke died in that spot the day before.
Yeah, he was with them when it happened.
How do you approach that knowing you are literally any moment from being dead.
You don't. You go through it. And this is the one. This is the grandest part of the military and the worst part of the military at the same time. As they train you how to not be vulnerable and to lose all emotion kind of thing while you're going through the process of war, but they don't give it back to you when you're done. So when I was over there, the only thing that saved us on a lot of trips was because this immediate reaction to requests. We were driving one night and so we don't have we don't run headlights at night, so we have night vision goggles, which don't work very well. You only seem like maybe twenty feet in front of you have these little bit ir lights on the front of your humby, and my driver's drive in. I'm sitting there in the pasture seat just like trying to stay awake, like looking at the road and instantly and this is crazy too, because you just go up, you just make loops. But all of a sudden, right there in the middle of of the road was a bob and I just l left as loud as I can, and the driver just goes left and then he's like, what he didn't see it. I was like there was an ied But it was that instant obedience to order that saved our life right there, because that was like homemade C four, like Russian style Sea four, packed into this little what they call speed bumps because it's like a metal with a little bitty loop like speed bump, and they put what they sorry audience, they call them anal beads. They're these little bitty uh like what do you call it saw blades that are just separated by two little pieces of cardboard and then they wrap them up so the moment that if you drive over them, the two metal pieces connect and it completes a circuit. So they usually when they put this speed bump on the road, they throw them out this way, so even if you swerve you hit those, it still blows up, not directly under for some reason why they put this one on. They put them over the top of it, and so luckily we swerve left. But it's that like when they strip away the Marine Corps at vulnerability and teach you, like just to go and go and go and not think about it. That's why we succeed when we do go to war. But that's also why we're killing ourselves when we come home from war, because they don't then say, well, here's how to remap back to the normal.
It maybe because they don't know how to remap. Yeah, okay, so that's the reality of driving a hum v around a rock in Afghanistan and fighting in these wars. And remember we're still talking about twenty one twenty four year old kids, yep, and your brain's getting right oled your body's getting beat up. And I'm glad you said talked about how head traum works because that's the same thing in football. Actually, if you get slobber knocked in football, your head moves, but your brain stays still. So what's happening is your brain spats around on the inside of your skull and getting bruised and traumatized. And it's why there's now in football concussion protocol And until your concussions over, you can't go back and play football because your brain has to recover. But you're sidd't. Yeah, military guys aren't because they go, oh yeah, your bells wrung, get back on humd and if you get four explosions, your brain's irreversibly affected.
Yeah, And they had they did have rules at least even when I was there. I think the rules privately changed now, but like for the better. But even the rule back then was if you had a concussion, first concussion, it was like yet twenty four hours.
Off, that is about two and a half weeks short.
Yeah, then if you get your second concussion, that's when you get to do I think a week and then third, third or two weeks and then third concussion means you're out, like you're unfit for duty because it's too.
Many times you have four.
Well, the first one, yeah, they didn't think. They didn't say I had a concussion.
There's no way if you tore cartlage in your chest that you were not concussioned.
Yeah, but they didn't say it. So I was on the road with zero at that time. And then January is like January's second was the first time I was hit it with the concussion. And I still remember this because I was sitting there thinking it was only sixteen hours off and they put me back on the normal shift because they're like, it's close enough to twenty four hours. So I didn't really get any time off, but I remember it being like, man, if I get blown up right now, he's gonna get a lot of trouble for putting on here the next day, So that that twenty four hour went through and I didn't get blown up, but the second day this is like people always say I'm lucky. I'm like, you don't even know why I'm so lucky. The second day of that as I was supposed to be recovering and I'm on patrol first vehicle. We're rolling down and a proof of smoke just comes up beside us, and I didn't see what the gunner saw. He say, hey, Gooba cast bro. I think someone just shot at us or something. I saw this proof of smoke come up, and so I go, we're outlaw. I was like, hey, outlaw too. Can you check the burm over here? My gunner says there was a proof of smoke, and so he looks. He's like, dude, that's a bomb. And he's like okay, So we cordon it off call eod. It was two one five five stacked with white phosphorus. So this is like napalm. This is if that would it would we would have been dead, completely dead. The only thing that saved us was whoever connected it. The blasting cap was the only thing that went off because they didn't make the circuit.
They pushed the button when you were BA was on our.
Truck and nothing. It was just the proof And so that was amazing for us. But it was something that I didn't even reflect on until really later on, when people are like, man, it's lucky that you didn't get work, and I'm like, you know, what's really lucky? At that time that little proof of smoke went off because I didn't even we didn't even realize we weren't. Just like in the moment in the military, you're not like, oh I could have died, I could have done this years like, oh my god, that was insane. We almost got blown up. Like that's how we process it.
So now it's time to start working new way out of the Marines and you're told you have a brain injury.
I actually wasn't told I had a brain injury.
Okay, well tell me how that worked.
So before this is the funny thing too. I had to extend. I don't think I've said this. I had to extend to go to war. I didn't actually meet when they first sent me to first Tank Battalion with first toes. They said I didn't make their deployment either. So I asked if I could extend in the Marine Corps, just even a few months, And I'm like, yeah, you could extend if you just want to do a month. And extend a month, I was like, I did not know that, or I would have done that with two seven, but thanks for telling me now, And so I extended one month in the Marine Corps just to go to war. So that was a whole nother hurdle. But then because I did that and they knew I was getting out the moment I touched down, I had to do my separation. They call it like steps and taps. I had to do that before I even left for Iraq. So, which is stupid anyways, because you're supposed touchdown or just have this time to like, you know, learn how to do resumes and stuff. And I did that before I even went to war, because they were just trying to you know, cut costs and be like, just do it now so we can get you over there. So the whole time, I was considered unfit for duty. So within four months of me being in Iraq, I couldn't work my normal job anymore. But I still was in Iraq. I was like, see you why for duty? Just because of the rule three concussions you're out rule. I got it and so, and I didn't know that my brain is was that bad. There was signs of it, but I didn't know the signs. I just figured they're the smart ones. So if they kept saying we're probably gonna send you to Ballad to get a cat scan, that's where they'll find out if you have any brain damage. Nothing. They never sent me. I just kept going throughout my days like normal. They just kept never sending me. So I was like, Okay, I must be good. But they'd put me on I'd be on this COC like the command center that was on Camp Fallujah, just as like a runner, and they'd be like, hey, go get Corporal Johnson from Hutt two to two. But the moment he said two two, I forgot the corporal's name. And then he'd say I'd be like, what was that, Gunny? And he'd say it again and I forget. I was like, what was the number? And he say the number and I forget the name. I was like, what was his name? And then he'd say that he just he'd get so pissed at me. I thought I was gonna get in trouble. So I started only learning the number because then i'd run there. There'd be two guys names on there. But hey, Gunny, once one of you up there, and then let him decide once you go up there. So I should have probably known, but I also thought I was just blown up a bunch of times. It's gonna take a minute for me to be unrattled so well for the rest of the three months goes by, and I fly back to the States and I get home in twenty on Palms, California, and I start checking out of the Marine Corps. Within the first like three days of me being home for more, I'm checking out going. I went to medical and just said like, hey, will you sign off on this? And're like, do you need to be seen by us? I was like, I don't think so, because nobody ever saw me then, and so I just had them sign off and I left the Marine Corps. So I didn't know I should have been medically retired. I still haven't been, but I just left and took six months off of just trying to find out what the next step was, and I knew it was college. But then after like six months is when I decided to go to the VA, and that's when I ended up getting diagnosed with it.
We'll be right back when you get back. Do you have survivors? Gill? No.
I didn't feel anything. It was not in like a bad way, didn't feel it like numb. They sit And I didn'tlearn until afterwards that PTSD doesn't even kick in until like one hundred and ninety days or plus out because it's like the think of whole reality shift. So I was just so happy to be home in like next phase of my life?
What do I do?
And kind of I felt pretty normal even coming home, even because you reflect on it and you feel like you're a bad person because you don't feel anything. You don't you don't feel anything that your friend. Do you feel it? Obviously you can't. It's hard to bring up. You can't talk to people. But you don't feel it, feel it like you think you would in the first initial stage of getting back. And I think that's because excitement's out weighing everything else. Your excitement levels are so high that it's kind of depressing everything else. So you're like, I'm back home. My mom came to see me, my girlfriend at the time came to see me. Like, Oh, I'm gonna do this. We're gonna travel across the country. I'm gonna eat Taco Bell. It's been like seven months and I hate Taco Bell. And you start getting so excited that I think you're suppressing them until it all just hits you at once. And that's kind of what happened.
I don't know the numbers, but I think during that time, how many servicemen a day were committing suicide.
So it's the numbers now they say is roughly there's roughly twenty suicides a day, and that's military and veterans, mainly veterans, is like seventeen points something of that. The other ones are active and reservist. But that's just to say that's including active.
I didn't realize.
Yeah, it's like number three for active or something. But that's only the VA study. So there's something called American Warrior Partnership out of Atlanta that did another study, a deeper dive where they partner with university you think of Alabama, and they went down to the Corner Report because what happens is if you don't have a suicide letter, they don't count as a suicide of a veteran. So if you get in a car accident or overdose or anything else, it's not suicide, it's an overdose. They're very black and white on that. But the Corner Report went down to like they actually went they searched every veteran who died. They went down to the path of being like is this most likely a death? So what they found was in their study that it is minimum of twenty three suicides a day in the veteran military is but it's most likely up to forty three because the people who didn't have notes still had all the indications that they've and I've seen this through the work we do with Creative. It's where someone was like, hey, before this program, I was going to have a rock climbing accident. I wasn't gonna leave a note. I didn't want my kids to know I killed myself. I was just gonna say, you know, hey, your mom fell off a rock. And so I know that they don't lead notes all the time. And so they did this big study that shows that most likely it's anywhere between the twenty three and the forty four number a day. Currently, that's.
Between two and twenty five hundred service people annually.
Yeah, we were safer in war than we were at six thousand people died in that twenty year war.
Right, and now you're losing five times as many service people, yeah, at home than you did in theater. So the war continues to kill service But.
That's the thing too, it's not even the war. Suicide is as a whole as up and a lot of that goes back, like childhood suicide and all that, and so I think these later states suicide, we're seeing a lot of non combat people who are killing themselves, a lot of active duty people who've never seen anything that are killing themselves. And so it's so hard to pinpoint it now where it's at. Back then it was pretty high because people didn't know how to deal with it, But now the numbers only keep growing. I think it's because a whole social like econotic, like the when iPhone came out, I was a part of the I was honored enough to be invited to the Province Task Force before it was inside the government. And so if you don't know, one of the things that Trump put in place was like this thing called Province Task Force, and it's supposed to be outside of the VA government. It's supposed to be a bunch of entities so that nonprofits get together and other people and solve veteran suicide. Drew a bunch of like however, it is, just try to solve it. I was the only arts nonprofit at the table at the time, which I thought was awesome. I went to DC met with all these people. It's like, this is gonna be great. So we started doing this like work up and then now it's been pulled into the administration. After the next administration came in, they're like, hey, let's pull this back in to the government. Good and I've been excluded from it. But when I was there the first time, they said, what we're really tackling is not veteran suicide. We are going to tackle that, but we're going to figure out why it's happening, and we're going to sprinkle that into everybody else. And they showed us statistics where like the highest rate of suicide in or highest rate of death in like Arizona somewhere from thirteen to sixteen year olds is suicide. It was a crazy number. And they showed us the correlation between like two thousand and eight up and suicides in every single population. So what we're ultimately trying to solve wasn't just better suicide, it was everybody's suicide. So I think that's where sometimes these I do want to preface this not war always, but it is there is an issue, and it's a military is the biggest.
Part of the issue, even if it's twenty two No, I know you can cut that number to fifteen hundred hundred percent.
No, a lot of it is fatter. A lot of the venters that we deal with is from war specifically.
So you've got a brain injury, you're trying to figure out life, and you want to go to college, and now enough time has pass that you're suffering from PTSD. Did you ever consider suicide?
Oh yeah, I mean, but my faith in God was the one thing that kept me above water when I if zero was killed myself and a hundred was me before war. I was at a nine when I first went well, it was during college when I was in my deepest, darkest place. But I was like in a nine and I was hovering there. But again, it was just my personal faith that I was just like, I'm never gonna do this. But I thought about it a lot of times, but I just was like, I'm not gonna do this.
That's dark.
Oh yeah, it was a lot of thought. I mean, I was hurting. I was everything, like I didn't know. I went from him again, not that it's a big deal in the kid twenty two person class, but I was prom king. I was class clown. I went and guarded the president of the United States. I went to war, and I'm a twenty two year old, Like what other twenty two has a life like that kind of life experience of what I went through. And now I'm bouncing in a bar with a brain injury and I can't learn new technical skills and I have debilitating anxieties that I can't leave the house for some reason. I didn't know why I was anxiety about, and I didn't know for the longest time I would. So I went to college at first, like normal, I went. I wanted to study business business school, right business entrepreneurship at this community college, because again we didn't have money. So I was like, I knew, I'm going to community college route, then I'll probably do a four year of college with the GNI bill. So I start going and I failed my very first business class, and that was the first sign of that there was a bigger issue than I knew about. Because I didn't have to use my brain for six months. It was like I took my Harley to surgis. I just rode around. I didn't have to really fully function with my brain. It was just a normal day to day. And so now I'm in school and I sign up for this hybrid class, which is online. You're in class every Monday, but you do online stuff, and I could not get There was a process where I was like, I never remembered where to go like online even how to even once I figured out how to go online to get it, I didn't know where in there. And I just ended up failing that class so miserably that that's when I went to the A hospital. I was like, I think there's something else wrong with me. And I go through the whole process and they ended up diagnosing me with tramic brain injury. And back then when they don't know how to talk about it, they're just pretty much like, oh, yeah, so if in two years you don't see any like anything better, you're probably gonna be like this rest of your life. Like that was their thing, not like right, yeah, so I have a time or two years and we're good, uh and so, but they're like, hey, you're probably not gonna learn new technical skills. Your left brains injured, so your short term memories like jacked up, you're all this stuff. You're my speech at the time, I did a lot of um my roll index was broken in my head. I couldn't find words and all these issues. And so now I'm thinking like, wow, I can't do a lot of even though I look like I'm you know, working a lot very fit, I still my body doesn't function that way. I'm still very much injured. And so I was like, well, I can't get like a heavily physical job even though I look like I can. And then I can't learn new technical skills, like I'm a piece of crap, Like what can I do? And so even in Illinois, they make you do speech classes. And this is when I found out I had anxieties really bad. I'm supposed to do speeches in front of these eighteen nine year old kids. Nope, they don't have any kind of you know, life, and like they haven't done anything like high school four months pretty much high school. This is their first writing class, speech class. And I'm back here, this veteran serve four years gard the president, and all we have to do is write a little report and then go up in front of class and read that report. Seems easy, right, Well I got debilitating anxiety to the points where I had to do one on one speeches my speech teacher. I had to go tell her that I had, Like there's a kid who had autism like on like on the like I don't want to be around people style that still would get up in front of class and do something. And then there was me who, when you look at me, every part of me should have been able to go up there. I couldn't and I couldn't get over that. And that's part of the reason why like even contemplats suicide because I was like, what am I gonna do? Like if I keep like if I'm broken physically and I'm broken mentally, just what is there in the world for me and so and.
Who's gonna want to be around me? Yeah, and so I just cause the anxiety.
It was in anticipation anxiety. I didn't even know what it was. It was the idea that I was going to be in front of class, speaking in front of people. And I think it ultimately comes back from being blown up by not knowing who was blowing me up. And so I'd be just driving every day like normal, then boom, and then I was just sitting in my truck when my gun I was boom killed. And so I think it was anticipation anxiety that is I was in the front of the class, or if I was the first person walking in or something like, something could happen to me. So I never knew what it was though, and that's where a lot of suicide comes from. It was because we never asked why why am I getting anxiety?
I never even thought about that. What about just driving around? Didn't you drive around and have flashbacks? And so it's not flashback, passed a thing on the sidewalk and freak.
So I didn't know that was happening, but it was happening. So you're subconscious, don't so yours? And this is the important thing that I get to tell veterans, is like, you're subconscious. Like so they taught me. There's this really cool article that described it the best and they broke it down Barney style. So they said, you have Barney. Yeah, they broke it down Barney style. They said it you had your foret very simple, very simple, your forefront of your brain and in the back end of your brain. And one's like your your uh how did they say it? But I think it was just like forefront of the back end of your brain. And so your forefront of brain is like what we're doing right now, we're talking, we're doing all this stuff, but if anything happened, someone came in here or shooter came in, we'd all go into a fight or flight brain, which is actually separate. It has no emotion, it doesn't attach motion. It's just if you're trained well enough, you go and fight. If you don't, you come back. And so in that brain is where like if you killed someone overseas in a fight firefight, and then you come back out of it and you're like, I didn't I didn't care that I killed that person in the moment, like I didn't feel anything. So you your brain starts talking to each other. Little brain, big brain starts to me like big Brain's like, why didn't you feel compassion? Why do you kill that person not feel anything? Then your wear brains just like I don't know, like I don't know why I did. So you're having this internal discussion or subconscious like are sometimes to picks up on everything. That's why we have anxiety before we think of like why am I about to get anxiety? So that anxiety subconscious was telling me when I was driving to school, then I was going to be blown up. But the forefront of my brain is just like I'm going to school, So my body's reacting to my subconscious and my mind's reacting to like what I'm doing that day.
Which is so interesting. That's how that that's how you don't understand it, but you can't get your body to do what you wanted to do.
Yeah, that's what leads to suicide. Is that whole why?
Why?
Why is this happening? And never trying to discover And that's where my next choice in life is what saved my life and saved a lot of other vendors' life. Since then was I decided to do art, I decided to take.
So okay, so yeah, So, first of all, that is so freaking gosh. I don't want to say it's interesting because it's horrific, but it is interesting. It's horrifically interesting. I guess that so many of our young men and women who served us come back to the United State with that very thing going on in their brains, and somehow they're trying to at the same time fighting all these internal struggles. They're trying to re enter a normal, civilized society and they're having a hard time finding their place in it. And who do they talk to? Because unless they're sitting there with a buddy who's been through it, nobody can really I can hear you, and I, for God's sakes, I empathize with that. But there's no way you can tell that story to someone who doesn't experience it and think that we actually get it. So now you're also isolated. So you've got anxiety, you've got things going on, you've got suicidal tendencies. You have to feel isolated, and you can understand why people would say I'm hanging it up.
Yeah, and I get it was so bad. I got anxiety about getting anxiety one time, and I still remember it because I make is same sandwich like I legitmate wouldn't leave house unless it was absolute need, ran out of all food supplies, and I was. I was trying to get job interviews. It's still like in that moment where you're like, you knew you had some issues, but you had to be successful, try to as hard as you could. So I was gonna go to a job interview, and I was making like a sandwich for the day, just like malooney and cheese sandwich, probably through ketchup on there. Because I was that type person like ketchup.
That's disgusting, nasty dude, that was my jam. I will not feel bad for you. I will empathize with everything you've said except for that disgusting to that have information.
So I'll be eating this awesome sandwich.
There's nothing awesome about maloney and.
And uh about before I was going to this job interview, which I was getting anxieties because of the job interview, right, but I was eating the sandwich when I was getting sure.
It wasn't about thea you were going to have from the Bolooneian barbecue.
I was well trained. This was at least my thousands sandwich. So the next day, when I had nothing to do besides probably game with my buddies, was making a sandwich. I started making the sandwich, and my anxiety came. Why again, because my body remembered, you know, the body keeps a score. My body remembered getting anxiety the previous day making the sandwich. I was getting anxiety because I was getting anxiety. Wow, it was like and that's where I think people will get.
Caught up as just to make it literally cristy.
Because they think, like what and so that's that's honestly. When I was like, something really has to change. And that's again when I went to I was still in college even though I was failed my classes, and I was sitting there taking again, optimism goes a very long way, and I was sitting looking back saying, Okay, I guarded to the President of the United States and had a really high clearance. So now that I am going to college, what I did learn and the separation program was you don't really need the degree you're going for unless it's very specific, like obviously, if we're gonna be doctor, you need a degree, but if you wanted to even go law enforcement, you didn't actually need like a law degree, like law enforcement degree. If you wanted to be executive director of a non probably you don't have to go through non off of management school. You just need a degree because it shows people that.
Get will to go yeah, and you can commit and finish.
And so I was thinking, Okay, I have the background, which is what most people don't have, like top TOI your security clearance, experience guard than the president. Now I just need a degree and I could be an FBI AGENCYIA agent, whate a three letter agencies and just be And I thought that might bring me normalcy again as being in a place where maybe combat something like that. And so I was like, but what can I do to get a degree now that I have a brain injury and I can't really do so and I have anxiety? So where can I go be with people who I don't want to talk to they don't want to talk to me. Maybe I'll be an artist.
I was like, yeah, coo, are you kidding?
I'll sign up for some art classes so I don't have to talk to these kids who don't want to talk to me. I don't have to worry about that.
Dude, a six foot five veteran rolling in with a bunch of eighteen year old and I had a Harley.
I had Harley cut off more cutoffs than I did shirts with sleeves on it. And I was like thirty pounds heavy and it's working all the time.
That well, but the artists crowd can be a little eclectic and all that. So but I just got to believe one thing did not look like.
No, when people see me walk in this room, just like what is that? Yeah?
Uh?
But it was good because again they didn't want to really talk to me. I didn't want to talk to them. There's no like, I didn't have to use my brain that much. So I thought, you know, I was like, okay, I'll just paint some things, eat some crans like marine stew.
We'll be right back.
So the only one that knew I had disabilities was a teacher because I had to report, like, hey, if I anxieties want to leave the room or not show up to classes, probably because something's happened on a PTSD flare up kind of thing. And so I'm learning drawing and painting and it's going well. I go to my gunner's grave every single year. I go to Houston to visit his family. I didn't know his family before he was killed. Sales afraid to call his family back when you can still they still had some you know, you flip through the books and find some people and UH call him up and just you know, I left a voice message saying, hey, you don't know me when I served with your son, and I'm coming to his grave on the day he died, and so I just want to know. I was being in town and they called me and they said, you need to stop by your house if you're coming. So I went there and I haven't I've never not gone. I haven't missed a year going to his grave and December spend time stayed his family's house, spend time with him.
Do you have a wump in your throat walking up to this kid's family? Oh my god.
The first few times, the very first time, because I was legit, I was in charge of him when he died, so I could have got a slap in the face. They could have been wanting, you know, me to come there for retribution, or it was going to be something different. And I'm so glad they are who they are because I remember getting out of that truck and my uncle shake.
I would be so freaking nervous I was. That was anxiety.
That was the most nervousness I've ever had. I had one phone conversation with him saying I was coming to town. They said, we're having a awake, like a celebration of life for Luke. So please, We're gonna be at our neighbor's house across the street. Just come over when you arrive and pulled in and she was like, are you rich? And I was like yeah. She gave me like the biggest mom hug ever, and at that moment, I knew everything was.
Gonna be all right, and so did they want to know everything?
No, they didn't, like they they kind of well she did specifically only because there she heard. It was a few years after that, like the first year, I just wanted to be like I served with him, no nothing else. Second year I came, Third year I came, and I think it was the third year where I just had to tell her that was the lump of the throat, like I need to tell her that her son didn't suffer, Like I don't know how much detail I'll get in, but I need her to know that she that he didn't suffer, like that was the main thing. And then come to find out that, you know, the other brains that served with him, he was engaged at the time. They decided when they came home to tell his fiance that like he said your name when he died, like try to bring her come by, which is all crap, which but that got back to the mom. And so imagine you're the mother of him thinking that another lady was like coming out of his mouth when he died, not his own mom. And so it's like this idea that like the is so I never wanted her to feel that, so I had to tell her. So I ended up telling her the whole thing, and she's like, I knew it. I knew that if it was any woman's name coming out of his mouth at the end, it was going to be his mom's name. And so that was the thing that I just felt so good that I got that off my chest because now she knows that he just didn't know.
Once are again, these are not conversations that people are supposed to have telling parents about how their children die, No, and reliving it. Yeah, all right, so you're an art class.
So now I'm an art class. I have this photo of me and his grave that my uncle took when I was sitting there, and I just loved it. It was like I was my hand on his grave, it was the tattoo with his name on it. It was me just kneeling there. And so in this class, I wasn't you're not supposed to do You don't need to do conceptual things or just you could copy photos, you could do whatever kind of you I want. You're just learning at this point. It was like I think by that time, it was drawing too or painting too, and I'm doing chalk pastel, and I have this photo of me and in my gunner's grave that I'm just doing by myself in the corner again, don't want anybody to see. And I'm coloring in everything skin tone this way's supposed to be, the cami shorts, the black shirt, his headstone. Everything is an exact replica of the portrait or the photo that I have next to it. And my teacher comes up behind me and he said, hey, I know you're probably gonna do the background green because it's grass. I see it here. But I just want to challenge you to do painted a color that wouldn't grass, would never be like it never be this color, Because if you do something like that, you gotta imagine that your art's gonna live where you're not. So if it's sitting up in a room somewhere and you're not there to explain it. If you want that person viewing it to know that you're a part of this piece, you need to have a conversation with him. So and I first I didn't I didn't understand any of that, and I still barely understand it. I'm like, that sounds stupid, Like I don't want to mess up this drawing because it's really good. It's like it's like the best I've done yet, and it is my first time doing chalk pastel. Every part of me was saying, don't do it because I'm going to ruin this piece. And I ended up getting red and just I did everything red behind it, just because I'm good marine follow rules, did everything read, not knowing why. And then it comes to critique time, and I was so art dumb. I didn't know what critiques were. Really, I just you know, I put up my piece. The other kids put up their piece, and then he's like, Richard, do you want to talk about your piece? I was like, uh no, thank you very much. I'm not gonna talk about like Richard, do you want to talk about anything. That's why I'm in hope. That's why this is my piece. Like that's why I'm here.
I'm here not to speak.
Yeah, And then they say, students who had no idea about my life, like what do you think about Richard's piece? What do you think he's saying? And then each one, one by one is like, I think you put Redd in there because you you're so angry your buddy died. And I didn't put his name on there. Anything I put I actually put on the thing John fifteen thirteen, which is no great or yeah, no great love has a man than to lay down his life for a friend. And so I didn't put any names on there, like it was somebody just put that piece up there. They said. Another person's like, I think you put red in there because you love this person. Another person said, oh.
I'd representing love, which I'm sitting here being glorious thing thinking it represents.
But that was the third person. The third student said, I think you put red in there because you saw his blood. You are with this person when he died. And I'm sitting here thinking, holy cra these eighteen night tel kids. You know nothing about me. And I felt like I was connected to for split second, I felt like they were a battle body because I didn't say anything and they heard everything. And so now I found a way to talk about my issues without actually talking about them, which is my biggest issue.
And you were speaking through your art and I was speaking.
Through my art. So I was like, what is this voodoo witchcraft that just happened? Like like how did how did you know? And I talked to my teacher more about it. He's like, that's what conceptual modern art is supposed to be. You're supposed to be able to hide symbols, use color that evoke emotion that has different meaning, and tell a story without actually telling a story. And that's what really good artists accomplished by doing it. They don't tape bananas to walls. They do other things that like really evoke emotion. And because there's the whole thing like never go to art, like you don't go all the way to that side of it. You have to stick in this middle ground where everyone can understand it. And that's where I was going. I was like, imagine I used one color to tell that story. Imagine if I understood every color and every pattern and everything, Like what stories could I tell? And get off my chest? And so I just dove deep into this idea of like art and how I tell my story and I started everything from that point. I was taking creative writing classes, I was doing every kind of art form to really trying to dive into it. So here I am this community college because I have no money, and this like gi Bill is paying for it, Okay, But then someone from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, not the Art Institute. It's like the global chain, like the School of the Artist to Chicago, where Georgia O'Keeffe went, Walt Disney went there. Disney, right, yeah, Walt Disney went there. Hugh Hefner, if you're that type of fan, he went there too. So a lot of artist, a lot of big alumni went there. And so they were like, this is like the Harvard of Art schools art institutions. And they came down and talked about what their school was, and I was like, oh, this is in my backyard. I was like, I'm gonna apply there. And I tell my teacher that and he's like, whoa.
He's like, this is Harvard.
He's like, you either just have a lot of money and you can get in there probably, or you study art your whole life. Like it's those two demographics they typically get even in Harvard. I have a lot of money, no people, or you're super super super smart. And so he's like, so I just don't want to break your heart, like I wouldn't go up there. So me optimist, I was like, that's the only school I'm going to apply for after this. So I applied for the school. I go up through my portfolio review, which every other student up there has thirty pieces of art like that was like the maximum was like, and it's sixteen to thirty. I pull up with like twelve and eight of them are still lives, like where you just take a piece of fruit and color it in like that would because I didn't have any concept material because I just discovered heart. So I go up there with my portfolio review on review day and they give it like a they have grading, and that one was fully just being graded on like draftsmanship and so like he's good enough to at least apply for the program based off of his skill set. And so then it was the whole like interview, go up there with my portfolio again to talk.
To miss special in the Marines.
It was the same kind of process, and so I go up there and I don't remember what her name, but I remember was a female was talking in the ministration office and I was showing her and she was looking at my pitiful, you know, placement of all the things, and I was like, Linda, Linda, Linda, listen, no.
I was just like.
She was like, you are obviously good at dude, like drawing, paint and all this stuff. But what we really are heavy on are like the next big artists, like concept ideas, modern art, all this stuff, which this is just lacking. You have like two pieces that really touch on that. And I had to be like, listen, I am either. I was just discovered art for the first time ever and it's completely changed to save my life. But here's what I want to create with your school. I want you to know what it feels like to be blown up, but without being blown up. I want you to know what loss of innocence in the war looks like when you have to save a life, take of life, be blown up. I was like, and I only think I could do that through your school. I was like, I could show people what this is. And so she called in someone else and that guy came in and listened to my shpiel again and they're like, okay, let's give him a shot, and they let me into that school. The issue was I had the old Montgomery jibill, which doesn't pay for private tuition, and so I knew at that moment it was another crossroad. Like God put so many different crossroads in my life where I just kept taking that hard path because it was okay. The state of Illinois actually has this veteran grant and the jibill paid me, So I was actually getting paid to go to school because I was double dipping, and that's what most people do. Know. It wasn't illegal, but I was doing it both of them. But knowing that I was gonna go to the school meant I forfeited both those the Illinois grant didn't cover and the gibuild didn't cover. So I knew at that moment, and I was with I was with a relationship for five years, and so I knew that if I moved to Chicago and went to the school, that that would be off and that I would go on extreme debt. And but I knew that it's kind of like you put the mask on yourself before you help someone else. There was no way I could help anybody in my life without helping myself first. So I was like, I'm going to go and I went there and that happened. I went extreme into debt, and then even my mom, who didn't have much money, pulled money like nine thousand out or four to one k just to support the stuff that I couldn't support outside of the government grants that I got. She's just a saint for doing that because she didn't have any money. She pulled it out of her house. And so I got into that school and I just pushed at it and it was just it was one of the hardest times in my life, but I knew it was something I had to do.
How long?
So I was there for two and a half years, is what you're saying, Like, how a long? Guys said, yes, two and a half years. And that was truly You imagine when I said, like, I went to an art school like everything you imagine, like the skinny jeans, skinny cigarettes, blue hair, like that's the school I had. Actually, it was like reverse Bulliam. I was like an elevator and someone's like, why.
Are you here?
Like they were picking on me for being there, and uh, I was like, I'm just.
Bigger than you. No.
I was just to me, I just hear do art just like you are. Because I was still very recluse and just didn't want to speak to people and do stuff because I still had such bad anxiety. But being there completely changed me. It's what I call the worried brain to artist brain transition, where I learned to tap into my subconscious like what you mentioned earlier. Driving to school. Did I feel like I was blown up? No, none of us do. But when I found out as an artist that that's why I had anxiety. So I do art around it. I could take photos of everything I saw on the way to school and put it up on the board. And now you knew as a civilian what I saw when I came into class. Just a bunch of bombs.
At some point, you did ceramics.
That was at the school. I didn't know what ceramics were. Again, I was so are dumb?
I did drink coffee out of it, That's what I said.
My roommate was like, I'm in the ceramics apartment. I was like what it was like pound plates, glasses and cups together, Like what do you do? It's like, no, it's clay. I was like, Oh, that's what happens. Like you get clay and you get to play with it, like because even my high school didn't have clay, and.
So and no doubt your parents were buying play does.
Yeah, and so he was like it's all free, So you can come down here with me when I'm when I'm in this class, when my first semester I had my drawling collage, all these classes and I go down there with him and I start just playing with clay, and it brought me back to childhood, where're like everything you made looked like something different, and so you just kept building, destroying, building destroyed, and I was like, for three hours, I didn't think about war. That's weird because I always think about war or something. And I felt good, again, what is this voody wiscraft? Like what just happened to me? And so that's all I signed up for it. I didn't know what I was going to create. I wasn't good at it. I just said. That was the cool thing about that school was no matter what you went in on, you could do whatever you wanted. You can come in on painting and ended up being a performance artist.
And they're still dealing with anxiety and PSD and all that.
And so that now was my safe zone. That was like that physical theory there, like just being able to mend and mold and not think about anything. So everything else. I put as many ceramics classes as I could on there.
So that's what I might talking about, being blown up with ceramics.
Not at first, it was just like, you know, what's crazy too, is you dive in your soap. Kind of the reason we do the things we do in our daily life is because of everything in our path, but most of it is so subconscious we don't even know it. And a perfect example of this is in my studio. I have all these pieces I'm building and I start from scratch. A lot of the is like I'll create something and I'll coil it up and build what I see and create some sort of military like something about me. I'll find it while i'm building. And this one time I had this piece and it had like four little loops. I started. I built this thing real big, and I put it up on this table and my instructor comes in and I have this like coffee cup in my hand that I go, I turn, I set it on the the my art piece, and he's like, why'd you do that? And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, why'd you set that coffee cup up there? Is that a table? It's like, no, that's my art piece that I'm making. He's like, yeah, but is it a table? And I was like, no, it's one of my art pieces. He's like, then, why'd you set your coffee cup up there? He's like, your body's gonna react for your mind es. He's like, your body and your mind are telling you this. And I looked at it and I was like, holy crap, this is like a legit pedestal coffee tape. I was just creating designs and building it up, but it was legitibly something to put other art pieces on. And it was that moment where I was like, we do this in our daily lives. Anxiety and everything else is that way? If how I explain and I always say, like find your why, whether it's a fake why or not, because imagine We're in a room of one hundred people and I come up to you and I'm like, hey, this person's gonna or I'm like, hey, one of these people is gonna try to kill you. That's anxiety. That's when you're like, no matter how well you're trained, you're gonna process like one hundred different people. What am I gonna do? We're the exits.
How do I do?
Like, that's your body. But if I gave you the same scenario and I said, that person in the back of the room is the one's gonna try I kill you, you have a whole different reaction. You're like, oh that person, the door's over here, you start. You're more calm in that process because you know what's going to be doing that. So when I was driving to school, it was the chaotic why. It was like, why is my body reacting to this? I didn't see anything. I was just why am I getting sick? Why am I doing this stuff? I became an artist. It was also identified it. Once I identified it, I did photos of photo art piece around it, which then got rid of it. So because I knew the why, I was able to attack the why.
It's interesting say that your body and your subconscious speaks to you before your brain does. That's the big brain, little brain. Then I have a business version of that, but it translates to everybody metaphorically, which is have you ever had something bad happen and your immediate first reaction is myknew I shouldn't have done that. Yeah, Well, that is a reminder that when you made the decision that worked out poorly, your subconscious was telling you not to do it, yep, but your ego overroaded your psyche's ability to tell you not to do it. But you did it anyway, which is why when something goes bad and you think to yourself, I knew I should have done that. Your ego was overriding your subconscious yep.
And you probably never actually heard yourself say it.
You never heard yourself say it, but you just remember, you know, And when you say that, I mean that makes a really lot a ton of sense. The difference is I'm talking about making a decision about selling a load of lumper for a price versus another price. You're talking about the decision about twenty two year olds that have come home with horrific experiences, wondering or not if they should try to continue on with life or not. Yeah, we'll be right back. So you transition out of art and you're graduating, and I've read you said I'm eighty five percent, which means you're covering and arts help and you recover, and then you think, well, if that helps me.
Yeah. So when I talked about that nine being a nine, and to me, it's like after our school and learning how to tell my story, and I did four years of being able to do that through music. I started teaching myself guitar because I was like, well if I want to if I could write down my fuddy story, why can't I just give a tune and walk away, so that now you could hear his story. I don't have to cry in front of you. You could just hear it that he lived and I walk away. And so I did four years of this where I was writing his story, trying to write make music, making art about my brain injury and everything else I was going through. So when I graduated and I was at like an eighty five percent back to normal Richard, and I was able to go out and do things and not be a stress. I still had anxieties and some other stuff, but I was back to livable, like one hundred percent livable Richard, but eighty five percent truly me. And I looked back and I said, well, it was just the education around, like the process I'm telling you, like finding your why and like baby stepping in tell your story and saying everything without saying anything. That was the process of education. Not art therapy, music therapy. It was art education, music education, and just utilizing it in the right ways. And so I go through this whole process and now I'm like, Okay, now I'm gonna do it. I'm going to join the FBI, joined the CIA, I even went to like a government hiring thing, And I really looked back and I was like, how selfish of me to think that I just discovered something that doesn't really exist the way that it should exist. And I wouldn't pursue this to help other people who are not going to see this as an option. I didn't see this as an option. I would have told you day one, I'm never gonna do that. It's because I fell into it. So then I was like, well, how do I make people fall into this? And can I even create a program in just a few days or a few weeks that is as impactful as my four years of figuring this out? And so through the process, I was sitting here thinking, well, I only told was able to tell my story through song because I met a guy at a bar who's doing a writer's round and he has nine number one hits. I think he wrote Alan Jackson's first number one here in the Free World, and he wrote like Sangria and Highway, Don't Care, Tim Mogol, Taylor Swhip, all these all these epic songs, and I just approached him one day at the bar I worked at and I was off that time, and he was doing his round up in Chicago, and I said, Hey, I've been trying to tell my story through song for a year and I just can't write. I can't put Luke on a pedestal he needs to be on. If I come to you in Nashville, just drive down there, will you sit with me and help me tell my story? Because there's to be easier way to do this than me trying on my own. You obviously doing this for a living. And he said yeah to me and nobody from Chicago just like okay, And I didn't know how big of a deal that actually was. Two months later, I come down there and we write a song and a half in like three hours. So the first hour and a half we had a song and I'm sitting here, I've been trying this for a whole year and you took my words and put it in a song an hour and a half. This is insane. So now that experience, on top of me graduating and being like I'm almost back to normal, was like, how do I now just bring veterans to Nashville to tell their story because it absolutely saved my life. And so that was the process that my brain was going through when I decided that, I was like, I wanted to start a nonprofit that helped veterans heal through the arts and music.
Which is phenomenal. So now, after we got the extensive background and unbelievable story, Richard Casper founded Great Events. But the first year it was really just six or seven or eight guys.
Right, yeah, and I technically co founded it. There's a lovely lady named Linda Tarsan who's in Chicago, who's a philanthropist, who I didn't know how to start a nonprofit and I was just having lunch with her one day. That's a whole another long story how we got to lunch, but just having lunch one day after I wrote with a veteran saying like, oh I wish I could just turn this into something where I could save more veterans. She's like, Okay, let's do it.
And so she helped me understand it's good.
So she had five board members come on, I had a few of my friends and veterans come on, and then we started Creatives in twenty thirteen. So I always like to make a note that she helped me co found Creative a's because we never, you know, truly do these things on our own.
So tell me about how it went that first year, which just.
So it was only nine I think nine total veterans through the songwriting program because that's all we had money for. And I would just like as veterans came in, I wouldn't find them. I would be like, Okay, we're now going to go to Nashville together because I didn't live in Nashville, and each time we went to Nashville, I would recruit more songwriters while I was with the veteran so i'd have one group. The first group that officially wrote with us outside of Mark writing with me was the band called Blackjack Billy, and two or three of them were number one songwriters like in their own right, they wrote songs but also did music. So I met them in Florida when they're performing, just said, Hey, I want to bring veterans to Nashville. You write with them? They said yes, So like are.
You telling veterans? Look, man, I know I've been there. You can't tell your story too much, anxiety, too much everything, But you can tell your story without having to speak up to the public by putting it down and having a song about it, so what I do or some of them looking at you going dude, you're not well.
No, At first, it was like my I knew who was suffering from my friend group, and I would just be like, hey, do you want to go to Nashville and write with the number one?
You write you out to guys that you're close with me at.
First because it was like the refer like we always know who's suffering with our friends, and so the first person ever to go through it was more of like a a he knows he was like a tester, but he is what like a tester to see if this program actually would work? But he also he lost his leg overseas, has sixty percent burns over his body, in his face, and he did not like telling his story. So he is the perfect person for me to approach to see if he didn't even do something like.
This, was he ashamed? I don't know.
I mean, he's he would probably never stay ashamed. He's just hard working.
He just doesn't want to Why did he want to tell him?
He's one of those guys he just doesn't talk like no, that doesn't affect.
Me, Like he's like he still had an internalized yeah.
Yeah, and and honestly it doesn't like his physical He doesn't want you to be like, treat him different because he's lost his leg. He still climbs towers like with his leg like that. He'd yeah, he is salted or just doesn't want you to treat him differently. Not that he hasn't processed a lot of this stuff, more like he's.
But still he's carrying that story and something. Yeah, and SI's probably creating anxiety and PTSD, right, and you see that.
And so I go to him and I'm like, dude, you want to come to Nashville with me. We're going to write a song with a number one songwriter and tell your story through it's And he trusted me because he knows my story and I know his story. And I was like, don't worry, I'm going to be through the whole process. I'm gonna be with you when you're writing and everything. But he's like, I've never heard of yes from him so fast because his love for music.
Was so great awesome.
So when I talk about what we do and anybody, if you want to serve anybody, if you could outweigh their anxieties and depression. With excitement, you can get them to do almost anything. And so when I'm like, you want to come to Nashville write on music road with a number one songwriter, it's so hard. That's like a bucket list thing then nobody could do. So yeah, I'll do that. But also, we're gonna tell your story. But don't worry, I'm gonna be with you the whole time. So I work with them on an idea and everything we're like building up. I'm like, this is what we're gonna say. We're we got it keyed in. Don't worry. I'm gonna speak for you when we get in there. I'm just gonna ask you to tell you like about the song. And that's another psychological thing you do. You don't say, hey, tell your story. You say, hey, tell them what the song's gonna be about, which is their story, but they see it as a song.
Kind of like kind of like, hey, Richard, you don't have to talk about your art, but we'll tell you what you're saying.
Yeah, same thing like love blood yeah, or if you have background or if you poured my when I poured my heart into that art, it's like, oh, well, this art is saying everything for me, or I could talk about my art piece, like if you were all looking at me.
Oh, because now you're not talking about you. Yeah, you're talking about the art yep, So I can be which is a degree of separation.
It is you're separation. You're projecting it onto there, which makes it a lot safer because there's no communication to you directly.
So that's what's happening with you.
That's what's having a song because it's like, oh, I'm talking about my song, not the time my friend died, but you're talking about the time your friend died. But it's the song idea, so and oddly it's healing. Yeah. And so he was talking about how it doesn't it's called until it feels like home because he walked through Hell for so long it felt comfortable to him, and so when he came back home, he's like, this is comfortable to me. I know it's weird to say, but I was trained for this and this is what I do. So now I feel uncomfortable being home because Hell felt so much more comfortable to the kind of reverse roles, which is weird to think about. And he wrote this song and he loved it so much. He sent it to all those people he couldn't talk to, and I had his like sister.
So like friends and family that he couldn't talk to. He just set the song and like, listen, if you want to understand, just listen to a song.
No, he didn't even do that, because I call it tricking them into healing, because he didn't know he was. He was so excited. He just had a song he wrote in Nashville. He was sentenced to everyone, like I just wrote this song in Nashville.
It's pretty bad.
It's like check it out.
And uh So he didn't even know he was telling us.
No, he kind of is the subconscious thing, like he knew he needed to get this out, but the forefron of your brain's just like I need to share this with everyone, Like I wrote a song in Nashville.
With another way, you're seeing this or you're sitting there bobbing your head up and down going I'll be damn this work.
Oh yeah, like within knowing. And he was the first person to say that three hour Ryne session helped me more than eight years. I've been at the VA Hospital and like stuff like that where I'm just like there's magic here, like for him to him too, just to even come down here, be willing to come down here. I was like, I think I just found something that's gonna help a lot of veterans who aren't seeking help. Because if you go back to those suicide numbers, even if you based off the twenty suicides a day, fourteen of those twenty don't seek help. So fourteen of those twenty don't even go to the VA or go to nonprofits. So you're talking about a group of people who don't want to be helped and are not searching help. So you can have the you can have a program that's one hundred percent effective and eighty percent of people aren't coming to it, So how do you build it so that you make them come to it? And that's what this was.
So after that first year of helping eight or nine.
And after the first three, it was people I never knew before, and that was really cool, the first veteran to pip out for the.
First three guys, So that first year, even that the remainder of those nine.
There were all just people who heard through the Great Fighter were like Jesse was like, my cousin is really suffering. He was in Afghanistan and he lost a buddy and I call that dude, and that dude would be like, hey, my buddy I served with is suffering. And then organically people just started applying out of the woodwork, just being like, hey, I did this is my last option. I don't have any other resort, but I just want to I want to come to Nashville write a song. Was the process, and the moment I picked up the phone, I'd say, hey, I'm Richard. I was blown up four times. I watched my friend get shot and kill beside me, What did you go through? So instantly breaks that ice, and they feel comfortable enough to say, tell me what they said or what they went through. And they tell me things probably sixty percent of the time, they tell me things they never told anybody, not even their family or the Marines they served with, like whatever it was because I was a stranger who understood them, kind of like when you call it, if you called Sucson Hotline, you're more open to talk to a stranger than someone who knows you because you feel like you're not going to be like judged for it. And so when they told me that, I'd be like, you know what, a really cool song idea would be about, and then we go into it and I'd get them so excited about their own story and be like, oh, dude, that would be a good story. That would be a good song. I'm like, you know who I paired you up with. This guy has six number ones and they're like, oh my gosh what. I'm like, yeah, and we're paying for your flights, your food, you're housing, and I'm going to spend the whole time with you. It's like your new battle buddy. So it was just it was awesome.
So now you're doing the song thing, but what got you out of it really was art.
And so now you say, well, because we didn't have enough money to do anything outside of like.
Yeah, because these guys aren't paying for you're raising.
From the get go, because there's friction points for receiving help. Some of the frictions money, some of the frictions like again, your anxiety is too bad, so you need excite me to way you're anxiety in order to get over. Some of us need battle buddies. We need to know what it's like to have someone to go through something we did. So I had to have a battle buddy and financially everything had to be paid for. So that was day one a no non starter for me. If we didn't have a nonprofit that didn't do that, then why even start one. And within the first nine veterans, we helped one Native American marine from the Foothill Tribes of Montana. It costs over two grand just for his flight, which is unheard of for the other what we were spending. We only raised like eighteen thousand cash that first year, and so to think, but I was like, he doesn't have access to this, so of course I'm going to put him on this list and fly him out here and put him up and write his song. So it was that. But I knew I needed the art program, and I didn't know what that looked like yet. I just knew I needed to build something. And so I went back to that school and to the School of the Arts Shoo Chicago, and I was like, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't have a game plan. Really, I just knew we needed a program. I didn't even know that program look like, which is the worst pitch ever, Just be going there back, you want to do something with me? I have an art program, but it's not a program yet. We can make it a program. It's like the worst pitch ever. And so I get a meeting with the vice provis and his name's Paul Coffee, and I'm just like, you know, this school absolutely saved my life, and I think that I could probably build a program that saves other veterans. But what I need you guys do is like eliminate the whole art background part of it. I want to help non artist veterans come through your program. And I don't know if it's just pairing up with a teacher or something like that and teach them. He's like, you know what we do, you could be the teacher. I'm like what He's like, Yeah, He's like, let's do this.
Let's do this.
You just you get veterans they apply through this program. And I'm like blown away how quickly he said yes to me, being like, let's just build something on a whim and I can be an instructor. So talk about kind of like posture syndrome. You know already Garden President was kind of crazy. Just be like, I'm guard the idea of me, Garden President from Washburn, Now, the idea of me not being an artist now teaching at the best art school in the country for my program or anything. It was just like, what is my life? Like, how is this even an opportunity? But it's because I asked for it. I asked to be a part of this, and I just didn't care because at the end of the day, it's like life is saved if I go ask and so that's why I was willing to go up there and ask for it. And then when he said I was a teacher, I just figured I was gonna be like assistant, like just be there and help guide them. But he's like, well, have you teach it and we'll just run it and we do three week programming so we could fit it in there. Does that work for you? It was like, I guess that works for me. So then it was on me to build the syllabus and get the program and get the veterans recruited and find the money. And so that's what we did. Our second year. We ended up running an art program with I think six veterans and it was a sole Vietnam vet who applied. And that was the thing about me too. If you do songwriting, I'm not gonna let you do songwriting. I want you to do urt. I want to teach you a new skill set to save your life. Like, if you're doing songwriting, it doesn't work. It's not gonna work. I don't care how much you love it. You need to do something different. I think that's where we get in our wheelhouse. We think, like, you know, hammer's not gonna fix every problem we have in a house. So why is songwriting gonna help every veteran? It's not. And so this old Vietnam vet applied for a songwriting program. I said, hey, we have this art program in Chicago. He's from la I was like that, I really love you. Go through because I want to teach you a new skill set. And so he's like, I actually grew up in Chicago as a dream of mine to go to that school, just to go to it. And so he applied for this program, went through it, and I tell you what, after three weeks he dived in ceramics. He called me two months later be like, Richard, you don't understand what you lit inside of me. He's like, now I'm a part of a seramic collective. I'm going to college for He's still to this day that was twenty and fifteen. He's still to this day doing ceramics and it's phenomenal out in La names Walt phenomenal, like completely changed the safest life all because we gave access and changed his direction and what he thought he needed to what he actually needed.
And away for these guys to express themselves without having to talk about their trump yep, but they're talking.
They are, And that one is I set up differently too, because when I look back, I'm like, I can''t do this, Like when I look back at how I started Creativet's, I was like, I can't do that like nowadays. Because so these were pretty much there's only one person I actually served with that was in that group of like six actually seven. I had to kick someone out for threading to kill someone, but that was a whole other story.
But I'm gonna go to Srama's class and I'm gonna make this knife and then I it.
But so they live in the We're paying for their dorms, they're housing, their food, their their tuition, everything even food for three weeks we're paying for and I live. I teach the class, but I also live in the dorms with them and I'm their ra so like for a whole three weeks straight, I'm like from finding the veterans, calling them all, telling them my story, hearing their story, buying their plane tickets, flying them out there, being there before to prep all the rooms for them. They're living in dorms. I'm like getting them situated. By the way, I'm your teacher. So nine of them meet me out front. We're going to class Monday through Friday, or Monday through Friday nine to four. I'll be your teacher. But afterwards, if you want to go out like, I'll take you, show you Chicago whatever. On the weekends, we buy like the city pass so they can go to like architecture tour, like feel like actual students, not like people going through a program. But on that first day, I do one on ones with every one of them, cause it'll be a challenge if you don't understand art or want to understand art, how to explain Picasso to you, Cause I could say, hey, he changed the figure twenty six times and he did these colors because of this reason, and you're still going it looks like my kid could do that. But if you told me about your friend being shot in a cornfield meta backed out of a pomegranate field, and I showed you what that looked like in Picasso style. You'd instantly connect with Picasso. And so that was my whole job, was they would come in this room, just one on ones, and I would sit there, not like back to back. Vendors would come in, they tell me their story, and I'd show them what their story look like as an art piece, like a modern art piece, because once they had that, they said, oh, I don't have to paint or sculpt. I could legitimately go to a thrift store and buy this piece and then go over here and get some clay and then go downstairs the wood shop and they'll help me design this coffin and like they now had access to it, and I just let them run with it for three weeks, thinking like an artist, like thinking how to tell their story in different ways. Because there's this one marine whose trigger was a palmergranate because his buddy died in a palmerrant field. So every time he saw one when we went out to like target or something, that's when he'd freak out and have an episode and have to be like pushed away because he was he reacted so negatively towards it because he wasn't expecting it. So when he's telling me the story about his friend being shot in his cornfield and it took thirty minutes for the chopper to get off the ground, that's why he ended up dying in this Pombrant field where there's more open space, where they moved him to. I was like, you can. This is as simple as like you going to buy a piece of corn and you writing his words, dying words where I love my life. I don't want to die.
I was like, you can write dying words where I love my life. I don't want to.
Because he was shot, gleeding out and this guy was stuck holding them. I love my life. I don't want to die. I love my life. I don't want He's holding them thirty minutes straight of just this till he passed away, and so that's stuck in his head obviously, And I'm like, you can do this piece of corn and you could write his dying words and put a pomegranate there. That's as simple as your This huge story can be shot here, die words up to the moment he died, So use a pomegran to show death. That's all I give him, and then they have to go out and expand on that they can't use my exact art piece. But from that moment on they're looking at life so differently. Now every class they go to, whether it's three D printing or ceramics or wood chop, they're thinking every moment now like, oh I could use a wood piece. I could like make a little frame house for this thing. Oh I could do this. So what Gino did at the end of this and this is a beautiful part because he called me three weeks later, like when we're setting up because we have an art show. I have to show your art at the end of the three weeks, and he's like, Richard, I went to jewel, I went to Oscar. I can't find I can't find a palm grant anywhere. So already in that three weeks we healed this.
The first step was he went being triggered by him to go in to look look for.
Him, because he repurposed the memory of what that Pomeran was. Now it's an art piece. Now it's his death. So I got to show it in a way, and so he ended up doing this plaster mold of his hand. He did this like wood board where he wrote for thirty minutes, because it took thirty minutes for a child. Together, he did a imer for thirty minutes and wrote I love my life, I love my life in red paint on this wood board. I love And when that thirty minute timer went off, he just smeared his hand across it and stopped, and then he installed his his hand that he had and he had palmergrant seeds that fell to the floor to a real pomegrant on the floor, and that was his art piece. That's like one of the most shit no matter what. You don't even know a story. You look at it and you're like wow when you see that piece. And this has come from a guy who's never done art a day in his life. But you just give him the tools of understanding like what art can do and how to hide yourself in art.
What did it do for him?
For him, it was that way to talk about it without talking about it. And so he now he was one of my first He was in that same initial class with Walt. He was my very first art veteran ever. He was just in our office in Nashville, recreating his pomegranate. He three D printed it and redoing stuff. He now carries an iPad with him where he does procreate all over. It's like a drawing thing. He's like every step of the way, I just when I feel anxiety, depression or rewar, I just go to my I just create art about it, and so giving them the tools to attack it from here on.
Year was this for sure?
Twenty fifteen was technically the first year we had art program. It was our second year, but our fiscal year ends in July or June thirtieth nine years ago. Yep.
Veterans from fifty states served one thousand, six hundred, is that right?
A lot more now? We served eight hundred by ourselves just last year.
So what's your total veterans served?
So it's probably up to three thousand or more. But we have fifteen million streams of our music, which we've already done study.
On fifteen million streams, yep.
And we have studies that show that our music actually heals people. We had just recently a Vietnam that hit up our Facebook saying I just discovered creative. A's because we have our music streaming. He's like, he's like I served in Vietnam, serve eighteen years. Your music has helped my PTSD so much because I relate to every song and he's like eighteen years, four months Vietnam, and so we have no idea what the true impact number is.
We'll be right back. I'm going to read this. Oftentimes I've been asked if I'm okay, or what it's like to be deployed, or what it's like being wounded in action. It's difficult to explain. Art gives us the ability to express what is hard to put into words. It helps us let our emotions go without the uncomfortable feeling of someone staring you in the face waiting for response, but instead they stare at the piece you created and they come up with their own conclusions. It's therapeutic to be vulnerable, and it hopefully helps individuals get a better understanding of service members. Great events helps bridge that gap. What else can you say?
There's it's powerful arts and option, and that's what most people don't know. They don't they're not searching for it like I wasn't. They don't fully believe it's gonna work. There's another guy who's now our veteran coordinator who to this day, every time he says it, it makes me want to cry because he's like he we run this program now at not just the school there in huge cargo, but at Glassdale School of Art in Houston, Virginia, Connwell University, Belmont University, and University of Southern California. And that class is where he went and he only went there because his friend went and he said, Oh, I'm just gonna go with my buddy and then I'm gonna go eat a bullet when I go home. I just my one last hurrah with my buddy.
He's like, arts, are you kidding? He's like arts and this guy was literally gonna go with his body to this thing and then he was going to kill him.
Yeah, he was like, this is a good opportunity just to spend my last days with my friend I served with for free, like paid me to go to USC and go to school. Cool. And he's still to this day says he was going to eat the bullet when he went home, and he's like, I discovered something completely new. And he's he's now part of organization. He's our veteran outreach, he's our veteran coordinator. So every veteran applies, he calls them and tells him a story and then gets them involved and stuff. But that's not the only story that we've heard from that, like so many people talking about writing the suicide letter on the day that we call them or other stuff. It's it's insane and more stuff like this needs to happen because art truly is an option and music is an option. And I hate that I treated it the way I did when I first got out. And I'm hoping that we create a movement that kind of helps everyone understand that they can get into it and they can save their life.
Even though my friends and family do not understand what it was like in a rock, I believe my song gives them a better understanding of what I went through while deployed. Man, I tear up, and I'll read that that is a person who loves his friends and family who cannot communicate with them. He's enable, and he's walking around every day trying to live life with this brokenness, and he has to feel relieved of that burden by writing a song because he says, my song gives them a better understanding of me and what I went through while deployed. I mean that's how you get over PTSD.
Yep, that's how you get it. Just we feel like we have to keep it in for multiple reasons, because we serve so you don't have to, like the idea of most people, serve so you don't have to see the evil exists, and so when we come home, we're injured because of that evil. If we tell you, it's why do we even go and serve for you? If we tell you. So, that's one part of it. The other part is if I tell you, you're not going to understand. And so there's so many reasons that the reasons why we don't tell you, But the only way we survive is if we tell you. So there has to be a creative way to do that, and that's what this music does. You have these songwriters who can write a song that makes you feel like, even if you're not a female, could make you feel like a twelve year old girl when you listen to them, because you're just like the impact of the music attached with the lyrics just make you feel something like even if you never went through a breakup and you listen to a Dell, you'd be like, oh my God, I know what it feels like to be broken up with and so music has an impact. And now we're working with the best songwriters in the world that don't have to even truly understand the situation to write it in a way that your family and friends are going to understand. But other combat vets are going to understand too that they're not alone. And that's why we had to be in Nashville with these number one singer songwriters. And that's why even people like Justin Moore and Granger Smith and Randy Rodgers and Craig Campbell, Craig Morgan, Jimmy Allen all have sat down with veterans for free just to help them tell their stories because they know the impact that it has them as an artist and other songwriters to actually help them decipher what they went through.
When you were going through your height of anxiety and your PTSD and your brain damage and all the stuff that people come back with before your art healing and your own self. And I found out you served our country and we're passing each other in an airport and I look at you and I say, you don't know me, and you'll never see again. I say, hey, man, I just want to let you know, really appreciate your service. Is that a good thing or a bad thing to say.
Well, it used to be good. I think it's over. It's the new hello to veterans. It's like it used to mean something because you didn't hear it a lot, you didn't truly know who it was. And then there's this rise of where that's just your normal response to people is like, oh, thanks for your service, thanks for I even catch up with sut like, oh your vetter, thanks for your service, like instantly. And so there's a song actually wrote with Be, a non veteran where in the lyric and says, your thinkings don't seem to work no more, because now it's just it's just like if you say I love you too much, It's like at some point it kind of like do you because you play delta?
Yeah, the loading goes this way. People who need extra time and assistance, which are old people and assholes who want to put their luggage in front of everybody that don't need any extra help, but use that as an excuse to board the plane so they have a place for their carry on. That's number one, and that's one of my biggest pet peeves. So I'm glad I got to say that. And if you're one of those people, screw you and everybody puts their seat down, Yes, that's right. Then then number two are veterans, and then number three active or military service, and then it goes to like platinum members in first class and then they board. That's the boarding thing, so pregnant women and women with a bunch of children and people in whelchairs first, and then veterans and or active military. And I can't tell you how many times I've been standing in line as those guys passed through to get on the plane before me, and sometimes they're stopped, or they'll turn and talk or whatever. And I've always said, you know, hey, man, thanks for your service, and I genuinely mean it. I have a an enormous appreciation for people like you who gave what you gave and struggled with you struggled with to serve me and my family. But I am hearing it often and I am starting to wonder if it's if it's now almost not received well. And that's why I asked no.
I mean, we usually could tell, though, like who's authentic and who's not it's hard sometimes, but most of the time, how you do it, you can just tell, you know, you to tell when someone's faking something like hey, yeah, happy to see you here.
You know, it's like.
Here, so usually it was like hey quick, but it's like when they stop and they're like hey, by the way, like thank you for like I never think you for your service, or like when you initial initiate it in a certain way where it's not just a meeting. If it's meeting, and then you hear it and you say thank you. Sometimes it's hit or miss, but when you got your way to go thank them, it's a lot different. And nowadays that kind of patriotsm died down like it was. It was from like too much to now, like you hardly ever hear it from people because it's so distant, like that war so distant you should and people would know like that you're being genuine about it. But you know what funny, there's a veteran of brought down. This is the first time I ever heard it, and I legit thought this was like a pickup line because these two ladies came up and thanked him for a service. He just looks how he did it he like shook there. He's like, you know you were worth it?
And I was like did you?
And I was like this is the best pick up one ever. You were worth it? And then he's like then he felt weird that I was thinking that way, because he was like, no, I just feel awkward, Like what do you say? And I was like, hey, you know they're worth it, so you're worth it. But he totally had like Rico like almost like even a week, you were worth it. But I was like, that's genius.
Marine, you know whatever. That's hilarious. If someone wants to support creative outs, if someone wants to become involved as a songwriter or art teacher for creative outs, or if there's someone out there listening to us who served this country and is struggling and needs creative ats, how they find Richard Well.
The first step for all those categories is just listening to our music, because, for one, by listening to his music actually does create royalties.
For the listen to the music.
You can listen to on any stream platform Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and you just search creativets as the artist.
That is that is spelled c R E A T I capital v E T S creative.
Yes, so just creative with the T S on the end of it, not a double V, which some people will try to do. But we released this through Big Machine Records, and we actually have artists singing our songs. So the artists will say creative, that's featuring Justin Moore, creative, it's featuring Aaron Lewis. Finn Skill is so cool. We had Vince Gill do backups on a song with Aaron Lows and Dan Timinski and so the idea of that too is a veteran here in those voices and be like, what's this? Then google us and find out We'll pay for their flights here, so like go in their.
Home pull out.
We have had one one R and B song, and one kind of rap song, one heavy metal song. But we're in Nashville, so a lot of people don't know we do everything, but we do everything. We'd find we'd find the writers who do everything. But that's the first step because for one, that music really does heal everyone. Whether you know a veteran or you've been with a veteran, you're gonna understand them more. If you are a veteran, you listener of music, you're gonna felt understand and felt like you're not alone anymore. And then as a donor, you're just listener music. It's helping build. It's not a ton, but it still streams over time that create revenue. And then obviously anybody wants to donate on our website creativets dot org and donate there and learn more. Same thing with veterans for applications on there, and our newsletter is an easy way to keep up with all the stuff that we're doing. And social media Instagram and everything.
Eight hundred people social media is at Creative Outs at Creative's and eight hundred vets this year.
Yeah, and that was through all of our program We do programs down twenty different states with a bunch of partners like the National Ability Center and Traf's Mills Foundation where we bring out songwriters to locations. We probably served fourteen different states last year and gonna help more this year.
So you wanted to have a Creative Vets like concert like Old Farm Aid used to do, remember.
That we building that. We've had some in Nashville with some people, but we're building to actually do a little tour or some we go around the country and write with people and sing songs. And we've done it like Coastguard Base in qy Wes. We've done a show down there for the active duty and stuff. But we're getting there.
Dude, a washed out high school student, last in his class from Washburn, Illinois, with siblings, who had issues from nowhereville to just wanted to go to the Marines and kick indoors. To ended up guarding the president, to coming home with anxiety and PTSD and a brain injury. Who found art, who found art to save himself and then decided he was going to save a bunch of others through the same love of music and art and serving. I mean, of these eight hundred vets, Richard the math says that a third of them would be dead. So it's literally saving the lives of the very people who gave of themselves to serve us. I cannot, I can't. I just can't think of a more noble cause. How does it make you feel to know what you're doing?
Well? That gets me to my ninety five percent? Me so that eighty five to ninety five.
Is all this. It's like, where's the other five percent?
It'll never come back, But I don't need to come back, like we don't all need to be one hundred percent all the time. We you know, as we get older, like we're not one hundred percent ourselves that we were back dates. So being in ninety five is like more than enough. Like I could easily survive at eighty five. But giving back to these veterans and hearing these stories each time, that's why after like over ten years, I still talk about it and cry and get enthusiastic and speak really fast about all this stuff we're doing because it just drives me. With every single veteran who's like and I wish I could even get into more stories with you, they'd just be You'd just be like yes because it feels so good.
I got one more question. I played chess in high school. That's my version, your version of being a six foot guy walking in with all the blue red art people while lettered in six sports but also played chess. So imagine me in the national championship with the chess kids. And yeah, I worked out too. I wasn't always old and fat, dude, So get over what you're seeing right now. But anyway, one of the things actual research says that playing chess makes kids smarter It's not that smart kids play chess. It's that kids play chess and get smarter because your brain exercises it. Literally, It's just like it's just like if you do if you do three arm days a week, your muscles build because you're using them. Your brain does the same thing chess. The strategy, the thinking, the long two hours of sitting and making yourself be able to concentrate for two hours actually makes you a better test taker. It makes you Chess makes you smarter over a period of time. As I listened to you in the same vein, I kind of wonder if having to think about writing a song for an extended period of time and express yourself in art, if that doesn't help in some weird way repair a damage braining, well.
The repetition of words do because like the rolodex that was broken now I'm recalling, like I forget what the number of words the average human uses today, but a songwriter uses ten x that. Because every time we're writing a song, we're trying to think of what words go where, we're trying to find new words. We're legitimately going to rhymean dictionaries online, rhymezone dot com and we're trying to find rhymes and near rhymes whatever works with the song that we're doing. So that's actually what healed most of my speech, Like I went to the speech pathologist stuff, but it was the songwriting portion. So I think there's definitely different parts in there. I know piano playing at the early age is the same thing where IQ goes up when you're playing piano at a young age. So I think it's the combination of the music, how the music affects you, like emotionally and resets well that stuff. But you can also remap your brain and remap or repurpose emotions if you come out of the same dark emotion and happy, which is a song. Like the same guy who was like my friend died and all this stuff. He's crying, but then an hour later he's like, I got a song. Every time he thinks about his friend, he's going to think about the last time he brought up that emotion.
So he's remapping his emotions.
Yeah, retrain, repurposing. He's repursing those memories as a good one rather than bad one, because now every time he thinks about his friend's death, he'll think about the last time he brought it up, which was in the songwriting session, which was a good memory.
Ben Carson a neuro surgeon. Ben Carson neurosurgeon, and he did the first successful surgery where he took away two co joined twins that were joined at the head and they lived. And I read one time when he said that the three most unexplored realms in humanity right now are the depths of the deepest oceans, the cosmos, and the human brain that we understand so little about it. But he says it can repair itself, it does have a way to remap around broken areas, and he's just seen it too much. And you know, hearing you talk and hearing the story, I can't help but think this is not only good for one psyche, but physically it's actually good for the brain.
Yeah, my left brain is Jambers, so my right brain took over. That's my creative side, that's everyone's creative side. And so that was a nothing. Going from nine artists to the best art school in the country. They said, yeah, one part was damaged to another part took over.
And went hyperactive and got you good at it. Yep, what a phenomenal testament to the ability of a human being to cope if they remain optimistic and they find something that can help them, which is exactly what CREATI Vets does. It is, Richard, what a phenomenal story. Do you find it all ironic that you came to Memphis and we're talking about the strength of music and you look around you and you're sitting in mephis Listening Labs, which is nothing but a three thousand square foot area of music.
This is awesome. When they when I walked in and they told me, I was like, this is a perfect spot for what we're doing. They didn't even know we're get into it, and I was like, yeah, it's all music, like we do music. And now to be in here with all music, I mean, there's no better, especially with the effects that music has on people, to be able to come and listen. Oh my gosh.
And this is a lab.
This is a cool vibe.
Yeah, it's a cool vibe. And it's a it's a uh, it's a it's a place that is a testament to the power of the very things you're doing with Vets. So welcome to the Memphis Listening Lab and Crosstown concourse. I'm glad we did this here because it couldn't be more appropriate. In my opinion, it feels perfect. Richard, thank you so much for joining us, thank you for sharing your story, thank you for your candor, thank you for the depths of explaining all of it to us, and most importantly, thank you for creating creativets and saving the very lives of the people who've been on the wall so that we can have our freedoms. And I mean it with awe sincerity. When I look you down in the eyes, I say not only thank you for your service when you're overseas, but thank you for your service now. I appreciate that you make our country a better place.
Bro. Thank you, you were worth it. What you were worth it, You're Jack.
And thank you for joining us this week. If Richard Casper or another guest has inspired you in general, or better yet, inspired you to take action by volunteering with creative Vets, by donating to them, by starting something like it in your own community, or something else entirely, please let me know. I'd love to hear about it. You can write me anytime at Bill at Normalfolks dot us and we will respond. And if you enjoy this episode, share with friends that I'm social, subscribe to the podcast, rate and review it, Become a premium member at normalfolks dot us. All of these things that will help us grow an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney. I'll see you next week.