Return to Base: Navy SEAL Commander Jon Macaskill on Combat Mindfulness

Hey there everybody and welcome back to the Return to Base podcast. On today's episode, we're going to be talking about mindfulness, meditation, and bad-ass Navy SEAL shit with former Navy SEAL, John McCaskill, who is also the co-host of the Men Talking Mindfulness podcast. So stay tuned. Bravo Zulu, this is Victor Lima, we are RTB. This is Return to Base, a Better in Life podcast. Welcome back to the Return to Base podcast brought to you by Better in Life. I'm here today with a great guest, John McCaskill, former Navy SEAL, and the co-host of the Men Talking Mindfulness podcast. How's it going, John? How's it going? Well, Cliff, how are you doing? Not too bad. For those out there in the world, this is like media magic. You'll probably hear this in February sometime, but this is January 4th now. So happy New Year, John, and hope your holidays and everything went well. Yeah, thanks, brother. Yeah, it was a funny holiday season. I actually went to the Army-Navy game on December 11th with a bunch of Army guys. So I was severely outnumbered, but we ended up winning that one. But I got COVID from like, I think, 16 or 17 of us ended up with COVID. And it put me down pretty hard. I mean, certainly not as bad as it could have been, but I was in bed and isolated. I have an RV, the recreational vehicle, and I isolated in there for about two and a half weeks. It was super boring. Wow. I didn't want my family to get it. And it was some forced downtime, because I have a way of, even if I schedule downtime on my calendar, I have a way of filling it up with stuff. And it was probably a good thing that I had forced downtime. But I was back up and partially running for Christmas and New Year's. So it was a good break. Yeah. Yeah. You heard it here, folks. Blame the Navy. Blame the Navy. I think if Army won, it probably would have been a different story. I think because Army didn't win, they felt the need to give me COVID. That must have been what it was. My brother-in-law, who's Army, he calls that new variant, what is it, Omicron? Omicron, or whatever. He calls it Army-cron. Army-cron. Yeah. So John McCaskill got the Army-cron variant. He's probably patient number zero, and the Army-Navy game is a super spreader event, but probably well worth it. It was. It was. Hopefully everybody else who was on your ship recovered well, or did everybody feel it? Yeah. Yeah. It was funny, man. We were just going back and forth about who had it, and what the different symptoms that were going on were, and yeah, everybody's back up. I mean, there's still some lingering aftereffects, some fatigue, and some brain fog, but for the most part, pretty close to 100%. Maybe my voice is a little bit scratchy, but other than that, I'm feeling pretty good. Somehow I've avoided the COVID. Yeah. However, my wife just tested positive not too long ago. Oh, yeah? Yeah. But she had no symptoms, so it kind of ruined our Christmas plans and stuff like that, but somehow my children and I didn't test positive ever, so I hope she doesn't mind me talking about it. We'll find out. Maybe get edited out later. Yeah, maybe we'll have to edit that out, but yeah, so as mentioned, John was a Navy SEAL, and served at an integral part of our country's history, definitely all through the GY era from, you said, 96 to 2000, right? 96 to 2020. Oh, sorry, 2020, yes. So, obviously, during that time period, things got busy. It's interesting, though, because when you joined, there wasn't a whole lot going on. Yeah, definitely compared to the- Kosovo, the Balkans. Right. Yeah, exactly. Same for me. I joined in 98, and I got sent to Germany for a little while, and right up until 9-11, it was a peace army. People were getting sent to Kosovo and stuff. I never got to go, but you could definitely tell, let's just say shining our boots and pressing our uniforms was of utmost importance during that time period. Right, right. I remember those days. Yeah, right, when you're not deploying, and then finally, somebody had the smarts to, well, they gave us, in the Army, they gave us the world's worst uniform, but they also gave us the tan boots that we didn't have to shine, so we appreciated that. But yeah, it's something else, going from a peacetime military or even low-level conflict type military to the full war machine of the United States military almost overnight, right? Was that your experience? Yeah, man. I was in Buds when the planes hit the towers in the Pentagon, and I remember very specifically one of our instructors, he pulled the entire class out on the beach, actually several classes all lined up side by side, and he stood up on this platform and he addressed all of us. So at the time, so let's see, I was not classed up. I was at Buds, but hadn't officially started. I didn't start until January of 2002 as a class, but I was doing what's called pre-training or pre-training rest and recovery, PTRR, but whatever. The classes were out there on the beach, and this instructor stands up after we had already seen what had happened, we knew what was going on, and everybody was trying to jump on our cell phones and call home and call New York City to see if our loved ones that were there were injured or part of this whole thing, and we couldn't get through just like everyone else was doing at the same time, which is why we couldn't get through. But this instructor was like, you know, this is probably the turning point or the major turning point for us as a military and us as special operations, and he compared it to Pearl Harbor and how Pearl Harbor had brought us into World War II, and that this was going to bring us into what he thought was going to be America's longest war. And you know, this is 9-11-2001, exactly right. And here we are 20 years plus later, and we're still fighting it in one form or another. So yeah, he was spot on and was absolutely a turning point, and I knew then that my career in special operations was going to be vastly different than some of my predecessors who had, you know, brought me into special operations, like you mentioned that they'd been in Kosovo and the Balkans and some of the other places, but certainly not what we've seen over the last 20 years. Yeah. So what were you doing before you went to Bud's? You mentioned you were enlisted. Yeah. So I was enlisted in the Navy, enlisted as a parachute rigger, and then served just shy of a year as an enlisted guy. Got picked up to go from the enlisted ranks to the Naval Academy. Graduated in class of 2001 and went straight to SEAL training as an officer, junior officer. And then literally, so May 2001, graduated the Naval Academy in SEAL training, at least the pre-training part of Bud's in September. And then September 11th happened, and then the rest of the world changed. Yeah. Your instructor, or what do you call him, cadre? Yeah. Yeah. Chief. Bud's instructor. Yeah. Yeah. He was a chief. Yep. He was spot on. He was. Probably the nicest he was to you the entire time. Yeah. Get back in the water. Exactly. Right. So how was your Bud's experience? Were you what you thought, true blue, or did you have any setbacks? Yeah, I did. So I was there in September, like I said, and I was supposed to class up with class 238 in October. And I did class up with them, but I did something stupid. I went out from the Naval Academy where you party a little bit, but you don't party as hard as you put it. You don't party like Tijuana. Yeah, exactly. So I went out to San Diego, I was still young and dumb. Now I'm just old and dumb, but I was young and dumb, and I partied entirely too hard initially on the weekends. And so when I classed up with class 238, I had pneumonia and literally made it through about 75% of the first day. And then I was out on the obstacle course on the slide for life, ended up because of the pneumonia. My fatigue just wore me out and I fell off the slide for life, basically sand darted into the ground. And one of the instructors came up and I was spitting up blood and ended up getting rolled from class 238 to 239, which started in January of 2002. And that was my class. So I started with 239 and went all the way through with 239, although I'd gotten rolled after one day of 238. So I don't really count 238 as my class, just because I only did one day. Yeah, you didn't even know those guys. Yeah, exactly. I knew my Naval Academy classmates that were in my class, but I don't remember many guys from that class, one or two. Anyway, we had a crazy cold hell week. I was going to say, it's never a good time to start, but January is probably the worst. It's either really cold and you've got really long nights and the waves are really big. That's the winter classes. Or the summer classes are just physically beaten down just because the instructors have to kind of beat you down because the waves are smaller, it's warmer. So it really depends on what time of year you go through, what type of torture you're going to get. Yeah. But yeah, ended up going through hell week in February of 2002. And it was one of the coldest hell weeks on record. It actually snowed. And I'm not kidding. It literally did snow in San Diego during our hell week. And the instructors all said, hey, we ordered this weather for you guys. So it was, yeah, it was fun. But all in all, I mean, looking back on it, 20 years later, so actually about 20 years almost to the day now, since I classed up, it was a lot of fun going through it. When you look back on it, right? I'm sure when you look back on your time in the service, you remember the high points. You don't remember too many of the low points. And it was brutal and it was miserable. But looking back on it, I remember laughing a lot. I remember looking to my left and right, knowing that after hell week, you know, the guys that you go through the rest of the training with, you have a lot of fun with and you're brothers. So I've still stay in contact with many of the guys that I was in buds with. So it's a good time. You mentioned it's one of those things where you say you remember the highs. I kind of look at it like the lows become the highs, and then the highs become almost like background. I don't even remember. I don't really remember too much of the quote unquote good times or the mundane. It seems that in my memory, it's all the stuff that sucked. Yeah, you're right. The stuff that sucked. Now we can all get together and laugh about it, right? That's right. That's right. I think one of my instructors at one point, we're done getting our counseling and he says, hey, that sucked, right? And I was like, yeah, yeah, that sucked. He said, you're welcome, because you're going to remember that. And this is probably going to be, you know, you're going to look back and it's going to be a fond memory. He was right. But luckily, I was able to make it through a lot of people for some reason, a lot of people were dropping like flies in North Carolina during that summer. And North Carolina in the summer, man, I've been there. Yeah, my lip has a tendency to start getting numb, my face feels kind of tingly. And I know I'm like, oh, man, I'm in trouble. But luckily, I don't know, by the grace of God, I was able to make it through. So the rest of your career from going to Bud's, finishing Bud's and then going off to the teams. Tell me a little bit about your experience there and you don't have to get into anything super specific, although you would have wrote a book about it if it was very cool, let's be honest, right? Every SEAL has a book. Every SEAL has a book. At least one. Yeah, all kidding aside, I am writing one, but it has nothing to do with my SEAL career or very little to do with my SEAL career and more to do with what I'm doing now. So yeah, graduated Bud's, you know, that summer in 2002, went out to SEAL qualification training or went across the street, really, to SEAL qualification training. So you've got Bud's on the western side of Orange Highway, yeah, it's called the Silver Strand is the nickname for it. And then you've got the Naval Amphibious Base on the other side, and that's where SEAL qualification training is. And that's kind of like, Bud's is kind of like the rite of passage to get into SEAL qualification training. And then SEAL qualification training is, for lack of a better term, is kind of like the gentleman's course to becoming a SEAL, right? Now you've earned your right to become a SEAL. You haven't become a SEAL yet, but you've earned your right to become a SEAL. So SEAL qualification training is, you know, another six months where you do basically everything that you do in the SEAL teams. You do some airborne training, some maritime training, some diving, some shooting, some land navigation, some ground tactics, working together as a team, immediate action drills, everything that you kind of see a SEAL team doing. And then from there, you get sent out to your SEAL teams. Real quick, did you have to go to jump school for parachute rigging school at Fort Benning? So were you already airborne qualified? So no, I wasn't. So parachute rigger in the Navy, what I really was, that's what it's called PR, parachute rigger. But really the true rating is air crew survival equipment man. And so really what I worked on, yes, exactly, exactly. Or stitch bitch is the other term for it. But I worked on ejection seats and survival equipment for pilots. So, you know, making sure that their flares were there, their pills to clear water, some drinking water, those types of things. And the parachute obviously connected to the ejection seat. So it's a little bit different than the parachute rigger in the Army, or at least the traditional parachute rigger in the Army. Some parachute riggers in the Navy go on to get qualified and they end up normally working with the SEAL teams. Ironically, I was not qualified as a parachute, as a jumper when I was a parachute rigger. And then later, as I went through SEAL qualification training, this is back in the day before the Navy had our own jump school. We did have to go through Fort Benning. Army training. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Dude, I'll tell you, that was probably the hardest part. And the only reason that like, not physically, but dealing with the BS at Benning, so much man, like lining up on the tables at 4.30 a.m. so that you can get ready to jump at 9am. Yeah. Or something ridiculous. I was like, this is ridiculous. And, and, yeah. Getting those guys ready for the mass exit. Oh, yeah. 82nd air war thing. But I mean, I understand why they do it. Yeah. Yeah. If I hadn't gone through BUDS and gone through, you know, kind of hell in order to become a SEAL already, I may not have made it through that training, mostly because of the BS. So yes. And obviously that was a requirement back then to become a SEAL was to go through airborne training at Benning. So, so, you know, you have to do it. So anyway, since then they've changed it and the Navy has their own jump school, a combined static line and free fall training there. You know, the joke is that, yeah, yeah, sure enough. And the joke is that at Benning, they stuff, what is it, stuff two weeks of shit into a three week sock because, you know, you easily could have gone through it in two weeks. And now the Navy, you know, this is obviously a bias because I'm a Navy, but then the Navy jump school, you get the static line and the free fall. And so you come out, you know, a more qualified air operator in two days, not in two days, but pretty, pretty quick relatively. Again, you know, like you said, airborne is, is there and done that way for a reason. It's so that you can get that mass exit out and you get, you get tons of people qualified in that, that amount of time versus what we do. We, we got a lot fewer people qualified, but they get more training. Well, you don't get the army airborne badge anymore. If you go through the Navy, I don't know if you got to wear it on your, yeah, no, you get your, you get your gold jump wings now. It's a rite of passage and I've heard, I've heard about that school out of OTAI, it seems like, no, I'm just kidding. But yeah, so, so I interrupted earlier, we went on a tangent, but you, you were up to the point where you're getting to your team, were you West Coast or East Coast? I went East Coast. I actually ended up going to a seal delivery vehicle team, which for your listeners, if they're not familiar with what that is, it's, it's a, it's a mini submersible. It's basically a mini submarine, but it's wet. So you're diving the whole time you're in it, you're in this thing, but you're connected to air and you're wet. So it was great time. It was a very unique mission, loved the work, love the people that I worked with. But at the time, there just weren't as many missions for that particular team. So my first deployment, though, I was assigned to seal delivery vehicle team, to SDB team two, I ended up getting attached to seal team 10 while, while I was even a part of SDB team two and ended up deploying to Afghanistan in 2005 for, for my first deployment. So went, went out there 2005, did that deployment, did a couple other stints to Afghanistan and Iraq between, you know, then and 2020 did, did a quick pump off the coast of Somalia and then some other interesting places in the world and got to, got to see, got to see the world. Somewhere off the coast of Somalia, interesting way to put that. I don't want to, I don't want to speculate, so I won't ask, but, but cool. So overall you felt that your career was great. You loved it. Or do you wish you were an accountant? No, it kind of looks like you could be an accountant. I do. I do. Especially now my eyes are getting, my eyes are getting old, man, like the rest of me. I had to, I've actually had to start wearing glasses, which I never thought I would wear. But when I'm sitting in front of a computer or on my phone, I have to wear glasses. So yeah, I guess age gets us all, man. But yeah, you know, I enjoyed my career. I worked alongside some of the most phenomenal men and women this country has to offer. If I could do it all over again, I absolutely would. There's some things I would probably do different, but, but yeah, there's, there's definitely aspects of it that I would do in a heartbeat again. What I, what I actually miss is that kind of sense of purpose, sense of mission that comes with being a military service member and sense of camaraderie, sense of tribe. I miss that a lot and I seek it and find similar groups, but not quite the same. But I'll also tell you, as I did my deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, and off of Somalia, but as an O, as an officer, I actually didn't see as much combat as a lot of my brothers did, even, even fellow officers. And, and in a weird way, I think that caused me to feel almost inferior to some of my, my, my brothers in, in the SEAL teams who had seen a lot of combat, right? We all, we trained for combat and, you know, much like first responders, nurses in the ER, they train for that, that patient to come into the ER, right? Or we train for combat. And when that nurse sees that patient come into the ER, they know they are on mission and they, they do what they need to do. They, and they ideally save that patient and sure, they don't want anybody to come into the ER, but when they do, they're on mission. Well, it's just like us that we train for special operations. You go through, you basically sacrifice a good portion of your life to training. Right. And there's a, you know, there's a part of you that wants to put that training to training, training work. Well, I honestly didn't see as much combat as, as some of my brothers and that in a weird way caused me, I think I said an inferiority complex earlier, but really I think it was almost like an imposter syndrome. Like these, these guys were tougher and had seen more than I had, but yet I was still rising through the ranks as an officer and I was in charge of them. So it was kind of this weird dynamic, but, but I learned a lot from that. And I also learned a lot from those that had been in combat and you know, I apply that in my, in my leadership and as a leader today in, in making sure that I'm, I'm compassionate with my people and, and know what it is they're experiencing because you know, maybe, maybe they have trained to do something and they're not doing it. And that can be, that can be a tough pill to swallow, whether it's combat or whether it's some, something else. But yeah, it's yeah. I, you know, I, I hear that. And to be honest with you, I I spent most of my career in special operations and, and we, my, in my career deployed plenty seen quote unquote combat, but same thing where I was never engaged in the big gunfire or anything like that. We, we went into plenty of houses, plenty of raids, helicopter raids. And for one reason or another, you know, it's just never, never really transpired for me, which at the time you do feel that bit of inferiority. And as a matter of fact, at that period, when I, when I first arrived to Iraq as fully qualified Green Beret was in 2009 and things were pretty, pretty chill, we were out there doing police, police type actions. I was working with a SWAT team out, out East. And so we were going out and getting after it, but it was a low intensity type thing where, you know, a lot of the guys who I was with felt the same way, you know, they hadn't been, been really tested the way we were doing a lot. Don't, don't get me wrong. We were doing heavy planning, right. Collection. Yeah, exactly. Like you mentioned, I went on plenty of raids, plenty of assaults and, and they were good. I mean, the missions were good. We did, we did what we, exactly. We did what we had planned to do. But again, I know this probably for, for your non-military audience, this is going to sound a little sick and twisted. I'm not like, I'm not a warmonger. I'm not going out and trying to pick a fight, but I've trained for a fight and I don't want to say I would have liked to have seen one, but because I, I mean, I saw, yeah, I saw some, but I didn't, it wasn't as intense as some of my, my brothers experienced. And in a weird way that kind of, you feel a little disappointed or a little bit like, like you got left out. But again, I'm, I'm not a warmonger or anything like that. It's just the same. Yeah. And you know, very interesting at this time period of time that I was talking about a kind of a senior member of our group joined our, our ODA. And he's, he had been kind of known as kind of a bullet magnet. Oh yeah. You know, one of those guys who goes out on raids and or on missions and it just always happens to her. Oh yeah. Hey, what's up, man? Yeah. Now we're going to get some and, and he very wise looked at us and said, Hey, I just want you all to know all you young guys right now, I want you all to know that you can wish your ass into a firefight, but you can't wish your ass out of one. And I know, I know some folks who wish and, and some folks who even talked their way into deployments where they knew that it would be.