imagine imagine what Eugene sledge that we talked about tonight
imagine what he went through on Peleliu and the tens of thousands of Marines
that suffered that unimaginable horror and then imagine
hackworth who he talked about here who wrote about face assaulting enemy
positions in Korea and he was wounded over and over again on the line and
still went back for more and then he got Alan Seeger the poet who in World War 1
went over the top over and over again to make his rendezvous with death and
there's been thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of warriors that
have been in very stressful situations and faced evil and faced death
much worse than the situation I'm in or a year in that we might consider
stressful and I even did this when I was overseas when I was on deployment when I
was a combat leader I was feeling stress and you know what we took casualties and
it was awful and it was heartbreaking and but there were other soldiers and
warriors throughout time that had been in much worse situations Gettysburg or
vicksburg or the Battle of the Bulge and in all those horrible situations they
proved really that humans can withstand almost most unimaginable stress which
meant to me that I could to and you can and and the first step for me is
doing that taking that look to gain some perspective and then in order to gain
perspective you got to do something that we already talked about you've got a
detach you've got to detach from the problems or the stress that you're
experiencing so that you can get that perspective of them now there's a couple
different types of stress now if it's something that you can control that's
causing you stress well why aren't you getting control of it generally it's a
lack of discipline so you gotta have the discipline to grab control and make it
happen and when I say you need discipline for
that what that means is these stresses that you're avoiding they're not gonna
go away if you avoid them so take the discipline to face the stressful
situation and get ahead of it don't be afraid of it now there's also stress
that's caused by things that you cannot control and if you remember talking
earlier about artillery and how horrible that was and what made it so horrible
was that there's no control over so if you can't control something and you
can't get control of it you have to at least embrace what you can and I'm not
saying you're gonna embrace artillery shelling but I'll tell you what when it
comes to things like artillery or for us in Ramadi was IEDs and we could do
everything we could do to mitigate that risk but eventually there's only so much
you can do and you cannot completely eliminate it but you can't control it so
why you gonna worry about it why you gonna stress about it if there's
something that's completely beyond your control
you cannot you've got to detach from and not let yourself get stressed about
it and on top of that if it's something that you can't control how can you look
at it in a different light how can you see it in a way that you could actually
take advantage of it how can you take that stress and make it into some kind
of a lie you know the the chaos of combat is something that I couldn't
control but I had to embrace it so I could try and figure out how to take
advantage of it so when it comes to stress don't fight it
turn it on itself and use it use it use it to make yourself sharper and more
alert and use it to make yourself think more and learn more and get better and
use that stress as a catalyst to make yourself better