I did five deployments to Afghanistan.
And then I did one tour in Iraq,
the initial invasion of Iraq.
We do a lot of our stuff at night to gain the advantage over the enemy.
This particular jump, the whole team jumps out at a high altitude–15-20,000 feet.
My night-vision goggles had come off my helmet.
I never panicked or anything because I'd done hundreds of jumps before.
I thought I was about 200 feet from the ground, so when I went to release my rucksack
Bam! I nailed the ground.
my seat C3 overlapped the C4 and I was permanently paralyzed at that point.
I had a machine helping me breathe and they're like well, that might take you 3, 4, 5 months.
You might always have the ventilator.
And I was like, hell no!
I'd weaned myself off of it within one month and they had never seen that before
but they never met anybody like me, so...
The injury that I sustained knocked out the part in the spinal cord that regulates body temperature.
I'm always very cold or I can overheat really easy.
If I'm laying in bed and I start getting hot or cold I have to yell and hope my caregiver hears me.
I cannot answer the door. I have to yell for my nephew or I'll text him.
Doorbell's ringing. Hurry, come see who it is.
So he opens the door and there's Tim.
For some reason, I got a really good vibe from him.
He came in and we sat down. Well, he sat down, and I was already sitting obviously.
But he told me, hey, I can help you out.
Since you're in that chair and you can use your phone and iPad you can access your security system.
As soon as I found that out I was like, yeah, I'm definitely in and I want this for sure.
Being able to do my air conditioner and bring it up or down is a crucial thing for me.
If I'm in bed and I don't have access to my phone or iPad then all I have is my voice.
And Alexa with Vivint really helps improve my life.
When somebody rings the door and me being able to see who it is and talk to him,
it's probably the the coolest thing.
I have numerous caregivers so they're always coming and going.
And I've always had to leave the door open, which I don't like.
But now I can give each of those caregivers their own code to get into my house.
And I can leave the doors locked.
I can do this all from my chair
being a quadriplegic which is wonderful.
I'm still jumping out of airplanes.
That's probably my favorite thing to do, which is ironic because that's the thing that got me injured.
I've Scuba dived, which was awesome.
I'm still shooting and I'm able to hunt.
Now I'm getting my son involved in hunting.
Vivint has really changed my life once again so found another thing to improve my way of living.
And I really do appreciate everybody behind the scenes that are working on this new system.
I think it's a great avenue for people like me
My chair's all tricked out with all these things that I can do
and now I have a smart home to go along with all that.