Everything that we do, everything that we see, everyone that we meet
adds to who we are.
By staying in that small little circle,
where you are just doing that comfortable thing.
You will never get those grand experiences that make you
a complete person.
My name is Michael Ivey
and I grew up in Dunn, North Carolina.
[Calls to cows]
My life was a very limited collage.
Sitting in the parking lot with a couple of buddies.
Coming home and working on a fence.
If the cows got out, that was the highlight of the week.
Because it was the one thing that was spontaneous.
At the time that the Navy’s recruiting campaign was:
if someone wrote a story about your life, would anyone want to read it?
And that resonated with me a lot.
I didn't want to sit down and read about putting around on a tractor on a farm.
I wanted to do something that made some kind of difference.
I sat down with my recruiter said, "What do you have that leaves soon?"
He said well I have BUs, and it is a carpenter.
When does that leave?
He said about three months.
What else you got?
Well I have EO.
What's EO?
Well I am not one-hundred percent sure, but it leaves in ten days.
That’s what I want.
Most people don’t know what a Seabee is.
They call us “Dirt Sailors.”
Because we don’t play around in the water.
You think about those guys that are going and they’re kicking down doors
and they’re storming the gates.
That’s not our job.
Our job is to make sure that once those guys finish doing that
they have a roof over their head to sleep under.
That they have running water.
That they have phone lines that they can call home with.
I have spent time in Iraq building ballistic fish tanks.
I have built forward operating bases in Afghanistan.
Building hospital waiting areas in Jamaica.
What became far more important than kicking down doors,
was doing things that enabled people to be safe.
Doing things that brought people home.
When you have gone out and you’ve done great things and you have experienced victory,
and you’ve experienced defeat.
Then living in this grey twilight
where you neither suffer much nor experience much
becomes drab.
But at the same time you begin to appreciate how calm that can be.
I am the unit movement officer for an EOD command.
And my job literally is to bring people home.
You start to realize that it does not matter if somebody writes a book about me.
It’s that these guys are getting a chance to come home
and read a book to their kids.
And I have a direct effect on making sure that that happens.
There is an entire breadth of experience, of emotion, of life that you will never be privy to
staying in the tight little confines that you have now.
It’s like trying to explain to a fish in a fish bowl what the ocean is like.
It’s scary making that choice.
It’s a big choice.
But if I could go back and change anything about that decision,
I would have only made it sooner.