- My name is Kevin Flike.
I'm a proud father, husband, son, brother,
director, Green Beret, and now MIT alumni.
(light music)
So I always felt compelled to serve our country,
and then 9-11 happened and it went from a
fascination more so to something that really
seemed like my duty.
The Green Berets are essentially like consultants
for the United States military.
You go to foreign countries to train their
militaries and their militias.
You serve on a 12 man team.
And in a case of, like Iraq or in Afghanistan,
you actually fight alongside the soldiers
that you're training.
And so you can guarantee,
when you sign up for this job,
that the person to left and right of you
during the most intense periods of your life,
is not going to be an American.
It's gonna be a local national soldier
that you've spent time training.
And that is what really drew me to this mission,
to be able to in tune with the culture
of the people that I was working with.
Seven months into my second Afghanistan rotation,
my team went and did a mission in the
north western part of the country.
About an hour into that mission we came
under heavy fire.
And for the next 10 hours we were battling
back and forth in this valley
in Northwestern Afghanistan.
In the 10th hour of that fight,
I'm going around the corner of a building,
it felt like I had been hit in the stomach
with a sledgehammer.
And I realized pretty quickly that I had been
shot in the stomach.
You know and in that moment there,
I thought that every minute that went by
was going to be one of my last moments
on this earth.
I was really surprised four days later,
when I had asked someone if I had gone
to heaven or hell, they said,
"Neither, you're in Landstuhl
"Regional Medical Center, in Germany."
Initially, as soon as I was hurt and came home
from the hospital,
about a month after my initial injury,
my wife bought me a book called
How To Get Into A Top Business School.
And everyday after going to physical therapy
for six hours I would come home
and I would tear that thing apart,
highlight things, make notes in the margins,
and started to develop this plan.
I made the decision there that I was gonna
push forward no matter how hard this thing was.
And it was even harder than I imagined.
And I had an absolutely difficult brutal time
getting off of my pain meds.
Until my wife sat me down one day and said,
"Is this it?
"Is this what you're gonna do
"with the rest of your life?"
And at that moment that was really the
impetus to continue to push forward there.
I stopped taking my pain meds one day
and began studying for my grad school exams
the next day.
When I came to MIT I was obviously
getting out of the military and just really was
trying to figure out what was next for me.
During my recovery things were brutal for me.
But they were still going better than most others.
So I'd work one on one with some of the wounded
soldiers in my unit.
And I really enjoyed being able
to give back to them.
And that really spawned into individuals asking
me to come speak to like Boy Scout
troops or churches.
And then when I started at MIT in the fall,
one of the classes was a communications class.
And at the same time that started at Sloan,
I was asked to go back to Union College
to speak on Veterans Day.
So I used my entire time in my communications
class to tailor the speech.
Now it's really the first time going out there
and telling my story.
Incredibly nervous, did a terrible job,
but it was the beginning.
Well I mean for me. . .
You know, I believe that an experience is worth
nothing unless you share it.
I want to die giving a speech like this. . .
I'm so thankful that I was actually able
to go through those experiences,
because it allowed me to walk a mile
in other peoples shoes.
I experienced addiction, depression, anxiety,
post traumatic stress,
things that I would've never experienced
if I hadn't had this experience.
And so now I have this ability to empathize
with other people and understand what they
go through in life, so that I can relate to them,
and hopefully inspire them.
(light music)
And I think the ultimate message that I like
to convey to people is that, you know,
there is always a light at the end of the tunnel.
No matter how dark it might seem.
And for somebody's who's been
through hell and back,
trust me, that light burns brighter than you
can imagine, once you get there.
(light music)