The Heroic Gent Podcast - Greg Stube

In this first-episode of The Heroic Gent Podcast, we speak with Greg Stube, a Green Beret who had to recreate himself after being badly wounded on the battlefield. Here, in his own words, is what he had to do to get out of the hospital bed a new man:

I was all but pronounced dead on a battlefield in Afghanistan. My body had been blown apart. I’d been shot and badly burned. A piece of shrapnel the size of a small dinner plate had gone through my gut. Somehow, I made it to a hospital Texas.

I found myself lying in a hospital bed in a burn unit smelling the stench of my burned body. At this desperate hour, I was sinking, falling into an abyss of being nothing I knew anymore. I was a dead body that was somehow still awake, and I was screaming in my head that I shouldn’t be here. I should be under a gravestone in Arlington that someday my son could put flowers next to on Memorial Day weekends.

I thought on this as I looked up at that bare hospital ceiling. All I knew was that whatever I had been was blown away. Before being wounded I was a tough Green Beret, now what was I?

I was in this confused state of mind when an Army liaison from Fort Bragg came to see me. He said he flew from North Carolina to Texas to help me readjust and to tell me the Army was there for me.

I asked, “Readjust to what?”

He gave me a puzzled look. He tried again and said, “You ain’t finished.”

I listened, but he had no concrete things to tell me. He had reached the limit of his understanding for how I felt. All he knew was that healthy men and women in his command didn’t ask questions like that. If they do, they are told to get with the program. If they don’t, they are gone. He knew that the young men and women in his command were so busy defining themselves as soldiers, they weren’t asking things like who they were or what their lives were about. He thought that whatever questions they had about their paths in life were being satisfied by their roles as soldiers and parents and other things. He knew that people who ask questions like that often leave the Army. He had seen in the past that such people blow with the wind until they settle somewhere and hopefully answer such questions for themselves. Or maybe they never do and just drown in a bottle or who knows what? He knew that much. And he knew he didn’t want that for me.

I got quiet then. I didn’t want to give this person a hard time. I wanted to give him the impression that I was as strong as ever. I wanted to thank him for all he did and was doing by putting on a good face. What I needed was simply something he didn’t have to give.

I was deep in this melancholy when Bruce Fracier, a Green Beret brother, came to see me. He told the nurses out in a waiting area as he suited up before coming in to see me: “Stube has killed more people than smallpox.” He had meant this as a great compliment. He thought it was a cool thing to say. It would have been to me too—before I was blown up, shot, and left lying on a bed in a burn unit.

The thing was, hearing him say I had killed more people than smallpox as I was thinking about the men I’d killed, was a different thing. I wanted to know what the men I had killed had been like. What did their families look like? Did they have children? Were they volunteers or were they forced to fight? I still didn’t know if I would live or die, and the prospect of meeting them and God frightened me.

I was just beginning to understand that people who’ve lived like I had for all those years aren’t whole. I was starting to understand how shallow I’d been. I was beginning to see there are two halves to what makes a person. It would take a lot more pain and trouble before I would understand any of this.

I began to ask for chaplains. I always wanted one there. I know people get like that when they’re near death or in some bad spot in life, and I’d always thought that was weak. I used to make fun of people like that. Oh, I’m sick, time to turn to God. Oh, I’m old, time to turn to God.

Perhaps it can be superficial and desperate like that, but I found there is much more to it than this.

During it all, I couldn’t understand how I had lived. How does a person live through the wounds I’d received? My friend and Green Beret brother, Nate Chapman, took one small bullet in the thigh and died. How did I live? I was a medic in the Green Berets and had done a lot of work on wounded soldiers. In medic school at Fort Bragg, we trained by replicating war wounds, so I knew what kills and what someone can live through. I knew very well that I should be dead. Everyone on the battlefield thought so too. As we had waited for the helicopter to take me out of the raging firefight with hundreds of Taliban, I heard soldiers ask about me, and I saw a medic shake his fingers in front of his throat. This is the sign that a person doesn’t have a chance. I would see this again on the helicopter and again in Kandahar. It followed me like a bad habit that is contagiously spread from one person to the next.

No one thought I had a chance. This is why I asked the chaplains why I’d lived. They said I couldn’t know that. I said I wanted to do all I could to pay God back for my survival. They said I couldn’t repay God, and that I was arrogant for thinking I could.

I didn’t know what they meant. I told a priest to just give it to me straight.

He said, “How can I when you’re so blinded by your arrogance you can’t even see?”

I had asked for this stern treatment. That kind of intimacy brought straight talk, the kind I’d grown comfortable with from the Army, but, mostly, from my father, Chief Stube.

My father was sitting quietly in the room when the priest said that to me in a tone usually reserved for unruly children. My father sat up. He’d brought me up in the Christian church, but fell away from the church when he was near death from wounds he’d received in the Navy. He was in a Navy hospital in Japan when his wife left him and abandoned their children—my half brothers and sisters—without telling anyone why. She just left. This was in the early 1970s, before the Internet made finding and connecting with people so easily possible. It would be years before he found all of his children again.

When my father came to see me in the hospital in 2006, he still hadn’t come all the way back into the church. So when the priest said this to me, my father didn’t say anything. The priest left after asking me to pray and telling me the answers would show themselves, that all I had to do was open my eyes to see.

As weeks went by, the priests kept telling me I should be thankful and I should do what I could to live my life with God. I didn’t know or perceive the exact context they had in mind, and I sometimes resented their evasive answers, though I had literally begged for their presence and counsel. It would take much more time before I would understand what they were trying to tell me. I needed to find a real foundation—one I’d superficially skipped over as a Green Beret who had thought he could stomp out any enemy—before any of that would make sense.

I heard about wounded warriors I’d gotten to know in the hospital who went home and hanged or shot themselves. They weren’t growing past their wounded bodies. They couldn’t adjust. All they knew were the physical and superficial, and now that was gone. Ours is a society that puts the self at the center of the universe. People live as if self-gratification is everything. Pain is pitied and managed away. Our elderly are hidden from us. Our wounded are given sympathy and attention to distract them, but they are rarely given what they really need. I saw signs of this superficiality all around me. I was just beginning to see what was wrong, not with my body, but with my conception of myself.

Then, one day, I saw the wife of a wounded soldier walking from our quarters to the hospital across the street. She was wearing pajamas. I criticized her lack of decorum. I thought she should keep a better appearance for her wounded husband and for the military community. But then, I found out that her husband had died of his wounds and that she had come running out of bed. She was so distraught that what she was wearing didn’t matter.

I fell apart when I learned this. I detested myself for thinking such judgmental things. How dare I judge her? How did I know what she’d gone through, who she was, and what was happening?

This was when I turned a corner. This was when faith began to heal me.

I made a conscious effort to stop judging others superficially. This new way of seeing things made me begin to hate the phrase “wounded warrior.” I get it. It’s graphic and real. Some of our warriors come back with parts missing and with holes shot right through them. But that’s just their body; it’s not them. When I learned to suspend judgement and open my eyes to the truth, that there is something special in us that is more important than our bodies, I began to heal. It took all but losing my body for me to understand this. All of what happened to me and what was killing those around me settled into a theme that suddenly showed what I needed, and what anyone who gets lost in war or in life really needs.

The code I’d lived my life by as a Green Beret soldier was no longer enough. I needed these deeper—what I call “feminine”—virtues to become a complete person who could climb out of that hospital bed and create new A-Teams to tackle the next physical and mental challenges in my personal and professional life.

I feel compelled to humbly share this, which is why I speak publicly and why I wrote Conquer Anything—A Green Beret’s Guide to Building You’re A-Team.