Bomb Disposal in Bosnia: MCPO Ken Falke

Ken Harbaugh:

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I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Master Chief Petty Officer Ken Falke. Falke served in the Navy as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Specialist during the 80s and 90s, tasked with disarming all sorts of explosives.

MCPO Ken Falke:

Well, my name is Ken Falke. I'm a retired US Navy Master Chief Petty Officer, and I spent 21 and a half years in the Navy as a bomb disposal specialist, EOD, explosive ordnance disposal.

Well, I enlisted in the Navy in 1981, but if I back up a year, I left high school to play professional ice hockey. And I went down to Fort Worth, Texas, and there was a farm team there for the Colorado Rockies at the time called the Fort Worth Texans. And it was a walk-on to the team. I never made it to the NHL, never really played much for the Texans other than practice. And my life was just kind of going downhill. And I had a roommate who was playing and who was going back and forth to Denver occasionally for NHL games. And we were drinking one Friday night and the guy said to me, or I said to him, I said, "Do you think I have a chance?" And he looked at me and said, "Fuck no!" And I think at that point I realized I was probably in over my head and I needed to make a career change.

And I grew up, although most of my hockey skills came from the Chicago and Pittsburgh areas, I grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, just about eight miles from the Pentagon in a very military neighborhood full of World War II, Vietnam vets. My scoutmaster was a Vietnam colonel, green Beret. My guidance counselor in high school was a 82nd airborne guy who had made two jumps into France during the Second World War. So I had these really positive memories of military people. I had a grandfather who was career army, and my dad had got out of the army and became a cop in DC, which is why we ended up moving to DC.

So long story short, I really kind of was scraping at the bottom of the barrel thinking my life's going in the wrong direction, how do I change it? And I walked into a recruiter's office. I used to run the youth and adult hockey leagues in a local ice rink in Arlington, Texas. And one of the guys that played on the adult hockey league was a sailor. And I remember him coming in and out of the locker room in uniform, and I had talked to him a couple times and it just sounded interesting. So I went down to the recruiter, and wasn't sure what I wanted to do and started talking to the Army Special Forces recruiters. And as I was walking out of this building... It was a small building with all four service recruiters in it. This Navy guy grabbed me and he had this recruiting book opened up to Navy SEAL. And I said that sounded good. I was very fit at the time, as you can imagine. I was playing hockey five hours a day. I was a swimmer in high school. I mean, I was very fit at the time and just thought I could do it. And I did. I enlisted in the Navy April 30th, 1981. The guy said, "When do you want to leave for bootcamp?" I said, "Tomorrow." And I left a month later. I was in bootcamp June 1st of 1981.

It was a billet to go into the SEAL teams, and it was a contract that the Navy had called a three by three, which I don't think they do anymore. And it was three years of active, three years of reserve. And you did, went through BUD/S, went through your active duty SEAL team, and then you went to the Reserve SEAL team.

I got to bootcamp and I failed the eye exam. And I had never wore glasses in my life and I failed it miserably. I think you had to be 20/35 or 20/40, what they used to call binocular vision acuity, meaning both eyes could see at that level combined. And I was at like 20/60 or 20/50. And the SEAL, who was the motivator at bootcamp at Orlando was a guy named Lucky Verlindi. And Lucky was probably the fittest man to this day that I've ever personally met. I mean, this guy was like an animal. And every day he worked us out and was getting us ready physically for BUD/S. And the waiver came back and I was gutted. And I went to him, and it was a chief, and I said, "Hey Chief, what the hell do I do now?" Because they had put in a waiver for me and the waiver came back disapproved. And he said, "Oh, maybe go EOD." And I said, "What's that?" And he said, "Bomb disposal." I said, "Damn Chief, that sounds dangerous." And he said, I'll never forget, he looked me right in the eyes, says, "Yeah, I wouldn't do it either." So I chuckled a bit and I'm like, "What the hell do I do now?"

Anyway, I went to the head, standing there in the urinal and over the urinal is a poster recruiting for the ceremonial guard in Washington DC. So I thought, I'll try this. And it had the dates up there and said go to the gymnasium. And I had finished bootcamp. I was in this holding pattern waiting to go to BUD/S. And I walked into the gym. And I heard my name called, somebody said, "Kenny." And that's what they called me when I was a kid, and my mom still does, but that's what they called me when I was a kid. And I looked up and it was this guy in uniform, he was a commander, a navy commander. And it was my best friend from high school's girlfriend's dad. And he was the commanding officer of the ceremonial guard. And I told him what had happened to me, he didn't realize I had joined the Navy. And told him what happened with the SEAL contract. And he said, well, you're six feet tall. If you want to come to the ceremonial guard, we'll make it happen. And I left Orlando a few months later... Maybe not even a few months, maybe a month later, maybe November of '81. Got to DC and started my career in the ceremonial guard.

I wasn't thinking at all about EOD. I mean, Lucky had really turned me off. 'Cause I thought he would've said to me, "Yeah, it's not the SEAL team, but they do cool work. You're still diving." That's what I was hoping. So in the back of my mind, I was going, well, I'm only on this three year contract. I'll do three quick years and I'll get out and go join the Army Special forces. And that was my plan. Well, I got to the ceremonial guard in the end of 1981, in January of '82, Air Florida Flight 90 hit the 14th Street Bridge. I don't know if you remember the story or not, but it was an airline, Air Florida, and they had deiced the plane. The coldest night in Washington DC I think in history to this day. And there must have been a foot and a half of ice on the Potomac River. And this plane took off, it de-iced and it waited around too long and the ice gathered back up on the wings and it took off and went straight down with less than a mile away and hit the 14th Street Bridge at rush hour. And almost everybody on the plane died, including one person trying to rescue. I was on duty at the ceremonial guard that night. And back in the day, they don't exist anymore, but there used to be two tug boats on the back of the ceremonial guard quay wall. And they used to bring the ships up Potomac River for port calls into Alexandria, and then years earlier, took ships into the Navy yard.

Well, anyway, the tugboat crews called over and we had a small duty section of, I say 14 guys maybe. And we left two behind and the 12 of us jumped on this tugboat and went out and started basically picking up bodies, picking up wreckage, all this stuff that you do after a plane wreck like that. And about midnight that night, I think the plane wreck, and I don't have my facts in front of me, but I think the plane wreck happened at about five o'clock. It was rush hour, evening, rush hour. But about midnight that night, this little dive boat came chugging up the Potomac River and the EOD school used to be in Indian Head, Maryland. Which is about 30 miles south of Washington DC, straight down the Potomac River. And I ended up getting onto that boat. And I wasn't diving, I was making coffee, I was boiling water because the regulators, they were diving and the cold waters were freezing. So we were kept pouring hot water in these regulators. And the EOD school had pulled all the Navy staff and students who were already qualified divers out to come up and do the initial diving on the wreckage. They didn't do the salvage, but they went down looking for anybody that possibly was alive or any other bodies and all those types of things. And the chief that was on the boat said to me, "Wow, you're a hard worker. Have you ever thought about EOD?" And I told him the story and he said, "Well, if you come down next week, I will give you the test and if you make it, we'll get you off to EOD school." So that's kind of what happened. It's a much longer story than that, but it was a blast. It literally was.

I went down there and met some great people. Many of them, the guys initially recruited me were former SEALs. Because in the mid '80s, when the UDT teams went away, the underwater demolition teams went away, all the marine mammals, the dolphins and sea lions that we trained in the Navy came from the UDT teams over to EOD. So there were a lot of the SEALs who really loved working mammals who came with them. And so it was really interesting. It was a great foray into the community for sure.

So in the Navy there's three diving communities, the SEAL teams, EOD, and then we call fleet divers or salvage divers. And the EOD and salvage divers have to have 20/20 correctable vision, which I had. And at the time they weren't doing laser eye surgery, which I ultimately had in the Navy as well. They hadn't done enough testing on it. They were worried that the pressure from diving wouldn't be good on your eyes. But in EOD specifically, you can't be colorblind, you do have to have your color vision. The red wire is important.

Well, EOD training, they say EOD training academically is the second hardest school in the US Navy behind nuclear power. Physically, second behind BUD/S. Because you still go through dive school and all the other aspects of chemical and biological warfare and the heavy suits and everything that you wear. So it's a pretty strenuous course. The pipeline for EOD training has changed over the years a lot. When I went through, you started in Huntsville, Alabama, a chemical and biological school and what I would call your initial hazing. Basically, are you good enough to make it into this community? And most people that got through Huntsville did pretty good in dive school. You'd lose a handful of people in dive school, but nothing like they do in BUD/S. BUD/S classes will start with 150 guys and 16 of them graduate in the class. In EOD school back then, if you got through Huntsville, we'd lose one or two maybe in EOD school or in dive school. But you're there for three months. The dive programs changed a lot. When I went through, it was just scuba. Initially it was just scuba diving and our underwater diving apparatus that we use for diving on mines, it's called the Mark 16 underwater breathing apparatus. So it wasn't just really a scuba class with this mixed gas UBA. Eventually, I ended up going through second class dive school, which was Deep Sea Dive school too. Somebody had a great idea in the '80s, I think it was an F14 had gone down in Virginia with some missiles on it and they needed EOD and there weren't enough deep sea divers to go dive. So they ended up making it a requirement at some point in time. So I ended up going back to dive school at Little Creek for second class school years later.

But that's kind of the way it all started. And then you left there once you graduated the diving phase, you went up to Indian Head Maryland, and for the Navy program, it was almost nine months long. The whole pipeline was about a year. For about nine months, learning fuses and firing systems and landmines and booby traps and improvised explosive devices, IEDs. And all the things that can go bang, that it's in the military arsenal or another military's arsenal, we would have to learn. And you'd have to memorize it. I went back as an instructor I think 10 years after I went through school, and I remember I was teaching projectiles and projectile fuses, and I remember lining all these fuses up on the table and these students trying to memorize them. And at the time, I couldn't remember how I remembered them. Because it was just so many. But I think that you'd go to class all day long. PT normally in the morning, go to class all day long, you'd get about an hour and a half break and then you'd have to go back to night study from 6:00 to 10:00 every night. And they had real strict requirements. If you didn't have at least 50% of the available night study hours and you failed a test, they kicked you out.

So like I said, academically super challenging program. The biggest difference, all four services have EOD. The biggest difference is after nuclear weapons starts off with the basic core principles and then demolition training and then ground ordinance, air ordinance, improvised ordinance, and nuclear ordinance. And after nuclear ordinance, everybody else leaves and then the navy goes on for another three months to do underwater ordinance and then they have to do a diving phase that's more EOD centric than they did in dive school.

So how it goes today, I'm not a hundred percent sure. I think it's still fairly similar with the exception of everything today is located at dive schools in Panama City, Florida and the EOD schools at Eglin Air Force Base. So it's in Fort Walton Beach, but it's pretty much the same I think for Navy guys today.

I initially finished the training in the late fall of 1985. And what was going on at the time was the Iran Iraq War, some mines that they had found in the Suez Canal. And we had sent a couple teams. I didn't go, we had sent a couple teams from the unit that I was at. I was at EOD. Back in the days, we only had two mobile units, one in Hawaii and one in Fort Story Virginia and Virginia Beach. And I was at Mobile Unit two in Virginia Beach. And we had sent a couple teams over to dive on the mines. And we do a lot. EOD is a very interesting community because a lot of people don't know that every mission that the Secret Service supports the president's travel on, there are military EOD supporting those missions. So there's always something going on as a antenna to be blown up at some old military base or somebody digs up an old mortar or somewhere. Back in the day, every aircraft carrier and every ammunition ship in the fleet had a four or five man EOD team on him. So there were always a lot of things going.

I made a couple deployments on the USS America, on the USS Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, I back-filled a guy who got injured on a ammunition ship halfway through a deployment. So just the normal things that you do in the Navy as a sailor. And then things started heating up for the Gulf War. I had just come back from a deployment to Scotland, Holy Loch Scotland. We had an EOD team in Holy Loch because back in the day, I don't think it's still the same case, but back in the day, every Navy base that had nuclear weapons had EOD teams. And Holy Loch Scotland was a nuclear submarine base. So we had a forward deployed EOD team there, and I had just come back from that deployment when the Gulf War started to heat up. The first Gulf War. And at the time we had a new program in EOD where guys had gone to work with the SEAL teams to support their missions. And there were only four guys who were selected initially, one officer and four enlisted guys that were selected initially for this job. And when my team came back from Scotland, we had a really, really good deployment supporting SEAL Team two and some other special ops kind of missions, and the stuff that we did right there in Holy Loch. And we came back with a really good deployment and our XO said, "I'm going to take your team and you're going to augment these four guys who are supporting the SEAL teams because shit's about to hit the fan and they're going to need more than four EOD guys in the Persian Gulf."

So we did that. We started all the training basically to learn how to operate with SEAL teams. And kind of what I had joined the Navy for started to come back. Obviously my mission was disarming bombs and mines and those types of things, but we were working with the SEAL team and going through the same shooting training and parachuting training, diving training that they had gone through. So I never felt like I was a SEAL, I always felt like I was an EOD guy there to support the missions.

And then we got the bad news. I guess Desert Shield I think started in August of '90, and we got the bad news in December of '90 that we weren't going to deploy. So there were some rumors, I don't know how true they were, I was a young sailor at the time. But there were some rumors that General Schwarzkopf who was leading the Gulf War wasn't a big fan of Navy SEALs and didn't want a bunch of Navy SEALs running around Kuwait and Iraq. But many of them did deploy and get off and do some good stuff. But when that bad news came out, the guy, the master chief who was running the SEAL program, SEAL integration program, had just come from Bermuda. We had a navy OD team out in Bermuda. And he said to me, "Why don't you go to Bermuda for three years? We do a lot of parachuting, we do a lot of diving. And then come back and try out for our unit."

So that was my plan all along. It never worked out. I went to Bermuda and had a blast. But during that timeframe, I was involved in a really serious accident. I was in a parachuting accident in Puerto Rico. I broke my back, dislocated my shoulder, I had a severe concussion. My parachute reinflated, I got drug down the runway and lost all the skin off the back of my arm. And quite frankly, when it all happened, I thought my career was over. It wasn't, I went on nine months later to run my best PT test of my military career. And that was kind of a real wake up call for me. And at that point in time, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I kept parachuting and I made over a thousand jumps. And I loved everything I did, but I didn't necessarily see myself going back to that specific opportunity. So I did an instructor tour. The detailer in the Navy, our detailers are the people who send us places and provide your military transfer orders. And our detailer told me he needed us at the EOD school, which was my worst nightmare. 'Cause I was an operator, I didn't want to go teach. The saying in the Navy is, if you can't do, you teach. I don't think that's true. In hindsight, I tell this to a lot of people that don't believe me now, I've been out of the Navy as long as I was in at this point in my life. But I tell a lot of people that in hindsight it may have been the best tour of duty that I ever had. For a couple reasons. One is it was the first time I trained a lot of people on active duty that were already basically trained by the EOD school. But the EOD school, you would get these people in, we used to say they can't even spell EOD, and you have to turn them around in a year to be a tech and to go to the fleet.

And to this day, I think at one point, every commanding officer of every Navy EOD unit, I was their lead instructor. And to this day, I remain friends with many of them. And to me that never happened at the operational units, 'cause you were always... I mean, I was gone. I was in the Navy 21 years. We added it up when I retired, I was deployed for 14 of 21 years. So when you're gone that much, you don't meet people at your units very much. Your team is close, but you don't meet the whole unit. But at the EOD school, you're there and you meet them all. So that was kind of where he sent me and it worked out really well.

I left the EOD school and was selected for an exchange tour, what they call a personnel exchange program, the PEP program to go to England and work with the British clearance divers teaching what we do in the US. So I spent two years on this great exchange tour, ended up in Bosnia with the British Special Forces. Just a great tour. In Bosnia. I would tell people, although Bosnia didn't get that much publicity from American involvement in the war, it was really an EOD war. It was the first time landmines had been laid in the quantities that... There were, I think 68,000 landmines in the first lane of the war. So we were in Bosnia and every day you were doing something. And they weren't just traditional landmines, many of them were booby trap, like IEDs are. And we disarmed and blew up I mean hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds of stuff. We used to gather it all at this big range and every Friday go blow it up, and it was amazing opportunity to really do our trade in a semi combat zone, if you will.

Well, the sensation of walking up on anything that's unexploded is amazing. Every sense in your body is elevated and ready to go. My last tour in the Navy I was at the headquarters element out in San Diego, but they did studies on bomb disposal guys in training and found out that the heart rates actually lowered when they were on the ordinance... Walking down and walking back, your heart rate's up, but when you're down there, you kind of mellow out. You almost kind of get in this meditative state and get focused. And that's the one thing, I believe it happens all through the military, but I can say for sure in the EOD community, we do a great job of training people. I mean, we do lose, we've had lots of losses in Iraq and Afghanistan of VOD troops. For the amount of work that's been done and the seriousness of the devices and bombers on the end of wires and cell phones and all the other things where you have relatively no control over. We just do a great job of training. And all that training comes when all these senses get heightened and they're on edge and all that training just kind of settles you into what's next. And sometimes it's a fairly simple problem: you walk up, there's a bomb laying on the ground, you walk up to it with a block of C4 and set it on it and walk back and get into a safe area and fire it off. Other times it gets a little hairier. You've got, there's a fuse on the front of the bomb and the fuse has got to be unscrewed by hand and you got to get a wrench and you're afraid that if you put too much torque on the wrench, the damn thing's going to go off in your face. And all of those things kind of happen.

The scariest stuff is the stuff you can't see. And landmines and IEDs that have been buried fall into that category. And you can imagine, let's say a mission, this mission occurred in Bosnia almost every night, where special forces guys have to get into a place to observe or set up a sniper post or whatever the story might be, and you're literally on your belly. And no Kevlar. On your belly with a probe in your hand, a probe that looks like an ice pick, probing the ground at a certain technique so you don't poke the landmine and set it off. And poking the ground and clearing an area so that the guy behind you or the team behind you can get into a safe area. And that's the stuff that really makes your butt hole pucker. It's really the stuff that you can't see.

Yeah, I think the things that I remember the most, and I'll stay on the subject of Bosnia for a second, the thing I remember the most was digging up a landmine and then looking, I was just about to pick the thing up and there was a grenade underneath it. And the grenade, the pin had been pulled obviously, and if you pulled it off, the landmine was set as a booby trap. And then the next day we pulled, I think I still have the drawings, we actually did some pencil drawings of the booby trap. We pulled another landmine up and there were six more underneath it. So they weren't the traditional, what I would call the traditional UN mine laying guidelines weren't followed. These were things that people just did just to make sure that there was limiting the access of where people could get to.

The other thing that I really remember, again, sticking on the Bosnian subject was one of the programs the British ran. I think all the sectors ran it. I was in the British sector obviously because I was with the Brits. It was called Operation Harvest. And Operation Harvest was an event that was done in concert, I think on the US side with civil affairs teams, on the British side, I don't remember what the guys were called, but the mission of Operation Harvest was basically to buy back ordinance. So you'd set up a table on Friday in this town square, people would literally bring you landmines and grenades and AK-47s and you name it, rockets, projectiles, artillery projectiles, a small arms ammunition. And each thing they brought, there was a dollar amount associated with it and they'd get paid. And I remember standing behind this table and this guy was pulling on my camouflage shirt and he said, "Oh, come, come, come." And I'm thinking, I'm not going with this guy, he's going to end up killing me or something. I ended up going, he owned a grocery store. And in this grocery store, I'm not shitting you, in this grocery store there were eight rocket propelled projectiles in the rafters that he had stashed away. There were, not exaggerating, maybe 50 cases of landmines, about four anti-tank mines to a case. This one particular anti-personnel landmine that was very prevalent and used over there in Bosnia, Russian landmine, maybe another 50 cases, 10 AK-47, as much smaller arm ammunition as you needed to fight a war. It was all tucked away in the back of this guy's store. And it was kind of interesting to see how when the war broke out over there, they were issuing civilians stuff to defend themselves. And it was a really nasty war. And all wars are, but a really nasty war. I mean, the Serbs were just driving big artillery pieces and 30 millimeter machine guns up to houses and just leveling Muslim houses. So it was pretty nasty and a lot of defensive work was being done like that. So I always found that to be fascinating, and then we'd all load the stuff up in the back of a truck and take it out to that range I mentioned earlier and just blow it up.

And some of it we kept for intelligence purposes. In the EOD world, we have a series of publications. I think every US ordinance item has a publication on how it functions and how you render it safe. We have a really good library of foreign ordinance too, but in Bosnia, I think I remember the number was about 220 items that had been found in Bosnia that weren't covered by EOD publications. And we had to basically take these things apart and send them back to the intelligence community where they would take them apart and write these publications. And that was super interesting to me 'cause it was really the first time that, other than IEDs, it was the first time that I had encountered unexploded ordinance that didn't have an EOD publication for it, and that was really interesting.

I felt super safe in my world. It's hard to describe it. I'll give you an example. My brother is a high voltage electrician. I mean, this guy is, he's as manly as a man can be. And I will not work on anything electrical because I hate getting shocked. And I remember saying to him, or I said to him one time, I'm trying to hang the ceiling fan or something, he said, "I'll come over and do it for you." 'Cause I just don't want to get shocked. And he goes, "dude," he goes, "you play with explosives and you're worried about 120 volts?" And it does put things in perspective. But again, he's a trained electrician. He's been doing it for 40 years. I was a trained bomb disposal guy and I felt very confident and not cocky but just confident in the capability.

The funny things that I remember when you think of your safety is things like my last deployment, my last shipboard deployment was on the John F. Kennedy. And we were in port a lot, it was during one of the gas crisis where they couldn't fly much or they didn't want the ships spending a lot of time at sea. So we were in port in the Mediterranean, I think it was 180 day deployment. We were in port for 98 days or something crazy. And the end of the deployment got excited because we shot a few MiGs down, Libyan MiGs down. But the beginning of the deployment was super slow, and every time a ship pulls into a port you do probably every 24 hours or so, and maybe even more often than that, you do these security swims on the ships to make sure that bad guys aren't around or putting sticky bombs, we call limpet mines, underneath the ship.

So you'd go to ports like Naples, Italy, and you can't... Some of the ports, Alexandria, Egypt, you have 200 feet of visibility. But you'd go to a place like Naples, Italy, and you'd surface from trying to get back into the rubber boat and there'd be condoms and hypodermic needles and all the shit that the Italians flush straight in their sewage, basically straight into the Mediterranean. Those are the things that you don't have training… Then you get sick the next day and the doctor's giving you [inaudible] and tetanus shots, and those are the memories that I like to put away.

Op tempo is an interesting discussion, and like I mentioned 14 of these 21 years. And when I say deployed, I mean sometimes it was a week, sometimes it was a month, sometimes it was six months, two times it was almost nine months. And these week things add up. My last job in the Navy, I was technically on shore duty and I was on a plane every single week going somewhere: national Laboratories, DTRA, DARPA, all these different places doing the work that I was tasked to do.

But the joke in our community was that EOD stood for everyone's divorced. And when you look at the military, historically, the military has always had a higher divorce rate than the civilian population. But not by much. Let's say the average divorce rate in the US is like 50%, the military was like 58%. In the special operations communities, you'll see divorce rates up to 95, 98%. And that's a big toll on the family. I've been married for 41 years. My wife's English, and she's tough, and she is a good, as we would say, a good Navy wife. She was really good raising our kids when I was gone. She always worked. And we made it work. We just made it work because I always tell people I think it's easy, although divorces are never easy and they're never nice, they're always nasty, but it's an easy way out. And I think that the things that happen to people who get divorced happen to people that stay married, and you just keep plugging away. I was at sea. We had a challenge getting pregnant after we got married. Our first daughter was born eight years after we got married, and we knew we wanted to have children. But we had a challenge. And then my wife got pregnant and I deployed on the Kennedy. And I was going to be home for the birth, everything was working out, and then I was sitting in an English class, I was trying to get my associate's degree when I was on this deployment. I was sitting in an English class on this aircraft carrier and they called General Quarters, and we had just shot these two Libyan MiGs dow . So you could imagine what happens when that happens, you get extended on a deployment. And I ended up missing the birth. Luckily, my mother-in-law had flown over from England, and one of the guys I was on deployment with was my wife's kind of birthing partner. So our youngest daughter was born. I got home. I was home, that was February, I was home for four months and then deployed again.

The great tradition is when people have children during the deployment, they're the first ones that get off. And when the Kennedy pulled back into Norfolk Harbor, I don't think I knew it, but I still have the VHS tape somewhere. One of the Virginia Beach news stations was there interviewing all the people who had had babies while they were on deployment. And there were a lot, there were, I want to say 14 or 15 of us that they let off the ship first to go down. And my wife and my mother-in-law are standing on the pier and the baby in the arms.

So it is emotional, it's try not to let anybody see you cry on the TV because it wouldn't go well over at the unit. But it certainly is emotional and it was just so good to be back home 'Cause it was extended. Nothing's worse than an extended deployment. It's one thing to go away for a long time, but once you get that return date in your head and it gets changed, and not by a day but by months, it's a little brutal. So it's a great tradition. I think that those things are videoed. Every port, I think that there's a Navy ship that comes home, the local news channels normally do a great job of reporting on those.

I got out of the Navy in the middle of 2002 after the first deployment cycle to Afghanistan right after 9/11. And I got out, truthfully, I was a master chief, my goal was to stay in the Navy for 30 years. It's all I knew, it's all I loved. But my last boss was a prick and I just couldn't take it anymore. I remember talking to a chief buddy of mine who retired before 30, and I was asking him, "Why don't you stay to 30 or 28 until you get your pay raises and all the things that we talk about as we get close to retirement?" And he looked at me and he said, "Listen." He said, "you'll know when it's time." And that's what happened to me. I knew it was time to go, and I put in my papers and the next day, stop-loss came out. So all SEALs and all EOD guys were put on stop-loss and we couldn't get out of the Navy.

I got out for two reasons. One, my best friend was a detailer at the time, and it's good to have friends in high places. But the main reason I got out is because back when I was in the Navy, EOD was not a rating. So I was a bosun mate. And both in EOD and in the bosun mate ratings, we were overmanned in master chiefs. And guys don't get promoted if you're overmanned, there's not enough billets. So when they did all the manning stuff, there were a handful of us that they ended up letting go. And I still, to this day, I still carry a few regrets around that. I'm so happy that I got out. I'm happy that the success I've had post-military career, but I do many days wish I'd have been there for the full 30.

My wife and I early in the war in 2004, started something that today is known as the EOD Warrior Foundation. And the job or the mission of the EOD Warrior Foundation when we started it was to raise money to keep the families of severely wounded, and I say severely wounded, physically wounded troops, to keep their families at the hospital. So we would pay for travel and hotel rooms and rental cars and meal tickets and the kind of things that you do to keep families together. And through that work, after I left my company and I didn't have a job, we started bringing their families from Walter Reed and Bethesda Hospital specifically out to our house. And we had a big estate, a 200 acre property with an old farmhouse and a couple small guest house on the property. And we used to bring their families out to our house. And it started off as like barbecues and weekend stays. Had one dad come out and spend a week with me deer hunting. He was a big hunter and was stuck in this hospital for a year and wanted to do some hunting. So those were the kind of things that started things off. And my wife and I were talking one day, and really what we didn't want to do in our retirement was run a bed and breakfast out of our house. So we had this big 200 acre estate. Most of the property was a hardwood mountain, big hardwood trees all over the mountainside. But at the furthest parcel of land away from our house, we call it the bottom of the mountain, was a 37 acre parcel that was all pasture land. And we decided to donate it, and we donated it, started a second nonprofit. We didn't want to do it just for EOD guys and gals, we wanted to do it for anybody who was hurting. So we opened up this facility. We went out to raise $10 million to build what is known today as the nation's first privately funded wellness center for veterans. And now our mission's changed a lot. We train first responders as well as veterans. But the work of Boulder Crest is really important to me. It has been, as a person, as a philanthropist, my goal is, and our goal at Boulder Crest is to really transform the way mental health care is done for people. Because what's done for PTSD treatments and depression treatments, the majority of people that enter traditional mental health care never get better. I tell people all the time that the mental health system is designed to make you feel less bad, not necessarily to feel good. And as everybody knows, we have a massive suicide epidemic in this country. 140 Americans a day take their own lives, and somewhere between 20 and 40 of those are veterans, military veterans. More cops this year will die by suicide than in the line of duty. So it's a big problem in this country. And I always tell people that the opposite of suicide is living a great life. Well, if all you're doing is reducing symptoms, you still have suicidal problems. And that's what we've seen. If you look at a chart over the last 20 years, the amount of money that has been spent on suicide prevention programs, the line runs parallel to the number of suicides that have been on the increase. And the common sense master chief in me says, why in the hell would we keep dumping money into the same thing that doesn't work? It's very frustrating.

So we've gone out on this mission. We met a psychologist by the name of Tedeschi who in 1995 coined a term called post-traumatic growth. And the idea of post-traumatic growth is what doesn't kill us, makes us stronger. And where you can see really large populations of people that have achieved post-traumatic growth in their lives, the two biggest populations that I know of are the Holocaust survivors and the 591 men that were in prison camps in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. You meet these prisoners of war, and I mean, they were tortured and starved and broken bones, and you meet them and you would never know anything bad happened to them. They're the most positive upbeat people I've ever met in my life. And we studied that really in depth. And not that trauma doesn't affect people differently, but what we believe strongly is that regardless of the type of trauma you have, that you can go on to do some remarkable things in your life. And that's what we teach at Boulder Crest. We're not a therapy program or a training program focused on the science of this post-traumatic growth and a wellness model that focuses on our mind, our body, our financial wellness, and our spirituality.

And that's really what we're doing. We have two facilities now. We have the mountainside property here in Virginia where I live about an hour west of DC. We have a second property in Southern Arizona. And the last couple of years, it's kept me busy and turned my hair gray is scaling the work around the nation. So what we're doing is finding other nonprofit partners who own facilities and deliver retreat breaks programming and teaching them how to run our programs.

And we've scaled now what was about a hundred people a year going through our flagship program, which is called Warrior Path, is now about a thousand people a year. And that's happened over the last couple of years. We just celebrated our 10th year anniversary. In 10 years, we've served over 100,000 people. So it's definitely a rewarding. Guy come up to you and shake your hand and say, "You saved my life." That kind of stuff really makes you feel good, and it makes you want to get up the next day.

If you want to learn more about Boulder Crest, you can go to our website and it's simply Boulder Crest, B-O-U-L-D-E-R crest.org. Bouldercrest.org is the website, and there's lots of information there for you.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Master Chief Petty Officer Ken Falke.

Thanks for listening to Warriors In Their Own Words. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We’re always looking to improve the show.

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Warriors In Their Own Words is a production of Evergreen Podcasts, in partnership with The Honor Project.

Our producer is Declan Rohrs. Brigid Coyne is our production director, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our Audio Engineer.

Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.