What Is Your Greatest Lie?

Let's face it....we all have those lies we tell our self. what is yours?

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From the Whiskey Niner One studios at Stock's Boneyard. Hey, welcome to another show. Now, this show is gonna get real, so we're gonna throw out the mantra. It's a safe zone, but not a comfort zone. So, this show's question is what is your greatest lie? And while you're pondering that pearl of wisdom, I'm gonna take a break for some DBY love and some shout-outs, and I'll be back in just a few. He's located just outside the Yadkin Gate. 6477C Yadkin Road. He has a wide variety of patches, hats, tactical gear, you name it. Tell him Doc sent you. Looking for that unique, handcrafted, one-of-a-kind gift? Check out Dee's Unique Designs on Facebook. She specializes in custom artistry from paintings to jewelry, coasters to tumblers, and everything in between. That's Dee's Unique Designs on Facebook. Give her your ideas and watch them come to life. U.S. Marine Corps veteran Scotty Fraser survived the battlefields of Iraq and came home to pursue his passionate music. His album, Do or Die, chronicles his journey from warrior to the man. You can listen to his music on all nature by follow him at www.scottyfraser.com. That's www.scotty-s-c-o-t-ti-f-r-a-s-d-r.com. Or follow the Scotty Fraser band on Facebook. Loss. The one thing to change is the world as we know it. Mike Bernhardt has collected poems from those, including his own experiences, who have battled loss and grief. Voices of the grieving heart tells not only of loss and grief, but the spirit to rebound and keep going. You can find your copy on Amazon and Kindle. Alright, I'm back for a brief pause for the cause. Now, before I dug into this episode's question, I'm going to make an apology. For this show, I borrowed some of the content from a manuscript I was working on about my battles with PTSD. And the book is called The Silent Enemy Within. And I was looking for relevant examples from my past. Now, I want to say this while the war was a huge part of my life, it's not the only part. I had to learn that lesson the hard way. I'm going to use some examples from my tour in Iraq, so I'm going to strap in and jump back to 2004. So this excerpt is straight from the book. Guilt is something that's hard to live with. Guilt has a way of making you feel less of what you are because of the way things worked or turned out. Let's face it. War is an ugly, dirty, nasty business. Mr Murphy shows up at the most inopportune times and screws up the most meticulous laid plans. Here are some examples. Here's some of my examples. Why did my convoy drive over that IED without it going off and the other convoys coming or going through the same area got hit? Why did those bleepity bleep eighty-one millimeter mortars miss? Why didn't the AH sixty four Apache light us up while providing close air support? Yeah, I think you get the point. Why I did make it home when the casualty count when I left was Iraq in 2004 was just over a thousand, I have to wrestle with the question more times than I care to remember. And the answer is always the same. I have no idea. Every time I left forward operating base danger into crit to go on a mission, I convinced myself that I was going to die, and in doing so I was able to focus on my job at hand rather than focus on the fear of the unseen dangers. Alright, here's just a squirrel moment here. I did a podcast where I gave my mission count as 127. I was corrected by my gunner, Chris, saying that every time we left one location to another in the course of that mission, that was counted. Well, I only counted the time I left the gate till the time I got back in. One mission. If that was indeed the case, then my mind blankery jumped into light speed trying to think of a way I can cash all my chips all those times. In 2005, while being homeless and staying at the Salvation Army's Red Shield Lodge in Albany, Georgia, I started to write about my tour in Iraq. Now the book took me over three years to get to the point where I could say it was more or less finished. I thought that if I could get out what was like locked inside, I would somehow cathartically answer that question. After three years of pouring out the darkest parts of my mind, body, and soul into those pages, I came to a conclusion that you know what? I still didn't have a clue. What the fuke? While it was something that I needed to do, and as painful as it was at the time, it still didn't answer the question of why I was here. I did the next best thing. I asked God himself. I might be on hold because I'm still waiting. And a little uh FYI. Yeah, I honestly do believe that this podcast was an answer. So he's not on waiting. He's he's not a call waiting. So I figured out for myself that maybe I was allowed to come home to share what it's like to sacrifice your experience for something greater than yourself. I believe in the old adage that God only gives you what you can handle. And I'm going to add handle is a relative term and sometimes open to interpretation. The shoot or no shoot situation involved those two kids still causes me guilt to this day. While I was relieved I didn't have to take a shot, I feel I let those kids get way too close to the convoy. I gamble with the lives of my teammates. Part of me would have been justified in killing them as a product of war. Collateral damage, you know? Wrong place, wrong time. Sorry about that. I know some of you may say that that was a good thing. One of the things I had to reconcile was that I went over as a medic with the primary responsibility to preserve life. I was also in a position to take life. I think of it like this, whatever it takes. Isn't survival the end goal of war? Make it out of hell and make your idea of heaven a little easier? So I sort of feel guilty for the fact I'd loved it over there. I actually find found myself and my element. All the chaos, all the time, the daily nuances of life back in the world just you know what? It didn't matter. Life was simply defined. No greater feeling of being alive than being surrounded by death and destruction everywhere. I did feel guilty for the civilians caught in the middle of all that destruction and death. The starvation and suffering was everywhere. Poverty was on a scale that I'd never been exposed to even before in I grew up for. I wanted to save everyone. I wanted to bring all the troops home, and I know that's an unrealistic expectation in the combat in the chaos of combat. Not everyone is gonna make it home. I didn't have it my power to be everywhere at the same time and aid the injured and comfort the dying. It just wasn't possible. I have to learn to accept that reality over many years. And I gotta be honest, I don't like it. But there isn't a whole hell of a lot I can do about it. Even when I worked in EMS, I couldn't save everyone. Even with the skills, the medical knowledge, and the love and the talent for the job, it wasn't up to me. And that is a hard pill to swallow. So for me, acceptance was the key to emotional and mental survival after all these years. And I'm gonna borrow a quote from the late commander Richard Demo Dick, Shark Man of the Delta Marcinko, when he commanded SEAL Team Six. You don't have to like it, you just have to do it. The journey to reconciliation, inner peace is is as individualized as the one carrying the burden. You have to find the answers on your life journey. Now I would hasten to say that there's a constructive and destructive ways to accomplish this. Okay. So I plagiarize my own stuff and I'll figure out later if I want to sue me for damages. Oh well. So guilt is the one thing that cause you to doubt who you are. That one lie that says coulda woulda shoulda. That little voice in the back of your head that's always causing you to question your actions. I thought after a really bad call into ambulance there was something I could have done differently after we lost someone. I did what I was trained to do in the way it was needed. Another squirrel moment. I remember my first cardiac arrest. I was at Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center in Aurora, Colorado, and I'm believing it was like 1992. So I was walking through the ward past an area that was designated for patients waiting to transfer for another facility. Kind of like uh a holding place. So I made some small talk with one of the guys whose first name was Eddie. I can't use his last name for obvious reasons. No sooner than I got to the other side of the area, a code blue was called for that area. I turned around and started to see that they were working on Eddie. I jumped in and started to get blood pressure, nothing. I started chest compressions and pushed for all I was worth. Round after round of drugs went in to stimulate his heart back to life. Nothing. While I was pushing on his chest, I looked into a lifeless lifeless set of eyes, and I was thinking, man, this is a whole waste of time. Eddie's gone. What if I had stayed just a few more seconds shooting the bull with him? Could I have made a difference? Well, I felt guilty that I couldn't do more, but again, it wasn't up to me. When I was in medicine there was a constant battle between us and the Grim Reaper. There were many times I said, Not today, you bastard. You can't have this one. Sometimes our odds were not in my corner. Have you ever made the choices that came back and haunted you? Maybe at the time you had a little angel on your shoulder whispering to you not to do it, but you did it anyway. If you would have listened, things might have turned out different. Alright, let's face it. As much as we want, we can't go back and undo the past. If we could, then the events of our present and future would be different, and maybe even for the worse. I can't tell you how to make your peace. I can only tell you what I've done. I started with accepting my past. I didn't say liking it, I said accepting it. There are a lot of things in my past that were bad, especially in my childhood. There is a thin line between regret and guilt. Regret is feeling sad or disappointed or repentant over something you failed to do. Guilt is a feeling of having committed a wrong or failed an obligation. To me, the difference is intent. Did I intend for these things to happen, or was it just a byproduct of a decision? Can you look at yourself with a clear conscience and say, I did the best I could. You know what? If you can, then you have reached a point of acceptance. With acceptance there comes something even harder. Oh, forgiveness. For every person on this planet, there is a definition of this word. And basically the gist of forgiveness is to let go of the hurt and anger. That doesn't mean you forget, but it means you don't dwell on it. Think of it a way to drop a heavy anchor that you've been dragging around. Is it easy? Nope. Is it scary? Yep. Is a payoff worth it? Well, that's an individual effort. Ephesians chapter four, verse thirty-two talks about forgiving others, but what about self-forgiveness? Just some food for thought. You know what? I've done this myself. I've asked God to help me with this, and you know what? He delivered. Better than your local food delivery service, better than that old domino's thirty-minute pizza delivery time limit. Here's just a final thought. If you have the power to crush the greatest lie you can tell yourself, guilt guilt and regret are the things that you can heal from. You know what? It's time to break free. As always, I thank you for turning in, and again, I'm not going to use the usual catchphrase. If you have any questions, comments, show suggestions, or you want to be a guest, hey, drop me a line at the boneyard2021 at yahoo.com. That's the boneyard2021 at yahoo.com. And man, check this out. If you want some official show swag, go to t public and type in Doc's Boneyard in the search tab. That is T E Public P-U-B-L-I-C dot com. I may be the voice on the mic, but it's your show. Remember, it's not the fat, the meat, the gristle, it's just the bare bones. God bless us in John three sixteen.