so you said when you’re looking at pictures now and you’re going through the years you can kind of start to identify things that you saw your that when you look back it becomes a little bit does it become more obvious as you look back yeah yeah i mean i i couldn’t tell you then but it’s uh it’s more obvious to me now this might be a dumb question but do you think that that has to do with the fact that we don’t get taught anything about this kind of stuff we meaning and and maybe it’s more prevalent now but you know um i i did a a a couple podcasts on here um about um lewis puller lewis puller jr he was the son of a famous marine the most famous marine named chesty puller and lewis puller was um he was he his dad chesty puller was like the the most iconic marine ever and he received five navy crosses and he the here’s a good way to describe how iconic he is he uh the marine corps has a has a what is it a mascot and they’ve had one it’s a bulldog and yeah the mascot i think they’re on number 17 but the mascot is named chesty and at boot camp they sing uh good night chesty wherever you may be that’s what they do in marine corps so this guy chesty pulled the most iconic marine of all time and he had a son and his son was uh not quite cut from the same cloth as his dad you know his dad was this kind of gruff guy and this son was sort of a more mild guy he wore glasses he went to college he uh was just more of a cerebral type guy and he gets done with college and he’s not really sure what he’s going to do with his life so he decides well you know my dad was in the marine corps go join the marine corps so he goes to join the marine corps he can barely get in because his gla his eyesight’s bad the people that are looking at his application are like wait a second this says lewis puller junior are you chesty pull her son he’s like yep no but we we can get you in so he gets in the marine corps goes through officer candidate school goes to the basic school and then it’s 1968 so he goes to vietnam and when he gets to vietnam um going on rotations in these three different spots and eventually goes on an operation and he steps on a land mine gets severely wounded he loses both of his legs he loses a bunch of his fingers and dexterity in his hands almost dies i mean it’s just a miracle that they were able to keep him alive and he he he does stay alive um comes back to america you know devastating for his dad the great iconic marine hero is breaking down when he sees his son chesty puller um lewis fuller you know eventually recovered from his wounds and uh wrote a wrote a book called fortunate sun which is an incredible book and and sort of you know he was he’d gone down the path of alcohol and being an alcoholic and all this and and um eventually comes out of that writes this book the book gets published and in 1994 he fell out of his wheelchair injured himself went back in the hospital um they put him on painkillers he got addicted to painkillers again and and he killed himself and what was when i when i did this series of podcasts about this what was crazy was every single marine every single marine 100 knows who chesty polar is but a vast majority of marines that i talked to as that podcast was coming out did not know the story of his son and it seems like the perfect way to educate people about the hardships that people face when they come home from war and they you know obviously louis polar had a multitude of hardships as well but it seems like the education that we receive and not just us in the military but then the families that there’s things hey this is what we need to be looking out for and it it seems like if you’re if you now are looking back at pictures to be able to say man i see this i remember this these are the kind of things is this like like part of the things that you’re trying to share now so that people have better education about this kind of stuff oh my gosh yes yes yes and again i’m no scientist i’m no doctor i don’t have research under my belt but i have what i’ve lived and sitting in my chair having been with this person for so long you know we we i didn’t just like meet a team guy and then we got married and that’s not to bust on anybody that did but you know i’ve known him almost his entire life and then to watch him through his career and then to lose him in this way i didn’t see all these signs and symptoms prior i think if chad i want to believe that if chad thought something was wrong with him that he was probably trying to hide it from me i have other girlfriends widows whose husbands took their life and they have said that their husbands expressed to them the struggle they were having and what they were thinking about and you know their signs and symptoms and i didn’t have that and it’s not going to be the same for everybody we’re humans we’re all different whole biological dna it might express itself differently but if we could maybe educate people a little bit more about the toll your service takes and and to know that even if you’re not killed in action or killed in training or you don’t die by suicide but you’ve led a very active career you are going to be impacted some more than others and let’s really have a conversation about what you might see and and when is it going to be really pro when is it really a problem
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