So when Marine sniper Jake Wood arrived home in the States after two brutal tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, he really struggled to leave the war behind him.
And ten years after returning home, Jake's unit had lost more men to suicide than to enemy hands overseas.
And he watched in horror as his best friend and fellow Marine plunged into depression upon returning, stripped of a sense of purpose and community and even identity.
And despite Jake's attempts to intervene, his friend died by suicide alone and really reeling, Jake remembered how one of the only things that had given his friend a measure of hope was joining him in Haiti on this ragtag mission to save lives immediately following the 2010 earthquake.
And it turns out that their military training had rendered them unusually effective in these high stakes situations.
And Jake wondered if there was a way to help communities in crisis, often in the wake of these profound disruptions and natural disasters, while also providing a new mission to veterans.
With that, he built on the early missions to co found the now iconic Team Rubicon, a disaster relief organization with over 140,000 volunteers that drop into locations around the world to battle everything from hurricanes to tornadoes, wildfires, pandemics and civil wars, while reconnecting with this sense of purpose along the way.
And in Jake's inspiring memoir, once a warrior, he recounts this extraordinary journey.
In our conversation today, we drop into some of the really powerful and transformative moments along the way.
So excited to share it with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields and this is good life project.
Right now you're hanging out in LA.
It sounds like you actually kind of grew up bouncing around a couple of different places.
Texas, Nebraska, ending up in Bettendorf, Iowa, which, by the way, if you google Bettendorf, Iowa, it's like the MMA breeding ground.
What happened there?
Yeah, that's actually so random.
I kind of forgot about that.
A guy named Pat Miletich was a really early UFC guy and a pretty famous and well known University of Iowa wrestler, and he started a training camp right there.
And, boy, I'm forgetting all the names of the guys that came through.
But, yeah, I mean, all the champs you trained there, all of them back in the early days of the UFC.