Captain Brad Geary
speaker
303 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Captain Brad Geary’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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um which is i think what attributes these suicides we did a suicide stand down um about a year ago and our prevention specialist said statistically the highest number of suicidal ideations in our force come from people under investigation whether you're innocent or guilty doesn't matter just the the simple part of being under investigation uh and those leaving the teams
And I was like, oh yeah, I understand that. And then they start showing all the psychological reasons why, all the things that these things produce. And like we've talked about, if we're disproportionately punishing people or putting them under this kind of scrutiny for no reason, man, 29% of suicides? My father-in-law quotes this old political satire cartoon, Pogo.
And he says, we have met the enemy and he is us. We should really care about that. I didn't go this in depth with Secretary Hegseth and Director Gabbard, but that whole system needs to be overhauled because if we have a suicide epidemic, which we do, we already have problems with this. Why are we contributing to that by allowing a process to be involved that disproportionately punishes people?
It's horrific. It's horrific. And I've heard it from them. I've seen it. I've seen it in their eyes. And we lived it. We lived it. We talked about some of the things, the suffering we endured through our career. We hit on this journey, this three-year journey, we hit three really dark moments. The first one was fear, fear-based, and it was when
is when they released this investigation to the press without having let me even see it and rebut it in any way. And I saw that frenzy as everyone was frothing at the mouth, and it was just horrible to watch. And we were actually scheduled to go on leave the next day, so I went to the airport with my family, and my mind just did a million places. And as we're checking in all of our luggage,
I had that moment, you know, they take too long sometimes and you're just trying to figure it out. And so you're just sitting there with nothing to do. And it was the first moment I had nothing to do. And I closed my eyes and it was almost like I'd been running in front of a wave and the wave just like collapsed into the back of me. And it's the closest I've ever come to a full-blown panic attack.
And I'm pretty sure I was having a panic attack. Heart starts racing. It was all fear-based. And I'm thinking in my mind, like, I got a kid about to go to college. I got another one about to go to college. This is all I've ever known. You know, what am I going to do? Like, what am I going to do? This is all I've known.
My mom signed a waiver at 17 years old to join the Navy because I wasn't a legal adult yet. This has been my entire adult life that I've invested in this job and in this mission and this sense of service. And it's being, I can see it. The dream is being killed right in front of my eyes. What am I going to do? And I was so afraid. I closed my eyes and just, I was like, oh, and I prayed.
And I'm like, Lord, I'm so afraid right now. Like, I don't even know. I don't even know what I'm going to do. I need your help. I need you to help me now. And in that moment, it was really cool. In my mind's eye, I saw myself. It was really interesting. I saw myself on a desert road.
And it felt very much like many of the places we've deployed to with mountains on either side and just winding nice flat path. And I looked over to the right, all in my mind's eye, and I see Jesus standing at a crossroads on the smaller path that's going up the mountainside, a very treacherous path, lots of rocks. I mean, unpleasant.
But he's looking back at me, he's holding out his hand and he's got a smirk on his face. And I heard in my mind him say, it's okay. I'm gonna walk with you and I'm gonna show you each step and I'll be with you the whole time. And so I reached out and took his hand and I'm back in the airport. Now again, this is all my mindset.
I don't want to make it sound like, I don't want to make it sound like, you know, it's like a full up vision, but it happened. And I've never felt, I talked about the lucid dream last time. It was very similar to that. And I'm back and I was like, whoa. And all of a sudden we're checking the luggage.
I go sit down on the airplane again, I stopped, and I start thinking through, I'm like, did that happen? And I start crying, because I couldn't even control my emotions. And my wife looks over, freaks out, like, what are you, you know, what's wrong with you? You're crying on the airplane. And I couldn't even speak it, because it was so overwhelming, I had to text her.
And so he answered my prayer and he showed me, don't be afraid, I've got you. So that was the first part, what this produced fear. The second part, failure. And in many ways, I think that's what many men fear is failure, or failure to provide, or failure to succeed. I felt that through all the criticism for sure, but it manifested most as a dad in the middle of all this.
Obviously, we were stressed. Obviously, we had hard moments. I was impatient at times. And I mentioned in the last one that my youngest son developed some sort of a brain injury where Um, basically his, his blood brain barrier got compromised.
And so when he gets sick, his, his, the antibodies from the sickness that his body's producing jump over into his, um, I think the basal ganglia part of his brain. And it's like fireworks going off in his brain and it produces irrational, just, uh, spirals where it was, it was, it was horrific to see as a dad. And it was like 24 hours. One of the, he would, for instance, um,
brush his mouth accidentally, and then freak out because there was dirt on his hand. There wasn't, but he had imagined dirt. And so he would now be so disgusted that dirt was in his mouth, he would start gagging and spitting. And he would just spit all over himself and the floor because he couldn't tolerate the dirt in his mouth. He was taking like five baths a day. It was really, really weird.
And we realized it was neurological, but we were really, really trying to figure this out. And so I was as a typical dad and man trying to ration my way through it. And so he's having a spiral one night and I say, buddy, just talk to me about it. Let's just talk through this. Like we can, we can talk through it. And he's crying. He's in an absolute, he's irreconcilable.
And he said, dad, it's a nine year old. He was eight at the time. Dad, I don't want to tell you because you're just going to get mad at me. And I said, dude, I love you. I'm not going to get mad at you. Let's talk through it. So we start talking through it. I wasn't able to solve it. And so at some point I get frustrated, probably with myself, not with him. And I yelled. And he starts crying.
And he said, dad, you broke your promise. Oh man. And dude, every dad goes through this. Just the feelings of failure. Like, ah. I stood up, I could barely hold it together. And I go to the garage and I collapsed on the garage floor and just wept. And I couldn't press my face into the pavement far enough in submission to God. And I was just like, enough.
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