Coleman Ruiz

I mean, some of my best buddies are Army and Marine Corps.

I'm agnostic to the service head.

When you end up at a certain point and you look back, you realize for 10 or 15 years, I've been indoctrinated in a very adaptive way.

to believe that I'm immortal.

Because if you didn't, you certainly wouldn't jump out of aircraft at 25,000 feet with no lights.

And you for hell for sure wouldn't go into some of these fucking towns we go into and end up in these firefights.

Like you have some weird, I'll speak for myself, I was entirely convinced that I couldn't be killed.

And just because I was in some way, Andrew, convinced that our training was so good

that that shit wouldn't happen to us.

so um so with the other guys i want to make sure i finish your question so it started with doug and then you know i don't know what direction you want to go here specifically but then it just kept going andrew right like at that time doug was 07 and then we went to iraq in the winter of 07 08 which was complete mayhem and the troop was i mean my my troop in the winter of 07 08

were like fucking superheroes.

And a guy named Tommy Valentine was the troop chief.

And we got home and he was killed in a parachute accident.

After all that shit we went through.

Badger, a guy named Mark Carter was killed in that deployment.

We got home and Tommy was killed in a parachute accident.

And me and a guy named Dutch, we went up to Minnesota to notify Tommy's parents and his sister and his brother.

And we're not, the Navy calls them CACOs, like casualty assistance officers.

These are jobs in the military where you're trained to do this stuff.

You know, one of the things that's amazing about us is if a guy gets killed, we send a team guy there.