By SFC Gregory A. Stube (ret.), Fox News
You think about a lot of things when you’re in a hospital bed with tubes in you and pieces of your body sewn back on, all the while knowing you really should be dead. At first, how you judge yourself is the worst of it.
I had been a Green Beret for 18 years. I was physically tough and had all these skills earned in sweat and blood. But after being blown up, shot and badly burned on a battlefield in Afghanistan, I found I’d only worked to harden the parts that had been blown up and burned away.
I found that everything I needed to really be strong was undeveloped and little understood, and that mainstream society, and even the Army, didn’t grasp this.
I was aware that other soldiers in the hospital with me had taken their own lives. I knew others who’d gotten out with missing limbs and PTSD who’d turned to alcohol and drugs.
I was a warrior, which meant I always trained for external threats. Now I had to look inward to avoid these traps.
We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be deceived by the Left’s identity politics. The Left too often insists we behave as victims of the powerful, of our physical limitations and more. We must instead define ourselves by what’s inside of us. From that basis we can conquer anything.
After a year in the hospital recovering, and after years of telling my story and giving my hard-earned perspective to audiences first as the official spokesperson for the Green Berets, the first they ever had, and then later as a retired soldier, I came to understand what had to be said. It was then that I sat down to write Conquer Anything—A Green Beret’s Guide to Building Your A-Team.
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