The Green Beret Who Lost His Leg and Returned to Combat | Nick Lavery

We're Out of Time

This episode features Nick Lavery, a Green Beret and first above-the-knee amputee to return to combat after losing his leg in Afghanistan. H

Key takeaways

• Nick Lavery is the first above-the-knee amputee to return to combat with the U.S. Army Special Forces after losing his leg in Afghanistan.
• He lost his leg in a 2013 insider attack by an Afghan national police officer, which was one of the most catastrophic insider attacks during the global war on terrorism.
• Lavery attributes his faith to a spiritual awakening during his recovery, which transformed his life and career.
• He chose to live with his amputation openly, both for psychological reasons and practicality in his military and daily life.
• Lavery is transitioning from military service to building a wellness community called Machine, focusing on human performance and wellness.
• He emphasizes the importance of veterans planning for their post-military life early, rather than procrastinating.

Conclusion

Nick Lavery's story highlights the resilience of service members, the importance of mental

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) You do see a lot of service members that are all of a sudden finding themselves as veterans, and then they're going, what do I do now? And my response is, well, we can't go back in time. However, for those that are earlier on in that process, I'm like, start thinking about this today. Yeah, I realize you've got 24 months until you think you're about to be a civilian. Now is actually the time to start doing it. Do not kick that can down the road. Do not procrastinate. Retirement or ETS is going to show up like that. And all of a sudden, they wake up and that no longer again, exists and I didn't put any thought or action into what the next chapter looks like up until this point, and it can get ugly pretty quick. One of the things I tell everybody, man, live life like you are the hero in your movie. One Method Placement is affiliated with Carrera Treatment, Wellness, and Spa and One Method Treatment Centers. If someone has a problem with substance use disorder, please call One Method Placement. That's 8888-8-3-1-1581. and if we can't help you, we'll make a referral to someone who can. Please, we're out of time. Our guest today has spent his life proving that impossible is often just somebody else's opinion. Nick Lavery is an active duty green beret, a silver star recipient, and the first above-the-knee amputee to return to combat with the U.S. Army Special Forces team after losing his leg in Afghanistan. He's an author, speaker, husband, father, and a leader whose message isn't about surviving adversity. It's about finding purpose through it. I also had the privilege of interviewing Nick's wife, Sergeant Major Toni Lavery, of the U.S. Army Special Operations, whose own remarkable story adds another dimension to their family's journey. When you finish this episode, you'll want to go hear her story. Please welcome Chief of Staff Nick Lavery Nick Lavery. So thank you for being here. I really appreciate it. You know, I hear things like thank you for your service all the time. But it sounds to me like thoughts and prayers. Okay. It just doesn't mean enough. They say it like, I love you, not I love you. Okay. It's just a different vibe and it drives me nuts. So I wanted to thank you for coming on because you're a true hero. You protect us. You've done great things. You're still doing great things. And I'm very appreciative. We're living in a very scary world right now. And we are divided as a country. And that's repugnant as far as I'm concerned. All we've got is each other. Our Republican brothers and sisters, our Democrat brothers and sisters, and our independent brothers and sisters. So, again, thank you for everything that you do, man. I appreciate that, brother. Thank you. So you're a pretty rich man. Have you ever seen a movie called Meet Joe Black? Is that with Brad Pitt? Yes, it is. Yeah, I feel like I may have seen it at some point, although don't ask me to regurgitate it because I couldn't tell you. But I feel like I've seen it before. I won't. I'll just refresh your memory. Anthony Hopkins is the man who is the head of the family. He owns a huge publishing company. The most elegant man in probably any movie I've ever seen. And then you've got the daughter who looks at Brad Pitt so intently and is so in love that her eyes well up. Okay? That's how much she loves him. When I saw that and it still hits me today, I'm like, I want that. I'd give anything for a woman to love me like that. Anything. The truest form of love I've ever seen. I know it was acting, but I'm pretending and I loved it. That's how your wife thinks about you. She is so in love with you. I've never seen anything like that. how do you take that in do you feel grateful all the bad things that have happened to have her and to have children with her is got to be something that you look at and say um I win yeah man i guess to to put a single word on it would be would be grateful although that doesn't quite do it justice um we have a unique bond and we've lived a unique roller coaster ride together as a team even before we were married but certainly coming up on 10 year wedding anniversary which is this year um actually next month and uh i can assure you that her sentiment towards me is compounded i'd say by a factor of you know 10x from me to her and her and i would probably debate that back and forth, you know, which is part of the fun. And also I think part of what allows us to operate the way that we do and have the household that we have that we're blessed to have. And also has enabled us to do great things in the professional world as well, as having that unique dynamic. And she and I were just talking about this the other day during one of our more interpersonal connection conversations that we have structured within the way that we just live our lives. and she, I think, framed it a way that was one of the effects of we're both incredibly capable as individuals. However, we both also rely on each other at the same time and kind of having that concurrently happening where we do rely on each other for our fulfillment and for raising our children and for our businesses and for the things that we're doing in and out of the military. like we rely on each other as husband and wife we can also go out and kick ass as individuals into this crazy world regardless of what the circumstances are and i'll close this out here real quick ma'am because I could talk for days about Tony and i'm sure she'll come up again through a conversation which typically does but you know like our initiation into like a real i'd say relationship as two people that moved from being buddies for a long time and training together and working together and whatever was at my lowest point in life when I was broken in a hospital fighting for my life totally dependent on others like that was the initiation of what we have today you know going back now 13 years to when that that really started for us and that was obviously really hard to do but she and I both look back at kind of the inception of our relationship as it stands today with just an enormous amount of gratitude because if you can make it through that together and not only come out the back end having survived it but be stronger because of it like what's the world going to throw at us that we can't that we can't take down as a as a team you know so it just put us in a great position to build a wildly unique foundation that we then have built upon now since then that's that's beautiful uh Boston or Maine Boston Boston strong yep yeah I I I swear if I would have picked, I would have picked Maine because it's always, you can't get there from here. That's what they say. You said something in one of your videos that was probably the coolest thing I've heard in a long time. Get it right. Enlightened me. There are no atheists in a foxhole. Yeah, one of my favorite expressions. Give it to me. elaborate on it for the for the for the for the people yeah i mean it's it's tough to to frame that without going back a little bit further in time you know through my upbringing i'm half irish half italian grew up catholic uh sundays was for church and football my entire life as a young person um i ran away from faith in christianity specifically like catholicism like as fast as i as i could i i couldn't stand it it was a chore i wanted nothing to do with it you know and so once I got past the point where it was obligated of me, which was really post high school, because I went to a Jesuit private school, I ran the other direction. I was like, I'm good. Like, I don't need God. I don't need faith. Like, I'm a man of my own deciding. And like, this is all on me and like free will. And like, I'm just going to do me. And I had like no grounding in intentional grounding, I should say, in faith through that portion of my life. and it really wasn't until I got into the military post college on my first trip in Afghanistan when that expression you just shed kind of came to fruition for me and you know you're in a gunfight rounds of flying you know explosions are going off of a place and you find yourself saying like you know please help me or give me the strength or like something and it's like who are you talking to or like what are you talking to like that was the initiation that kind of reintroduced faith into my life, something I had, again, I'd run completely away from. And it was still a very small, like, iterative kind of relationship development between me and God, you know, at that point. But then once I was wounded and everything that we know, according to modern medicine, would not only suggest, but dictate that I was supposed to have expired multiple times during that experience. And that's really where things went to a whole other level. that was when Jesus came into my life, into my heart, spoke to me, you know, directly. And things just went into a whole other direction, another level of my relationship with God and Jesus and my Christianity. And really becoming more, more interested and curious about learning scripture and learning what does it mean to be a Christian and the Holy Trinity. And those elements that I had heard those words before, but they didn't mean anything to me. Now, of course, they do. And they are deeply ingrained into the way I live my life. and my number one priority is to serve God. I'm a, you know, I'm a soldier of God. And I live through that means. And that's taken my life personally and professionally into overdrive. And, you know, every day I'm living on borrowed time through his blessing. And I get to wake up every single day, particularly on the hard days. And I get to serve him. And by virtue of doing that, well, I get to serve my fellow man. God to the kids. Oh, God has been. persistent topic of discussion. We have a nine-year-old and a five-year-old. And, you know, church on Sunday is a practice that we uphold. We say grace before every meal. We pray intermittently together. Just the other day, we were traveling back as a family. And flights got delayed. And it's, you know, typical people are going crazy. And Tony was in the bathroom with my youngest. And my oldest, we were out there. And it's like somewhat chaos. Flights are getting canceled. people losing their minds. And I just looked at him. I say, hey, man, you want to, you want to pray real quick for a safe travel back to, so we can get back home? And he's like, yeah, let's do it. So like right there in the airport, amongst chaos, he and I, we just held hands and we set a quick, quick prayer. And that's what's become just part of our operating system. And my oldest, who's nine, he's taken it on him. So he's been educating me on Christianity and God and the story of Abraham. And I'm like, where did you even learn that? You know, so he's like, he's going into his little, you know, tablet time or screen time, he's like purposefully seeking out this kind of content and he's absorbing it, which is, which is awesome. So yeah, you know, Tony and I, when we first realized we're going to be parents, it was like how much we want to introduce, you know, Christianity and faith and God into this. I think that that's a healthy conversation to have is like, what's the framework here that we're going to kind of go off of to help raise and develop good, upstanding young people? It wasn't as deliberate nine years ago as it is today. That's been, I think, part of the journey. But both my boys are full blown. They're off and running into the direction of Christianity and Jesus and God. And I think that that's amazing. I love it. So as you can see, I've got a ton of questions. And I haven't read them if I'm going to ask one question on the list. Right. Okay. Because I don't talk to people like you very often. and one of my biggest regrets was not going into the military. But I was a full-blown drug addict, full-blown. I didn't have parents that talked to me about it. Hell, they didn't talk to me at all about anything, okay? And so it's just been a huge regret for me. And so what I've done is I've treated hundreds, maybe a thousand veterans in my life and they are the easiest people to treat for drug addiction and alcoholism. And the reason they're the easiest is because they've got a baked in discipline, right? And you can literally, someone could be having an episode or struggling in that moment and acting out and you can literally say, soldier, and they just straighten right up. Then you get them a hug, you whisper in their air, this isn't how we do this. We love you, right? And it's just, what is it like in the military? I asked Tony the same thing and then talk to me about veterans. What is that stress like to the point to where people have to self-form? Medicaid in order to either get through the current military or the trauma afterwards. It's a good question, man. I got to preface it by saying, you know, every service members experience and journey is different. You know, I think just we all kind of tend to get labeled as, and it's okay. There's nothing wrong with this, you know, as service members or like veterans. And those are like massive genres of. of millions and millions and millions of unique circumstances and experiences. Not one is in the same. And you can use like some cliche examples that would state the difference. Me, I came in directly into special forces. I've only been a Green Beret now coming up on 20 years of service. Like my entire military experience has been in special operations during peak GWAT era. Compare that to. And this isn't better or worse than. I'm just saying that it's different. compare that to an admin clerk who served a year and a half and then got medically retired for whatever reason or just decided to get out of the military. Like those journeys are just so different. So it's hard to paint this like massively wide brush that accurately answers any question really pertaining to like veterans or military or mental health as it pertains to service members. But I can say from my own experience and then working with others. that do different things, of course, over two decades. I think one of the greater challenges that we have, there's two that I'll highlight. One is the negative stigma that's associated with raising your hand or outing yourself that you may have some challenges that you're dealing with. And the fear that is going to come with that, fear of being judged negatively by your peers, fear of losing your security clearance, fear of missing the next deployment or the next training cycle. Like there's a lot of different fears that can come with that. And being seen as a liability versus an asset, I would argue, is one of them for most service members. Certainly when you get into the realm of special operations, like that, that's really it, in my opinion. It's I need to be seen and deliver as an asset every single day, which yes, is true. And so should I be struggling with something? and I'm like, oh, you know, like, I think I may need some, like, help here. There's this massive fear that I'm going to be seen as a liability. And like, I can't have that. So I'm almost willing to do anything to avoid that kind of perception of me as a potential liability. And that's one. And the other component I'll highlight or element that I'll highlight is the sense of nobility that's wrapped up in just putting one foot in front of the other and continue to go and continue to add