Takin A Walk/Episode Eighteen with General Jack Hammond from The Home Base Program

Buzz Knight:

I’m Buzz Knight. On this episode of Taking A Walk, this walk is part of the two part series focusing on the Home Base Program. Home Base is a collaboration between the Boston Red Sox and Mass General Hospital. Retired Brigadier General Jack Hammond is the executive director of the Home Base Program. The General has a legendary career in the military. Among the experiences, Commanding General of US Forces and Kabul, Battalion Commander in Afghanistan and Iraq. His leadership skills are unparalleled and his dedication to excellence is at the highest level.

Buzz Knight:

General Hammond, it’s an honor to be taking a walk with you here in Charleston.

General Jack Hammond:

Thank you. We’re at one of the most historic parts of the city here with the USS Constitution. We can see The Old North Church right across the water, and the Bunker hill monument right to our back.

Buzz Knight:

It’s an unbelievable place. It still evokes so much emotion and memory and passion. And as we’re taking a walk today, there’s some pretty serious times that are going on in the world that affect our country. And I would be remiss, General, if I didn’t ask your opinion of the crisis with Russia and Ukraine and how it affects us?

General Jack Hammond:

Well, we’ve kind of boxed ourselves in here a bit. For the past four or five years, Putin has been signaling that he’s going to try and rebuild his Soviet empire and he’s made no bones about it. For those that don’t know he’s a career KGB officer that grew up in the KGB. And when the Soviet union fell in 1990, he was horrified and angry and humiliated. And that’s a bad combination for a guy that’s pretty much a dictator. And you can see over the past 30 years how he has seethed with anger about this, trying to get some kind of primacy role for Russia and restore the glory days of what he considers the Soviet Union.

General Jack Hammond:

And one of their big red line issues is not having buffer states around them. And first of all, he was completely enraged when those breakaway republics like Lithuania and Latvia joined NATO, that to him was treachery. And you look over at the Ukraine, he lost all his buffer states. And going back to the czars, Russia has always wanted those buffer states around them to protect Mother Russia. And when they lost those, and then they flipped and they became part of NATO, that was the ultimate. And so you’re going to see him right now put his cards on the table. And we’ve threatened him with all sorts of sanctions, he’s factored that all in. That’s not going to scare him. So the real question is what’s going to go on over the next few weeks and how far does he go? Because he’s going to go, he’s already already hitting it with some… And he’s already laid claim to the Ukraine.

General Jack Hammond:

But sitting right down the road from them you’ve got Poland connecting to that. You’ve got Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia that are all NATO members. And if he touches any one of those article five of NATO triggers this event, that could be another world war. And across the water we’ve got China waiting with big eyes open trying to see what we do with a very strong eye towards Taiwan using the same premise. Right?

General Jack Hammond:

And I know I’m going long here, but I want to share one point. There’s a great book written by a professor of a course I took at Harvard, Graham Allison called Thucydides Trap. And he highlights all these major wars in the world that have taken place where they happened by second order effects, unintentionally. Where countries didn’t want to get into war, and a lot of times it’s a collision point between ascending and descending powers. And one of the most notable obviously is World War I. The assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand. Who cared what happened to some royal household family member in Serbia to create a war where 40 million people died as a result of that one assassination, but it happened because the trigger points were all there.

General Jack Hammond:

And so what we worry about now is one of those trigger points where somebody makes a mistake, somebody misinterprets something. And then next thing you know, it’s a full blown war and the war escalates. And you can see because of the collaboration between China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia already, each of them knows they could never beat the US or NATO independently. But if they all nipped away, it’s like a pack of hyenas going after a lion. One-on-one, they’ll never win, but a pack with one lion, you never know.

Buzz Knight:

Oh my God. So do you look at this and think that our allies can play a particular role to sort of divert this? This has really got to be a collaborative effort, doesn’t it?

General Jack Hammond:

Well, so part of this is a day late and a dollar short. For the past five, six years, they have propped Russia up. Russia has wanted to do this since the nineties, but they were broke and they were incapable of doing it. What props Russia up is when oil goes over $40 a barrel and through the support of Germany, France, and all these European countries that are at most risk, we’re not at great risk, they’re at the biggest risk. Neighbors, right? They propped the price of oil up to a hundred dollars a barrel right now. And it will rise when this thing kicks off. And so all our sanctions in the world don’t matter if oil goes to $200 a barrel, he’ll just make that money up in the other side and someone will always buy oil, as we’ve learned. Saddam was selling oil.

General Jack Hammond:

They created all sorts of ways for it to get out there. So his oil will get out there and people will continue to buy it. The question is what will they do and how solid will NATO align to protect themselves, right? And then moving forward, Russia needs to know there’s long term economic consequences that will put them back in that state of ruin. There are other things we could do and we should be doing that include starting to empower the local groups that are going to fight back with the right type of missiles, weapons, and systems so that they can start causing some havoc back there. Russia can’t sustain this forever, and if all of a sudden over on the Georgian border, they start getting into some trouble they have to shift troops over there.

General Jack Hammond:

I don’t know whether the bell Russ will do it, but some of the other countries we’ve been working with in that part of the world and certainly Latvia and Lithuania, if there’s a little stuff over in the border there, he’s got to divert troops. He’s got most of his troops right now concentrated there, and it’s expensive to keep them there. So he won’t do this forever. Something’s going to be happening shortly, but the question is, how long can he sustain it? And then much like in Afghanistan, he left because they couldn’t solve the problem and they were bleeding financially. And between that and Star Wars, we bankrupted the Soviet Union. That’s the methodology we probably want to do, because we want to avoid a shooting war. They are a nuclear power, and he’s already made that point last week to remind everybody of it.

Buzz Knight:

Blessings to our leaders and blessings to our troops and we’ll leave it at that right now.

General Jack Hammond:

Yeah. Then one last thing I’d just like to add. There’s a lot of political division in this country on which side you’re on Democrat, Republican. And it goes back and forth and it’s pretty aggressive these days. But I would just caution everybody on any of that right now and just remind them that when you’re on the plane, root for the pilot.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah, maybe this can be an odd byproduct that unifies people.

General Jack Hammond:

Yeah.

Buzz Knight:

God, I could only hope, right? Because it’s not happening.

General Jack Hammond:

The stakes are high.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah. The stakes are high. Well, general let’s saunter around Charleston a little bit and take a walk. How do you use taking a walk when you are maybe in a situation where you’re stuck with a particular problem or you just need to kind of unlock and sort of break out of it, how do you use taking a walk to help you?

General Jack Hammond:

Well, I think no matter what, a nice walk helps you clear your head and think of all of the opportunities, kind of work through some of the challenges. I tell you, over the years my wife and I regularly go for walks and talk about issues that are going on with our family members or with each other. There’s a beautiful lake in Wakefield, Lake Quannapowitt. That’s a nice three mile loop. We live up in West Newbury port, and there’s some great trails up there that it’s just great to get into outdoors. You get back to nature and you have a conversation without all of the noise.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah, really I think especially the last couple of years, taking to the outdoors as well has been so necessary because people have been cooped up, right General?

General Jack Hammond:

Well, that’s the thing. I think once the pandemic hit in full force, I’ve never seen so many people out walking again. There’s a lot of COVID puppies that are out there. So a lot of people got dogs because they were home now and they could actually have a dog. They didn’t have to leave it sheltered or doggy daycare and all of that silliness. And so a lot of people are out more and taking a van of living in a great place like we do.

Buzz Knight:

It’s a beautiful place and it’s nice to see people out getting out for sure. So how did you first know at a point in your life that you were going to spend a career in the military?

General Jack Hammond:

Like many things and as a young person, I didn’t know, there was no grand plan initially. I knew I wanted to serve our country. In my mind’s eye, I planned on doing it for three or four years. I looked at all sorts of different options and finally I just enlisted in the Mass Guard. So I could to do it on reserve status while I was in college, and that was my plan. And by the way, in Massachusetts, I went to UMass and so they offered a hundred percent free tuition and so it solved my other problem. And so that was my plan was to come in, do four years, I’d owe two years after college and do my part. And once I got in, I enjoyed what I did and I went on active duty and made a career of it. And that four years turned in to 20. I stayed in for a little longer and it was another 11. And it’s amazing how time flies when you are enjoying what you do.

Buzz Knight:

And who were the people that shaped you in terms of leaders? Especially either associated, obviously with the military or outside of the military?

General Jack Hammond:

So in different phases of your life, there’s different people, right? Obviously someone that’s shaped a lot of my life as my wife, Colleen. We met as lieutenants and we’ve been together for 35 years. And so she’s taken off a lot of the sharp edges, and there’s probably a lot of grateful soldiers for the fact that she’s done that over the years. But as an army officer, I was really fortunate to have some really good folks early on that got involved with me. I’d say one of my company commanders, Alex Ahopolous was a great guy. He was one of my first company commanders, Vietnam veteran, combat infantryman with the Ninth Infantry Division in Vietnam. And Al was just such a great mentor on leading troops and the importance of it. And he spent his year in Vietnam in the Mekong Delta where it was always raining. It was wet, it was monsoon. And it wasn’t met, it was jungle. And amongst all of that, people are shooting at you.

General Jack Hammond:

And so he taught me about always keeping a good, positive attitude and taking care of your soldiers. I had a Battalion Commander that was a Green Beret in Vietnam, and he taught me a lot about planning and operations. So at different points. And then obviously I have a very close friend who’s a retired Command Sergeant Major, who I’ve known since the eighties. And he was my Command Sergeant Major in Fallujah in 2003. And he gave me that other perspective of number one, don’t ever get full yourself because you’re an officer. And work with the NCOs, but you’re still in charge. And you’ve always got a factor in taking care of people when you do stuff. And it kind of led to a philosophy that I’ve adopted for a long time now, that it’s no matter what you’re try and accomplish it’s always about people and stuff. You’ve got to get the right people and then you got to give them the right stuff to do the job. But in the absence of even stuff, it all comes down to people.

Buzz Knight:

So when you commanded in Fallujah, how many people were part of your watch?

General Jack Hammond:

Well, so it was interesting. At that point in my career I was a Battalion Commander and before we shipped out, we did other missions post 9/11. And so in my battalion, I had a battalion of soldiers. There were a thousand soldiers in my battalion. And right after 9/11, we had Homeland Security missions we were given to secure reservoirs, bridges, all these installations and critical infrastructure. And then after two weeks, that mission ended, we were ordered to secure seven US airports. If you remember back then.

Buzz Knight:

Sure.

General Jack Hammond:

There was no such thing as TSA. We had to go in to oversee the security at the airports, working in hand and glove with the state police. And we did that for nine months. And as that mission wound down, we received orders for Afghanistan. And so in June of 2002, we received orders to report in July to ship out. We got ready, we shipped over to Afghanistan and then the missions got all tangled up because everything was tangled up in the early stages. That was the second rotation in to Afghanistan. Halfway through that, I received orders to reform when upon return for the invasion in Iraq.

General Jack Hammond:

And so they kept my headquarters, but I picked up new units. And as we entered into Iraq, I moved up into the Northern part of the Sunni Triangle into the Balad region with a battalion of two infantry companies, two military police companies, and we had roughly 700 troops. After 30, 40 days, I was told to split my headquarters and form a second battalion a hundred miles away in Fallujah. And they gave me additional units. I had a military police company, I had psychological operations teams, I had counterintelligence teams because the mission was direct action mission to take down the insurgency in that area as a counter terrorism kind of group. So I had two different battalions, probably all told, probably back to a thousand again, but split between a hundred miles. And so it’s difficult to try and keep track of that. And as you get senior, you take charge and lead larger formations of soldiers.

Buzz Knight:

So when you think of leadership lessons that you learned during those particular periods, what is transferable from those lessons to the leaders of today? No matter what they’re leading?

General Jack Hammond:

Well, I think everything starts at a beginning, right? And what the US Army does, and so if you put it in perspective, the military provides us the best opportunity to look at leadership. So people go to medical school to become doctors, people go to trade school to become plumbers and electricians. They go to aviation school to learn how to fly and become pilots, right? There is no school in civilian life that trains you to become a leader. There’s nothing. You may say business school, I’ve looked at the curriculum and I’ve gone to it. They have maybe a class out of the curriculum. And one three credit class doesn’t make a leader, you can answer questions. The US Army in particular grows leaders, that’s what we do. And I think through all ROTC, West Point and OCS and all that stuff, we grow somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 brand new leaders every a year, and we’ve trained them all through college, right? So pretty strong curriculum.

General Jack Hammond:

At the same time, we are in a leadership development program for people that are already in at different points in their career. 400,000 leaders are going through leader development training constantly. So every year we’re training 20,000, 30, 40,000 new ones, but there’s always 400,000 that are somewhere in progress of leader development. And there’s really three components that I see, and one of them is training. You actually have to have formal training. You don’t just knight somebody and tap them on the shoulders three times and say, “You’re now a Lord.” You’ve got to go through a process and learn, right? Then there’s also mentorship. You’ve to have folks, like I named a few of the folks that were mentors for me at different points in my career. And then it’s experience, you’ve got to have those jobs that are a building block to give you the on the ground experience to be prepared for that next job.

General Jack Hammond:

And so the military does a very good job of giving you all three so that as you rise, and by the way, if you fail, they kind of move you over to the side and you may stay in the Army, but you may not be in a command position anymore, you may be in a staff position because it’s just not your thing. And that doesn’t mean you’re bad or good, it just means that’s not your skillset. You may be an amazing guy on lining up artillery pieces or public affairs or personnel or logistics. You may be a logistics excellence guy, but you just don’t have those leadership skills to command at that next higher level. And so there’s a process to find work and find your skills and leverage them in a different way. You just don’t see that in the private sector. And what you do see, however, though, is failure.

General Jack Hammond:

Right now in the private sector, and I’ve seen that in the last decade, since I’ve been out, there’s a void of leadership. Not a void of people in leadership positions, and that’s a problem. So when you have that misalignment where you have all these people in charge, you’ve got a problem. And in stable consistent times, you can muscle through it with enough people during a crisis is when you see mishap, right? No matter what it is, anytime there’s a crisis somewhere, if a leader fails it’s highly visible because the impact can be catastrophic, right? What happens when volatile and an instability becomes enduring, which it has since 2020. Now you’ve got a real problem. And so what we’re looking at in this country is we’ve got a situation where we have an enduring time of persistent change and instability, right? That we’re facing because every week change, and we don’t even know when Omicron’s here or it’s not, we can go out, we can’t go out. We can go are back to work, we can’t go back to work. We’re going to have a hybrid force, we’re not going to have a hybrid force.

General Jack Hammond:

So you’re going to have people leading organizations that really don’t know where they’re going, because they’re not sure what their stability is. And when it’s unstable, that’s when leadership matters most. And if you don’t have people that are qualified and good leaders, solid leaders, it’s much more noticeable and you see the catastrophic effect of all these businesses that went under in 2020 and 2021 because they didn’t see it coming. And shame on you because it was telegraphed nine months before it came. And that’s on the government and the private sector because the government failed. We had plans in place on Homeland Security to have enough ventilators. There’s a list of catastrophic crises that you deal with in Homeland Security, one of them is the pandemic.

General Jack Hammond:

Back in 2007, I was on Governor Romney’s Homeland Security Advisory Group as an Army Officer. And they had people from the state police, they had people from MEMA, they had people from the hospitals, fire, everybody. When they got to the pandemic, that’s a shoulder shrug. They had plans for everything, the two they didn’t have plans for and they didn’t develop solid plans for were cyber and pandemic. Cyber just is elusive for people. And it’s really not that hard, but it’s one of those things that law enforcement doesn’t look at because they think it’s techy. And techy people aren’t in the business of enforcing it. So it’s a void and it’s still something that we’re very vulnerable for.

General Jack Hammond:

When it looked at the pandemic, unlike every other catastrophic manmade or natural disaster, those are focal points. So if there’s a hurricane, if there’s a flood, if there’s a tornado, if there’s a winter storm, you can bring resources from the United States out of the affected area, into the area. You can draw on the full FEMA resources to help solve the problem like we did in Katrina. Do you know what I mean? The National Guard brought 600,000 troops in in five days, phenomenal. Or whatever the number was, 300,000 troops. A crazy, crazy number, but in five days, because they were unaffected. A pandemic simultaneously wipes out the country. And the problem was the preparatory things to do, to have PPE on hand, to have ventilators on hand, that was all identified back in 2007 and eight, but it became a budget thing where they said, “It’s not really going to happen. Let’s use that money for something else.”

General Jack Hammond:

So the money was given to them, that’s the other sin. All of the states got money from the federal government to buy all that. And so if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do, you face a price. But as I mentioned a minute ago, the root of it all starts with the individual leader and that’s rooted in strong values. And the Army has a set of core values that every member subscribes to, it’s the army values. Loyalty, duty, respect, honor, integrity and personal courage, nothing crazy there but if you ingrain that in everybody’s thinking, and everybody looks that way, it can provide you with both an individual well calibrated moral compass for leaders, and then a guiding North star for the organization. So everybody’s going to act and behave in the same way that your organization has decided. And if you have that, everybody becomes mission oriented the way you want them. And that’s step one. And then you build on that to all the other aspects.

Buzz Knight:

Are you surprised the lack of scenario planning in leadership for crisis that still exists?

General Jack Hammond:

It’s stunning. And again, in the military, we’re always doing contingency planning. We had plans for what we did in Iraq back in the eighties because we knew Southwest Asia was a hotspot because of Iran. We knew Iran, Iraq, that area was a hotspot. So every hotspot in the world, there are Army contingency plans in place. There’s unit assignments that this is what we’re going to need for package. And then when it starts getting closer, they take those out and then they source them better and they really take a hard look, but they’ve already looked at it once and they’ve already come up with some initial plans. And there’s groups of people that always are looking at those, same for Homeland Security. But in the private sector, they get caught up in the day to day. They’re worried about making mission this week and it’s very shortsighted versus that longer approach. And that’s immature leadership.

General Jack Hammond:

If you look at what your needs on more long term, and that’s why we don’t have good leaders, because it’s an investment in time, talent and treasure. Everybody wants the immediate fix so they’ll say, “We’ll send so and so to the business school at Harvard.” Well guess what happens when they come back? Half of them then use that and go to another job because they’ve now got a Harvard MBA or Stanford or Yale MBA. Right?

Buzz Knight:

Right.

General Jack Hammond:

And so they don’t make that long term investment, they try and make it at the end. And the second thing they’ll do is they’ll try and buy a leader. So and so has a great track record, offer him a crazy salary, guess how long he stays? Until someone makes a bigger salary offer. They’re not committed to your course. And so they don’t want to do the hard work of growing leaders within their organization over time, because it’s hard work. And frankly, unfortunately we as a country have an attention span of a three year old on Mountain Dew.

Buzz Knight:

General, let’s talk about the hard work that you and your team is involved with that’s so critical with Home Base. We touched base at the beginning of the pandemic because Home Base and many other organizations were obviously going to be challenged through the pandemic. How are things going now at Home Base? And let’s talk about how people can be more aware of helping our troops?

General Jack Hammond:

So, you touched upon a lot of key points just prior to the pandemic. And so it looked like prior to the pandemic, we were making some headway with some of the mental health challenges that our veterans were facing. Between the pandemic, two years of hibernation and isolation, which is the worst thing for anybody with a mental health issue, and then you combine that with the really catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Politics aside, if you’re going to do it, do it, but the way they did it was just horrific. And as we saw the after effect of the humanitarian crisis. But for the warriors that participated there, it caused them to question the value of their service. For the military family members that lost soldiers, it caused them to question the sacrifice that they made. And then as we looked at it at Home Base, we had veterans that were actively in care getting calls and texts from Afghan civilians pleading for their life.

General Jack Hammond:

So picture if you’re going through a two week program to solve are posttraumatic stress issues, and you’re getting a call from Anne Frank telling you the Nazis are banging on doors and I’m next. And you can’t do anything to help them.

Buzz Knight:

Right.

General Jack Hammond:

How does that help you as far as the moral injuries you’ve sustained? It’s reigniting them. And so those guys were actively in care. We had folks that had gone through care and got to a good place, and they got those calls and it ripped the scab off and they were now re-injured. And then we also saw a lot of folks that were doing fine, that it was kind of below the water line and this was that straw that broke the camel’s back and then they needed help. And so we’ve seen an unprecedented call for care from across the veteran community. At the same time, we’ve seen a 20% growth in veteran suicides since 2020. And so the challenges and the needs have grown, at the same time, the ability to connect with them has never been worse because as you know, the VA is a government entity and getting in contact with a government entity during the crisis has not been easy.

General Jack Hammond:

And frankly, they’re too big. They’re too bureaucratic to really effectively deal with this. They don’t have a standard of care across the entire VA system. Every VA system is separate and autonomous. That’s no way to run a network system, so they don’t function effectively. There are some excellent clinicians and excellent VA hospitals, not all of them though, because there’s no standard of care across the system that they apply. And so we see a lot of folks that are dissatisfied with that at Home Base, and we do our best. And what we’re able to do, and we’re not perfect, nobody is. And anybody claims that is a little bit of narcissistic egotistical problems there.

General Jack Hammond:

But we’re able to leverage the deepest resources of some of the best hospital and medical capabilities in the world. That’s why Home Base is successful. And good enough is never good enough. We’re always looking to identify new and improved ways to develop new clinical solutions for problems that are ancient. If you look at PTSD, that goes back to the dawn of time when two guys with clubs are whacking each other, right? One of them gets his head split open. One of them gets a concussion, that’s TBI and PTSD. That goes back to then. You look at the Romans, the Gladiators, the Civil War, World War I. Trauma, trauma, trauma. Right? Traumatic brain injury, especially with the invention of gunpowder, when we saw that. The concussive effect and the banging around effect.

General Jack Hammond:

And so as we came into this new 21st century, we were able to apply a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience, whether it’s from the NFL and the concussion world there, whether it’s from the number one department of psychiatry, MGH, that has 600 clinicians that all have different specialties and harnessing some of those to come up with these plans. And developing breakthrough models of care, which in our case is that 14 day program we’ve talked about where you’re able to hit the pause button in life and just focus on getting better for two weeks. And we have you from sundown to sunset, sun up to sundown, and we were able to compress two years of therapy into 14 days. And I’ll go back to our Mountain Dew three year old, that’s everybody including our veterans. They want to get better now, they’re looking for that quick fix.

General Jack Hammond:

If you go to traditional outpatient care, it could be a year. It’ll certainly be 15 weeks, 18 weeks. And going to see a clinician once a week for three, four, five months is not only untenable because you can’t get that time off of work, it’s hard. And it’s an injury of avoidance where you don’t want to talk about it. And so you’re trying to keep it down, you don’t talk about it. They talk about World War II guys don’t talk about it, because they don’t want to talk about it, it’s the worth time of their life. It’s the best and worst, but catastrophic, they lost friends. They have to talk about it. And so putting everything aside, putting them in a bubble and working on it for two weeks, morning, noon, and night, we get to it. And we have incredible results.

General Jack Hammond:

And we have amazing partners at UCLA Emery and Rush that partnered with us and do the same thing. And over five years, we’ve got five years of data from four academic medical centers to prove how this works. Oddly enough, the government hasn’t picked up on the program and started doing it themself. So we’ll keep doing it, we’ve developed the nation’s first program for the families of our fallen. It’s the only program in the country where these catastrophically injured family members who are sitting at the kitchen table when the veteran pulled the trigger in front of the kids, more injured than any veteran I’ve ever met, had nowhere to go for specialized care. We created a program for them.

General Jack Hammond:

We created a special program at the request of Naval Special Warfare for our special operations team members for comprehensive brain health and injury treatment. And that’s been alive and running. And we see Navy Seals, Green Berets, Delta Force members, because we’re the only game in town with level of care that’s required and accessible. And then most recently what we’re looking to do is build capability and capacity and areas that don’t have access to care. And so we look at communities of color where they don’t have good psychiatric care, and we’re working with community health centers. Last week, I was in Arizona meeting with leaders in Arizona, from both the government, the governor asked us to meet with him and he wants to help build some capability that we’re capable of doing. And the tribal name in Navajo, Apache and Hopi nation.

General Jack Hammond:

Because these veterans come back from war after serving this government and country, and they live in abject poverty on the reservations with no access to mental healthcare. It’s a sad state of affairs, but we’re finding different solutions by looking at it, getting the right people in the room again, right? People write stuff. And we did it in Florida, already in Southwest Florida, partnering with great communities down there to build clinical capability, to handle and care for their veterans and they want to do it, and so we’re there.

Buzz Knight:

So lastly General, are there days that you lose hope when you walk in to lead your team? And if so, how do you get past that moment of that feeling?

General Jack Hammond:

Yeah, so I get frustrated, but hope is something that I value too much. We always talk about the fact that optimism is a combat multiplier. And I told you about my friend, Alex Ahopolous. And I asked him, how did he get through rainy day, shot at every day? And he explained to me, you can do hard time or easy time. And that’s the truth. You can look at it like this is pretty good. Or you can say, this is awful. How do you want to spend your day? And he taught me that lesson. So that stuck with me and I’ve followed it my entire life.

General Jack Hammond:

But hope is another thing. When someone loses hope, that’s how we lose 22 veterans a day. They’ve lost hope for a day without pain. I never lose hope, I get frustrated and then I try and find a solution. And I’m blessed with the ability to have a lot of access to resources, to try and marshal those resources, to try and solve those problems. And when I hit the wall and the fact, I keep talking to the government about trying to help support the funding and what we do. We have to raise 30 million and dollars each year. We’ve raised 130 million to care for wounded veterans and wounded families. We have never received a penny from the federal government in reimbursement or grant money to do any of this. And we’ve asked every year for 12 years. So that’s frustrating, but I won’t lose hope because I know there’s good people that want to do it. They just can’t figure out how, and so we try and figure out how.

Buzz Knight:

Well thank you for your work, your service. Since this is a global podcast, give a little shout out to the Home Base Podcast that you guys have worked so hard at and done so much great work on.

General Jack Hammond:

So Dr. Ron Hershberg, who is a physical medicine rehab doc at Mass General and Spalding Rehab, he works in the intensive care unit. He works brain injury stuff with the New England Patriots. Ron committed to this course because as we know, it’s such a great medium to get to people. We created Home Base Nation to support the work we do, and to get the word out on what’s available for care, and tell the stories of amazing Americans that have overcome great challenges in life and adversity after war. Or those who have committed themself to as a member of the grateful nation to support those people. And some of the stories are amazing.

General Jack Hammond:

We’ve had incredible people come in, whether it’s guys like Shaggy, who was a Marine Corps veteran from Desert Storm and a household name in music. Spike Lee after he did a movie had a big focus on Black veterans and some of the issues they go through. Bob Woodruff from ABC, an amazing, amazing guy. Sebastian Younger, who wrote this phenomenal story called Tribes, which really goes well beyond the military to the fact that we’re all mammals and we do like to be around other people.

General Jack Hammond:

But Ron’s been able to pull a great thing together. And I encourage anybody to go to Home Base Nation. Same thing, it’s in all the usual places. And learn a little bit more about what we do.

Buzz Knight:

Well, thank you for all that you do. Thank you for listening to this Taking A Walk Podcast. General, it’s been an honor and I can’t thank you enough.

General Jack Hammond:

Well, thanks Buzz. And I appreciate what you’re do and our opportunity to tell our story a little bit.

Speaker 1:

Taking a walk with Buzz Knight is available on Spotify, apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Buzz Knight is an established media executive with a long history of content creation and multi-platform distribution.

After a successful career as a Radio Executive, he formed Buzz Knight Media which focuses on strategic guidance and the development of new original content.