Common Goal Leadership

I gave a talk at Church of the Saviour in Wayne, PA on Nov 25, 2025. We had a great time discussing some questions on dealing with stress, managing your personal beliefs, and my own journey to be a better man. Below are the speaker notes:

2 Marines and a Sailor walk into a room. This sounds like the start of a joke but unfortunately this is a tragedy, not a comedy. 

It was 2006 during my first deployment to Iraq and we had arrived in March. We had conducted the turnover with the unit we were replacing and had begun going out into the area south of Fallujah. The Battle for Fallujah had already occurred in 2004 but now the military outpost in the city was getting attacked. The USMC believed that insurgents were stockpiling weapons in the area south of the city called the Zaidon. My unit, 2d Recon Bn, was the USMC’s special operations unit similar to the SEALs are to the Navy; PJs are to the Air Force; and SF is to the Army. The USMC assigned my unit the task of going out into the Zaidon to find and disrupt the weapons stockpiling.

Now we’re all caught up. In May, two months after we had been there, my Company was clearing a series of houses at night. 4 Marines and a Sailor went into a house, found it empty, and began to leave. What they didn’t realize was that the walls were fake. There was an exterior set of walls and an interior set with a walkway between. Between these walls insurgents hid with machine guns, poised to strike through holes in the walls. 

Elsworth and Steshko left the room and before the others could join them, the enemy machine guns opened up. Lee Deal, the Navy Corpsman, was killed instantly, Sean Debevois was hit 4 times up his body including his head, and Chris Piekos dropped unscathed. Elsworth and Steshko popped smoke and threw it into the room. Piekos crawled out. Adam Holmquist went in and dragged out Deal’s and Debevois’s bodies. He would later receive the bronze star for his actions that day.

We proceeded to drop a bomb on the house and leveled the building. While we had lost one, and the other had been critically wounded, all three were as good as dead when they stepped foot into that room.

Fast forward 6 years. I have completed my second deployment to Iraq, left the USMC and gotten my college degree at Embry Riddle. I applied to the FBI as a Special Agent because I wanted to fly surveillance. Over the next 13 years I worked international terrorism, violent crimes against children, and health care fraud, but primarily flew aviation surveillance for the NY office. However, to further my career, in 2020, I applied to and was accepted into the Domestic Terrorism Operations Section (DTOS) in Washington DC.

DTOS manages all cases related to Domestic Terrorism to include white supremacy, black supremacy, sovereign citizen, Anti-Government, incels, etc. I arrived in August 2020 and 5 months later, was staffing the FBI Command Post during the events of Jan 6. 

This takeover of the US Capitol actually had surprised us. We had intelligence that a particular group planned on bringing guns across the river from Virginia on a makeshift navy, in order to attack a different target. So when thousands of people went into the capitol, we were ready, but shocked. For the next two years, this was all I did, managing cases on the West Coast of people who we identified had illegally entered the Capitol. 

I returned to Aviation Surveillance in 2022 and in 2025 Trump became our President. He immediately pardoned the Jan 6 criminals and a list was made of Agents who worked on those cases. Several people have been fired including those I had worked with. It was akin to having my career in a Tornado Watch.

In the same year, the FAA decided they needed a psychiatric evaluation to determine if I was a risk to aviation safety. I had provided a VA psychiatric evaluation and the FAA wanted a $4,000 one conducted by their specialists. Despite flying safely for the past 14 years without incident and having my FAA medical granted each year with PTSD disclosed, suddenly they suspended my ability to fly. 

Each day I had no idea if I would get a call firing me illegally or if I would just continue my career as normal. I worried for my family’s safety while I was at work. Additionally, I was unable to fly in a unit that does aviation surveillance and was defending myself in legal motions against the FAA. The stress in my life mounted and became overwhelming.

Remember those three veterans who had been in the firefight in the house? Chris Piekos had done relatively well. He was in Boston getting a degree and playing sports. He was handsome and well liked so it was a surprise when he died of an overdose in 2022.

Then in Sept 2025, Sean Debevoise resurfaced in a shocking way. After the room in 2006, he had been airlifted back to the US where they left the bullet in his brain and gave him a partially titanium skull. He refused to talk to the rest of us. His story began to change, accusing us of trying to kill him and burying his body. In Sept, Sean drove his boat up to an open bar in Southport, North Carolina and opened fire, killing 3 and wounding 5. He was later arrested.

All three were effectively dead at this point. And I felt myself becoming emotionally unattached. I had dealt with stress before but it became clear that I was in trouble. I began seeking ways to help me deal with the stress which brings me to this exercise.

When picturing stress, you should imagine a backpack on your shoulders. We call this a ruck in the USMC. Everything you do in life contributes or mitigates the stress in the pack. Say for example, you have a big project at work or school. Take 5 lbs and put it in. Let’s say you’ve been in a car accident and nothing major but you now have a variety of insurance paperwork. 10 lbs. 

Similarly, you like to paint and each week you spend some time with a canvas. Remove 5 lbs. Perhaps you deal with some marital issues or your dog dies. Add 20 lbs. As you add and remove stress, your body needs to compensate for the added strain. You lean forward, you certainly can carry a little bit around but too much for too long will grate on your muscles. It affects how you interact with others. 

Then you go off to war.

Whatever you bring to combat is going to have an affect on how you deal with combat. And the result of this weight will need to continue to be dealt with. Debevois’s actions, while responding to an event 19 years ago, affected me now. Everyone deals with stress in different ways. Working out, talking with a spouse, playing video games. 

There are also unhealthy ways to deal with stress. Drinking too much, self-medicating, flying off the handle. They will minimize the stress in the short term but add to the stress in the long term.

Take a look internally. How is your ruck? How are you mitigating the weight? Can you help others? Are you able to help yourself? Thanks for listening, and I hope this has been helpful