 I'm joined today by medically retired Marine Corps Corporal Michael Jernigan and proudly served with Company E, 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment. On August 22, 2004, while on a deployment in Mamadiyah, Iraq, Michael's platoon was on patrol when it was hit by two 155-millimeter artillery shells that were buried in the ground. The blast caused life-threatening and life-changing illnesses or injuries. Forty-five percent of Michael's cranium was crushed in. He had shrapnel enter his right eye and exit through his left eye, which cut everything in between, and he had to have two fingers reattached and his right hand fully reconstructed. He fractured his patella, he cut his femoral artery, and Michael went through 30 major surgeries in the first 12 months and spent 16 months in hospitals and rehabilitation facilities. But since that attack, Michael has taken this second chance at life and turned it into something that is never taken for granted. He's a volunteer. He graduated with a bachelor's degree from the University of South Florida, and he was also featured on the HBO documentary, A Live Day. He's also been a contributing writer to the New York Times.com's Home Fires blog, and congratulations to him. Most recently, he was selected as the 2020 Citizens Honor Service Act Award recipient from the Medal of Honor Society. Mike, thank you for taking the time to speak with DAV today. Thank you, Rob. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. I get to talk to you. I think it's a lot better. I appreciate that. There we go. Since learning about you, I've been amazed by the amount of things that you've accomplished in spite of your injuries. But even with that superhuman will and resilience, you have really been tested by this COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting social isolation. Can you tell us about when you first started to notice something was off and that the isolation was taking a toll on your well-being? You know, I'll be honest. I think my wife noticed before I did. You know, but we were in D.C. doing some lobbying for the foundation back in late February. And then we came home. And I mean, I had been reading about this coronavirus issue in China and as it was spreading in the Wall Street Journal. And then mid-March here, I live in Fort Worth, Texas now, we got locked down. And, you know, it was interesting because it's not necessarily, I didn't have any place to go, really. But for some reason, just being told that I can't go anywhere, just had a bad effect on me. And I started getting a little aggressive. I started getting irritable and angry. They got a little volatile around the house. You know, and I'd say that was probably three weeks in, two to three weeks in. It really started to go. And through that trying period, you somehow another find your way to mine. I'll tell you, what was interesting about our experience in the beginning was, you know, the first week of the lockdown, we had a plumbing issue. OK, our toilets weren't draining. So we wound up having to call the city. And the city came out and they were checking the pipes out back. And they were trying to blow air into the system to see if they can dislodge a clog, right? And in the process, they blew wastewater up through our toilets and sinks into our bathrooms. And we had wastewater about two to three inches deep in the bathrooms, right? And this is wastewater from five different homes in the neighborhood. You know, oh, yeah, it was. I mean, I'm talking my wife had to clean this up. You know, luckily, we had people that had cleaning supplies that were willing to help and dropped off Clorox and that type of stuff. And the city of North Richland Hills, Texas, where I live, they stepped up and they took care of us and they got it fixed. And our landlord was great in helping through the process. But you know, this was a four or five day process to get this thing fixed. So, you know, when you wake up one morning because you hear water flowing in your bathroom and you step into your bathroom and you realize that you're standing in a few inches of wastewater, it's a wonderful way to wake up, you know? Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah, and there's a lot of that kind of kicked off. OK, this is what this quarantine is going to be like. You know, I think that that incident and in addition with being told, you know, you can't go anywhere and the stress and the frustration of trying to deal with the city because the city workers were we're not working at the time, right? So I've got to convince the city of NRH here in Texas to to get their guys out here and help. And then, of course, when the problem happened, they kept telling me, well, this could be weeks before we get it fixed. And, you know, so there's that type of thing. And luckily, the city stepped up and within days they got it fixed, which was great. But, you know, it's just a whole way to kick off the quarantine and it kind of set my mood for this quarantine is what I'm trying to say. And you told me recently, though, that you you found some despite those challenges and that. Yeah, so OK. So that's what I'm doing. So this was manifesting itself with a lot of anxiety, a lot of aggression and anger. So I decided to call the Vet Center because I do counseling at the Arlington Vet Center and I asked if they do any anger management type counseling and they said no, but they referred me to the Fort Worth VA outpatient clinic and I got in touch with somebody there to do some anger management. Well, they normally do their anger management like group counseling and there's in a group session with a workbook. And there wasn't a group session going on for obvious reasons. So I'm trying to go through this workbook by myself and I'm trying to do this with a counselor that's normally in a group session, it just wasn't working. And I told the lady, you know, with all due respect that this isn't working for me, I think I need to go a little deeper with like counseling counseling. So I got set up with a doctor at the Fort Worth clinic there and he started talking about mindfulness practice, right? And we're hearing a lot of this. We're starting to see commercials for these apps on TV and talking about meditation and how this can help. And, you know, I'm finally at the point at 15 years after being wounded, I'm willing to try anything, right? If it's going to work, there's a chance it'll work. I'm willing to try it. So I started trying this mindfulness practice and I have gotten some some good benefits from it. Can you tell me what that practice is like for people who aren't familiar with mindfulness? Like I was four weeks ago like you just like you. Yeah, you know what I did was, you know, I asked the counselor, I said, so what is mindfulness? You know, you hear about it all the time. How do you define this? And he said, you know, mindfulness is really just the art of practicing being in the moment at the time, OK? And, you know, you hear that and you're like, OK. So being the student I am, I got my history degree. So I go searching for information. I went into audible.com and I found a book called Practicing Mindfulness and I downloaded it and started reading it to get an idea of what mindfulness is. And, you know, they think the best way I can define what is mindfulness really is. It's the it's the practice of bringing your mind back to what you're doing at the moment, OK? Because our mind wanders all the time. We sit in our desks in front of our computer. Our mind wanders. We start getting hungry. We start thinking about food. You get the idea. But it's being able to refocus the brain on the task at hand. And I'm thinking he's caught me just right now thinking about what my next question was going to be. How are you trying to how are you how are you able to to incorporate mindfulness into your everyday life? What is that practice like? Well, you know, I started meditating, OK? So I'm doing at least 30 minutes of meditation a day. And I'm just trying to throughout the day. And this was a great thing about that book. I picked up practicing mindfulness is it has a bunch of exercises on how to how to build this capability because this is something that, yes, we can do, right? It's but it's something we're not really used to doing. As Americans, we're we're always on the run, right? We're always working. We're always going. You know, I was listening to a song the other day that just came out called Work. And the guy the guy's crooning about how he's always working. He's always working. He's always working. And then when he actually interacts with people, it's just through his phone, you know, and we're disconnected. But we're always stressed out. So meditation has been extremely beneficial for me through all of this. And I this might be a strange question, but you are our Marine. I was Marine. I am Marine. Is there any similarity at all? And I know that I think about back to rifle training specifically, and that feels like almost like a meditative practice, you know, just, well, you know, it's funny, like you're talking about like snapping in, right? Yeah, we can follow that type of stuff. It definitely is, you know, and you see people religious, people in religious sex, they do this through prayer and that type of stuff. You know, I think the meditation for me is a way to just try to focus on nothing, right? And the way I do this is I'll sit down, I'll lay down on my bed flat. I'll get comfortable. I'll sit out later for a couple of minutes because, you know, you get fidgety and you got to find a comfortable thing. I've got noise canceling earbuds. I put them in as far as like mindfulness goes. I think the military conversion, devil dog is situational awareness, right? That was drilled into our head from day one was situational awareness. Be aware of the situation you're in right now. You know, we focus on the mission at hand, right? Because the mission at hand is the mission we're doing right now. We want to focus three weeks from now. We've got to focus on what we're doing right now. And that's where it kind of interlimes with our military training. Do you think that there is a resistance maybe from the military, from veterans, to getting into something that almost has like a bit, and maybe you experienced it, it has a bit of a woo-woo sound to it, you know? Yeah, you know. I mean, so that's maybe stuff, right? Yeah. This is a stepping stone drug for something else. Meditative mindfulness is a stepping stone drug. I don't know, I don't know. We'll see. You know, it's funny. My wife, Kimberly, is a wonderful woman. We got married back in 2017. But when we started dating in 2015, I was on antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication. I was taking Sultana for sleep, and I was still anxious all the time. And she started doing some research, and she got me on lavender oil, right? And using melatonin, and I was able to get off all those medicines. Then now I'm doing meditation. Oh, did I mention my wife's from Southern California? Yeah. It's a pie. It is, and I was, so it's funny, because a few years ago, I think it was 2017, I was living in Florida. My wife and I were living in Florida, but we came out to Texas for a two-week program for traumatic brain injury, because obviously I have traumatic brain injury. And they taught me a meditation practice to do for 20 minutes a day. They told me it could help me lower my blood pressure. I think, okay. And I went home, and I tried it for a little while, and I just didn't stick with it, because some of the other stuff they told me I didn't like. I think it is that military mindset that, you know, this is, I'm thinking of, you know, long-haired hippies putting flowers down, rifle barrels at protests, or you think of Buddhist monks and loin cloths sitting there for hours meditating. It just, it's not what we're trained to do. We're trained to be conflict resolvers, right? We're trained to come in. And we're also told that we can handle anything, right? It's drilled into us in training. It's necessary for our mission in the military, but it affects our life from the military forward. You know, and we take that mindset into the rest of our life. And sometimes that doesn't convert to a stress-free life. I was hesitant. I had, you know, the word is escaping me now. But you know, I was hesitant to do it because the meditation had just seemed like, how's that gonna help? How has it taken 30 minutes out of your day to sit there and think about nothing gonna help? But like I said earlier, I was at the point where I was willing to try anything. Well, Michael, I appreciate you sharing that journey with DAV today. You look great. You sound great. I saw you in February and was just right before this pandemic started and it really does my heart good to see you and talk with you again. And I really appreciate you sharing your mindfulness journey with our audience. Well, here's the thing. If it can help anybody else, it's worth it. You know, I know that I'm not the only one facing this. If I'm facing this, there's a lot of other guys and girls that are facing the same thing. You know, it's funny because you get so used to being on the run. You get so used to doing things that when you're confined to your house and all of a sudden you've got nothing to do, you don't really know how to organize your time and your brain kicks into a hyperdrive. You know, because your brain is used to run. It's used to move and it's used to doing things and then you gotta be able to deal with it. You know, I look at this and it's just another tool in my rucksack. You know, it's just another tool in my rucksack. So now I've got this tool. So when I face problems, I can pull this out and I can apply it and it'll help me accomplish whatever mission I'm trying to do. Again, thank you. Thank you so much for sharing that tool with DAV. And we look forward to talking to you again. Thanks, Michael. Yeah, definitely.