“A lot of people have asked me how I went from being a soldier to being a comedian,” Retired U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Thom Tran says in his Got Your 6 Storytellers talk. “Comedy is my therapy.”
On his fourth day in Iraq, Tran took a gunshot to the back of his skull in a gunfight. As Tran talks, footage of the incident from the field plays behind him. In it, he wipes blood from his neck and says, simply, “f***.”
Tran, who is now based in Los Angeles and works as a standup comedian, writer, producer, voiceover actor, and traffic reporter, has a punch line for everything.
He talks, for example, about how he holds so may jobs because he is constantly on the verge of being fired from at least one of them. He describes how memory loss — a result of his injury — allows him to hide chocolates from himself then find them with that same feeling of surprise you experience when you find money in a pair of pants. And he even manages to make the audience laugh about the way his father reacted to the video of his son being shot in the head.
“We have to be able to laugh at that,” he says, pointing to the video screen behind him as he stands before an audience that is experiencing shock, inspiration and side-splitting laughter all at once.
“Cause if I didn’t, I don’t know where I’d be today,” he continues. “Laughing, this therapeutic thing that comes from your soul, is the only thing I’ve found that can heal that.”
It’s no wonder Tran went on to found the GIs of Comedy, recruiting military veterans to travel and perform for troops and civilian supporters around the world as a way to bring laughter to them and to help them heal.
Watch his story, then share it with six of your friends.
Tag: got your 6
Jason Everman’s Unlikely Life Trajectory From Music to the Military
Jason Everman, the guitarist who played with Nirvana and Soundgarden, says punk rock was his soundtrack growing up.
“It was this loud, fast, aggressive music that was essentially the sonic middle finger,” he says, standing before a picture of his teenage self wearing a Black Flags T-shirt. “And as I was this kind of 15-year-old gawky walking middle finger, we complemented each other.”
In his Got Your 6 Storytellers talk, Everman focuses on his unlikely life trajectory, the path that took him from playing in rock bands to becoming a U.S. Army Ranger and later on, an elite member of Special Forces.
“It was the year of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, absolutely,” he says of a turning point between tours when he realized that punk rock no longer brought him the joy it did as a kid. “I had no structure in my life other than touring commitments.”
But under this surface of “living the dream,” Everman continues, “I was profoundly dissatisfied.”
A friend who was a former Navy SEAL told Everman he might consider joining the military, saying his own experience challenged him in ways he had never experienced before.
“Challenge leads to achievement, and achievement leads to joy,” Everman says of one of his biggest takeaways from his service in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This veteran bears tattoos on his forearms as he talks about ridding himself of the “shackles of cool.” Watch the video to discover his story and how rock music and military service continue to shape his path.
Service Taught This Veteran What Is, And Isn’t, a Threat
On a street corner in Chicago, an older woman stood and watched as three buses passed her by. She kept letting kids board the bus ahead of her — saying they caused nothing but trouble — so she continued to wait.
This is the scene that Eli Williamson, who founded Leave No Veteran Behind after his service in Iraq and Afghanistan, describes in his Got Your 6 Storytellers talk. In it, he has the audience reflect on what it is like for members of the military to return from war and see how so many of us avoid members of our own community.
“The military is designed to engage our nation’s existential threats. And we build teams around these existential threats. We take perfectly good strangers and make them close if not closer than family,” he says.
Williamson returned to civilian life worried that he would not be able to build those kinds of relationships back home. But five years into his work with Leave No Veteran Behind, which uses employment training, transitional jobs and educational debt relief to empower veterans to strengthen their own communities, it is mission accomplished.
One such transitional job had to do with addressing youth violence in the same city where Williamson grew up. Leave No Veteran Behind challenged the idea that metal detectors and armed personnel can keep our kids safe with communal resilience strategies that emphasize safety as opposed to security.
“We did this by leveraging some of our skills that we learned in Iraq and Afghanistan and we would go out into a very specific neighborhood and provide presence patrols, without the guns,” he says.
These patrols, conducted around Chicago Public Schools, facilitated safe passage for kids before and after school, leading to a significant decrease in violence.
After meeting the older woman waiting for the bus, Williamson told his team to treat the kids who had plowed right past her as they would treat any officer, saying “hello sir” and “hello ma’am.”
“Many of these kids would just look at us in a very quizzical way. Because many of them had never been called sir or ma’am a day in their life,” he recalls. “But over that course of a year, something really strange began to happen.”
Watch the video to learn how veterans, who have been trained to know what is and is not a threat, have a unique ability to draw members of their community closer together rather than further apart.
What Does a Lunar Eclipse Have to Do With This Veteran’s Path to Writing?
Phil Klay looked up at the night sky while he was deployed to the Anbar province in Iraq as a marine Corps public affairs officer. He had received a letter from his great aunts saying there would be a lunar eclipse that evening and that the Middle East would be a great place to view it. “Now, if you’ve seen a lunar eclipse, you know the moon darkens,” he says. “Mine turned the color of blood.”
In his Got Your 6 Storytellers talk, Klay explains how he lied when he called his aunties later that evening and agreed with them that the eclipse was beautiful. He locked his reaction about the eclipse away, along with the bloody scenes he saw after suicide truck bombings.
As his deployment continued, Klay kept busy — partly as a way to cope.
“I was no hero,” he says, referencing the military doctors who inspired him. “But at the very bare minimum I could be admirably stoic, joining the long lines of Marines and soldiers unwilling to share the burden of the terrible things that they’ve seen.”
When Klay returned from Iraq in 2008, he realized the American people did not seem to be paying all that much attention to the war. His anger compelled him to confront all that he had covered up. And he did so through the power of the story.
“I wanted civilians to feel about the war the way that I did. But I didn’t want to have the responsibility of telling them why they should,” he says. “And it occurred to me that perhaps the stories that I was afraid to tell were exactly the ones that I should be telling.”
Watch the video for more on why Klay, who won the National Book Award last month for his collection of short stories, “Redeployment,” became a writer.
The Military Gave This Veteran the Permission Slip She Needed to Lead
From leading the 100,000 Homes Campaign to being recognized by the White House as a Champion of Change to founding the Billions Institute, an organization committed to supporting new solutions to global problems, Becky Kanis has committed her life to making bad things better.
Her motivation stems from one moment, which she shares in her Got Your 6 Storytellers talk. When she was a lieutenant in the 25th Infantry Division, a U.S. Army division in Hawaii, every single link in the communications system went from green to red. At three in the morning, Kanis stood at the colonel’s door — and with a knock, knock, knock — woke her up and explained the situation.
“She literally poked me in the chest and she said ‘un-f*** this lieutenant,’” Kanis says. The colonel could have kicked a trashcan; she could have micromanaged. But instead, she gave Kanis permission to fix the problem.
Kanis says that in order to do our part to make the world a better place, we should ask ourselves three big questions: What do you really want? What are you willing to let go of? And what lights up your heart? Kanis’s talk centers on how she has applied those questions and pursued answers to them in her own life. And it explores how we can all give ourselves permission slips to un-f*** things.
While her seven minutes onstage includes a lot of laughs, there is also a moment leaves the audience in awe. Kanis displays two images of a formerly homeless man named Ed Givens. First, he appears drunk, with his back against a brick wall, and later he appears in a suit at a party the White House threw to celebrate the success of the work that Kanis and others did to address homelessness.
“This is the kind of change that I know in my bones is possible in the world,” Kanis says. Watch the video, then join Kanis in her call to action to un-f*** big things together.
From Military Officer to Entrepreneur: How One Veteran is Focusing on Renewing America
The Got Your 6 campaign is celebrating the accomplishments of veterans through Storytellers, a series of videos that media partners — including NationSwell — are promoting to raise awareness of all that our veterans have to offer the country.
In the weeks ahead, we’ll share the stories of a U.S. Army Combat veteran who uses comedy to heal war wounds, a punk rocker who found his sense of purpose through service, a West Point graduate who says the military taught her how to unf*** things and more.
The first video features Greg Behrman, the founder and CEO of NationSwell. His talk centers on three projects that he’s focused on since returning from deployment: NationSwell, the Connecticut Heroes Project, and his favorite project, which you’ll have to watch to discover!
Behrman opens his talk standing before a picture of his 10-week-old self, squeezed between his mom and his dad — who, as a boy growing up in South Africa, dreamt of moving to America one day. Behrman says that his perception of the United States has always been linked to the sacrifice his parents made and the opportunities that afforded him.
One such opportunity was at the Harvard Kennedy School, where Behrman was a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. While there, he spent a lot of his time reading the stories of service members, coming to the realization that he wanted to be a part of the Armed Forces. He commissioned in the U.S. Navy (much to his mom’s surprise, given his tendency toward seasickness), then did two years of reserve duty before deploying to Afghanistan and returning with the desire to build something new.
Behrman also speaks about his motivation for building a media company devoted to elevating solutions to national challenges, before going on to discuss his work to address veteran homelessness in Connecticut, his home state, and concluding with his favorite project, who looks very much like his 10-week-old self.
“My hope for her is the same one, I think, that compelled my parents to move halfway across the world all those years ago,” he says. “It’s that she has the opportunity to pursue her dreams and the chance to realize her full potential.”
Veteran Storytellers Take the Mic and Change the Conversation
Got Your 6, a campaign working to change the conversation about veterans and military families, is hosting its Storytellers event in New York City today.
By bringing together service members who continue to pursue careers as change makers and problem solvers, Storytellers represents one way Got Your 6 is bridging the military-civilian divide by uniting the government, the entertainment industry and nonprofits.
The Storytellers that will deliver short presentations include Greg Behrman, founder and CEO of NationSwell; Becky Kanis, who led the 100,000 Homes campaign and is now working on a new project called the Billions Institute; and Don Faul, head of operations at Pinterest. Each of their talks will be filmed, released and promoted widely with the help of partners including MTV and The Huffington Post.
NationSwell will feature these videos in the weeks and months ahead so that this celebration of veterans can continue well past Veterans Day. You can take action in support of the Got Your 6 mission by joining the conversation on social media using the hashtag #wagegood then sharing the videos with six of your friends.
In the meantime, here is a glimpse at highlights from the 2013 Storytellers event.
[ph]