Seth’s Story

Pushkin Pushkin heads Up. This episode contains a reference to suicide and detailed descriptions of combat. Hey, it's Jake here. I hope you enjoyed the Truth about Sarah this season. There were so many interviews Jess and I did that we just couldn't fit in, but that really stayed with us, kind of looping in our heads. Some of them are pretty haunting, and we wanted to share a few of

Nassmell the Song of the sub Life and now ever again, how heavy the Silence was. Let's go back before the last year.

Sarah actually helped write two songs in Nashville. The second is a kind of soul searching love ballad called still See Me. The lyrics, well, they're all about this woman who's lost her way in life. Here, have a listen.

And find me.

Things.

Everything seen in the don make sense.

I'm not used to scene you see.

See, I'm not who I used to be and I can't find the me I've known. Yeah, it's almost like she was giving us a peek behind the curtain, hinting at the double life that she was leading and all the confusion and heartache that it caused.

We all listened to her song and thought, oh, this is great, wonderful, you got some more healing. And then just to come find out, you know, it was all a lie. It was all just smoking hers.

That's Seth Cole. He's the guy that I was telling you about. He works at Creative Vets. He's their veteran outreach coordinator and Seth he actually met Sarah back when she was living her double life as a wounded veteran. Well, Seth was happy for Sarah that she'd found some Catharsis. He told me that when you heard her song still see me, something about it just didn't seem right.

I I couldn't put my finger on it, but I just didn't. I didn't believe the song. I did not believe this song, and that was that was the first thing that I had thought. But I was just like, oh, well, maybe you know, there are a few things in there that didn't make sense to me because a lot of the songs you can listen to and you can like, oh yeah, yeah, I could see that happening. But hers, it just it just had something to it. I didn't just wasn't connecting.

When I interviewed Seth back in November, we talked for hours. I heard his whole story, and, like so much of what you've heard this season, that story it will once again change the way that you think about Sarah Cavanaugh. Welcome back to Deep Cover season six, The Truth about Sarah. This is Seth's story. Let me start by telling you how Seth found his way to create e Vets. He first joined as a participant, a veteran looking for something, anything that might help him find some solace. Then he

I just say, hey, I'll start out. My name is Seth Cole. I'm a veteran of the Iraq War. And I made it about six months into my deployment before I was hit with Martin nineteen grenade and that completely ended my career. I ended up going back to Walter Reed and I woke up in Ward fifty seven where they were talking about cutting my right arm off.

You're just dropping all this on them.

I'm just dropping all of it on them because I want them to do the same thing with me. I want them to reciprocate exactly what I just did. If they went through something so totally dark that it put him in that space of mine that you know I can't go further. I need them to tell me that, and so I tell my whole story.

Seth's story, it has a rocky start. He grew up in Kansas in a small town called Stafford.

I've went all the way through life, you know, pretty much five years old, didn't know a dad, didn't know anything about life. My mom said, my dad ran off. She brought another guy into my life at five. That was my stepdad. When I was fourteen, my mom and my stepdad got divorced and she decided that she wanted to marry a new guy, and that guy didn't want any kids. So at fourteen, I was kicked out of the house. You were fourteen at the time, Yeah, I was.

And were you so?

Were you?

Were you going to school?

I did up until about junior year, and then in junior year I just couldn't keep up with it anymore. It was either work or go to school. And so I was just I was tired of finding myself not being able to have water, not being able to have electricity, or not be able to have gas or you know. So I had to I had to figure something out, and I had to go get a better job.

So Seth gets a job painting grain elevators. You know, those big metal towers pointed at the top. You see them scattered throughout the Midwest. Anyway, Seth painted those and he picked up other jobs wherever he could. He says he worked long hours, not much pay. He was stuck and he knew he needed a way out, a way forward.

I was just like, Okay, what am I going to do with life? And how am I going to get out of the situation. So I went to the military and then the National Guard. It was like, yeah, we can get you in there. We'll ship you out in about May, and.

That was that.

Seth was now a member of the US military. After some training, he was sent overseas in two thousand and seven.

So I got deployed to Mamada Iraq. I saw a lot of things that I probably didn't want to, you know, that very first week, and then after that it was just like downhill, you know, everything from dead camels to dead humans.

Seth says that from the start it was chaos, just one thing after another, and it didn't let up.

Every day from that point on was either a mortar attack or a rocket attack or some sort of crazy thing that happened. We had mass casualty come in and everybody was being run out by journeys and I'm probably one hundred yards away looking at this. We were in one of the worst areas in Iraq, and it showed.

One day, Seth was given an assignment to set up a radar system in between two villages. Seth was with his buddy, another soldier. Someone took a shot at them from behind a tree line. The bullet hit the sandbag in front of him. His buddy, who was holding this Mark nineteen grenade launcher, jerked it down into his lap and it was an old piece of gear no safety. The trigger depressed, it fired, The round hit a wall, ricocheted and exploded three feet from Seth's face.

As I just, you know, thought about it for a second, I had dropped a piece of brain out of my head, which I thought was a clot. I picked it up just to you know, just to make sure, and it was a piece of brain, and I was like, oh my god, this is not good. At that point, I was just like, oh, oh crap, I'm dead. And so I passed out and I was in and out of consciousness. They did like the triage and Baghdad they did a surgery and ballade and then I woke up in.

ICU and Walter Reid Seth suffered a traumatic brain injury. He spent three and a half months recovering at Walter Reid, then another year and a half at a hospital in Fort Riley, Kansas. Once he was stable, he moved to Washington State and tried to start over. He enrolled in college in a clinical psychology program, but then the seizures started bad ones. He had to drop out. He couldn't drive, he couldn't work. He told me he felt completely cut off alone and things got dark, so dark he thought

What a War Of Project. They reached out to me and they said, hey, we want to put you into this program called the Independence Program. And it's a lifelong deal where we follow you throughout life and we, you know, help you with services. Help you get a CSS, which is community support specialist more or less just a caregiver to help you clean your house, take you to appointments to you know, because at one point, with all those seizers, I couldn't drive.

All of a sudden, Seth had the support that he desperately needed. He got all kinds of help from Wounded Warrior, including retreats where he could connect with other veterans.

One of the things that they had though for this saying was a financial summit to kind of teach you how to balance a budget, keep savings, to you know, play with the stock market if that's what you want to do. And that's where Sarah, Russell, Travis and I all.

Met Sarah as in Sarah Kevanaugh. At the time, Sarah was also enrolled in the Wounded Warrior Independence Program. She even had someone helping her at home with daily tasks. At that retreat, Seth formed deep connections with the people that he met. There was Russ the Salt of the Earth, former Green Beret. There was Travis from Detroit who was a double amputee, and then of course there was Sarah. Seth told us that he heard stories from Sarah about her service. Stories you may recognize by now.

She said she went to Afghanistan, she ended up having a ide go off pretty much right beside her and broke it, shattered her hips.

Seth remembers the first time that he saw Sarah standing in the hotel lobby mingling with the other vets.

She was She was outgoing. That that was the biggest thing, Like she was talking to everybody and she was out going.

She she definitely.

Struck an interest because I wanted I wanted that bug that she had, if she was able to go through all the crap that she said she was and.

Be able to be that bubbly.

I wanted that bug because I wanted to be able to get back to being a social butterfly. And so I just kind of gravitated towards that. And I guess that you know, Travis and Russ both saw the same thing. It organically kicked off. We hung out with each other the whole time.

This is something that we've seen before. Sarah shows up at these events surrounded by real vets, many of them struggling, and somehow she just fits right in. She finds unity, She blends, she bonds. She knows how to connect in these small group settings where people can often be guarded but also quietly yearning for connection, and she doesn't overplay it. A sore hip here, bad back there, nothing wild, at least not at first, nothing that sets off alarms, just enough to pass as one of them.

Every once in a while she'd be like, oh my hips, are tired, and so Ress had picked her up and give her a piggyback ride, and she was blaming that on oh my hips are killing me, and my back's curtain. I've got so many metal rods in my body, you know. And so I mean, it was just like the normal stuff that if somebody had been through an ID or somebody'd been through a traumatic incident, you know that you know, really hurt their body. That that was the kind of

After the retreat, this new group of friends continued to swap advice, share what they learned about how to navigate the system and make the most of the resources available to veterans and get this, It was actually Sarah who first told them about Creative Vets, the program that helps veterans make songs about their life, and there was another program that Creative Vets ran also where veterans could create

So before that, I had been planning on just going and saying goodbye to to Russ and you know, even Sarah at that time, and just kind of coming back and eating a bullet. I had been thinking about it for a very long time. I had a spot picked out, you know, so that was what it was gonna be.

But fortunately something got in between him and that bullet. That date he'd made on the calendar to attend to the Creative Vet's Retreat. It was an art program held in the campus of USC in Los Angeles. He spent two weeks there. Russ and Sarah went with him. The three of them hung out and explored the city, Venice Beach, Malibu, the Santa Monica Pier in class set it his artwork, and he made a piece called Dinner Before Disaster. It was his way of telling the story of what had

I went out there and in the in the time that I was out there doing all that stuff, a light bulb hit and I was like, Man, I could share this with everybody, and this could actually help them to get through some of these traumas. And so when I when I got done with the program, instead of going and eating that bullet, I went back and threw myself into the VA and the volunteer side. And so you know that that was my my life changing moment. It just it put a new sense of purpose into me.

We'll be right back. After his time in Los Angeles at the art retreat, Seth did okay for a while. Then COVID hit and Seth, like so many of us, struggled with the shutdowns and the isolation. Then he got a call from the executive director of Creative Vets asking him if he wanted to participate in a songwriting program over zoom.

Everybody was, you know, sitting in their house and I was getting back to that spot again, you know. But I was like, Okay, there's something that's going to happen. And Richard called and he was like, Hey, we're going to do a virtual song right since we can't bring everybody out to Nashville. Would you be up for that? I said, yeah, why not.

Seth was not a musician, but because the whole art retreat in Los Angeles had gone so well, he figured, let me give this a try. Seth was assigned a mentor and a songwriter who listened carefully to his story.

They asked me, you know, what do you have on your mind? And I was like, look, I'm interested in being able to take pretty much my whole life, you know, and put it into here and then that way that I can just put all that Tromotte behind me. And they were like, okay, yeah, let's do that. And so I started pretty much from the beginning where I did with you, and I went all the way through everything. This took like six hours or more just to be able to get everything done and on you know, that

For years, Seth carried the weight of his story without a place to set it down. But here, through this songwriting program, he found the space and the courage to lay it all out. Trauma, memory, truth, all transformed into melody. What had once felt unspeakable was now a song.

You know, just such an amazing experience come out of there, even being virtual. When I got off the computer, I was so happy and elated and just ready to go.

And the song, it was something that he could share.

You've been able to put this out and get things you know on paper that you know you don't ever have to talk about again. Now you can pass this song over to somebody and that I'll explain your story for you.

What was it like the first time you heard this song, Like it's an actual song with music and someone singing it.

Oh my gosh, it was like goosebumps everywhere, Like that was my story to come into life, and it actually made an impact on not only me but the people around me, because every time that I shared that song. Every time that I sang that song, every time that I've played it, it was just someone came up with something new to say about.

Well do you sing? Can you sing a lyric a line for me? Are you not a singer?

I do sing? Give us a line?

Then all right. You don't get to choose your flesh shan blood hell you raised away you're from Sometimes it cause your dell tane fancy fold your hands to the man upstairs when the way he's putting on is just too much. You can choose a lit break you down, fine to keep you alive around fine with siy to rise a bug.

Man. Yeah, that song gets me every time anyway, So sorry for that. On warm up singing No You're Good debut at the opry, I've had a couple of times we've been on the field of the Titans game. We've been gosh where else.

It played on the field of the Titans game.

Ladies and gentlemen, here to before Seth's song, Rise up, Bob, please put your hands together for correct pampble. Some people have a picture perfect childhood with the house of home.

Know you.

Seth told me about this moment standing in the Titans stadium before tens of thousands of fans, and these musicians are performing his songs, belting out the words to his story like an anthem of hardship and resilience. People are cheering, and then, in a scene that could probably only happen in America, they offer Seth one final tribute.

Seth, thank you so much.

You've given so much to your country. Now as a single father of five, you're giving so much to these kids. And how about a twenty twenty four Nissan pathfind.

Are planning, madician, so you can get these kids into school.

We love a brother.

More time was that no ladies and gentlemen, my.

Kids and I were all standing out there, and it was just one of the most emotional moments in my life. It was really one of those experiences I can't put into words. It's just all emotion.

Even though Seth has found some healing and community creative vets, it still hasn't been an easy path for him. His friend Travis, the one from Detroit, who was a double amputee, he passed away in twenty twenty one. His memory stays with Seth and it still kind of tears him up that he couldn't have done more to help this friend and fellow veteran.

I had just talked to him the month before, and he was doing good. He was learning language, he was you know, he had a plan for life. And you know, something happened that week that you know, just completely threw him back into that spiral and so he went back to go find pain relief and found death instead.

Seth told us that Travis never applied to a program with Creative vets, but he really wishes that he had. Whether or not it would have helped, it's impossible to say, but he can't help but wonder what it might have done for Travis.

He was trying to find those tools. Every time that we talked, it was you know, I'm doing this, I'm doing that, you know, And he was trying to find the one thing that's going to help him to be able to get out of that hole, and he didn't find it. So knowing that it really leaves a burden on my heart for him.

This lost opportunity underscores what Sarah stole a spot that somebody else could have taken.

We're a very.

Small organization, so being able to do large groups is not something that we're tailored for We're for that small, intimate, you know, session, and we can only help so many veterans a year, and to have one that comes through the program multiple times that happens to not be a veteran really takes away from those that could have been able to get in here and do something with their life and turn it around.

For Seth, these Creative VET retreats, they're not just a perk, not just a nod to the hardship. Veterans have endured their chance to make sense of that hardship, to embrace it, to find meaning in it, to take something jagged and raw, and through the alchemy of music, shape it into something that speaks not just to others, but also to oneself. That's what the process of collaborating on his song did for Seth, That's what he's seen it do for others.

Most of us have to go through the VA, and the VA wants to sit there and ask us questions, you know, and then we give them the answer and then they're like, how do you feel about that? It's like, I don't even know how I feel about you know, life in general, so asking me how I feel about this, I really can't give you an answer on that.

But it creative vets. Seth found a place to talk, and now anytime he meets someone new, he doesn't have to answer questions or even say a word. He'll just play them his song.

You don't get to choose your plesh Blood, how you raised awhere your firm sometime the car rginality there, so you pulled your hands to the man upstairs when the way he's putting on he's just too much, and you can choose.

To let it break you down.

If I had to turn your life around, Crime, the Stream, the Inside.

The Risible.

Next time on Deep Cover, we dive into one of our biggest unresolved questions from the series. Did Sarah Cavanaugh have an accomplice?

So there had to be other people involved? There absolutely had to be because I.

Clearly remember at least two times when Ivy was on the phone, there had to be another person.

This episode was produced by Amy Gains McQuaid, tali Emmlin and Sonya Gurwit.

It was edited by.

Karen and Chakerji. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Original music from Luis Gara, mastering by Sarah Bruguer. Special thanks to Jess Mchughe, Jake Flanagan, Sarah Nix and Gretacone. Additional thanks to Creativents. I'm Jake Albert