Seth’s Story

Pushkin.

Hey, it's Jake. I hope you enjoyed our season The Truth about Sarah. We'll be having a live event later this year. It's going to be a conversation between me and my co host Jess McHugh, and we want to hear from you too. What questions do you have for us about this season? Send your questions to deep Cover at pushkin dot fm. That's deep Cover All one word at Pushkin dot fm, and stay tuned for more details on this event. Heads up. This episode contains a reference

Na smell the Soul a fields of Blood and down Ever, lookgat how heavy the silence was. Let's go back before the last ye.

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, goods round down, can't find me, good things, I'm done everything, scene on the darn.

Sense, I'm not res.

Scene fuste scene.

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, you know, wonderful, you got some more healing, and then just to come find out, you know, it was all a lie. It was all just smoke and mirrors.

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 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. It just wasn't 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 Kavanaugh. 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 Creative Vets. He first joined as a participant, a veteran looking for something, anything

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 and 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

And were you so? Were you? Were you going to school?

I did?

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 being 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, 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 Mamadia 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 you know, some sort of crazy thing that happened. We had mass casualty come in and everybody was being run out by gurneys 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 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 bagdad. They did a surgery and ballade and then I woke up and ic you and Walter read.

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

The What A Way 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 I'll 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. Do you know, because at one point, with all those seiters, 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 the 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 Kavanaugh. 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 an 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 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 words 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 community, 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.

Every once in a while she'd be like, oh, my hips are tired, and so Russ had picked her up and give her a piggyback ride. She was blaming that on Oh my hips are killing me and my back's certain. 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 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 going to be.

But fortunately something got in between him and that bullet. That date he'd made on the calendar to attend to the Creative Vets 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 peer in class. Set did 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 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 kid actually helped them to get through some of these traumas.

And so 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 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 you 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 Charlotte 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 piece of paper.

And by the time we were all said and done, they had the melody, the song, the leader, all that stuff put together, and we took it over to the studio the next day and put it down on track.

For years, Seth carried the weight of his story without a place to set it down. But here, through this songwriting program, he found this 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'll explain.

Your story for you.

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

My gosh, it was like goosebumps everywhere like that. That was my story coming to 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 I played it, it was just someone came up with something new to say about it.

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 blue hell you raised away from Sometimes it calls your dell tane. Fancy you fold your hands to the man upstairs when the way he's putting on is just too much.

You can choose.

Break you down, fine, to keep you alive man, finely side to rise bub.

Man.

Yeah, that song gets me every time anyway, So sorry for the non 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 the fourth that song Rise up Bull, Please put your hands together for correct Campbell.

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 Pathfinder planning a magician so you can get these kids in to store. We loved brother, what more time with that doll, Ladies and gentlemen.

My kids that I were all setting out 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 was just all emotion.

Even though Seth has found some healing and community at great events, 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 Seth, 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 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 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.

Not really.

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 him 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 created 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 flesh and blood, how you raised or where your from.

Sometime the cards you delity there so you puild 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 have to turn your life.

Around Crime the string in Inside the Rise Blood.

Next time on Deep Cover, we dive into one of our biggest unresolved questions from the series. Did Sarah Kavanaugh 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 Gaines McQuaid, Tally Emmlin and Sonia Gerwit. It was edited by Karen Chakerjee. 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 Greta Con. Additional thanks to creat Events. I'm Jake Albert