We'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast was produced, the Galligle people of the Urination. We pay our respects to Elder's past and present.
It's January twenty fourteen and we're inside a US Navy FA eighteen plummeting towards the Atlantic Ocean. A dogfight had gone terribly wrong, and now Lieutenant Keegan gil can do nothing but hold on tight as his jet succumbs to an out of controled diet. He's forced to eject at the unbelievable speed of six hundred and ninety five miles per hour. He crashes into the shark infested icy waters. His injuries are so severe he should be dead instantly.
Keegan's limbs are torn and he's suffered a traumatic brain injury. It's a long battle with hypothermia as rescue teams race to find him. When he regains consciousness in hospital, he realizes his injuries are catastrophic. His life will never be the same. I'm at Middleton and this is head game today, Keegan Gill on his epic journey to Helen back. Mate, Look, you look like you're in one piece, so that's good news, mate,
that's good news. And haven't read your story. Car. How you're stealing one piece is absolutely amazing, and you've almost fought through an impossible scenario to be where you are today. But let's go back to the beginning. Mate. You know you're a former retired because of the incident US Navy fighter pilot. Was the military always in your family or always in your bones? And how did you come to joining the military at such a young age.
You know, it really wasn't in my family very deeply. I had an uncle who was a marine, and my grandfather served in World War Two, but my immediate family was actually sort of a group of hippies.
You know. They wouldn't let me have Gi Joes.
When I was a kid, I couldn't play violent video games. I was allowed to have guns so I could go out and go hunting. So I was always out in the woods, camping, hunting, fishing, just being a kid, climbing trees, doing all the stuff that little boys should be doing, building forts, you know, catching salmon with my hands in the river behind our house, and just having a good time. But I definitely wasn't built to be stuck in a cubicle sitting at an office job under fluorescent lighting all day.
And I had a really good professor in college who was a former Navy test pilot. He had flown with the Sea Wolves back in the Vietnam War, so he had he had been in the heat of some of the most intense conflict, flying Huey gunships and all sorts of stuff after and so he sort of rubbed off on me a little bit. But I ended up becoming
a flight instructor while I was in college. I ended up becoming a corporate pilot for about a year after I graduated from college, and I had a friend who was applying to go to Navy OCS Officer Candidate school to become an officer in the military and try to become a pilot. And at the time, I didn't realize that you could even do that. I was a community college kid, you.
Know, I didn't. I didn't.
I thought you had to go to the Naval Academy and your dad had to be an admiral.
I didn't.
I didn't realize just a guy off the street with a bachelor's degree could apply and potentially make it to fly F eighteens.
So basically you went down the commercial route and then a buddy of yours said, hey, listen, this is what I'm doing, and that sparked something within your within your mind or within your within your heart, where you thought, do you know what I'm going to see if I can not transfer over but start this program.
Yeah, exactly right.
And until that moment, it, you know, kind of dawned on me like, well maybe I can do that. And there's this website called air warriors dot com that gave me a guide on like how to prepare what I needed to know, how to get the application going and everything, and so I just kind of dug into it and realized this was a viable option for me, and I was getting a little while the corporate job was great. It paid really well, it was really cushy, got to go out to really nice dinners all.
The time and travel the world. Uh it was. It was a good gig.
But I got bored of it, you know, I was like, I need, I need something more than this. It became very routine, and I had that calling to adventure which led me to apply and I ended up getting in and so I headed to Navy OCS, spent a few months getting my ass kicked by Marine Corps drill instructors and graduated as a Navy insign one officer that basically doesn't know what in the world they're doing, and headed to flight training.
And what was it like? What was it like that that t transition, Because like you said, you know, you're flying around the world, You've got a cushy job, you're eating good food, you're being super respected, and all of a sudden you're being yelled at and screamed that by the drill side. Was it quite a shot for you or did you? Were you completely expecting it?
I mean, that's what I signed up for. I wanted it. I wanted that experience.
I know, I'd seen Full Metal Jacket and all these movies that guys getting I was like, I knew what I was getting into, and I prepared for it. You know, I hit the gym really hard. I was in really good shape. I prepared myself, memorized everything I possibly could, and advanced and I showed up ready to.
Get my ass kicked.
And I really, I really liked it because I don't know when there's other people around you that are freaking out at the scenario yet you're like dead calm.
It's somehow there's.
This this weird place that I could get into with that where I was just at peace in that environment and I really liked it and thrived at it and made my way through flight school.
I reacted well to that. When someone was on my and they were yelling and screaming at me, I'm thinking, right, just get it done, you know, right the first time, and they stopped yelling, they'll stop being on my ass. And it worked really, really, really really well for me. So you've done that, and then you say you went to flight school. So is there of two stages to this?
Yeah?
So so the OCS portion, the officer candidate school, that's just kind of like boot.
Camp for the officer side of things.
As long as you have a four year degree, you can go in and do that program. But once you come out of that, you still got to earn your wings if you're going to be a pilot, and the whole way through that is incredibly competitive. You're competing with all the other guys for the slots for the jets and the more desirable aircraft. But yeah, you do a little water survival training, some ground school. Everything's graded everything. You know, people are kind of dropping like flies the
whole way through OCS. A bunch of people drop out api the ground school, people drop out. Water survival people freak out when they have to wear their boots and flightsuit and go swim a mile in the pool or get flipped upside down and the helo dunker for the survival training.
People freaked out. But I was like, I love that. That was like what I signed up for.
You know, I winged as a naval aviator in May of twenty twelve, and then I headed for the most challenging training yet, which was the training in the F eighteen super Hornet. And you know, walking into that hangar and seeing these jets and how big they are in person, it was it was surreal, like I can't believe this is going to be my job.
And you said, there, what was it like getting your wings? You know, passing that training, because just getting on selection is a big, big feat, like you said, But then you start to see all these sort of experienced, you know, elite soldiers drop and it motivates you just to keep going. You look around, you go, God, there's only a few left out of out of you know, this big batch of individuals and then you get badged or you know, you get your wings. For me, it was one of
the proudest moments of my life. Take me back to the moment, because I can imagine that imposture syndrome. From becoming a commercial pilot to to now receiving and receiving your wings. How did it feel?
Yeah, I mean it was. It was incredible.
It was like a serious, deep pride that I experienced. I'm sure similar similar to yourself. You know, when you put that you put that little thing on your chest that says you've done it, and it's like, holy shit, I can't believe I did it, and I'm so proud. And then very quickly you show up at the F eighteen training You're like, I'm a winged aviator.
I know what, I know.
You realize you don't know anything. You go right back down to the bottom of the food chain.
You know what that's that was. I made sure that I relished in the moment for all of a couple of hours, you know, and they're like, you know, you pass selection and they give you your burying belt and they say it's harder to keep them to earn and then they kick you into a squadron and then like, hey, get get the bruise on, you know, get the tea and coffees on.
You're back to making coffee.
Yeah, pretty as quite lucky because I went, Yeah, I deployed straight to Afghanistan. So I was quite lucky. Within two weeks I was out with the boys, you know, so I managed to sort of miss that butt. But walking through that hang and what you just mentioned, what was it like walking through that hang and knowing that you were going to jump into one of these beasts?
You know, it was absolutely surreal.
It was a mixture of excitement and nerves of like, okay, you can't screw this up. You made it this far. So there's just so much pressure on you. While while you get those little moments of just bliss in surreal, a lot of the time you're just so busy and so stressed out about all the things you got to know very quickly. It can kind of diminish that that excitement that you showed up. It's like you show up, I'm ready to do this thing, but now I actually got to do it.
And how how long until you have sort of left to your own devices to one of these FA eighteen fighter jets.
It's pretty quick before you start solo and the jet, I think there's there's a very robust ground training, so you're doing lectures, computer based training as well as simulator training, so you learn the procedures of the aircraft, you learn the emergency procedures, and then you're only in the aircraft for about I think it was maybe four flights that you have an instructor in the back with a stick,
and after that you're solo. So you really only have a few hours in the F eighteen in real life before you you're sent out the door on your first solo.
You do, you guys train pretty much like us, like as if it's real time, don't you So you are going into these dog fights as if it's as if you are, you know, serving and protecting your country.
Yeah.
I mean you hear the term routine training mission or training mission, and I think people in the civilian world hear that and they're like, oh, they're just training, like they're just you know, just dicking around out there. But are like you, guys, our training is as close to the real thing is possible, and oftentimes we're training in skill sets that are very infrequently used in real combat.
But you know, you're still fighting the jet. Especially with dog fighting, casts all these things, your close proximity to the ground, you're maneuvering these aircraft at the edge of these the capability, you're multitasking, managing all these systems, talking on multiple radios. Like, there's a lot going on, and
it's really difficult and it's extremely dangerous. And with dog fighting, you are doing everything that you would do in a real dogfight with with just a couple training rules put in place to keep you keep you a little bit safer than you would maybe be in a real scenario. But other than you know, not hosing off real missiles or ordnance at like guns at one another, we're doing it dang near as close as you can get to the real thing.
Just explain to me what a dog fight looks like.
Yeah, so a dogfight is two or more aircraft within visual range of one another, basically trying to shoot each other down. It's sort of the epitome of what people probably think when they think fighter pilot. So you're trying to hit the other guy with a missile or gunfire to shoot them out of the air and so in order to do that, you oftentimes got to get their jet in front of you and get behind them ideally so that you can get a missile or gunfire that's
going to actually hit them with the real shot. So, as a pilot, you're maneuvering the jet, you're pulling seven and a half g's, you're performing this thing at the edge of its capabilities. So if you can imagine your body here with your gear on, weighs two two hundred and twenty pounds, Now you're under all that g force at seven and a half g's. Now it's like you weigh fifteen or sixteen hundred pounds. That you can feel and you can imagine that crushing weight. So it's sort
of like doing a high intensity interval training. You're playing four dimensional chest, you're operating weapon systems, radar, defensive systems, you're talking on multiple radios, like there's just a ton going on, and it's not uncommon, especially when you're a younger guy, to what they call a helmet fire, where your brain is just so overwhelmed with information that it's
just like you don't know what to do. So it's it's incredibly intense and it's it's probably the most demanding thing that we do as far as the physical demand and the mental demand combined together as that dogfight.
You talk to me about the physical demand because you mentioned the G force there. You know, you're not only fighting the enemy where you have to be psychologically switched on and in the game, but you're fighting the aircraft. Like you said, you're bending this aircraft. You're fighting the g's. You have to be trained enough to ignore that so you can stay psychologically switched on one percent on the target,
otherwise you're not going to make it out right. What's it like physically to be in that situation under those g's wist having to perform at such a high.
Level, Yeah, it's it's you can imagine you're squeezing your legs, you're squeezing your your glutes, you're squeezing your core to try to force that blood up into your head. You're doing what's called the anti G straining maneuver, which is where you're breathing and then you're kind of locking up your throat and kind of forcing the blood into your head.
And so you're.
Taking these really shallow little breasts to try to force that blood up in your head. You're doing everything you can just so you don't pass out. So imagine just doing like a max deadlift and you're pushing at the extremes of your deadlift and your freaking your vision's getting narrow.
And while you're doing that, you're having to think.
You're having to fly the jet, you're having to operate the weapons systems, you're having to talk on all these radios.
It's kind of.
The edge of what I think the human mind and body are capable of doing.
Let's go back to the fifteenth of Jam twenty fourteen. Now I can see you nodding your head. There. That's a that changed everything. Could you just take me back if you can keeganto that morning when you woke up, you know, just you know, And I don't want to say just a normal routine because when people say, oh, just this, you know, practicing in such a high stressed situation and you know, dog fights in training scenarios, It's
not just a normal routine. Everyone is so different everyone who requires you know, it depends how you wake up, depends how you feel in the morning. How did you feel in the morning of the fifteenth for jan twenty fourteen, going into work.
Yeah, you know, got up and it kind of felt like a routine day. At this point, I had been in my first fleet squadron. You know, I'd been through years of all this flight training to earn my wings, to get through the F eighteen training pipeline, and now I'd been in my first fleet squadron for nearly a year, and so it was starting to feel like a normal job.
You know.
Yeah, I was going to go fly an eighty nine million dollar fighter jet, but it was it was starting to become.
A bit routine.
And despite as crazy as what I was about to go do that day, I woke up in the morning just like I was heading into the office, you know, just just and it's also you don't realize that any day could be life altering if things don't go right. And so, you know, I got ready just like anybody else does. I took a shower, got dressed, headed into work, drove in, showed up at the office the squadron in the ready room, and was ready to go fly, but just had no idea what was about to come.
Down the line.
So when you go in and you go and fly, you're you're going in. You know, you're going to be doing a dog fight training scenario. What you're feeling particularly nervous or excited that day or was it, like you said, was it just the case of, right, let's see what we're going to go, let's get out there, and let's let's get this this scenario done.
Yeah, I was, you know, I was feeling good that day, Like I felt like I was doing well in my squadron. I was still a fairly new pilot in the squadron, but I was well respected. I was I was working and hard, that same mentality that I had in flight school where I would just I would work my butt off. You know, I might not be the smartest dude, but I'm going to outwork everybody if I can. And so
I showed up prepared for my flight. We brief everything extremely meticulously, everything from the admin of just getting to and from the airspace we're going to utilize that day.
We're looking at all the different factors from the weather, the water temperature, the air temperatures, the cloud conditions, and we brief everything in great detail, and then we get into the tactical side of things and what are we going to do today, How are we going to fight these jets, What kind of setups are we going to do for the.
Dog fighting, and so you brief all of that ahead of time.
And that morning I showed up at the squadron and my buddy Fisty was at the duty desk, which all the pilots rotate through, just answering the phones and coordinating the flight schedule. And as a joke, he had put up on the whiteboard the airspace that we were going to utilize that day, which is normal, but then he put all these these little positions of GPS tagged sharks
that were out in the airspace. Is this shark tracker app on his phone to look up all these sharks positions and put him up there, and he said, hey, today would be a terrible day to eject. The water temperature is at thirty seven degrees fahrenheit, so near freezing water temperatures. The air temperature is below freezing. We've got wind and churned up ocean swell, and there's a great white shark named Mary Louis. The sixteen foot thirty five
hundred pound white shark was directly underneath. So we're laughing about this, and then an hour later I'm out over that airspace and that's and that's the moment that really my life took a drastic change.
Wow, take me back to the moment and you know of seconds before the moment that you realized that you were going to have to eject, that you you know that you were going to end up in these icy shark infested waters, and why did you have to eject?
Yeah, So, so we had done several rounds of fighting for the day. We did a little aired air fueling before we started the dog fighting, and then the flight lead and I broke off to our own airspace and did several rounds of this fighting. So you can imagine it like a round in martial arts, where you fight until there's a clear winner or loser, and then you set back up and you just kind of do that over and over again. And we had hit joker fuel, so we had just enough fuel left to get one
short fight out. So we ended up setting up quite a bit lower and quite a bit faster than typical for a one mile a beam set, which is what it was caused. So the aircraft were side by side about a mile apart from one another, and the flight lead called fights on. We pitched our jets in. As I came to that merge where our flight paths crossed, I was already about thirty degrees nose low and partially inverted.
So I opted to continue to roll my jet inverted and pull down in a split as maneuver to dive the aircraft down towards the ocean. And normally that aircraft can do it in about five thousand feet of vertical airspace.
But I didn't realize how fast my air speed had gotten because of the unusual setup of the fight, and so as I hit about bull's eye nose low and this jet, all of a sudden, a system on the aircraft kicked in that thought that there were bombs on the wings that weren't actually there, and it limited the
G force that I could pull. So I went from the seven and a half G pull where I can feel just my head and helmet ground would weigh about twenty pounds with the Gehemick's helmet, which is sort of this big bulky superspace helmet that we wear where all of our weapons displays and everything can go with you wherever you look. So say that my head and my helmet weigh about twenty pounds on the ground. Now at nearly eight g's that's like having one hundred and fifty
pounds just on my head. You can feel that you're looking around because you got to keep sight of the other guy.
And then all of a sudden that just eased.
Is I'm looking up trying to spot my flight lead so I can try to shoot him.
I just feel the jets settle. So it was like.
Going around a sharp corner and a sports car and then having the steering wheel kicked back halfway. Only instead of skidding off the road, I'm stuck in a dive at the ocean. And this all just happens in a few seconds. Before I know it, my radar altimeters go off going altitude altitude, meaning I just broke through the five thousand foot hard deck that we put there for
training purposes as the ground when we're training. So now in the at least in this training environment, I'm dead because I just went through the ground.
I have a hard deck in a ceiling, don't you? Is that correct?
Sometimes you'll have a ceiling, but oftentimes where we were training that day, we didn't have a restriction on the ceiling.
So you're going through this hard deck that you're not meant to penetrate.
Yeah, so I went through the hard deck, which my heart sank. At this point, the aircraft is not responding to my control inputs. I'm now in an out of control aircraft. The ocean is rushing up at me. In my display and my helmet and the hud. There's an arrow and it's saying pull up, pull up, and I'm thinking I'm pulling up. The stick is in my lap and the jet is not turning as it's being commanded, and the ocean just rushed up at me and filled
the canopy. And if you get that feeling where your heart just sinks, like something terrible is about to happen, and that's the emotion that just kind of froze. And from there my body just took over. Instinctually. I assumed the ejection position. I grabbed that cable between my legs and pulled and freaking. Within a half second, that rocket motor ignited under the seat, blasting me. Initially, you get a fifty g instantaneous blast, which you can imagine your
body weighing fifty times its normal weight. That compresses your spine, knocks the wind out of your lungs, that ease to a twelve to fourteen g sustained rocket boost. A normal ejection is very violent, even if you're straight in level flight below one hundred and eighty knots, which is ideal. I was well outside of that envelope. I was two seconds from impact, going six hundred and ninety five miles
per hour, so basically at the speed of sound. And what messed me up so bad was impacting the sound barrier with my body. And it turns out the human body is not terribly aerodynamic at the speed of sound, and it just wrecked me. I mean, rip my helmet off my head traumatic brain injury, bashed my face up like I look like I got my ass kicked and
fit fifteen rounds with Mike Tyson. Broke my c one in my neck, my left shoulder, the scapulus shattered both my arms just rag doll, shattering my humorous and my upper arms. My right humorous tore through my right bracul artery, causing rapid internal bleeding. My left forearm shattered the radius inalna and severed the median nerve that controls my left hand. I had a brachial plexus injury from my spinal compression. That that's the nerve group that controls a lot of
the upper body. The gear on my vest was all ripping off, My radio, my signaling equipment, all of it gone. My dry suit that I was wearing to protect me from that icy cold ocean water below ripped apart and shredded open. My boots were flailing around so violently they became like wrecking balls, smashing open my lower legs. So I had two open tip bib fractures, chunks of my bone falling out of my dry suit, dripping and fallen into the water to chum it up for mary Lee
down below. And this all just happens in a split second.
You know.
By the time the ejection sequence had completed, I was a second and a half from impacting the ocean. In that time, the jet impacted the ocean and just vaporized into nothing. And miraculously that parachute deployed that slowed me enough so I didn't die impact with the water, but very quickly that parachute that had just saved my life then sunk underneath that churning ocean swell and started to
pull me under. The dry suit that was supposed to protect me from this icy, cold like needle light freaking water going in my face and neck and filling up the dry suit turned into this big old sea anchor. And so now with broken arms and legs, I was just at the mercy of that parachute. The sea words, which are the explosive devices that detect salt water and
automatically disconnect the parachute from you. Both of those devices failed, so I remained trapped to the parachute, which then, if for anybody who's ever been held underwater when you need a breath of air, it was just that over and over and over, and I was getting held under the point where I needed a breath of air and I couldn't get it. And at a certain point your lungs just start to spasm and you start to slurp in that salt.
Water, and.
I don't know how I eventually would get pulled back to the surface. Luckily, my LPU, the life preserver unit around my neck, had inflated, and that created enough buoyancy that on occasion I would rise to the surface, cough up some water, get a quick breath of air, or yell for help, and then pulled back underneath in the meantime, my flight lead spotted my parachute opening and knew that there was an emergency. He rapidly coordinated the Onseen commander.
He got a hold of air traffic control, and he spotted a fishing vessel about a mile from my position, and he was able to get down really low and really fast when they wouldn't answer on the radio, and blast it over their bow and thump them so like a show of force over these fishermen that are out there just chilling, and he got their attention. He was able to get them over to my GPS position that he had dropped, and while when they got there, they tried to rope out to me to get me to
pull in, and I wasn't able to grab it. It just ended up getting tangled in the parachord. But at least that fishing vessel provided a rough location for where I was at because I was in the drifting ocean with those currents. Otherwise I would have drifted out and wouldn't be here to tell you this story. Eventually, a couple Navy H sixty Seahawk helicopters arrived on scene, and on that forty ish minute flight, I was in and out of consciousness.
I was coding.
They were doing everything they could to resuscitate me and keep me alive, and they said I would go from like stillness of death to just shouting and screaming. And I don't have memory of it because I was in such bad shock, in such a bad brain injury. But you know, it was a wild ride for that crew, and they eventually got me to the hospital. They rushed
me in. They took my core body temperature. I was at eighty seven degrees fahrenheit, so I should have been dead from the hypothermia, but the hypothermia had actually constricted the blood flow and preserved my brain function well enough to keep me alive. They had to do multiple blood transfusions for all the blood loss. They had to treat me for rabdough because my kidneys were so overwhelmed with
all this tissue breakdown. And once I was semi stable and the water was pumped out of my lungs, they induced a coma and then rushed me into surgery. I spent the next week undergoing over a dozen different trauma surgeries as they reconstructed my skeleton from titanium rod steel plates, screws. They sutured me back up from all the fasciotomies that they performed to salvage my limbs from amputation. I was
covered in hundreds of staples and sutures. I had a brachial artery bypass where they took a vein from inside my arm and did it like a Frankenstein job, so that I could get blood to my hands. Anyways, it was a miracle that I was still alive, but I was still in a comatose state. And you know, all the members of my squadron, my family are at the ICU waiting room waiting to hear is he even going to live? And someone in the squadron piped up and said, ah, he's a scrap motherfucker.
He'll be all right, Megan.
One question for you, mate, how are you still alive?
It was it was seriously miracle after miracle. All these little twists and turns throughout it were unbelievable. I really think there was some kind of divine intervention that I was still meant to be here for something, you know, because I shouldn't have lived, and and you know, I I'm just lucky to be here.
So that stage that you eject you your training just kicks in, right, it's not okay, what's that thought process? Is it I'm gonna die here or is it just gonna or you'd write, I need to kick into to my my training and I need to eject asap.
Yeah. It was.
It was as that oh shit feeling hit me and the ocean was rushing up. It was just instinctual and that training kicked in, like we had practiced getting into that position and all the time, and like all that just kicked in. And from there, I don't from the moment that I felt that oh shit feeling and I looked down and saw the ocean from there, I have no linear memory, like my mind just what we got it from here, buddy, hold on for the ride, and
and just my survival instincts and training kicked in. And I have little flashbacks from being in the ocean, but most of what I'm telling you has been recreated through the investigation process, the retrieval of the black box. So I was really in and out of consciousness in the water.
Any memory whatsoever? Do you have any flashbacks? Is there any sort of memory sort of reconstruction that you're doing or was it just one blur? Until you find yourself in the hospital.
Yeah, So for years I dealt with night tears where I would go back into the water and I would be I'd be feeling the emotions, I would be feeling the darkness, I'd be feeling the tear, you know, the.
Combination of one.
I'm being drowned alive, I can't breathe, I'm being pulled underneath the water, and I can't swim, and there's a shark that's going to freaking finish me off.
You know.
So I got those those moments of just the emotional tear of being in the water. But other than those little clips, I don't have really anything from from the time I reached to pull that injection handle until about two weeks later and the lights finally started to come back on.
Wow, and what does the you mentioned all your injuries. What was your thought process? You know, what was going through your head when you obviously realized that you could never you know, fly again and never go back to doing something that you trained so hard for that you spent your whole life thriving towards.
Yeah, you know, I woke up and it was like waking up from a dream, except for some reason my bedroom wasn't my bedroom. And there were all these people there smiling and talking to me, and I was hooked up to all these machines, and I was covered in staples and sutures in wound back, and my arms were basically my arms and legs were all vacuums. And one of my first thoughts was they had tied me down the bed, like why am I tied onto the bed? Why is this blanket holding me down? But it was
because I was paralyzed. I couldn't move. And eventually the medical staff came in and they kind of explained the scenario and said, you've been in an ejection. You're lucky to be alive, but you're likely never going to walk again, You're never going to be able to use your arms or hands again, and your military flying career is over. And in that moment, there was a spark in me.
It was, I think, the same spark that got me to be a fighter pilot in the first place, which was go ahead and tell me I can't do something. I'm going to fucking prove you wrong. And I spent I spent the next two years undergoing all sorts of intense rehabilitation. I spent three months in the polytrauma center just doing speech therapy, vision therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, kinesio therapy, you name it. I was doing it, working
my ass off. It may have meant I just I just wiggled something that day, but every day I was doing everything I could, and I had this opportunity in there, in that darkness. I could have just bit off on all the darkness, all the dread, all the statistics, all the hey, you're not going to get better. But instead I had this little spark of fire in me still,
and that's what I started to feed. What if I do get better, what's it going to be like when I come back into this hospital in my flight suit with my wings on my chest upright and say, hey, I'm back flying jets. And so that's what I started to cultivate instead of biting off on all the dark shit, which there were some hard days, no doubt, But what I really started to feed and work consistently towards with discipline, was what do I need to do today to get better,
even if it's just a tiny bit better. And every day wasn't always progress either, but it was I was always working at that light, working towards that little spark of hope, and little by little, you know, I eventually got out of the polytrauma center. I started to be able to get around on a walker. I started to be able to wipe my own ass again, brush my own teeth, all these things I said I couldn't do.
And after two years of more surge, undergoing, you know, overcoming prescription drug addiction to all the pain meds they had me on, I was able to gain a stack of medical waivers. I had to go through a Field Naval Aviator Evaluation board, so an investigation into the crash, which ruled in my favor and gave me the option if I could get my body physically back, I could go back and fly. And after two years of all of that, I was able to max out the Navy's
physical fitness test again. I was literally running circles around the people at the command that I was at while I was recovering. And I returned to the cockpit of that F eighteen after all of that.
You got so you've flown since?
Yeah, I went back to active duty as a Navy F eighteen.
You are shitting me now, and to tell you the truth this is it gets even crazier from here, just so you know, like we're just getting into the good stuff now.
So two years you've got that spark inside, and I understand that spark where someone says you can't do something, or someone doubts you, or someone you know, you're just like, right, listen, So you actually believe in your mind from the moment they tell you you're never going to fly again, you believe in your mind that you're going to get back in the fight in in an F eighteen vice jet.
Yeah. Yeah, it was the same.
It was the same little belief that I had that imagined that I could be an F eighteen pilot, you know all the people, Oh who could be an F eighteen pilot?
You know.
And in that same I didn't you know, I didn't know what I was doing at the time, but it was the same process. It was, what's the goal? Can I do it? I'm going to visualize doing it. How do I get there? I start now with consistent work and discipline, and I work towards it little by little. And that was the same thought mindset that I went into this accident. Was Okay, they're telling me, this is impossible. That's what they said about becoming an F eighteen pilot.
I'm going to apply the same mindset to this. So how do I do it? What's the mindset? And I think the mind is so powerful, you know, I don't think that we even can comprehend the power that it has. When you are positively affirming what you can do and then you work at it with consistent action, I think we can really accomplish damn near or anything.
And I love what you said about, you know, being consistently disciplined, because ultimately that's the key. How did you remain and what is discipline? In your eyes?
Discipline is just holding yourself accountable, you know. Discipline is those days you wake up and you hurt and you don't want to try, but you do it anyways. That's the discipline. It's nobody else is telling you. Nobody else may even know that you're you got this going on, But it's holding yourself accountable and doing that and.
Almost doing the things that you know you should be doing but you don't want to do. Right, it's you mentioned it. It's the small percentages, the zero point zero one percentages. You know, it's tiny tiny progress. People don't realize. People think being disciplined, you're going to go from zero to one hundred. It doesn't it. It's the small steps. Little steps take me back to the home. And were people absolutely shocked that you got back into a jet?
Yeah, I mean the duty station I was at the job I was doing. The commodore of the strike Fighter Wing was my boss at that point, and he saw me at command pt out there just crushing it, and he was just in disbelief. You can see his mouth is just like, huh, how is this guy back doing this? And and but because of that, they saw where I had come. And you know, I was doing well at my ground job too. I was you know, doing some taking on a lot of responsibility, and I was doing
the same stuff at work. I was working hard at what I was doing and doing a good job at it. And they saw I was physically and mentally back, and so I was blessed with the opportunity to return to the cockpit. One day, he walks into the office. I'm filling out emails. I've been sitting at the stupid desk for you know, a year or whatever while I was doing the recovery and he comes in, he says, again, what are you doing. It's like, oh, I'm just working
on this. He's like, you want to go back and fly. He's like yeah, thinking like, oh, maybe I'm going to start in a few weeks or a month. He's like, no, you start right now. And so I basically just headed out that day and my mind's just crazy, like holy shit, this has really happened. It was overwhelming, a combination of excitement and then and then the nerves hitting me of like, oh, I actually got to do this now, you know, the game's back on, the pressure's back on.
Take me back to you getting in there, because obviously there must have been a wave of emotions, nervousness, anxiety. Was there a moment and I can I'm probably getting a bit too Drew. Was there a moment where you're just flying along and it's surreal, you can't believe you're here.
Yeah, you know.
On my first solo back, I definitely had that surreal feeling, and I went out into the airspace and I decided I need to roll this thing inverted and I need to pull it at the ocean and do that maneuver because I want to see, you know, I'm I got back on the horse, but I need to see am I going to freak out if I do the same thing? And so I rolled that thing inverted and pulled down at the ocean and it was just pure joy and excitement.
You know, the ocean's rushing up at me. I pulled out the bottom as the jet should have done in the first place, and I was just like, yes, I'm back.
So you went and done the exact same maneuver that you were that was supposed to happen on the day of the fifteenth of jam and you went and executed that and came out of it.
Yeah, but at a slower air speed so that the jet didn't freak out, and it didn't have a code on it that was telling it not to turn, so it Yeah, it was. It was basically doing the same thing more or less.
And what did what did that feel like? What did that flight feel like?
Just just overwhelming joy, you know.
And and then I got back to flying and I was made it through the flight training pipeline. I graduated as the top Stick. I graduated with the River Rat a war meeting. I was a lot of fun to hang out with outside the cockpit, and I went back to a fleet squadron and I was back at it. And this is kind of where the happy ending Disney version of my story would be, but this is really where the real mindset and difficulties started to begin. As my career progressed. I was on a flight on a
detachment down at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. We were doing a live fire missile exercise. So I went out and I got to fire a live a nine mic sidewinder missile, a heat seeking missile at a drone, and then broke off and got to do some dog fighting with an F twenty two Raptor. So just like the world's most premiere freaking dogfighting aircraft, just this thing that I had seen at air shows as a kid and drooled over, and I got to be up there
wrapping it up with this guy. And so I came back from that flight and I remembered fighting the Raptor and all of that, but I couldn't remember what was going on in the missile shoot. And while I was watching the debrief watching my tapes, I was getting confused by the symbology and like stuff that I normally know was really hard to understand, and I just thought, you know, maybe I'm just tired, and I tried to sleep it
off that night. The next day I felt even worse, and when I got back to my hotel room on that second day, I was just I was in a panic for some reason. I was having panic attacks, which I had never had. I sat down on the edge of the bed in the hotel room, and it felt like the whole room tumbled around me.
I was experiencing vertigo.
I was having a really hard concentrating and it was confused, and I sat down on the bed to try to set my phone alarmed because I had to get up in the morning and fly and I couldn't do the math, and I couldn't operate a cell phone, so I realized something was wrong. There had been a number of incidents in the F eighteen community where the pressurization systems had been malfunctioning, causing rapid decompression to the cockpit. And as
a you know, divers would know decompression sickness. If you come up from depth too quickly, the nitrogen can come out of solution in your blood and it can form bubbles. Yeah, you get those in your joints, get the bends. It's painful, but you get those bubbles in your brain, it can block the blood flow and it can give you like stroke like symptoms or aneurysm or even kill you, you know, when you're not getting proper blood circulation to the brain.
And so it was suspected because there had been a number of these in the F eighteen community, to the point that they had started to put hyperbarret treatment facilities on the aircraft carriers to treat guys coming back from flights with this condition. They rushed me to a dive base that was nearby at Mayport and treated me for decompression sickness overnight in the hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
The next day I was still a bit out of it, but a little bit better.
And when I got back from that detachment, I kind of reluctantly went into the medical kind of weighing my options at this point, which is in a high speed job in the military, as you know, as soon as you start to say there's something not right, like there goes your medical clearance, there goes maybe your security clearance.
So it's very taboo.
But I knew like whatever was going on there's no way I could safely operate in aircraft, and so, you know, kind of knowing the way of the situation, I went in to see the flight surgeon and pretty quickly I got a delayed onset PTSD diagnoses and they all kind of just bid off on that PTSD thing, and it all just became about my emotional state and let's sit down and talk about this state. And it was not helpful.
It was frustrating because hindsight, what was going on is the hardware of my brain had been messed with pretty hardcore. I had physical damage to my brain from not only the ejection, but now a decompression event that exacerbated, adding insult to injury, and it was just screwing with my head. But the way they made me feel was this was all just an emotional thing that I needed to get over. And I was thinking, I can compartmentalize anything. I've been
compartmentalizing my whole career. I can put that in a bottle and move on. But this wasn't working because the hardware was damaged. But instead of fixing the hardware, what they did is they started to give me these pills. They started SSRIs, they started an antipsychotic metay cation called quatiopine for sleep. It was supposed to help with severe insomnia, and the thought was, if we can just get you some sleep, you'll get better, which I think there was
merit to that. But when you give somebody a sleeping pill they're not getting RESTful sleep, it may knock me out into this unconscious state. So as things progressed, I just got worse and worse.
I went in.
Not sleep rest and and I started to go into hypervigilance and paranoia, into full blown psychoses. I thought, I thought the government was hunting me. I thought they were trying to poison me and my family, and it just got worse and worse. I was eventually medically retired, and that treatment continued at the VA once I got out and my family moved back to Michigan, and I was
just getting worse and worse. And within a couple of days of having my dosage at quatyopine increased from three hundred milligrams a night to four hundred and fifty milligrams a night, my wife came home from a job interview, and that's like a heroic dose of this shit, and you know, she came home and she heard me rustling around, and when she came into the room, I was completely naked. I had shaved off all my hair and chunks. I had shaved off my eyebrows for some reason. My facial
hair was all shaved off. The only thing I had on was I had a black plastic garbage bag tied around my neck like a cape, because I thought I was like Batman or Superman and I was going to go out into the northern Michigan snowy weather and fight crime like that.
So she loaded us up.
She's a trauma nurse, so she had dealt with psychotic patients before in the er, but now it's her husband, which was a whole different thing to deal with. But she loaded us up, took me to the emergency room, and I spent a couple nights in an out of body experience in the psychoses. And when I came to I had been transferred to a VA in patient psych facility. And as I became lucid and more aware in that facility, you know, what I saw was truly abysmal treatment of
veterans in that facility. When you're on one to one care, every fifteen minutes. They would come into the room, shine a fl slash light in your face to wake you up and make sure you're being safe. It's hard to sleep in this place to begin with. There's all these other guys having psychotic events. There's yelling and screaming all night. There's people walking in and out of your room. Everything's hard tile floors and concrete wall, so everything just echoes
through the place. You're confined into a very small facility. We were lucky if we got to go outside into a concrete yard surrounded by metal fences and brick buildings, maybe once a week if we were lucky. So we were getting no exercise, no sunlight, and the only again, the only answer there was more pills and more pills, And.
To me, it was the detox yet, to detox yourself off these pills in order to become saying again, right, it was the pills that.
Was yeah, yeah, you know. I eventually got out of that facility.
I spent forty days living in that nightmare of a place, but with the advocacy of my family, they were able to get me out. And then I sought a different route to treatment, and I stumbled across psychedelic assistant therapy, and I still to cross this whole world of modalities for treating brain injury and mental health issues that aren't available at the VA, they aren't available through mainstream insurance. And that's what really worked for me and it gave
me my life back. And you know, through the use of psychedelic a system therapy traumatic brain injury clinics where they actually went in and addressed the physiology that was off, doing a lab work to actually see where the physiology and my body was off, and then addressing that with nutraceutical supplementation, hyperbaric oxygen therapy. There's this whole world of
healthcare that can actually heal the brain. And what's amazing about the brain is I remember growing up and they always say, you know, you damage your brain or a brain cell and it's gone, you're never going to get
it back. Well, that's simply not true. The brain is constructed of cells, just like the body is, and when you give it the right conditions, which are sleep, good food, clean, hydration, exercise, sunlight, you know all that stuff, the body heals, the cells heal and regenerate, and it's amazing seeing what the human brain can heal from. Even the level of damage that I had going on has been mitigated through through this, you know, several years of this kind of treatment.
But pretty much everything that.
I've had that works is not available at the VA, and it's not available through mainsure, through mainstream medical system. You know, they're actually actively trying to fight this stuff because it's it's competition with their business model. You know, they don't want something that can fix you. They want to be able to give you a pill the rest of your life and make a profit off of that.
What you've just explained is something that I'm working on for VETS as well, which is which is super interesting that you just hit on that. But let's finish off on the Phoenix revival. Talk to me a bit about about this, about your memoir and where we can get it, and and why you voted.
Yeah, so, you know, I really felt inspired to share my story after having gone through that seeing so many guys struggling in that system. So, and this is a widespread problem throughout the world right now. I think I think there's a lot of healthcare systems that are pretty
messed up, especially with the mental health treatment. And I remember being in this place of darkness and all of that, despite my hard charge and attitude to get me through the physical recovery of the ejection and got me into the world of the fighter pilot being.
An faighteaen pilot to begin with.
Even with all that, I got into a place that was so dark and lonely and broken. I was ready to end it and felt so alone, and so I wanted to be the light for other people that are in that same darkness, the same light that I wish I had. And so that's what inspired me to write write this book, Phoenix Revival, The Aftermath of Naval Aviation's
fastest survived ejection. It goes in much more detail about some of the things we talked about today that I hope will help inspire people and also give them the proper tools so that they can get themselves out of whatever they're going through, some practical guidance, some resources that can really make a difference in people's lives. So that's why I wrote it. But please check out a copy. I promise you you're going to have a hard time putting it down.
Do you know what, mate, you are the epitome of physical robustness, psychological resilience and emotional intelligence. Wrap that all into one. You have Keegan Gil Keegan, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for coming on board. Make sure you pick up a copy of Phoenix Revival to hear more because we've just scraped the surface here, Keegan, Thank you so much.
Mate, Thank you so much for having me on.
It's a pleasure to hear more about Keegan's life story. Pick up a copy of his memoir Phoenix Revival. Thanks for joining me on this episode of head Game. If you enjoyed it, please leave me a review. I'm at Middleton. See you in the next episode.