Give our love to Sandra with John Wayne Troxell

back from the military, recruit training and everything. And when they left, they were just like me, a guy that didn't have purpose and direction and was going through life doing the things that teenagers do, skirting the edge of the law. And when they came back, though they were sinewy muscular, their chest was out, their shoulders were back, their voice was booming. They were confident, and they didn't

just walk anymore. They kind of saunters that air of confidence that they had, And I thought to myself, I don't know what they're feeding them in the military, but I want some of that.

came back and were transformed. But seeing guys like him and other guys that had joined the Marine Corps, seeing them come back, that was kind of what influenced me to say, I want to do this.

like one of those round pegs. I just fit right into the Army. And as I got through my recruit training, my basic training at Advanced Individual training, and I went to my first duty station, I thought, this is what I'm going to do for my four year tour, and I'm going to get out. And less than a month after I got there, I met a girl named Sandra Jimenez. On the first of February nineteen eighty three. I'm going to he won in a club with a fake ID, and all of a sudden, I asked this girl to

dance and she turned me down. The other Joe that I was with a friend of mine, who was a brand new private, I asked her like three times and she turned me down. So he went and asked her, and so she danced with him, and I was like, no, she you know. So now I mean, I'm pounding beers and whiskeys and everything, and I'm watching her dance with my buddy. And it was on an elevated dance floor, and all of a sudden, he backed up doing his

move and he fell off the dance floor. So me, being the true battle buddy that I am, I raced over there, jumped on the stage, took his place, and after that, you know, the rest was history. We started dating my wife and I. We got married six months after I met her. She was pregnant soon after with our first child, and I realized in a hurry that this is what I need to do to take care

of my family. It's not individual responsibility. I have a wife, and I have a son on the way, and so I said, I'm going to put my effort into being the best soldier I can be. And little did I know that from then on my career would span almost thirty eight years. And I never thought that I would reach the pinnacle of the enlisted ranks in the Department

of Defense. But I just kept pushing forward, and my focus was the better soldier I am, the better leader I am, the better off the men and women in my span of control are going to be, but more importantly, the better I'm going to be able to take care of my family. So that was kind of how I got started and how I pursued my career was always striving to be better the next day than I was that day. And so if I wanted to be an

airborne ranger, I went out and did it. I wanted to be a jump master, I went out and did it. I wanted to be a pathfinder, all these things. Wanted to get a college degree. I went and did it. All the things that I thought would make me a better person, better husband, a better father, but more importantly, a better soldier and a better leader. That's what I was focused on.

the East Germans, but it was never a reality. It was like a star that you could see, but you knew you were never going to touch And I got to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and my wife and I were driving on the base just to check things out because we'd never been there before, and we saw this five ton truck with a bunch of grimy paratroopers with camouflage on their face sitting in the back of it. Obviously they had just come from a drop zone conducting

a parachute jump. And Sandra even looked at these guys and said, Wow, these guys are serious. And she looks at me, Are you sure that you want to do this? And I said, absolutely, you know. But then I got into the unit and I realized all we talked about was being prepared to go to war. That's all we talked about, even though we were a peacetime military. But

we're a rapid deployment force. When we go on Division Ready Force one, you got to be ready within an hour to come in alert marshall, deploy and go to combat in less than eighteen hours from notification. And so even then, being a part of a peacetime military, it refocused me and it caused me to start being the best that I could be because of the level of physical fitness that we required there, and then the level of additional skills that required, like being a jump master.

And I still even in nineteen eighty eight, the Sandinista guerrillas from El Salvador invaded Honduras and we got alerted. I was in jump master school at the time, but I didn't go. But we did a jump into Honduras to show support for the Honduran forces. That was still not a combat deployment. It was Operation Golden Pheasant. But that kind of set a light off on me that hey, this could happen anytime. But even still I wasn't completely

convinced that we would actually go to combat. Nineteen eighty nine, I'm on Division Ready one Force, but it's the start of half day holiday schedule. So I kissed my wife and my two sons goodbye, and I said, hey, han, i'll be back at noon and we'll go Christmas shopping for the boys. And so I kissed her goodbye, and I got in to the base. And as soon as I got on the base, it was open posts then, but there was an MP all of a sudden at the ends under the base now and they were checking

ID cards. They said, hey, what's going on. They said, oh, we're in hand security or whatever. So I got to my headquarters and they said, hey, glad you're here. We were just exercising the alert roster. We've been alerted. And even then me and my teammates thought, are they going to make us do an emergency deployment readiness exercise during half day schedule? What kind of bullshit is that We still weren't convinced that we were being alerted to go

to combat. Because if you in Panama at that time, Manuel Noriega, the dictator that was running Panama, had lost the election, but he did not concede. As a matter of fact, his thugs ended up beating up the guy that actually won, and there was a Navy lieutenant who was killed because of the unrest down there. There was a Marine Corps family and service member that were assaulted and everything. And now all of a sudden, Americans had Fort Chairman and elsewhere were at risk, and so we

got alerted. We were sent to the personnel holding area. We were trying to figure out what was going on, and there was a freezing rainstorm going on too, and we didn't have any heaters in the tents. We were in. So now not only are we clueless on what's going on, but we're pissed off because we're freezing our asses off and we still think this is some kind of exercise that we're going through and we're not getting our half

day schedule. So my platoons are Dave Freeman and I finally said, screw this, let's go find out what's going on. We walked into the brigade headquarters and as we walked in, we saw officers around this table laminating maps of Panama. And we looked each other and said, I guess we know what we're doing now, And all of a sudden we not real there's our answer. And then when we got back to our tent, we were issuing ammunition, live grenades, claim wars, all of that stuff, and all of a

sudden we knew this was real. We were packing all of our ammunition in our combat gear, and the chaplain walks into the tent. Hey, look, no pressure, but if anybody wants to say a prayer, come on over here.

and we're on our way to combat, you know. And at one am we started parachuting in to Rio's airport. The Rangers were jumping on the military airfield, Document Airfield.

We were jumping on the military airport. And little did I know that my wife found out I wasn't coming home by watching the news that night and seeing that American forces were conducting a combat parachute assault into Panama to toppol Noriega and to reinstate or in state the rightful government and to protect American lives and innocent Panamanians.

And that's how my combat started. And for the next week we secured all of our assault objectives, we expanded our lodgment area out, and we started taking down targets. But an hour into the first patrol I went in, we lost our first American specialist in Alexandro Manrique Lozano

from second Italian five or fourth Parisheet Infantry Regiment. I'm thinking to myself at that time, twenty four hours before this, this young man was thinking about going home with his family or spending time with his family over the holidays. Twenty four hours later he gave his life in defense

of our country. And that told me that we've got to dig in, We've got to get through this, and we can't allow you know that we've lost an American to kind of drag us down, and so we've re We continued to focus and get after the enemy and everything, and by the Christmas Eve, we had lost four paratroopers, two on an assault on what I call Tinaheatus Hill, which was this huge hill that we were taking down the lt Grays, which were an elite force of Panamanians.

But at about Christmas Eve, the fighting started dying down and I found myself pulling security around the Papal Nuncia, the religious chapel that was in the heart of the town where Noriega had holed up in trying to get

religious protection from being captured by us. And so as I pulled perimeter security out there with my team on our shared and armored reconnaissance vehicle, there was a Marriott hotel across the street, and so I told my guys, I said, hey, I'm going to go check it out and see if there's any payphones in there, and we'll see if we can contact our families. So I grabbed one of my guys and we went over there, and

sure as shit, there were some phones in there. So I picked up the phone and called collect to Sandra, and that was the first conversation I had with her since I had left, and it was a very emotional conversation. I mean, the hair is rising up on my arms now. It was the first time one I've had my baptism by fire ending up in two point ambushes and stuff like that. I've seen Americans killed, We've killed enemy fighters. But now I'm having a conversation with my wife and

our children. And within that three minute call there was a bit of solace in peace. But then after that call, I had to go right back out into the combat zone. But that there, Ashley, was the turning point that told me that living this military life and this warrior ethos life, regardless of what service you're into, what you do, that on any given day, your life could change in a heartbeat, and all of a sudden you could find yourself against an armed enemy and combat as brutal and unforgiving as

it is. Unfortunately, good men and women perish in battle, and we have to be best prepared to deal with that brutality and unforgiveness in combat. And I told myself as a leader, I'm going to make sure the men and women in my charge are going to be always ready, regardless of how long I stay in the military. That was the point that changed me to now being always wired for combat, even though we were still a peacetime military. But then seven months later, Saddam Hussein invades Iraq and

I find myself back in a combat zone. But this time, I think mentally and emotionally, myself and all of the paratroopers I were with in my company, we were prepared for it because we had already experienced combat. That's what changed me into being somebody that was always going to be folkscus on being best prepared for the conditions we could face on the worst day of our life in combat.

know what I'm gonna get back. You didn't have any of that. To not be able to have that effective communication with your loved ones before you go employ what you've trained day in and day out to do. That brings in a whole different element that I've never really thought about.

your husbands were in combat. They parachuted into combat on the evening of the twentieth of December, and they will stay there and continue to fight until you know, Noriega capitulates and Panamanian forces surrender. And in one of the spouses even asked, so there's potential that they could get killed.

I mean it was an innocent enough question, but as a peacetime military with peacetime families, you still hadn't put it together that, as you just described, Jake, the level of brutality, the violence of action equates to people get killed. And so this in it is enough question, and the commander, the redetachment commander, said yes, some may not come back, and I was so happy to hear from other spouses on how my wife was deemed as one of the strong ones. Now, Sandra grew up as a first generation

Mexican American. Her dad was from Chihuahua, Mexico, her mom was from southern Texas. They had nineteen kids, wow, nineteen kids in twenty three years. She grew up poor, but she had to be resilient through her childhood and everything and as she grew up. So I think this kind of upbringing prepared her. And she used to say this all the time, and through my multiple combat tours, I've got three sons I have to worry about, and I can't sit around and talk gloom and doom or you know,

feel sorry for myself. I've got to be here for my kids. And so that's nobody prepared her for that other than her upbringing. But that was the focus she had, and in it she knew I was in combat. She said, I can't control what's going to happen with my husband, but I can control what's going on with my kids. I can keep them focused, I can keep them energized with school. And then when they had these meetings and we started talking about or the family started talking with

the rear detachment about the realities of combat. I would say she was stoic to it because of her upbringing, and it was I was so proud that when I got back when people would come and compliment me on my wife and how strong she was, and I said, that's my Sandra. That's as I call her, my little windmill. She has just always been that way through our entire thirty nine year marriage.

spouse becomes synonymous with you. And so anytime somebody would reach out to say hello to me, somebody I served with in the eighties the nineties, two thousands senior officials in the Defense Department or the administration or in Congress. Every time they would say Hey, how's it going, or how's it going, John, they would always say, give our love to Sandra. And so I'm going to talk about the importance of a military spouse to the success of

someone that lives in this warrior class. And if Jake, you kind of talked about this a little earlier, that if you don't have that outlet when you leave you know, whether you're training or whether you're in cock, if you don't have that outlet when you come back, known as family and especially a significant other, your wife or your husband or whatever, I mean, it's tough to deal with that.

And I would have never without Sandra's support, without her direction, without her advice, I would have never reached the levels of service that I reached. I had to have that person, and she's always been that person. Now, don't get me wrong. Our marriage hasn't always been beer and skittles, Okay, I mean she's had to written really yeah, I mean she's had to rip my ass sometimes, but it was because I needed it. And then I would even tell you this.

She was the one that gave me an ultimatum about a year before I was retiring that said, I need you need to go talk to somebody about all this anger you have, or I'm going to have to reconsider the direction we're going. As a married couple, think of this. We had been married well over thirty five years. She was telling me there was something wrong with me. She was telling me there was something wrong with me. When I came back from just causing desert storm, I just

wasn't listening. And I thought to myself. In in the eighties and nineties, PTSD and traumatic brain injury weren't even things that were talked about. But when she told me that, I went to see a therapist just to appease her. But when I got in, when I got in there though, it felt like my therapist at the time her name was Gina, that she was ripping my skull open and reading my brain. She knew exactly what was going on with me and everything, and so she diagnosed me with PTSD.

And think of this now, the stigmas associated with mental health and Jake, you'll appreciate that my two bosses at the time I was diagnosed to PTSD, the chairman was fighting Joe Dunford Marine and the second trom.

up the mountains of the Hindu Christian Afghanistan. The longest walk I ever had was leaving that clinic and going to this Chairman's office and the Secretary of Defense's office and telling them I was in therapy for PTSD. And you know what Mattis said to me. He said, Okay, good, what are you going back to Yemen to tell me what's going on with al Kaeda in the Arabian Peninsula? And then Dunford was kind of like, okay, good, pack your shit. We're going to go to Afghanistan and Iraq

to visit the troops. It was a non issue to them. I had given myself this stigma, but to them it was a non issue. They were like, Okay, good, that's good for you. It's going to make you a better leader.

eat a piece of humble pie. You have to inhale the factory.

just don't flush that stuff under the table. I had a conversation with a staffer in Washington, DC on one of the trips. I was there right after Afghanistan, the abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan, and I was talking to this person about how I was very critical of the strategy that we used, okay, and the undue stress and risk we put on the men and women that had to deal with getting all the US citizens and SIV people

and clearing out of Cowbo Airport. And I said, anybody that knows anything about Afghanistan, you can't say in two weeks we are going to move the troops out first, and then we're going to try and get all the non combatants out and everything, and then try to get the equipment out. We kind of did that ass backwards when we should have took the equipment out.

because you have no skin in the game. Right, you have never faced a business end of an enemy rifle or seen a buddy on your left or right get vaporized by an improvised explosive device, and they went from some precious, beautiful human into a pile of flesh, hair

and camouflage material. I said, you have no skin in the game, So it's easy for you to say that, I said, but we who have served are never going to forget when we lose men and women, and we're certainly not going to just throw away twenty years of fighting in Afghanistan and say, okay, what's next. All right,

It doesn't work that way. And if we continue to say veterans got to get over this when they're dealing with the mental and emotional struggles of post combat, you know, in post traumatic stress, then we are adding to the problems. We are not trying to solve it.

the roof. I mean, you're getting burnout rates at the cyclic rate with therapists and psychologists because it's like the gates of open. It's a supply and demand issue now. And so the fact that you started it because of an ultimatum by Sandra, which I can't wait to meet her, because I'm just going to give her a big, huge giant hug because I get it. And I also understand how iron sharpens iron absolutely, and I also understand how

when we come home, it's not just us they're affected. Rather, you know, you're like me and you spend eighteen months in the hospital and you're trying to figure out what your new normal is, which is not normal at all. We affect our entire family. You have to have a Sandra. If you don't, it doesn't work. And I know that you had soldiers that it fell by the wayside because

they didn't have a Sandra. They may have had a spouse but they didn't have someone as strong and it's cemented and as rooted in their own conviction as you did.

That's just the way she was when I was a Striker Brigade Sir Major during the surge in Iraq in seven and eight, when we put five army brigades and two more Marine brigades in Iraq. You probably remember that the first eight days of combat, my commander and I had visited the morgue seven times to identify the remains of some of our guys that had been killed in action.

At the same time as we are knee deep in this combat back home, every time we have somebody killed and after you official notification is out I would call her and she would go to the memorial service. We lost fifty four over that fifteen month tour and had over five hundred severely wounded. She went to every memorial service, every funeral. She went to visit the wounded along with me in San Antonio and in Walter Reid. But here the eighth day, I've been in combat eight days now

and the worst nightmare of any military family's life. The two sedans that come driving down your neighborhood full of guys in their service Alpha uniform and one guy holding the Bible.

she heard the next door neighbor's wife start wailing. So my next door neighbor green Beret Sergeant Major Brad Connor had been killed in action. So now Sandra went from someone that thought it was I that got killed in action to now having to, you know, provide support and solace to our next door neighbor who just lost her husband, and to their children and everything. That's why a military

spouse that is engaged and understands is so important. But there are service members out there that don't want their spouses involved. And I will tell you I had one guy in my brigade during that tour, a great sergeant first class, a great non commission aficer. He was a platoon sergeant. He didn't want his wife to worry, so he told her, oh, I don't out of the wire. Ever, even though every day he was out in the wire

and he was fighting al Qaeda every day. In his last day as a platoon sergeant, when we were going to pull him out of that platoon and put him into a staff role where he wouldn't go out of the wire, his vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device and he was killed in action. So when the casually notification team let this person know, or let his spouse know, she said, how can this happen. My husband never went out alive. We have to explain the realities

of what we're doing. And if we think that we are protecting our loved ones by not sharing in the harsh realities of combat, stuff like this can happen. And think it's already bad enough that her husband was killed in action and that their father was killed in action, but it was just amplified when they were under the impression that he was just going to go over there for fifteen months, sit in a staff role and do nothing and come home in fifteen months. It even amplified

the pain and the anguish. And so I think in our military couples there has to be these frank conversations at all time.

Otherwise could have been mitigated just by being straight up. And that is why I think it is so important that That's why I always say there's a significant difference between communication and effective communication. Anyone can communicate effectively. Communicating is an art, but it takes honesty and vulnerability. You cannot have it without those two things. And so I'm grateful for Santa. I cannot wait to give her a hug man like because I get it. I get it,

and I know the true backbone. Yeah, and I know why we're the best in the world. And there is a lot of women and some men that have never put on the cloth of this nation, but are a significant reason why we're the best in the world and we're still a free country.

store can be like a deliberate combat operation. One way. Yes, it's one way in and one way out there.

our ears absolutely, because there's no prosthetic for that. Yeah, the one we got. We have to be able to talk to someone who's an unbiased third party that can just help us make our souls lighter. That's it. There's no judgment there. It's not a sign of weakness. It's exactly the opposite, which I think now, especially after having done it, you would completely agree with. It is a

sign of strength and courage. And it doesn't only make you a better soldier, leader, husband, father, it makes you a better human being that by default gives you the ability to help other people.

that people forget, is that we're not robots. Ye're not robots. And even those brothers serve shoulder or shoulder, it's like we're we can't forget the most important God given title first human.

did some things. So I knew that to get closure with what I was doing, I need to let my sons know that it was me that had the problem, it wasn't them. As I was growing up, and so I wrote a letter to all three of my sons. I was still the SEAAC at the time, and I included a book. The name of the book is Why Is Dad So Mad? A book about PTSD and military families. It is a children's book written by the author Seth Castle and illustrated by Carrisa Gonzalez Oathen Why is Dad

So Mad? Oh? Wow? And I sent that to them so that they could understand or hopefully understand that what I was going through wasn't because I was a bad father. It was because I had this thing known as post traumatic stress disorder that I hadn't come to terms with, and I certainly hadn't accepted it or anything like that.

That was probably one of the most emotional things I had to do, and one of the most gratifying was to write that letter to my sons and give them this book so that they could understand what PTSD is about.

as well, growing my potential and everything. What's culminated in me having the honor to serve as the senior enlisted guy in the Department of Defense, it has to be the United States Military. The person is obviously my wife, Sandra. I've had a lot of influential people in my life, but I could not have made this journey for almost thirty eight years were she not by my side through the good times, the bad times, in all the fun that we've had.

like straight up, That's how I feel about it. That's the truth of the matter.

myself for nothing. I have so much admiration for my wife, for people like Ashley and all the military spouses out there, because they are an integral part of our national security, no.

going some karaoke and some dancing in there. That's kind of I've never forgotten that it's okay and it's not a sin to have fun. Absolutely, and so I am all about turning myself into a jackass by getting on a microphone and belting out some blank.

a goal and they've failed to reach that goal. I hurt as much as they have because for some odd reason, I feel like I had something to do with that. So what feeds me is helping others attain their goals.