Peak Points | Travis Howze - The Saddest Moments with a Firefighter

We’re revisiting Episode #06 with former firefighter Travis Howze in this recap, focusing on his experience responding to the Charleston Sofa Super Store fire, a tragic event that claimed the lives of nine firefighters. This moment stands as a testament to the courage and sacrifice of those who risk everything to protect others. Shawn Ryan Links: Spotify - Full Episode Apple Podcasts - Full Episode Travis Howze Links: Website - https://www.travishowze.com Book - https://amzn.to/3mpFPdC Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/travishowze Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 0:59Shawn Ryan?

  One of the most tragic events in American firefighter history.

• 1:03Speaker 03

  I'd heard that my friend Louis was missing.

• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  This is the straw that broke the camel's back and kind of sent you into the downward spiral of PTSD.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  I looked down and I realized my hands were on the shoulders of one of our guys. His head should be right here, but there was no head.

• 1:20Shawn Ryan?

  What eventually ended your career in the fire service?

• 1:23Speaker 03

  We certainly weren't expecting any of that. Often referred to that as a death trap.

• 1:27Shawn Ryan?

  When did you decide to put the bottle down?

• 1:28Speaker 03

  It was something as simple as, how do I want to view my world? The word is perspective.

• 1:34Shawn Ryan?

  So the Sofa Superstore Fire, which claimed the lives of nine firefighters and is one of the most tragic events in American firefighter history, if I'm not mistaken.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  You're right.

• 1:53Shawn Ryan?

  And you were a part of that and you responded to that. And you mentioned that this changed your life forever. And out of all the traumatic events that you've witnessed and been a part of, this is kind of what... This is the straw that broke the camel's back and kind of sent you into the downward spiral of PTSD.

• 2:24Shawn Ryan?

  And also, I watched a, I did a lot of research on this too, and it seemed to be a very controversial incident, and a lot of lessons learned happened from it, and, and, and it seems that the, the men, you know, like yourself, that, that survived it are, are considered legends in the community. But

• 2:54Shawn Ryan?

  I wanted to, before we get going on that, I kinda wanna put everybody in the mindset of how, how horrific this was, so I wanna roll the tape.

• 3:13Shawn Ryan?

  That was your best friend on the phone, and

• 3:19Shawn Ryan?

  telling his wife that he loved her, and, like, I really just wanna set the tone on how fucking serious and tragic this was.

• 3:30Shawn Ryan?

  The day started for you at a memorial golf tournament, and I'd like to start from, from right there.

• 3:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, his last words that you heard was my friend, my best friend Louis Smolky, in his last dying words, as he was burning to death.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Stuff to hear.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  June 18th, 2007 started out as a normal day for us. We, we certainly weren't expecting any of that. We, we actually all got together. I was off duty that day, and

• 4:15Speaker 03

  We were having a golf tournament for another friend of ours who's a firefighter who was killed four months to the day prior in a car accident. And that was another really good friend of mine who got me, who got me the job in Charleston, actually. Really? Yeah. He was one of, one of my other best friends. I mean, it's, it is, uh, so paying homage to him, trying to raise some money for his family at a golf tournament and we're doing what, what firemen do and just like, you know what, uh, what seals do when y'all get together and cops do when they get together? We get, we get drunk and we have a good time and that's, uh, that's what that golf tournament was about. But by the end of the day, you heard the tapes, that's what we were all thrown into. And, uh, at the end of the golf tournament, we, um, everybody's phones kind of started

• 5:00Speaker 03

  ringing and, uh, we were all told the superstore is on fire and we all knew that that was a horrible place to have a fire. We often referred to that as a, as a death trap if, if that's one of the calls we ever had to go on. Cause we, as firefighters, you pre-plan buildings. That means you find buildings in your area and it could possibly be a threat or, um, get, be very bad. So you had to like kind of strategically plan how, how you would face this monster in the event that would happen. How many buildings were like that in that city? Tons of them. Tons of them? Yeah. I mean, they're, they're everywhere. It's just old, old furniture stores. It's actually an old grocery store that was converted into a, uh, a one-story furniture warehouse. I mean, so it was a huge, like a hundred something thousand square feet.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  Don't quote me on the square footage, but it was a big showroom and then it had a big storage, storage facility behind it and that's where the fire started. So we found out that that building was on fire. We, um, we all got in our cars and just went. What were you thinking on the way there?

• 6:08Speaker 03

  I had heard that my friend Louis was missing.

• 6:11Shawn Ryan?

  You heard that before you even arrived?

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:14Shawn Ryan?

  When you heard that it was the sofa superstore, did that, did you know it was gonna be fucking bad since, since the that was already pinging on everybody's radar?

• 6:26Speaker 03

  Well, it's like I told you earlier, it doesn't, uh, never seems real until it's real.

• 6:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  And, uh, it just seemed like another fire. But when I heard he was missing,

• 6:36Speaker 03

  had extra adren- adrenaline kicked in and I drove faster. I broke through a police barricade with my vehicle. Honey, I didn't drive through it like smoking a bandit or anything. We just went around it. The cop was like, what the fuck? And like, fuck you. And I kept going. And when we got there, the building had just collapsed. So I got there right when everybody had been pulled out.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  And my girlfriend was driving my car at the time. My firehouse was right up the street. I told her, I said, go to my, my locker in my firehouse, grab my shit and get it back to me. I gotta find out what's going on. And so this time you got hundreds of firemen on scene, man. I mean, hundreds. There's probably three hundred something plus people on the scene that night.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  And it was just a sea of red lights everywhere. And, uh, ran up to my buddy, David Griffin, who was pumping, uh, he was the engineer on engine eleven. And I ran up to him and I said, David, what do we have? And he, he turned around. He said, Louis is missing. And, uh, he said, Travis, we got a lot more guys in there too. We don't know how many. And I was like, in, in that? I mean, cause now the building is, is down and there's just fire every fucking where, everywhere you look, it's just fire blowing. And then, uh,

• 7:44Speaker 03

  in Charleston Fire Department, we didn't back out of fires. Um, we were very cowboyish and we were very prideful of the way that we did things. And we were very, very aggressive. And this is hundreds of years of tradition. And it finally caught us. And it, and bit us and it cost us nine guys. And, uh,

• 8:04Speaker 03

  I remember hearing reports of like nineteen or twenty initially is what they thought. But by the time the smoke settled, it was nine. And it was nine really good dudes and all those dudes I knew.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  Very personally, I'd worked with every single one of them. We, uh, we sat around that table breaking bread many a nights, having jokes, having laughs. You knew their families. And, uh, Louis was, uh, just happened to be my best friend because, and I wasn't his best friend. He was one of those really cool dudes that had a lot of best friends, but he was my best friend. And, uh, he, when I started with Charleston Fire, he took me under his wing and showed me the ropes.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  And, uh, I had a very special connection with him. And I didn't know by the end of the night, I still didn't know what lie ahead. I didn't know that I'd be the one next to his burnt corpse, sitting there looking at him in a manner I, I can try to describe, but it's gonna be hard.

• 9:05Shawn Ryan?

  You did make entry.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:07Shawn Ryan?

  You know, um, if I remember correctly, you, did you make entry and you got pulled back? Was that, was that right?

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Well, we went around the delta side of the building. So when you're looking at a building, the front is alpha and then you go around clockwise. So we got to the delta side, which is square building would be the right side. And we go through this place, man, it was, um, it was just twisted steel, like spaghetti, spaghetti noodles, and it was still hot. There were still a lot of fire present and, uh, but we had guys missing. We didn't have time to not get in there. We really wanted to find these guys and I guess some of us thought that we were going to find them alive, but it's just not the case. There was, I think around 15 and 20 of us on the body recovery teams. We were all broken apart and put into five man teams and we all came in from different parts of the building.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  And, uh, my five man team, we went in and it was literally, you couldn't move two or three feet and you had to stop and you had to figure out a way to get through the voids that were there. There'd be like a little hollow opening here and we'd crawl through that and the next two seconds, you're standing on what used to be the roof.

• 10:16Shawn Ryan?

  So you're, you're in it at this point and how many guys are with you?

• 10:20Speaker 03

  Four other guys.

• 10:21Shawn Ryan?

  And so just to paint a picture, cause you got really descriptive in your book about the smoke, you can't see your fucking hand in front of your face, the heat and, and.

• 10:34Shawn Ryan?

  There was nothing, uh, and I could see how it would be easy to get disoriented and, and fucking lost in something like that. And you couldn't even, uh, you couldn't even bring a hose in with you to retrace your steps to get the fuck out. And, um, I mean, the amount of courage that takes, I mean, it, it, and it doesn't, uh, did it seem like it was even a courageous thing? Did it, probably didn't even go through her fucking head. It was just, we're going.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  Only thing is, is they wanted volunteers and a lot of guys didn't raise their hand.

• 11:10Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Very, I think, because those guys knew they didn't want what was on, on the inside of that building. It's not that they're less of a firefighter.

• 11:18Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  I think that they just knew, I don't want to fuck with that.

• 11:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  And we're here to do whatever we gotta do. But there was a select group of us that did. And, uh, I certainly, you know, often say the worst decision I ever made was going inside of that building that night. But the best decision I've ever made in my life was going inside of that fucking building that night and carrying them, carrying them all home. Um, and, uh, it didn't seem like anything courageous. It's just what needed to be done. You know, our guys are down. We got guys down. We gotta do what we gotta do. Push forward and go get it. So we didn't, we didn't even have fucking air packs on our back because they were all used.

• 11:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  So we're choking on smoke and we have what called flash hoods. The firefighters have flash hoods. And when you put your face piece on, you pull your flash hood up and it protects skin right here, protects your neck and your ears. So we're choking on smoke, literally gagging on black smoke. Um, and you, you, you can't see there's, you know, and you're crawling next to big flames, fires, and they have ladder companies dumping water on top of us. And in a normal fire situation, you would never be operating inside of a fire. When you have tower units raining water down because they're just so powerful, it could hurt you, it could, you could injure a firefighter, blow debris on them. They could push fire on top of them and kill them. But we had no choice. We had to go in. We had to do what needed to be done. And it seemed like it took a long time to get to, to them. And once we started finding them,

• 12:40Speaker 03

  um, you would hear a team shout out, I got somebody and, and, and we would do the same. And, um,

• 12:55Speaker 03

  I saw something silver and um it didn't look like anything we had seen up until this point because everything was just black and then I I saw something and I went over to investigate what it was and it was by myself and I crawled up there on my hands and knees.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  I started looking at this thing and I say in my book, I was just turning my head like a curious dog trying to figure out what the fuck is this?

• 13:33Speaker 03

  And I realized that uh it was an air pack of one of our, one of our guys. It was uh, we wore silver, silver, silver Scott air packs. And it busted open. It didn't look like an air pack. It was just like, it was like filleted open. And uh, once I realized what it was, I had my hands, I looked down and I realized my hands were on the shoulders of one of our guys. And we wore black gear. It just looked like a pile of black shit, like debris. And then when I realized that, I pushed, I pushed back and I looked down and uh, I realized these were his shoulders. That's his back because the pack is on his back. So this, his head should be right here. But there was no head.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  There was nothing. It was uh, it was, it was just a couple of teeth. There was no helmet. There was no skull. It was just teeth. And um,

• 14:28Speaker 03

  I looked down at the opening. There was an opening and there's a spinal column sticking out. And I just, when it got real for me and I realized, because I'd been to calls where we had burned up kids on Christmas. I've seen burned kids. I've been to burnt people many times, but.

• 14:46Shawn Ryan?

  Nothing hit like that one.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  No. No.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  I realized, right then, whoever's in here is dead. Whatever count that they have on the outside, every one of them's fucking dead.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  And I knew Louis was in there and we just, we had no way to tell who was who. It's one thing when you got a dead body there that you can recognize, but when you know it's one of yours and you don't know who the fuck it is.

• 15:16Speaker 03

  So what we had to do is, um,

• 15:19Speaker 03

  we were tasked with not moving the bodies and just trying to identify them the best way that we could, without doing too much. And what the coroner was going to do after all the smoke cleared is come in and GPS them and locate where their bodies were. So that's what we did. So this, this one individual,

• 15:43Speaker 03

  Captain Billy was a

• 15:46Speaker 03

  really good dude. He'd been in fire service thirty something years. He was off engine nineteen and, um,

• 15:52Speaker 03

  we ended up pulling his fire pants down and his wallet was in his pants and we, he opened it up and we saw his, his driver's license with his credit cards, man. And it was just like, god damn it.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  It's one thing when you're working with dead people and you have no relationship, you don't know them because it's not real. You go to these things and it sucks. It fucks with you from time to time, but it's not personal. This is personal.

• 16:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  There's no get back like we talked about and you're just like, what the fuck do I do? So, but we got a job to do, man, and we can't sit around too long. So we, we gotta find more of our brothers and then we go, we, we, we go not too far away and stumble on another one. Cause at this point, smoke's starting to lift a little bit more. As the fire got knocked down and, um,

• 16:40Speaker 03

  we found Mark and, um, he was, uh,

• 16:45Speaker 03

  he was face down.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  Rolled him over, his hands were in front of his face and it's almost like, like he saw the flashover that happened in that building. It's not a backdraft, that's movie shit. I mean, those things happen, but flashovers happen all the time in fires and that's when everything reaches its combustible limit at the same exact time and everything just, the, all the superheated gases in the building go, and it's just a big ball of fire and ninety-nine percent of firemen that are caught in these things die because it's so quick and it's so violent. It's almost like he felt it or saw it and did like this and then turned and fell. His hands were like this, but I didn't know it was Mark. Mark was off of my truck, ladder five, and I had a fucking great relationship with Mark. We worked together many times. And

• 17:32Speaker 03

  so we roll him. Yeah, I think your bodies are still hot, man. You can still feel when you're touching them. I'm not wearing gloves at this point and I had them, I would take them off from time to time, but every once in a while, we'd roll a guy over and you'd have your gloves off and you could feel that heat in your hands from their gear, how hot it was and they were fucking burnt so bad. And when I rolled Mark over, the best description I can give you is we have a plastic face piece right here that covers our eyes and right here is usually rubber and it's black. I don't know if you've ever seen ultrasound of a, of a baby, three D, that's what his face looked like. It was baked into his mask. Damn.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  And we undid his coat, pull his coat open and we had metal name tags back then and it had his name right there. And that's how we identified Mark and we heard other teams yelling out that they were finding guys and, you know, it sounds selfish and everything, but I was so worried about Louis. You know, all of these guys were important to me, but this is, this is my dude. Yeah, it's your best friend. And I don't want it to be real and I want to hurry up and find everybody and I'm not wishing that it was somebody else, but you can't help but in that moment to be like, please, don't be my friend.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  And uh, the next brother we found was Brandon, my team. We go into this back storage room. It's like one of the only pieces of building that was really left intact. There was a lot of smoke damage, not a lot of fire damage. Um, Brandon was huddled down in a corner and his body was just normal. We rolled them out of this corner and he just had a cut over his eye. And what happened is Brandon ran out of air, but he got away from the fire, but he died from smoke.

• 19:18Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 19:19Speaker 03

  And he just looked peaceful, man. And uh, his um, his wedding invitations were in the mail. Were still being delivered everywhere around and he died that night. He was actually just working for somebody else. He did a buddy shift for somebody else and it cost him his life.

• 19:35Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  So that Brandon was, I knew we had eight at that point and, and by this time it had come through that we have nine confirmed. Cause this is hours into the night and um.

• 19:46Shawn Ryan?

  What's the uh, what? Was the fire completely out? Was there still smoke?

• 19:52Speaker 03

  At this point, smoke was, smoke was still there, but it was nothing like it was. I mean, it was, we were in there for hours.

• 19:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  Um, so the, the whole fucking building came down and there was really nowhere for the smoke to go except into the atmosphere. Part of the showroom was still, still there, but after bulk of the fire was knocked down. Cause you gotta think fire was in all these different little pockets where the collapses were.

• 20:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  And so once those were done, man, all the smoke pretty much dissipated. And that's why I think it took us so long to start finding guys is because there was so much smoke. I really think we probably crawled over them a couple of times possibly.

• 20:25Shawn Ryan?

  Shit.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  I just didn't know it. So uh, now I know we have eight. And some guys were in there with Brandon and I love Brandon too, man. And just like, I want to spend some time with him, do whatever we need to do, but I gotta find Louis, you know? Um, that limousine company you talked about that I owned, I, I drove for Louis's wedding. We had a lot of fucking fun together, man. And uh, he, this is actually the night after his anniversary. He lived one, one year and one, one day after his anniversary.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  So I put my helmet on and I got a job to do, man, and I was actually in a part of the building where you could stand up and I start walking out and man, I probably made it ten or fifteen feet and I walked through what seemed to be a doorway. I'm having to relive this because it's, I can't describe it to you.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  And when I did, as soon as I cleared that doorway, I looked to my left and he was laying right there. So.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  I knew it was him just by looking at his skull, you know? I didn't need confirmation. I knew. Because he had a distinct face and even when, when his skin is baked off of somebody's face, you can still recognize him and it's a sick thing to say. But I've witnessed that. And Louis was on his back, man, and his, his left leg was underneath his right. His right leg was straight out and there was a piece of big ass, piece of steel across it. And we ended up having to dig that out, but his arms were sticking up in the air and his fucking sleeves were burnt off, his fire coat. All the skin was burnt off of him and just his arm bones were sticking up. His radius and all that. His hands were burnt off and his head was, his head was back and his eyeballs were burnt

• 22:16Speaker 03

  out. Fucking skin was burnt off of his face and his mouth was wide open. And I just got on my knees next to him.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  Told him how much I loved him.

• 22:36Shawn Ryan?

  What eventually ended your career in the fire service?

• 22:39Speaker 03

  So it was a culmination of a lot of things building up to one, one major incident. So you say, I got in a fight. What, I ended up going hands on with a lot of guys in the department over the course of two and a half years. And it's not something I'm proud of. I'm actually very embarrassed about it. But it happened and it needs to be talked about because the reason I talk about it, it's you can see a shift in people's behavior. Like, we're family. And when you see somebody acting differently, something is wrong. And nobody ever pulled me to the side to help me. Nobody ever pulled me to a side, to the side to try to figure out what was going on. What happened was, this new behavior that I was taking on was just becoming normal. At the funeral for one of our guys, I got into a physical altercation on the bus.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  We had a bunch of buses brought in because the funerals were so big, we couldn't take everybody's cars. So they had to bring families on buses and firemen mixed with families. And I was on a bus with some firemen and some families, some young children, some old people. And something was said to another fireman and he threw his hat at me and kind of joking around, but kind of not. And I just stood up and slapped him and slapped him into the seat, the empty seat. And everybody witnessed it. Yeah. And this is somebody I'm supposedly love, you know, and protect. And I just did that. In that event, everybody got up, they left the bus and I was kind of alone on the bus after that. And then after that was more of the same.

• 24:05Speaker 03

  I got into physical altercations at the training facility where I assaulted one of our guys that needed help. He fell down and he was having flashbacks of the fire. He was there that night too, and he was screaming all of our dead guy's names. And I picked him up and started slamming him into the wall with all of his gear. And I was like, knock it the fuck off. And when I did one of the training, instructors came over and grabbed me and turned me around. And when he did, I threw him into the wall and told him, you put your fucking hands on me, I'll kill you. And then we had an academy instructor standing right there and I looked at him and I threatened to throw him out of a window. And that was accepted and it swept under the rug. And then again, behind a grocery store, training one day, I slapped one of our other guys right in the face. Cause he just came close to me and said something and I just lashed out and hit him.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  And at this time, I was drinking a lot though, you know, I was drinking, I was coming to work drunk and everything. It wasn't acceptable. It's embarrassing, man, but nobody, it was just not an issue to anybody else. And it was just kind of, all this was on my plate for me to deal with and to figure it out. And this is what happens to these cops and these firemen out there. They end up losing their jobs or hurting somebody else because of all the shit that they're going through. They bring it to work and that's what I was doing. I had no outlet for it.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  The straw that broke the camel's back for me was, um, I came to work one day, my, my, my house engine ten ladder five and uh, we had a new guy in our, in our house and he, he put his coffee cup on a, on our dead guy's monument. And it pissed me off. I went over there and I grabbed it and I shattered it on the ground and I opened the door and told him if he wants his cup, it's in a million pieces. And if he does it again, I'll fucking kill him. And those are the words that I used and that's how it truly felt. Yeah. And when I said that, one of my other good friends said, why are you being such an asshole? And when he did, I took that as him defending the new guy's actions and not defending our guy's honor. Yeah. And I told him if he says another word to me, I will kill him too, in a minute. And he said something to me.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  And um, at that time, a bomb was lit inside of me and the fuse was about that fucking short. And when he said what he said, it's like somebody poured gasoline on that fuse and it, and then the bomb ignited and I, to this day, I can't tell you what happened. Because I completely lost it and I blacked out and I, I just remember being outside with my captain shaking me.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  And I'm, I'm crying and he just pretty much told me that I'd assaulted my entire firehouse and the cops were called and they were on the way to arrest me. They offer any help at all, the department? Man, I can't. So our department did the best they could with what we had at the time. We'd never, in the fire service,

• 26:44Speaker 03

  there had been other incidents, but not like this magnitude, I guess. Yeah. So it was kind of like a free fall to trying to figure out the best way to help guys and they, they came up with uh, with some counselors really quickly. I don't know the timeline on it. But they wanted guys, hey man, we got these counselors for y'all, go talk to. And of course, me being alpha male like I am, I'm like, fuck them. I was like, these motherfuckers, they've never looked at their friends like we have. They've never fucking held dead babies in their fucking arms. They've read books. Who the fuck are they? To tell us how to feel and how to be. Yeah. And that was the problem, because looking back, that was the worst fucking thing I could have ever done.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  I hurt myself with that mentality and I hurt other guys around me because I would tell them to, if you go talk to anybody, you're a fucking pussy. And that's one of the biggest regrets I have because I talk about being a coward and it's not easy to say that. That's me being a coward. That's me being too manly, too macho and having too much of a fucking ego to accept the help that is available to us. We had people, licensed professionals. Who would listen to us. Maybe had I listened to them, I wouldn't have fucking shoved a gun down my throat and pulled the fucking trigger. Maybe if I listened to them, I wouldn't have burned my entire fucking inner circle down to the ground, you know? But I wouldn't even give it a chance because I was too macho, the culture that I had been exposed to my entire life. And that's what I speak on now.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  I speak about how we're killing each other with the suck it up mentality because it's bullshit. Yeah. I understand it. Suck it up. We have to deal with certain things. But there's nothing wrong with, hey, suck it up while we're doing this. We got a job to do. Let's go get our guys. And then when we come back, if it, if it fucking bothers you, let's talk about it. Because there's nothing wrong with me and you being completely human and not being okay. It's okay to not be okay. And that's what I'm trying to instill in when I speak at conferences and everything. It's okay.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  Doesn't make you less of a man. Fuck, it makes you more of a man. It's worth me doing that if it reaches one fucking person in our community or even outside. And it helps them become a better mother, father, husband, wife, child, whatever. If it helps them realize that they need help and they can go get the help they want, then fuck it. I'll relive it. Because that's what we do. Yeah. We lift people up. We don't fucking help bring them down. And I got caught in this vicious cycle of bringing people down because I was so fucked up for so long. When my whole world crumbled down on top of me right after that, when everything just started, I mean, everything just started eating shit around me.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  I fell into the victim mindset and it was the whole, why me, why me, why me? Why have I been exposed to all this? Why have I experienced this? I got scared to go to fucking sleep at night. I was, I would cry alone away from my wife. I would be in another room crying because I was afraid to go to fucking sleep because of what was coming for me in the middle of the night. I knew it.

• 29:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  And I would hide that. And I'm not ashamed of that anymore.

• 29:44Shawn Ryan?

  How long did it take you to be able to, to talk about that?

• 29:50Speaker 03

  Long time, many years to talk about it the way that I talk about it now.

• 29:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  I, lo- long time, fucking decade. I've, I tried. I tried later on in life to talk about it and I'd shut down every time. I just couldn't do it.

• 30:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  But I realized at some point that my experiences may help other people too. And by me speaking about it, it may help me as well. And that it did. And that's why I do now. I always say, when you're in a place that makes you sick, you can't get better. It's like a cancer patient testing cigarettes from Marlboro or whoever. You're only gonna get sicker. I tried to stay a hung on tooth and nail, man, but I realized when I realized I had problems and something needed to change, when I finally, because people ask me, what made you reach out for help?

• 30:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 30:42Speaker 03

  You know, and it was me sitting in my living room, dry firing a weapon in my mouth. I'm choking on the, on the, on the weapon. The barrel down my throat was slobber and drool all over it. My tears running down my face and a bottle of whiskey next to me. And then I load it. And then I go to pull the trigger and I stop right where I thought it would go off. And luckily, I stopped prior to it going off. And I knew right then I needed help, so I got the help. But it wasn't in time. But yes, to answer your question, um, when I got away from the fire department, things started drastically changing for me, the an- the anxiety. The, um, I always had the nightmare shit, I still do.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  But that that rage inside of you, it it calms. So getting away from there was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. I didn't want to leave like that. I wanted to stay on the job thirty years. I wanted to be, I wanted to retire, wanted to do the right thing for my guys, ride that rig for them. But it wasn't in the cards for me. So I got away from there for a long time and now I'm back. And now I do a lot of work with fire departments, police departments, but I'm better now. And I'm I'm with them at a different capacity now, you know? So I'm not completely immersed in it all the time. I can step away from it. Yeah. Yeah. When did you decide to put the bottle down? That's the day after our wedding in twenty twelve. No shit?

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, man, I got so fucked up at our at our wedding that my my poor wife, she um she had to eat cold grits with the uh with the cab driver that took us to our hotel because her husband was passed out upstairs. Oh shit. Yeah, the great first night together. Oh shit. Nah, but I I had been thinking about it for a while. That was just for me, that was just the thing. I woke up the next morning and I said, man, I don't ever want to touch this stuff again. And I haven't. Cold turkey, done. Yeah, I looked at it and I I started looking at if I'm ever going to get better, it's going to it's going to be a long road to hoe. But I need to look at the things I can control right now that are not helping me. And the biggest one that stuck out to me was alcohol.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  There was it it didn't add any positive thing in my life, nothing. Yeah. Everything that it offered me was negative. So I was like, dude, just gotta go. Yeah. So I just I quit cold turkey right then. That's uh, that's not easy to do. No, but it's at first, you know, the hardest part about it is now being the sober guy around all the people that are drinking. Yeah. And you're sitting there when you when you don't want to be there, like you talk about in your social anxiety posts. I get it.

• 33:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  I don't wanna fucking be here. But I have to put on this smile. And that doesn't mean I'm not contemplating fucking everybody up in this room.

• 33:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 33:32Speaker 03

  But it's just something I've had to learn to to accept and and and deal with. And I'd rather have that than going back home with that bottle and putting myself in a position to not be here anymore.

• 33:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, well, for for everybody that's listening, who is from, you know, the fire service or military, police, who's fucking drowning themselves in a bottle right now, and there's a lot of them. I mean, how fast after you quit drinking?

• 33:59Shawn Ryan?

  Did? How fast did that acceleration start to get you into a better mental state? And and I'm sure your business fucking started taking off too at that point.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  Well, honestly, I'd love to tell you it was lightning fast, but it wasn't. It was a culmination of things because I was so fucked up. And the biggest hurdle I had yet to face was ownership and acceptance of everything.

• 34:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  And I I

• 34:24Speaker 03

  always was asking why, and it was I became the victim of like, this only happens to me. Why me? My life is in such a horrible spot, even though I wasn't drinking, I still had that mentality. And that's never who I was prior to all of this. I was a very positive upbeat guy, but this thing does something to you. It rewires your brain and you have to be your own surgeon and go in and fucking reconfigure the wire. It took years of me going in and trying to rewire until I finally fixed it. And it wasn't until um last year, when I realized what it was. It was something as simple as how

• 35:04Speaker 03

  the word is perspective. Something as simple as perspective. How do I want to view my world? Do I want to look at it through this victim? Feeling bad, horrible, fucking poor, poor me lens? Or do I want to look at it from a standpoint of, look, you have this beautiful life. You have these horrible experiences, yes, but you can do something with them for the greater good. And you can make a positive impact on people with what you have experienced. And so I chose that. And the second I chose that is it was like a light switch. Well, how the fuck did that come to you? It's funny you ask that it came to me sitting in my car with a gun in my hand, ready to blow my brains out for the second time.

• 35:41Shawn Ryan?

  No matter where you're watching Sean Ryan's show from, if you get anything out of this, please like, comment, subscribe, and most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, please leave us a review on Apple and Spotify podcasts.