Although life is filled with very tough moments that deserve to be discussed in depth so you know what you can do to make the most of the situation, get through it, and come out a better person, it’s important to also acknowledge the less serious, more comical and lighthearted moments.
This is especially important now, considering how challenging life has been for so many over the past couple of years, because sometimes, a good laugh is exactly what’s needed to alleviate the stress you feel. And sometimes things can seem so bizarre or bleak, all you can do is laugh. As former Navy SEALs, this is a feeling we’re all too familiar with. So, in this blog, we’d like to look back at some of our favorite PG stories from our experiences and share them with you.
One of our founders, Bill Hart, used to work alongside interpreters quite often during his time in the Middle East, and this led to some situations that were pretty ridiculous and humorous, even amidst the harshly serious backdrop of war.
On his very first operation, Hart’s platoon was questioning a group of men in a house who had been restrained, and after a brief back and forth, their interpreter started insisting that the men likely spoke English because of their accent. One of the men turned all the way around to say, “no, I don’t speak English,” causing the interpreter to crack up and walk out of the house.
Another time, while driving around with his interpreter in Afghanistan, Hart found the lack of any traffic laws absurdly funny. Drivers just make their way through traffic as if they were walking through a crowd, and instead of traffic cones, road work and construction are signaled by a stack of rocks. When driving around close to the Pakistan border with his interpreter, he was treated to an anecdote about why Pakistan was a “crap country.” According to his interpreter, you can do anything if you have money in Pakistan – a man can go to the police and say he wants to kill someone who insulted him, and the police will ask for $200. But if he kills someone else in his efforts to kill your intended target, the police will be after him – not to punish him for the crime, but for another $200.
You can hear Hart tell these stories and others himself on episode six of our Embrace the Suck podcast, aptly titled “Crap Country.” We encourage you to give it a listen, along with the rest of our podcast library.
