A Green Beret Medic in Afghanistan on COVID Containment and Why American News Is Broken

Vance Crowe [00:00:01] As the crow flies on the Vance Crowe podcast. Dax, welcome to the podcast.

Dax [00:00:11] How's it going? It brings me back to another time.

Vance Crowe [00:00:13] Yeah, man. So you are a long time friend, a guy that I knew back when I was working on the Crip Clipper Cruise Lines only. Yeah. You are not on a, on a ship anymore. You are a Green Beret, a former Green Beret living in an undisclosed location in Afghanistan. So welcome man. Correct. What, what is going on with you? Where are you kind, what are you doing over in Afghanistan?

Dax [00:00:35] So, yeah, so right now, so I was Green Beret. I got out in 2018 and now I'm a just a civilian, so, so basically I'm a, what's considered a civilian private military contractor. I work for a company who has a contract with the US government to provide security for a, a forward operating base out here in Afghanistan. And my job as one of the leaders is to, you know, make sure my guards have what they need. It's a static guard position, so they, they stand towers and they watch the gate and those kind of things. And I'm just in charge of those guys. It's pretty great, pretty great job. Pretty easy, pretty laid back.

Vance Crowe [00:01:18] So we'll go into what you're doing now, but you are a long, long way from where I met you, you know, you were working in the hotel staff of a cruise ship and one day I look on social media and my buddy Dax, who we used to go out drinking together, is now a Green Beret with photos of him blowing stuff up. Gimme a little bit of your history and then we'll go into the, what's going on with Coronavirus in Afghanistan.

Dax [00:01:43] Sure, sure. All right. So, you know, I was working for the cruise ships and we got bought up by a second company and in that process I kind of decided I didn't wanna work for them. I had fallen in love with a young lady and was getting ready to move to St. Louis to start a life with her. And, But it turns out, you know, those, those relationships seem, seem a little bit sweeter when you're one of you's on a boat. One of you is not. So as soon as we got back, that kind of didn't work and I was looking for the next fun thing to do and there are a lot of Green Berets from my hometown, and one of them was a good friend of mine. And through talking to him, I decided, Hey, you know, why not? So I did something that was kind of unusual. Most people who go to the Special Forces have already spent five or six years in the army. I signed what's called an X-ray contract to, so basically you sign up a contract, you go to Infantry Basic, you go to Airborne School, and then you go directly into the selection process for special forces. And so I did that. I became a medic, what's called an 18 delta. The training was about two years long. I learned Farsi, which is a, a dialect of Persian spoken here in Afghanistan. I went to the medic school for a year and wound up on a team in 10 Special Forces group stationed outta Colorado.

Vance Crowe [00:03:06] I have a good buddy that before we did this interview, I asked him about being a medic in the Green Berets. He said, you are essentially a, a very sophisticated, maybe physician's assistant level in the civilian world for how much, you know, in order to be able to do your work.

Dax [00:03:20] Yeah. You know, special operations medics as a whole tend to be a, a pretty revered thing. We have a school that lasts about a year long. What's interesting about it is you get about four or five years worth of college in that year. It's kind of what we call drinking from a fire hose. But, so yeah, all special operations medics go to the same school for the first six months. So the Navy Seals send their medics there, the MARSOC guys send their medics there and the PJs use the para rescue jumpers from the Air Force also used to send their guys, although I understand they have their own school now. So they go for the six months and we become trauma experts, basically in the field, trauma experts. And then what separates a Green Beret from everybody else is you stay behind another six months past what everybody else does, and you do your clinical medicine. So you're doing everything from, you know, learning how to diagnose, you're doing disease processes, you're even doing dentistry and veterinarian medicine. So you, you get a little bit of everything

Vance Crowe [00:04:24] And then once you were deployed, you saw action. You, you've been in in wartime situations.

Dax [00:04:30] Yeah, yeah. So most of my career was actually pretty laid back. I spent most of my time in the Sahara Desert, just working with troops there, training them up, taking them out on missions for whichever, you know, terrorist organizations were, were the big problem back then. You may have seen in the news about, I guess it's about two years ago now, the, the the three Green Berets that died in in North Africa. And, and that kind of opened up this scene like, wait, what are we doing in Africa, kind of thing. Well, what we're doing over there is, is that's the new terrorist battleground. 'cause they can take large swaths of that land that nobody's watching and and own it. So we were there training troops, trying to get them ready to combat what's coming so that we don't wind up with a second Afghanistan.

Vance Crowe [00:05:16] So I, this is kind of a hard quick transition, but I have to wonder what is the world of terrorism in during a, a giant pandemic? Like is this ready state? You know, the military? Oh yeah. Tell me more.

Dax [00:05:30] Well, you know, it's, it's, it's interesting because it, it slows down both sides of it, you know, and we're just getting our first taste here in Afghanistan, so it's kind of hard to say right now there's only about 300 confirmed cases. Of course, we know in a third world country when you have 300 cases, you've probably got at least 3000. But you, you just don't hear 'em about 'em, you know, you've got third world countries where the testing is not there and

Vance Crowe [00:05:54] There's no hospital services for a lot of these villages. There's no, they're not not

Dax [00:05:57] Going to the doctor. Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm, I'm not too far from Kabul, so, so there is quite a bit of, of medical support around here. But yeah, I mean they are, the big problem with Afghanistan is that you have people who have fled Afghanistan and gone to Iran to, to not be here for the war for the last 20 years. Well, one of the big things that the Iranian government's doing is they've been deporting about around a thousand people a month since this war began trying to send 'em back over here. Well, they're just walking across the border from Iran, now you have people leaving Iran and masses because they've been hit so hard by the disease. And that's where you're seeing it come from. People are coming through that border and coming into the Hurat region and, and those places and the, it's just spreading for there. The other problem with that is, you know, these people don't, you know, we talk, we, we worry about Americans living paycheck to paycheck. These people are living meal to meal, you know, it, it, it's not an easy life. So, you know, when you shut down their ability to get food, it's, it's much more difficult over here.

Vance Crowe [00:07:07] It, it's amazing as you're saying words like, Hey, they speak Farsi and they're in Herat. I actually in graduate school, live for two years with a guy from Afghanistan. And when I think about Oh really? Yeah, Bert Fathi and it, it's, right now we're thinking about the pandemic, overrunning ICU hospitals. But you think about a world under which they don't have mass media, they can't warn people the options to wash your hands are so much lower. The, the quarantine stay at home. That just doesn't work. Right. That is, that has gotta be potential for real civil unrest or just massive death.

Dax [00:07:44] Well, you know, I will say as far as personal hygiene goes, that's, that's something that Islam has always been very good about. I mean the, the need to wash before prayer that, you know, when I think on that level of washing hands and, you know, you know, taking care of yourself, the Muslim world tends to be much better at that than we do. Yeah. You know,

Vance Crowe [00:08:06] It kind seems like a selection pressure, right? The people that were the most devout washing their hands five times a day so they could pray all of a sudden their God would keep them safe.

Dax [00:08:14] Yes, absolutely. So, you know, that's not bad, but yeah, I mean people are hungry in, in these countries. I mean, not only is it third world country, but it's a country that's been at war since human history, so Yeah. Yeah. It makes things exponentially more difficult.

Vance Crowe [00:08:32] So let's talk about you. You're in charge, not only of like the security, trying to make sure that that base is safe, but you're also a medic probably involved in medical treatment. What? Yeah,

Dax [00:08:42] So, you know, I work pretty closely with the medic that's out here. However, you know, that's not my main job. So I, I would be the medical asset, medical asset if something happened for my company. But as for, you know, medical on the camp, that would be the medic out here. Of course he understands, you know, that I'm a useful person for that. So we do a lot of work together. He talks to me at the end of the night and we, we kind of talk through, you know, what's happening, you know, what's gonna happen and what we're gonna do about it. Like, we, we had to push just a day back 'cause we thought we maybe had a possible case on post. We got lucky, we were able to test him. He was unconfirmed. So as of right now, we're doing all right on this camp.

Vance Crowe [00:09:23] So I don't understand how forward operating bases work at all. Are you coming in contact with strangers every day on the base? Is it, how do, do you do some kind of containment?

Dax [00:09:34] So, I personally am not, the way these things usually work is there's, there's an outer base and there's an inner base. And so for us, like the Afghan forces handle that outer security and then they have their own compound. Then here where I am living and working is just American and NATO troops. However, we do have shop workers that come on that are local nationals. We have, you know, the guy who runs the store, the guy who runs the barber shop, all those things. Even some of the people who work at the chow hall, our host nation individuals. So what we've done with that, we started this I think about three weeks ago, is we just removed all of that. So no more shops for right now, no more, you know, no more sitting in the chow hall, everyone goes, gets their food and goes back to another place to eat. You know, just trying to keep those masses down. 'cause we've been very lucky. We have not seen a single case on, on here and we do not want to because it's such a, you know, it's, it's like a cruise ship. It's a small ecosystem.

Vance Crowe [00:10:38] Yeah. I mean that's been one of the weird things for I think anybody that's ever worked on a ship is to watch these people that are stuck on a ship for two weeks, three weeks. I mean, that would be hell it, it like to be just stuck there. I mean,

Dax [00:10:52] And just remember, you know, the Norwalk things that we would have go through the ship and it would completely, you know, just shut everything down. Now we're talking about a disease that's, you know, is so, so much scarier to everyone, even though I think if you've ever seen someone with Norwalk Norwalk, you know, that's pretty scary too.

Vance Crowe [00:11:10] Yeah, that's right. I i, I definitely remember that. So dex like what's going on day to day? What has changed then because of, because of this.

Dax [00:11:20] So yeah, we've, we've gone almost locked almost on a lockdown style thing like we would do when we were expecting a threat. You know, we are, you know, my guards that are up front have a very specific list of people that they're letting in. None of them are host nation, they're all our NATO troops. Of course you have to, you know, you have to balance this, this line because the NATO troops are here for a reason. They have to be able to go out and do that. But then they set, you know, according to the army, they set the guidelines that they, they, you know, that are responsible and that we can keep operations going. But certainly everything slows down a little bit.

Vance Crowe [00:11:58] And I imagine you got a basic guys that are used to getting aggression out and energy out by lifting or doing jiujitsu or doing something.

Dax [00:12:06] Yes, absolutely. That, that has been a big one for us was losing the gym. But you know, the, the thing about these, these guys, even the ones who work for me is, you know, even the people that are here that are not currently working for the military, they've all worked for the military before. So, you know, this isn't their first rodeo. You know, we, we go to some places that have not much of anything and we get used to filling up ammo cans with rocks and using that for weights. Right now my big thing is, is resistance bands that I've gotten into

Vance Crowe [00:12:39] Going crazy. I saw you doing that Crazy. You had a Mia

Dax [00:12:41] Culpa

Vance Crowe [00:12:41] Saying, I used to think this is not, yeah. So what were, what was that all about?

Dax [00:12:45] Well, you know, I'm a I'm a big fitness guy. I, I love working out. I prefer the bodybuilding style now that I'm out of the, out of the military and, you know, I was a bit of an elitist, you know, I, I wanted to lift weights and I wanted to lift them heavy and I didn't wanna do anything else. So when these, you know, these famous bodybuilders would come out and be like, oh, I'm just doing bands from now on. I'd just kinda roll my, roll my eyes and laugh a little bit. But, you know, it's actually in a lot of ways a better exercise. And yeah, I've been forced to learn that over the past month working out in this tiny little railroad car I live in. But yeah, I think it's, I think it drove people crazy for a little bit. But now we're starting to adapt to the new way of life. We work out outside in small groups and we're getting it done. Yeah, I, we still, we still have our fingers crossed every day when we go to the meeting, like, please say the gyms, but open back up.

Vance Crowe [00:13:44] I, for me, it was a big adjustment because I had a routine worked out where I'm either lifting with one of my buddies in the morning or I'm going to jiujitsu at night. And that schedule of having other people that were expecting you to show up was one of those things that I thought I'll never get over that. That's the only way I can work out. Well now I'm either gonna get fat or I'm gonna get out into my, into my backyard and lift some weights and do some body weight exercises. And so you figure

Dax [00:14:07] It out, you know? Yeah. I think it's a, a learning experience for all of us to learn how to do some new things. 'cause you know, when you are that fitness person, you know this 'cause you're a fit person. Like, you like schedule, you like things to be the way they are and when they change, it hurts. But what's cool about that is it reach, it causes us to, you know, reach outside the box. And now I have this admiration for resistance bands and body weight training that I used to just laugh off as nothing. So yeah, I, I think that's a good thing. And, but yeah, you, you definitely, you definitely have to get on it. 'cause I think if I were out here with nothing else, I have nothing to do out here except work. So that was kind of my qi where I would just kinda, you know, get better for the whole day and get ready to do everything and it went away.

Vance Crowe [00:14:58] So this is changing the subject a little bit, but with regards to Coronavirus, I've, I've had some people on where we're talking about the level of quarantine that is being put on in the United States. So first in St. Louis the city, they locked it down and said, Hey, everybody stay at home unless you're an essential service. And then that's grown from there. And then you start seeing people say, if you see somebody going to church, you gotta lock that down and you can report them. When I hear this, I understand that that is really important to not spread it because you're gonna imperil the medical workers. You know, you may get more people sick than need to be, but on the flip side of it, there's a matter of liberty, right? We the first amendment correct. And the ability to gather as a soldier, as somebody that has fought and, and you know, we ha Harold you as people that, that give us our freedoms. What do you think about those freedoms? How, how on guard should we be?

Dax [00:15:53] So, you know, I I think it's a, it it's an interesting and a very dangerous line. And you know, and actually my view on it since we've started this has changed. You know, when, when this whole thing started off, I was like, you know, when they take religious, you know, liberties away, that's when it becomes a problem. But, you know, in keep in mind, I have a been, I've been here for this whole thing. I have not been back in the us so I kind of got that outsider perspective of what's happening down there. And you know, one of the things I saw was the church that I attend, the church that other people attend, they're figuring it out. They're figuring out how to use the internet. They're figuring out how to do these things to make, to make these things still happen. And I think that's the responsible thing to do. I think the dangerous thing is, is when the government starts telling you, you have to do that. You know, but, and, and there are some outliers, there are some churches that are saying, we're, we're still coming together. And I think that's dangerous, but I also think that's their right to, to do, you know. So I don't know if that's not really an answer. I'm kind of skirting the question there just because I, I don't necessarily have an answer, but would be, I

Vance Crowe [00:17:05] Mean, I think one of the thing

Dax [00:17:06] Answer would be,

Vance Crowe [00:17:07] Oh, go ahead.

Dax [00:17:08] I guess my answer would be, stay home, don't go to church, but I can't make you stay at home and not go to church. You know what I mean?

Vance Crowe [00:17:15] Yeah. I think that that's been one of the interesting things about enforcing all of these rules, right? Because in St. Louis and in some of these other places, they've had an outbreak where police officers are getting sick. And so then those police officers say, Hey, we're only gonna go in felony criminal situations and otherwise we're going to ignore it. And then so you start saying, well, there are people that want other people to behave differently. So they're saying, Hey, you guys don't meet in a church, but they're not willing to go out and stop them. And you can't really, you don't want to ask your police force to do it. So you get into these conflicts and I don't want that conflict. I don't want people to be fighting over whether or not they can go to church. But at the same time, you start, you start realizing that rules come when somebody is willing to enforce them. And if you don't have somebody willing to enforce them, is it a rule?

Dax [00:18:03] Correct. Right. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you know, that's, that's one of those fine lines that we're skirting right now is, is, you know, trying to tell people and trying to, trying to hope that they will do it because we have no way to enforce those things, you know? But yeah, I don't, I think that's all about all I have to say about that.

Vance Crowe [00:18:22] So talk about what it is like to watch this happen from a remote place far away from everybody else. I mean, I had a guy on from Montana and the day after we talked, or two days after, he had two people in his county get it. So you're more remote than that. What's it like watching the slow motion tidal wave?

Dax [00:18:40] You know, I, so the view that I have most of it is what happens on Facebook. So we all know that's not the actual truth of what's happening. I do get a little bit of, you know, mass media actually remind me to tell you about the, the media that I get. But, you know, it's been, it, I was frustrating e especially in the beginning, to watch people not take it seriously. And I think one of those things that has happened through talking to my father about what's happened, and he told me, you know, Hey Dax, listen, I've been through this before. And you know, he is like, and every time it's nothing. And one of the things that was frustrating to me is that, you know, it wasn't nothing. The, the swine flu wasn't nothing. All these things that happened were huge events. It just happened that we did the right thing so that they never became what this is. And unfortunately when that happens, people think it was just a scare. They don't understand that, hey, you know, this was bad, but we did all the right things to keep it from being a, you know, a global pandemic. They think, well they were just, they didn't know what they were talking about. And I was scared that the same thing was gonna happen here. You know, that like all these people, you know, that are the naysayers for the disease that say, you know, it's just the flu. It's, it's not that big of a deal. We can't do all these things that we're doing. If we do the right things, they will believe they're right, even though they weren't. And that's kind of scary.

Vance Crowe [00:20:12] Yeah, I mean the, the, when I started seeing the photographs and, and, and video out of places like Iran and even China, it, it didn't quite become like, holy crap. And just recently, if you've seen the video coming outta Ecuador, that place is hell. I have not on earth right now that that place is, as far as I can tell, there are so many bodies and the poor people in the, in the slums there, they can't get rid of the bodies. So they're dragging them and then running away and leaving them out in the streets. And you think about like, that makes this not a US problem. And I watched the news in the US describe it as like our people and our masks and, and I think, man, like it doesn't matter. Let's say you stop it in New York and LA and Florida and Nebraska, fine, if you don't stop it in the barrios of Brazil, it's coming back. Right? So we're all tied into this together in a way that we've never been all tied together in a war.

Dax [00:21:08] Absolutely. It's, it's an alien invasion is what it's, it's that thing that's gonna bring us together to have to fix, fix something on a global scale that we haven't had to do since 1942. You know, it's, it's an interesting thing. And you know, one of the places that I look to, so what I'll tell you right now is the, the, I was in medicine for 10 years, special operations medicine, we've talked about that. I was high up, you know, I I was a very high, highly appraised medic being a Green Beret medic. And in that 10 years you learn a little bit about medicine, but you learn a whole lot about who to listen to because the thing that you learn is that, you know, I could study my whole life and I'll never know anything, know everything about this medicine. So I have to be able to look to those people that know what they're talking about, the pathologist, all those people. And I think the average person doesn't understand how much knowledge it takes to be in their position. You know, how much schooling, how much, you know, practical work it takes to figure out how these things work. 'cause we just know so little about medicine and I think the thing on Facebook is they read one article and they're like, oh, it's just a flu. And they move on and it's like, well, everyone who knows what they're saying is terrified. So I'm terrified.

Vance Crowe [00:22:26] So tell, talk about the news. What news do you have access to? What are you paying attention to and how do you know who to trust? Oh,

Dax [00:22:32] Okay. So, so it's interesting because here we have something called a FN, it's Armed Forces Network and it's basically a little cable box, a satellite cable box. And there's, you know, there's a movie channel, there's a sports channel, there's a Jeopardy channel, which I watch every night. It's my new addiction is Jeopardy. I've never watched it my whole life, but it happens to come on right when I come to work. But then we get a news channel, and what's interesting about that news channel is it plays an hour of a news station. It starts with an hour of Fox News and then an hour of CNN and then an hour of Ms NBC. And then it rotates back and forth like that. And what's interesting about that is getting to see the different ways in which those, those organizations report the same news. And so yeah, that, that's interesting. You know, you, you'll watch a story from Fox and it of course has that right lane, and then you watch the story from CNN and it has that left lane, and then you get M-S-N-B-C, which is just an interesting news source to me. I I, you know, I I've never watched it in my life before becoming a soldier. It just still happens to be on there. And it is, it, it is much more interesting than those other two I mentioned.

Vance Crowe [00:23:48] So I had, you know, once you go to Clipper ship, you know, we, we got off of the, the main line, Hey, this is the way Americans get news. And once you got off the ship, I wasn't watching cable, I didn't get TV against, right. So that was kind of my leaving this all behind. And now we're watching the local, not the local, well, we do watch the local news, but we also watch like the evening news with CBS. And one of the things that I noticed is that all of their anchors enunciate their words and very slowly, and you start, like, at first I was annoyed by it, and then I was like, oh, wait a second, this is so that the widest possible audience can listen. I mean, the reason that you don't get in-depth information here is because they're trying to hit the center of the bell distribution of what is it that people are able to understand. And so, right. I I had not ever realized it's, it's, they're making a business case for making news simple so that the most people can understand it, as opposed to we're gonna give you the most sophisticated understanding of epidemiology. It's a different world. Correct.

Dax [00:24:51] Yeah. And you know, the, the, the interesting thing that separates, you know, the 24 hour news stations from that is that those stations make their money on a political lien, not on actual n news. So, you know, going away from your CBS nightly news, it's interesting to see the war that happens there because, you know, everything's gotta be politics on 24 hour news. Everything has to fit into that

Vance Crowe [00:25:17] Us them

Dax [00:25:18] That one thing. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:25:19] That

Dax [00:25:19] One thing that we could still argue about in our country now that we have all the information at, at our fingertips. And so everything including, you know, coronaviruses to stories about a cute little girl all have to be political.

Vance Crowe [00:25:33] This podcast has opened up my eyes because normally I'm just interviewing experts and, and people are interested to hear what does Jackie Joyner Sey think about dedication and discipline to, to whoever else. But on this one, I decided I'm actively going to find perspectives that make you upset. Because if I'm not, then that means I'm only interviewing people that already are in your echo chamber. I've never felt such pushback. I mean, people that I've known for years sending me middle finger emojis Wow.

Dax [00:26:03] And,

Vance Crowe [00:26:03] And telling me like, the blood of these people that will die is on my hands. And it goes on both sides. So it go, if I say,

Dax [00:26:10] Hey, yeah, absolutely, I'm,

Vance Crowe [00:26:11] If I'm interviewing somebody that says, Hey, shutting down the economy is gonna cause more suicides and other things, then I get all these people saying, you monsters. And if I do the other one and I show, Hey, this guy thinks the interstate should be shut down and we should really go on lockdown. There are people saying, you know, I'll, I'll fight that with a gun. You know, I've gotta have my freedoms. And you're like, holy cow, there's there, maybe

Dax [00:26:32] There

Vance Crowe [00:26:32] Is no middle ground.

Dax [00:26:34] And, you know, I think that's changed. You know, I, I think when we were going through our formative years, I think we're about the same age. And when we were going through our, you know, college years, it was still like, we still valued opinions that weren't ours. And, you know, I have an interesting life in that I've, I've lived several different lives. I, I went to art school in Colorado, I worked on cruise ships, now I worked for the government, I worked for the Green Berets. So I have this wide spectrum of friends from the extreme left all the way to the extreme right. And, you know, I, I think that the thing that people aren't doing, which is part of the thing that makes us great, is respecting everyone's opinion for what it's, I mean, just because you're talking to someone with a different opinion to yours does not mean that you agree with it, but have that discussion, learn something. When we went to college, I had no idea how I felt about politics. And when I threw out my ideas, I would get crushed. And, you know, someone didn't agree with it, they would argue with me. And that's what made me a person. It wasn't only hanging around with people who feel exactly as I do, so that I can feel better about my situation and never grow. It was surrounding myself with people who felt completely different than me.

Vance Crowe [00:27:54] Agreed. A hundred percent. And I think that one of the one, this, this coronavirus thing has been fascinating because people will come with an extreme opinion that they believe is knowledge that two days later is completely smashed. So the thing about the masks when they were like, Hey, you're saying people should wear masks, that's not the truth. And then two days later, all of a sudden people are saying, Hey, everybody should be wearing masks. And you, you watch people move from I, and I think it's a, it's a fear mechanism, right? We all overestimate how much we know about something. And probably as you were a medic, you get a couple weeks in and you're like, Hey, I got this thing, this is not gonna be too bad. And then you go a little further and you're like, oh shit, I didn't know anything. And I think that that's what's going on here. And the thing that, the reason I can be so open about my opinion is nobody is waiting on me to make a decision. I don't decide whether Missouri shuts down churches or not, but you absolutely, as long as you're listening to other perspectives that makes this a, a more colorful a adventure, really.

Dax [00:28:52] Yeah. And I mean, you know, like what you said about the, the things changing, like nobody knows how to do this. We are learning how to do this in 2020. You know, the last time we had this major thing was what, 1920 with the Spanish flu. You know, it's interesting that these things seem to happen on the 20th year, but you know, we don't know how to do this in the age we're in. And so everything we're learning, we're learning on the fly. So, you know, and it's just like working in medicine, you know, let's say you were a person, just a first responder who did CPR, you know, in the time that I've done CPR, we went from chest compressions with, you know, two breaths every 30 compressions. Then we went to only chest compressions because breaths don't work. Then we went back to 30 chest compressions with, with two breaths. You know, the medical community is such to where we don't understand it. Everything is theory. And so, you know, as we figure this thing out, we're gonna change our opinions completely from day to day. So,

Vance Crowe [00:29:55] So you're a person that's lived in extreme isolation for people that are now just getting into this quarantine and having the realization, Hey, I may be here for another month. What can you teach people about how to make sure they use their time wisely and they're thinking about it in a way that keeps their mind strong?

Dax [00:30:14] Yeah, you know, I, I, I have lived that laptop, you know, a lot of personal time spent alone while I was out here. The thing I'll say is, is finding that schedule, finding, you know, setting a schedule and sticking to it. Having that, you know, morning workout routine that you do, you know, then reading your news, but then going away from your news, not spending all day on a 24 hour news cycle, just getting more angry and more angry and more angry. Get out there and learn a new hobby. One of the things I've picked up lately is meditation. And I absolutely love it. And, you know, that takes a a up a good portion of my day and it, you know, gets me centered, gets me ready to take on the day. And then at the end of the day, you know, I, I have my meal, I watch my movie, I read a little bit and I go to bed. You just kind of have to find that, that thing I'm working right now. So I have the opportunity to do that. Most people have, you know, all day long now in the US to do whatever they want, but find, find something useful to fill your time up with, you know.

Vance Crowe [00:31:12] And if you were advising somebody to have a civilian medical kit during a time when they think, hey, hospitals, may, may not be something you can go to for your regular stitches or your, or you can, but you're taking a risk going. Right. What do you, what do you recommend about what should be in everybody's first aid kit right now?

Dax [00:31:29] You know, it, it, it's kind of hard for me to say I live in a trauma world, so everything with me comes with trauma. You know, I've got an entire trauma bag in my car in the front of my house, all these different places. You know that right now, that might not be necessary. However, when, when this thing, when our, our healthcare gets overrun, which I, I do believe it probably will, you're not gonna be able to get that medical care. So what I would tell people for this particular time to have is if they have kids with asthma stock up on their asthma medication, if they have, you know, if they have allergies, stock up on those things because you know, all those things that you need for daily life, especially if it's respiratory problems, you're not going to be able to get, once the healthcare is overrun, you definitely don't need extra toilet paper. I don't think you, you know, and I, I, I think you just need those things that you need every day, you know, have some Tylenol, have those things. But al also always have a trauma kit. Always have something that you can use to, you know, stop bleeding, always have, you know, bandaids, you know, alcohol swipes, those kind of things in a bag, because, you know, if these things go further south, you you, you're not gonna get any help with those things.

Vance Crowe [00:32:43] Yeah. Back maybe at the end of February, beginning of March, I started really buffing up my first aid kit, but I was a boy scout, so I had, you know, a reasonable amount of first aid training for, for a kid. Yeah. And one of the things I realized is you get a cut that needs three stitches right now, Vance, I didn't, I didn't have anything that could stop that. So I wanted to get a few things where it'd be like, hey, the, the better my medical kit is and the better my skills are, the larger my perimeter is on the areas of things that I can take care of as opposed to going to the hospital. And I don't think that's for everybody. Right. But if you're capable of doing that, having the supplies absolutely. Is what gives you that larger perimeter.

Dax [00:33:20] You know, I, I think for that, like, you know, having some of those butterfly strips that you can use is a great thing. You know, having all those, those larger bandages that you can use, some medical tapes, some trauma shears, that kind of stuff is important. But more important than being able to suture up a wound is being able to clean it. Because when you can't get to a hospital, that's the big piss piece you're missing is the ability to clean that wound. So, you know, having a bottle of alcohol in there, having, if you can get your hands on, on, and you're not allergic to shellfish, getting your hands on some rubbing iodine to rub a wound with those kind of things.

Vance Crowe [00:34:00] That's great advice. So, Dax, I I, one of the questions I've been asking everybody is what do you think the world will look like in two weeks?

Dax [00:34:11] In two weeks? You know, I would say one of the things that I, I've learned from the medical experts is how much we have in common with the Italian healthcare system and how, you know, how their system is built, almost the way ours is. They actually have, per capita, they have more respirators, they have more hospital beds than we do in the country. But if you look at 'em, it's very similar. And the only thing different from them was they had about a three week head start. They got this disease about three weeks before we did because they had, they had some people come back and start spreading it. I think you can look at, look at them and get a really good view of what the United States is gonna look like.

Vance Crowe [00:34:51] Holy terrify. And that's a scary Yeah. That's, that's a scary

Dax [00:34:54] Thought terrify, I think. Yeah. Yeah. I think it is. I think that's probably where, where we're gonna go. And I think at this point, with the amount of cases that we have of people just not knowing they have it, you know, those, those true cases, not the identified cases, I, I think we're there.

Vance Crowe [00:35:12] Well, that's, and I think

Dax [00:35:13] That's what we've gotta look at.

Vance Crowe [00:35:14] It's, it's an interesting thing because St. Louis got prepared early where I'm at. 'cause I live in St. Louis now, and now the, the beds haven't filled. And I am already hearing people say, well, I think that it was way overblown, or we got this solved. Or even more people saying, you know, I think I had a cold where I lost my sense of taste back in November, so I'm probably okay. And you're like, I, that's not a good deal

Dax [00:35:38] To take. Yeah. What I tell those people, what I tell those people is, is let's wait and see. I hope you're right. You know, I hope we don't get overrun. I, but you know, we haven't reached that point yet to make that decision. And if we start making that decision now, we're gonna make things worse.

Vance Crowe [00:35:54] Amen.

Dax [00:35:54] So, you know, you know, I, this is what I told some of my friends on Facebook. I was like, Hey, you know what, if this comes out and I'm wrong, make fun of me. All you want, do it. But just do the things that you're supposed to do now because I would rather be made fun of by someone who's alive than have to go to a funeral when this goes away.

Vance Crowe [00:36:14] Powerful words, man. Dax, I'm gonna let you go. I am deeply grateful for you being willing to do this, and thank you for being a guy that stand and watch over our soldiers and making sure things are safe. Thank you very much for what you do.

Dax [00:36:27] Absolutely. Absolutely. It's good to see you, man. Great

Vance Crowe [00:36:29] To catch up, man. Thank you.