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THE SJ CHILDS SHOW
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THE SJ CHILDS SHOW
Episode 289-From Combat to Resilience: Rich LaMonica's 22-Year Army Journey and Mental Health Advocacy
What happens when a New Jersey native with dreams of joining the Army turns those dreams into a 22-year journey of service? Join us as we chat with Rich LaMonica, a retired Army veteran who opens up about the values instilled in him by his hardworking parents and the challenges he faced, including a last-minute scramble to prepare for college. We reflect on his four combat deployments and how the patience and communication skills he honed over the years contrast with today's culture of instant gratification. It's a heartfelt discussion that touches on the host's own memories of waiting for letters from her father during Desert Storm and the unique bond formed through those exchanges.
In a raw and candid segment, Rich delves into the psychological aftermath of war, emphasizing the importance of recognizing when to seek help. Rich shares personal stories about how combat changes a person and the subsequent struggle to find appropriate mental health support. He highlights the power of family support, resilience, and humor, offering practical advice like stacking small daily victories to maintain momentum. Rich also stresses the significance of finding tailored professional help and the supportive networks available to veterans and first responders, making this a crucial listen for anyone facing similar challenges.
Rich also shares invaluable resources for mental health support, including podcasts and nonprofit organizations like Team RWB and the Travis Manion Foundation. We discuss his upcoming book about soldiers transitioning back to civilian life and his ongoing mentorship projects with the Travis Manion Foundation. We wrap up with a heartfelt conversation about the unexpected joys of meaningful encounters and their lasting impact on our lives. For more information, visit The Misfit Nation website and check out The Misfit Nation Podcast on all social media platforms.
Welcome to the SJ Child Show, where a little bit of knowledge can turn fear into understanding. Enjoy the show. Hello, and thank you so much for being here today, the SJ Child Show. Today I have a guest that I'm going to be excited to learn more about, because this is our first time meeting. This is Rich LaMonica. I hope I said Rich, right? It's Rich right, I'm just kidding. It's so nice to meet you. Give us an introduction, let us know why you're here today.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Thanks for having me, thanks for the invite. Like I said in the pre -reel, this is always great to meet new people, especially when we're both in cold climates right now. For whatever reason that is, it's an awesome time. Awesome time of year is the new year has started and everything and everyone's focusing on their new goals.
Speaker 1:But about me I'm born and raised in New Jersey, the youngest of four. We grew up in a railroad apartment which, if you don't know, is an apartment building, an apartment where none of the rooms have hallways, it's just straight room, room, room, room, so you have to walk through everyone's room to get to your room. And I lived in the last room with my two brothers. My sister had her own room for obvious reasons, since she was the only girl, and then my mom and dad were the room between us. I guess as the buffer and being the youngest, I learned early to fight because you had to fight, being the youngest with other two adult siblings, and my parents worked hard and showed us the value of hard work and taught us all the right from wrong, whether we learned it right away or it took us a while.
Speaker 1:As I was going through high school, my goal in life was always to join the Army, because I thought the Army was the coolest thing in the world. As a kid I used to sit and watch that. I'm pretty sure it was either the ending of Vietnam or something that was going on in the Middle East, with my dad on the news and my dad was in the army. So I was like I always want to be in the army. Then I was about to go into my senior year of high school and I was too young to sign up by myself. So I said, dad, I need you to sign this form to let me join to college. I said whoa, I haven't prepared for college. I haven't taken one class to get ready for college. So he said well, you better go sign up for them. So I went to my counselor, signed up for all the maths and sciences. I didn't take my first three years of school and my senior year. Instead of being cool and hanging out with everyone, I was going to class with freshmen, sophomores and juniors and learning science and math again and getting ready for college. I took my SATs and somehow I passed them and I got into Berkeley College in New York for my freshman year and then I transferred to St Peter's College, my second year in Jersey City, and I played football there for two years. People were finally saying, hey, this college isn't for me. I don't want to do this.
Speaker 1:I joined the Army since I was old enough to do it on my own 1993, and served 22 years. I retired in 2015, with four combat deployments along the way. After I retired, I took a complete year off to basically figure out how to reset my life and also try to find my growing up job, and I found that to be like the hardest task I had in my life. But 365 days after I retired, I found a job. I worked there for two years helping other veterans and then I landed this job I'm in now, where I train soldiers before they go to war or to big training events to help them succeed, and in that last three years I graduated with my master's from Georgetown University. Congratulations, my doctorate. So now I guess I'm a school person. Now I wasn't. Like I said earlier, we all change as we grow.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's incredible, Wow. Well, thank you for your service, and I mean that's a lot of commitment, a lot of commitment which shows a lot of strength on your parents part to instill that in you. So that's fantastic.
Speaker 1:I give all my respect to my parents for what they put up with four kids for one and working hard and teaching us values along the way, without letting us waver that far outside the gray area.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm an only child of a retired major general in the Air Force, so I can appreciate, you know, like the military life and can't understand what it's like to have a sibling, but at the same time you know like it is interesting. I remember during those years waiting for letters from Desert Storm to come, you know, and they would come every few months and I would get just that's. All you had back then were these handwritten letters. So I hold them dear in my treasure box of memories.
Speaker 1:Much different concept back then than now. Now it's an instant gratification now, so it's yeah, yeah, and it's something that we don't.
Speaker 2:it's almost impossible. How do we teach kids now how to like and have that experience? They're on a totally different path and things you know we couldn't have imagined. Right Going forward for them.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of our youth today don't understand what patience is. So writing that letter, sending it, letting it get wherever it's getting for receiver, getting it them writing and hoping it comes back. That patience to wait for that letter every day, running down to the mailbox and did I get one? Did I get one? Especially in your case? You were probably a little girl at the time. Wait for dad to write those letters and you'd be so excited when that one came. Dad's good. He's writing jokes to me. Dad jokes to me in a letter. So it it's great.
Speaker 2:Exactly, oh, that's exactly it. And I remember one time in middle school him coming in his flight suit to my middle school and surprising me. It's such a different appreciation for my kids today who see their dad every day. It's hard. Who see their dad every day, you know, and bless his heart. I wouldn't want to have it any other way, cause I I know what it feels like to have that missing piece, you know, of a family member gone. But yeah, but anyways. That's enough about my story. You're here to talk about you. No, it's. It's great when we can just understand each other's journeys too or, you know, even just have compassion or grace and understanding for others no-transcript.
Speaker 1:Okay. So during COVID, like many people, I decided that I'd press the pedal down and do everything at once. So, 2020, you know, everyone went through that whole whirlwind of everything going on. So every month, I was writing just a funny post online at the end of every month saying welcome to this level of Jumanji. You made it through this one. Now, when we get to this one, you fought these demons. Every month there was a different fear that they were throwing out there. So I put that fear in my post and at the end of the year, I had basically 13 different things that I wrote and my daughter said you should put that into a book. So at the end of 2020, I 2021, I finally finished that book with her help editing.
Speaker 1:So my daughter helped me edit the book and it came out 13-step guide to success right here.
Speaker 1:Love it, it was published right at the end of December of 2021. It gives you 13 steps to be a successful human not in business, not in making millions of dollars, but how to be a good human. And it's doing pretty well and it's got a lot of good positive reviews. In that time, I also started my doctorate and I started my podcast. At the end of 2020, I said to myself I got about eight extra hours a week that I don't have to deal with. What can I do? So I started research. I said let's start a podcast.
Speaker 1:So I started the Misfit Nation podcast to try to give veterans a place to voice, to get the pressures of PTSD off their chest. So maybe we'll have them a little longer, because we're trying to fight that 22 veterans a day that are dying via suicide. And after my first few episodes or actually about half a dozen they're like, hey, we need something else besides our voices. We need someone to tell us how to do things. How do I write a book? How do I start a business? How do I get to Hollywood? How do we get into music? There's all the coaches out there that can help us be better at anything. So that's what I've been doing. So, 234th episode posted yesterday.
Speaker 2:So it's going pretty well. That's wonderful to hear, and do you have? Are they veteran guests that you have on?
Speaker 1:It's probably about a 50-50 mix right now.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. I think it's so special to learn from other people's stories through anecdotal experiences. To learn from other people's stories through anecdotal experiences you gain so much kind of if because you don't know when you're going to come across any kind of experiences. And the more you learn from other people's experiences you could take that you know a little bit wiser to move forward. But there's so much that is needed to be still healed and talked about. As far as PTSD and trauma from you know veterans, how do you start? Like, where do they start once they have come home and they, you know, just they don't know where to start. What is a good place we can tell them today is a good place to start.
Speaker 1:First thing you do is understand you have a problem. You're not the same person you were when you left home. You're not the same person you were when you went to war. You change and for me, it was nearly nine years or so before I admitted something was wrong with me. So 2003, 2004, I went to Iraq, my first in-face combat deployment. I came back. My wife and daughter both said, hey, something's wrong with you.
Speaker 1:I went back in 2010 to Afghanistan, came back and when I came home I knew something was wrong with me. So I went and asked for help and they told me no, you're a senior ranking person, you need to go back and lead, take care of yourself. I said okay. So it wasn't until I retired, really, where I finally started getting help and I once you realize that you need it, you have to go get it. You have to let people know you need it and you have to go get it. I'm not saying go to the va or go to Dr X, because no doctor, no two doctors or no two people are the same. So you have to find that one person that actually fits you. And it took me to go to a civilian doctor to sit with him and chat with him, and I went to him, I think for six straight months and he got me into a better glide path and made my head way better, and that's that's what helped me to propel to where I am now.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's such great advice too, so just don't quit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, and listening to your family understanding that you gone through something serious that they couldn't possibly imagine, but that they can still see the effects that it's having, maybe, on your day-to they can still see the effects that it's having, maybe, on your day-to-day life. So I think that that's really kind of hard for people to listen to, but right for them to hear.
Speaker 1:Definitely and it takes. Like I said, you have to understand that you did change and you're not the same person you were when you were 12. You're not the same person you were when you were 18. And a lot of these young, when the war was going on, a lot of young 18, 19 year old women and men were going from high school to training to war, like immediately, with no, hey, this is what you need to mentally prepare. And then they get there. They lose a buddy, they lose a friend, they see something happen, they see a kid that got killed by accident. That's in their head forever. How do they deal with that? There's no puzzle piece that says, hey, how to do it, you would need help. You got to give help there. It's out there. You just got to reach out and other veterans will help you. Other people will help you First responders. They're always good about helping. They have the same issues, first responders, and so they have a big network of things that they know we can go to as well.
Speaker 2:Oh, I love that. So let's go to the opposite end of this and look at the beginning of the journey. Now that you have all the experience to look back, what's the best way to prepare to do this?
Speaker 1:I think in my case, the best preparation I had was having a strong family background, and my parents teach me resilience and teach me how the value of hard work and a positive mindset. That helped me out a lot and I can tell, as I was struggling through things, that maintaining positivity did help me. I never got so down where I just couldn't function. So having that strong, positive mindset, knowing that there's going to be light at the end of the tunnel, you don don't have to stay in the darkness forever. You have to keep pushing forward, get up every day and start stacking victories. I mean, if you, if, even if it's the one victory day where you wake up, that's a victory. The second victory, by making your bed and then brushing your teeth and count them up as you go throughout the day. Just stack victories every day and I think that helps everyone. What will help everyone as they go through their journey or the battle?
Speaker 2:And I like what you said about humor, because I think that humor can be used duly in defense mechanisms, probably for some, but also for enlightenment and for just to help us kind of get into the groove and maybe see a different perspective. Because when we change our mindsets we're oftentimes able to see perceptions a little bit differently and different opportunities come.
Speaker 1:Definitely Humor helps, like you said, both ways. It's a mask or it's just something to get everyone in a better way, to make them laugh, make them forget about why they're upset for at least a few minutes Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely Well, and as a speaker, I think that you have to learn how to use humor to maybe draw your audiences back in or, you know, connect with people. So, yeah, I think that it definitely has its places, you know, in where it needs to be, and even for a serious topic, as we're talking about, you know, with veterans and PTSD, I mean there also has to be a light at the end of the tunnel, like you said. What type of resources, like, like you said, a doctor's office, what other type of resources are out there? Podcasts, right, there's probably now that that's a newer thing out there.
Speaker 1:Podcast is a great medium to find. Find a show that you can listen to, and a lot. There's a lot of shows that talk about mental health and there's a lot of shows that talk about any many, many different health issues or diagnoses, and you can find one that fits the niche you want. Or if you just want a comedy one, there's a ton of comedy ones or true crime you don't want to watch true crime on investigation discovery, you can listen to it all day on a podcast. But there's always something out there as far as that medium. But there's also a lot of organizations out there, nonprofit organizations that can help you Team RWB, travis, manion Foundation, warrior Project. There's tons out there that are there with resources waiting to help you. You just got to reach out and say, hey, I'm Mr X or Ms X and I need help.
Speaker 1:And just get out there and get that help.
Speaker 2:Now what if we are the family member of someone who we're noticing might need some help? How do we best approach our family member or friend?
Speaker 1:If it's your family member, you know their, you know their triggers already before before an incident happens, so you know what not to do.
Speaker 1:So kind of approach it lightly. I don't want to say walk on eggshells, but just approach the subject lightly. Say, hey, last year you were so much happier. Now it seems like you're down. What's going on? Is something going on you don't want to talk to me about? Or hey, let's go do a run, you used to like running. Let's go out, let's go do a run, you used to like running. If they say no, then why not? Why don't you want to run? Oh, then that's another thing, that's another sign, symptom that's telling you hey, we need to get you better. Then maybe the best step would be how about we go and find someone to help us, because it's an us thing when it's a family unit. If it's a friend unit, it's a little trickier. But you can still do the we us thing with friends too, especially if they're a good friend of yours. You don't want to lose a good friend. Say, let's take care of us so we can hang out next year and go fishing or go hunting or do whatever we do together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I think that that's so important to know how to approach your friends and family, but to truly just want to have compassion for them. And if you are listening and you want to find resources, please reach out to myself or Rich and we can guide you in the right paths to get help for your friends or families that might be struggling. What is next on your list of things to do? What are you going to do? I mean, you've got the book out and podcast. You don't have time for anything else. Rich, what are you going to do?
Speaker 1:Well, I got my next book almost ready. This one is going to be more of a fictional, fact-based fiction story. It's a conglomeration of a lot of the people I met along my career. I put them into characters in this book as soldiers and war and how, basically the transition back to civilian world and how they deal with the same thing. We just talked about PTSD and the fight after you take the uniform off. So I'm about halfway through. I was a lot further than I trashed a bunch but brought it back.
Speaker 1:You know, like you do when you're creative. But now I'm going to spin it to the civilian side and send the first half to my daughter for her to destroy it and send it back to me and through that process again. And also I'm the co-leader of the Travis Manion Foundation chapter here in Clarksville, so we try to keep veterans involved with the community when our main focus is mentoring the next generation. So getting out there and doing character does matter presentations and getting young middle school, high school women and men to get out there and start leading from the beginning. So there'll be the future leaders of our country.
Speaker 2:So important. I believe that our youth is just the most important piece of our generation's future and so much, yeah, and so much can be. They can be helped in so many ways and they need us strong adults that want to see them have strong futures, to be their speakers and leaders and help them to become the next, you know, the next ones for sure.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:I love that Absolutely. Now tell us before we go what's the name of the podcast, your website where we can get 13 steps to success.
Speaker 1:Awesome, my website, which will get you to everything. It has my podcast on there, our YouTube is on there and the book is on there as well, as our merch is on there. And the the book is on there as well as our our merch is on there as well. So it's the, the misfit nationcom. It's the misfit nation m-i-s-f-i-t-n-a-t-i-o-ncom. Our podcast is the misfit nation podcast. One word, misfit nation, and that's on every social media platform as well. You got the email is misationPodcast at gmailcom. We usually answer within basically 30 minutes, usually unless I'm in a meeting at work.
Speaker 2:Wonderful. It's such a pleasure to have you on today. I obviously read your profile when I invited you on, but it's been a little while and I think that I mean I was a little surprised and like excited to to talk, and now I'm like, oh my gosh, of course this is exactly what I needed. Isn't that funny how those things run into our, our days like that, you know, and just like bring us that, that good talk that we needed to have with someone.
Speaker 1:Awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you so much for being with me today, and I hope we can stay in touch.
Speaker 1:Definitely, it was an honor to be on the show with you.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. Talk to you soon.
