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SHORT DESCRIPTION

In this episode, we're doing something a little different. Our conversation with Brad Snyder, a Navy veteran, Paralympic gold medalist, and author, will reveal some behind-the-scenes insights into his memoir, "Fire in My Eyes." We'll discover what inspired him to write a memoir, what it was like to put some painful and confusing memories down on paper, and other details about his process. We will also talk about some leadership lessons that go beyond the pages of a book, including the metaphor of "Tap and Advance."

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT for "TAP AND ADVANCE"

MAJ. CATHERINE ROY, COMMUNICATIONS AND MARKETING MANAGER: Welcome to the VMI Leader Journey podcast, where we have inspiring conversations with leaders to uncover the strategies, lessons, and stories that shape their success. Today, we're excited to explore memoir writing with Brad Snyder, a Navy veteran, Paralympic gold medalist, and author. During this interview, Brad shares some behind-the-scenes insights into his journey from the Naval Academy to the Paralympic Games and how he learned resilience, determination, and the power of embracing challenges.

We'll use his memoir, Fire in My Eyes, as a guide to explore what inspired him to write a memoir and the process of the writing. Plus some leadership lessons that go beyond the pages of a book. Whether you're a student leader, athlete, or just curious about leadership, this conversation will inspire and motivate you. So grab your headphones, lean in, and join us for this enlightening exploration of leadership with Brad Snyder.

Let's dive in.

Welcome, Brad Snyder. Thank you so much for being a guest on today's episode of the VMI Leader Journey.

BRAD SNYDER: It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

ROY: I have a lot of notes here, and as we just reviewed, there are a lot of things I'd like to get into. First of all, how has your visit been so far? How have you been here for the whole two hours?

SNYDER: It's been spectacular. It's always a special treat to be able to visit somewhere that has such, deep and intertwined history with our great country, as VMI does. And I've, you know, always had a stout appreciation for this institution but never had the opportunity to come and visit the campus. So I'm really excited to be here now.

ROY: Excellent. So well, again, we're just super excited to have you here tonight. I want to get into first, the book that you wrote, which is titled Fire in My Eyes. I have read it cover to cover. and you co-wrote that book with Tom Sileo. I will just tell our audience that it's an excellent read.

I highly recommend reading it. just for the human interest stories. But then we'll talk a little bit later in the podcast about some of the leadership lessons to gain from, reading the story. So, first of all, I'll also say that part of our Courageous Leadership speaker series that what we are also doing is giving away a copy of the book with each talk.

My overall impression is, having read the book is I was very impressed with the authentic voice and several instances you talk about, failures and struggles, which I think will be an inspiration for the cadets. it was certainly inspirational for me, even so, a couple of questions about that. Number one, in your own words, why write a memoir?

SNYDER: The book covers aspects of my childhood up to the decision to go to the Naval Academy, my experiences at the Naval Academy, and then, my military experience. But then most of the quote-unquote story revolves around the year between my injury in September of 2011 and then my, ability to go to the Paralympics a year later so that that year is a real consequential part of my entire life and kind of the focus of the book.

Shortly after I competed in London, that story kind of went out there, and I got a lot of invitations to come and speak at various places. The Naval Academy, being one of the Naval Academy Leadership Conference, is one of the first places I spoke. And at that point, I didn't really fancy myself a speaker. I didn't really know what to put into a speech, and I didn't really know what to say.

And I sort of would get up on stage and bumble through a bio of myself. Hi, am this guy. I did these things and here's my story. What what questions do you have? and for whatever reason, that resonated with people. People really liked that. I was just kind of sharing my perspective on this unique set of experiences.

I got better and better at sharing the story, got more and more invitations over a span of a few years, and frequently the suggestion would come up like one of the incredible story. You know, you're this incredible person and you should really write this into a book. And then I would go and do more speaking and they would say the same thing, and they would introduce me as things like American Hero and, you know, resilience figure and this and that.

The other thing, and, the way I was introduced did not feel like me, didn't feel like who I am, who I aspire to be. Certainly, I know we all aspire to be heroic in some sense, but for someone to actually say that in my introduction was very unnerving and especially reflecting on my past. I haven't always been hitting homeruns, you know, like I haven't always been winning gold medals.

I have a whole bunch of things that I've screwed up along the way. And I thought, you know what? For anybody who's calling me a hero, maybe they don't know the whole story. Maybe they know all the good stuff. Maybe they don't know the bad stuff, too. And for someone to call me a hero, I want you to know the whole story.

And if you read the whole story and you still want to call me a hero afterward, then great. But I wanted it all to be out there, and there's a lot I can't share about that journey into blindness. And beyond that, I couldn't get out in a 45 minute keynote, and so I agreed. I thought, yeah, writing a book would be a good idea.

I spent a number of years trying to write the book. I had really bad insomnia after my injury, so when I couldn't sleep at night, I would just stay up all night writing chapters about this chapter's about that and trying to sell the pitch to a couple. Publishers got told, 'thank you for your service, but no,' a bunch of times it turns out that Tom Sillitoe is, a childhood friend of my cousin.

So I, we actually had a familial connection. He had just written another outstanding book called Brothers Forever, which is about two Naval Academy grads who are now buried in Arlington together. I highly recommend that book. but there was a very natural partnership there. I had actually already had a near complete manuscript, but at least so far as I could see, when I when I started working with Tom, I sent him the manuscript and he promptly deleted probably about half of it, which was a blow to my ego, but maybe recognize that I really didn't know how to intentionally put an arc together.

I had written a bunch of chapters about stuff that nobody would really care about. And then when I read back with Tom and edited, there was a lot of power in sort of the Mark Twain quote. If if I had more time, I would have written a shorter note, and by editing it down, I think it ended up being a lot better than it was.

ROY: Yeah, yeah, it's similar to, Oprah Winfrey likes to say reading is rereading. Yes. And certainly writing is editing.

SNYDER: That's correct.

ROY: I have definitely experienced that. So why might someone want to read this book? Let's give you your best plug for reading this book.

SNYDER: I think, and I, I don't know, I won't presume to be the reader, but I can say what I was trying to achieve with the book was sort of an explanation for my mom. my mom didn't have a ton of background in the military. I don't think she was ever fully aware of the nature of what I was doing in the military.

Both because of her lack of connection with the military, but also, because I intentionally withheld information, I guess I, you know, I didn't really want my mom to worry about where I was going or what I was doing. Right. And I knew what I was doing was risky. And so I would sort of knew from my as it to my mom.

And there's a I don't know if it's in the book or not, but I, my mom was really mad at me in the hospital. Her because people would visit me and some books. Somebody came to ask me about particular aspects of what was going on in Afghanistan. And of course, I was in the hospital and I was after injury and I was all doped up.

So I was very honest. And afterward, my mom kind of growled at me. I thought you were passing out candy to children, which is what I would frequently tell her on the phone and say, what do you do every day? Oh, well, we're, you know, we're out in the villages, and I give candy to children, you know, hearts and minds and that sort of thing.

And she seemed to willingly accept that at the moment. But I think, after the fact, came to recognize that what I was doing was very different than what I had shared with her. so, you know, kind of keeping my mom is the target audience in mind. My mom's not going to get a lot of military jargon. She's not really well versed in, are interested in the, like, the grander strategy of it all or counterinsurgency or international relations.

I think what my mom wanted to understand was what was my experience, what was was I afraid, what was I trying to do? What were all my friendships like? Was it difficult to be away from family? was I scared when I got hurt, that sort of stuff. So I, I, I, I was also an avid reader at the time, as we all are probably of military memoirs.

I'd read McChrystal's book and Petraeus' book. And, what the what I thought in all of those military memoirs. One, they're all too long BS. They're all laced in jargon. They're all.

ROY: We are very.

SNYDER: Intentional about trying to situate themselves in this really big history. What I felt like was missing in the sort of the war memoir, genre was just like, just for me, like a my experience is just some yokel from Florida who thought it was a good idea to serve my country. I went and did this kind of crazy set of things.

I wasn't trying to explain it all. I wasn't trying to have a comment on whether we should have been there or shouldn't have been. There was a good was it bad? Was it whatever, you know, was and this was my experience with it and it shaped who I am. And I think you should know about it. And that's kind of what I was trying to achieve.

ROY: I would say you definitely accomplished that task. and certainly, I think it does give a fresh perspective in that, military genre, space. And and you didn't have to explain your political reasons for whatever decisions happened with our military. So, so, so that is I think that did free you up to share a more relatable, authentic story.

Talk about the process a little bit. So you did mention and touch on that a little bit that you had written this fairly long memoir that 50% just got slashed. and I would say that, Tom Sileo's work on this did help. What I noticed was the reuse and repurposing of certain phrases that did help connect stories and chapters together.

Yes. What else can you talk about in terms of the process of writing the book?

SNYDER: Yeah, I think from my perspective, my approach was like a scrapbook. I could think of an image in my mind and write the context of the photo. And that was if you flip through a set of photos of my background, that would sort of be how the chapters were arranged. And this memory was a really cool memory and a really cool story.

Let me tell you about it. And this is a really important part of the story. But it was very fragmented. Not Tom did a really, really good job of adding a lot of structure, as you alluded to, binning different thoughts and photographs into cohesive chapters that all matched a general arc from being a child in the Witchy-Waky Springs all the way up to being injured and then to the Paralympics, he added a lot of flow, and it made it a lot easier for the reader than what it would have looked like if they even had read the manuscript I submitted to Tom, which was again, like a scrapbook.

The process after that, I will say, as, as prideful as I was in the manuscript that I sent to Tom, there were big chunks missing, and it was because it was all the hard stuff to write. For example, everything in the hospital for me was hard to write on because it's a memory I don't necessarily like going back into.

I was really doped up. I was first newly blind. everything was very just massive in that set of memories. And it was hard to go back into that space and as you said, like be authentic about it. I could have said, you know, here's the facts and figures. Here's what happened. I was in the hospital between September the 11th and whatever else, but I actually wanted to go back into that space and understand what was it like with my brother.

What was it like with my mother? What was my head space? What was I afraid of? What was I excited about? What was I? What were my true honest feelings? and, you know, you have to go back into that, but you had to be in that memory and then describe it. It was just a really hard thing to do.

But I would say it was extremely cathartic for me to go back into the blast and go into that memory and, and search around in there and understand what happened to me. what was my perspective and what was the perspective of my friends who are on the battlefield, what it must have been like for them, right, to hear the blast and to run over to me and see me all messed up and be worried about that? Yeah.

To think of my mom getting a call at 530 in the morning to think of my sister having to fly to the hospital and, you know, go to the, the airfield at, Langley Air Force Base and know that I'm on there but not be able to talk to me. And these are all, like, really heavy memories that I had to go back into to write about.

ROY: And did you just write those stories or did you have, like, an interview, like a moderated interview with Tom Sileo or with a phone conversations?

SNYDER: I think the depth of my thinking is always best when I can sit and write it right. So, I wanted to go into this space. I wanted to write what I thought was important, and then I would submit it to Tom, and then Tom would come back in a lot of cases with most of the chapters. It was an editing, like here, I screen through this, I fix your typos.

I corrected a couple sentences. I added some detail where you needed it. There were especially with big chapters like the Blast, or hospital chapters. There was more of a where are you going with this section? And tap in advance was like an idea that came out of talking about the rehab process and me sort of sharing with him this idea of these concentric circles and then I don't know who it was, said it, but it was in conversation that it dawned on us like, oh, you know, there's this really neat connection between the metal detector and the cane and this idea of clearing for each footstep.

You know, it's just like life, you know, you got to, like, know what you're where you're at before you can take a leap somewhere else. And so you have to be comfortable and then you have to take a risk and you have to be comfortable. You have to take a risk. And that cycle repeats over and over and over again.

Oh, what a cool idea to rope that into a broader concept. you know, a leadership lesson that follows on. So I think they all started with, you know, I am the subject matter expert in those memories, right? I have they're my memories. Right. So I wanted to go back into those memories, pull out what I thought was important.

And then Tom did a really, really good job of pushing, nudging, and shaping all of those ideas into being situated within that broader arc.

ROY: Yeah, it sounds like he was trying to help you be very purposeful. Yeah, in what you were trying to accomplish and keeping it your story exactly at the same time, so excellent job there. I couldn't help but wonder as I read the hospital scenes, particularly. You talked about your mom's voice being the first thing that kind of, that you felt you could trust in this bizarre purgatory. And that that helped you come out of this coma state that that they had put you in. A lot of times you referenced those instances where you were not conscious with the term dreamscapes. can you talk a little bit about that?

SNYDER: Yeah, yeah, they were very strange. my experience throughout that time was, though, you took your normal perspective and your normal perception of time and memory, and you folded all up and you tied it in knots. Time moved at different speeds. My memory was all odd. and, for that first week especially, I didn't always recognize that I wasn't seeing with my eyes things would appear in my mind, that were generated by real stimulus.

So, sounds I was hearing with my ears in the environment around me would reshape themselves into different realities in my head. and look in my keynote. I'll make this joke later. I kind of as a joke. I say, Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, like, everything looked like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, which is one of many dreamscapes that I often found myself in some.

Sometimes my dreams would have me in. Like these really strange, like, you know, if you were able to go to a shipyard and you're in all those CONEX boxes that are being loaded off of the ships, I felt like I was at one point, I thought I was trapped in this everlasting yard of shipping containers. Right. that's one dreamscape.

Other dreamscapes were like walking around in the desert. at one point I thought that I was in a tent, like a a green army tent in the desert with no walls in it. And I kept thinking, I. You would have thought that Walter Reed would have had walls, you know, like. And so I say that to say that for me, these realities, these alternative realities were very, very, very, very real to me.

Yeah. And they were flexing and something I didn't understand. And that's why I called them dreamscapes. It's important to know that, that those were my reality for a while. And that's why it was so disorienting. Why is this so normal for everybody else? You hear a doctor and a nurse come in and they're talking to each other as though it's completely normal to be in this derelict tent in the middle of the Desert Rise shipping container area.

And I just didn't get that. but I do remember early on hearing voices, and specifically my mom and my mom's a long, long. You should know about my mom. My mom's a 38 year neonatal nurse, so I thought, my mom knows the hospital, and she'll know what's normal and she'll know what's abnormal. And she's going to advocate for me and to hear her voice and for her to be calm ish and to say, hey, we're here and this is okay.

And we've talked to the doctor and you, this is what's going on. That was something I could trust in psych. Okay, if my mom's okay with this weird thing, then it's okay, right? And as the week went on, I came to, like, kind of understand that these are dreams. And even though I sometimes I would know that I was dreaming and I would be afraid of the dream and be stuck in the dream.

But I knew, you know, after being in the hospital for a couple days or every night, my mom would leave and go to her hotel or whatever, and then she would come back in the morning, and sometimes the nights were the worst. I would have the worst nightmares at night, and I would know I'm stuck in my nightmare and I know I just have to wait.

I just have to wait for mom to come back in the morning and the nightmare will go away. And that's how it worked. Like in the morning, my mom would bring some breakfast and she would show up. And there was like this immense amount of relief, like the nightmare's over and my mom's here, and I'm okay.

ROY: You could relax.

SNYDER: Exactly. And just day in, day out, that's how it went for a period of a couple weeks.

ROY: So I wonder if there's something that, practitioners can learn about patient care through you telling that story. Yeah. I know that they encourage family members to come in, although not to overtired patient, but just interesting that having those voices and then whose voice maybe is the one that the person can connect to to come out of their, dreamscape, if you will.

SNYDER: So actually, for sure. But I will tell you, the practitioners at Walter Reed were really good at that. They were really good at understanding the amount of stimulus I could take. And they understood that my family was a very comforting presence for me. But they were also very mindful of like, my mom's going through hell, too. She's watching me really hurt and really messed up and navigating massive uncertainty.

She's afraid to if she needs to go to sleep. So the the practitioners at Walter Reed were good about, hey, we've got this. Go take a couple hours, get some sleep, come back breakfast thing in the morning. So they navigated all that really well. They did other things too. I was telling them like, don't give me any more sleep meds.

That's freaking me out. They're like, okay, we're going to we're going to change the meds. We're going to do this. They were very responsive to my needs. One nurse gave me a talking watch, and when I, when I told them about the night, like being stuck in my dreams at night and how that really wakes me up, they said, here, listen, this is your watch.

When you wake up, always hit your watch, and then it'll tell you what time it is. And now auditory reality on time. so, so long as I knew time was clicking by, I wasn't stuck in the nightmare. I was still grounded to reality even if someone wasn't there. And that was actually really insightful. And that's exactly what I started doing.

Every time I woke up, I would look and see at the time. Now, sometimes it felt like I would click it a couple times and only a few seconds will have gone okay. And it was freaking me out that way. But at least it was always going by. So I always knew I'm not stuck and mourning is coming and people are coming back and it allowed me to navigate that kind of terror for a little bit when I also had, like my favorite nurse at night was this fellow named John, who was a combat medic.

He said he was a combat medic in Afghanistan. He he knew he knew what I was going through. He knew the battlespace. He had friends. We had similar friends. he was just like a very like it was very easy to trust him. And he was able to kind of establish that rapport through our common experience. And so I would always kind of feel comfortable when John was around to.

ROY: Go look, all right, well, I'd like to transition over into some of the leadership lessons as we close out our discussion, because there's getting time for you to move on to other things. So I do want to go on to some of the leadership lessons that I took away from the book. We've already mentioned. Tap in advance. Yeah.

Can you like in a couple sentences, talk about tap in advance and give it some context for a cadet audience?

SNYDER: Sure. Tap in advance. I think starting at the very abstract level is all about, if you, no matter what you want to do, whether it's like, achieving a growth mindset, having goals, competing for a championship, getting a PhD, getting through your undergraduate experience at VMI, you can't do it all at once. You have to do it in these very small, incremental steps. And it involves, becoming comfortable with where you are.

But knowing that you need to take little, tiny risks constantly to push your boundaries and become more capable, more wise, more well read more. You know, physically fit whatever else that's happened. Advanced metaphor comes from blindness, where when you're using a blind cane, what you're doing is you're clearing a spot for the one step in front of you.

That's it. you're safe where you are. You're standing there completely fine. But I'm going to use the cane to clear one space in front of me. And then I take one step, and then I clear the space and take another step. So no matter how hard things get, how complex they get, how difficult and challenging and scary and adverse and whatever else, all you have to do is take one step and you just tap and advance.

Tap and advance.

ROY: That's excellent. another, phrase in the book, you talked about the Delta. Yeah. So I think that it's a nice segway from tap in advance. and it reminds me that the future is we might have plans, but it's kind of unknowable. So I call it like a fog. Yes. You really don't know. You are kind of navigating your life as best you can.

One step at a time. Yeah, but then there's the experiences that we have, and in your book, you you coined the phrase the delta. Yeah. Talk a moment about that.

SNYDER: Is a fun kind of process. Point about the delta. in my original sort of manuscript, I go off on all of these offshoots all the time. So coming from the Naval Academy, I'm all about these leadership vignettes and the lesson learned all the time. Right. I think Tom encouraged me to have more patience, tell the story first, and then tell the lesson learned.

So he took out a lot of the little vignettes that I had along the way in the book, and then in the epilogue told me, go out. Well, write whatever you think is the broader lesson learned. And I think throughout the writing of the book, and actually in a, in an article that's not part of the book, with the Players Tribune, this idea of the Delta came out when I was talking about some of my experiences when I was most frustrated being blind, and how I realized that the frustration was not with the thing itself.

I think it was either, you know, trying to wash dishes and breaking some of the glasses or, when my dog would come back to me in the dog park. gizzy, God rest her soul, she's passed away a handful of years ago. But, I realized that for me to sort of mitigate these moments of frustration, I had to realize that they weren't coming from washing the dishes or the dog and the dog.

Right. They were coming from an expectation in my mind that things should remain as they are. I should be able to wash dishes a certain way because I used to be able to do these things before this dog should come back to me, because she's supposed to help me and I can't get out of here without her help.

So it's an expectation thing. I had to learn that things aren't. They're not always going to be the way that they are that you think they're supposed to be. And for me to become less frustrated, for me to be at peace with my current reality, I need to let go of these tethers, both my past, who I used to be and my future, who I want to be.

And I have to accept who I am and know that context always changes. I'm always changing. I'm never going to be the same. I'm not 24 anymore. I'm different now than I was when I walked in here 15 minutes ago. We're always making these small, incremental changes, and by holding on to past versions of ourselves or inappropriately bounding us to a future versions of ourselves, we can't possibly be who we are.

And sometimes that, prevents us from being at peace, being happy, finding joy and delight in all of the like miracles that exist all around us. As a blind person, I'm extremely fortunate to still be alive. I talked about Tyler a lot in the book. My buddy who didn't come back right. and for me to get frustrated over washing the dishes ignores the miracle that I'm still alive.

It's a dishonor to my buddy Tyler, who died so that I might still be here. And so for me to really be at peace with who I am and to let go of this idea that, you know, I should be this kind of man. I'm not that man. I'm a blind guy and I do blind guy things, and I have a certain set of capabilities that I need to get that I need to accept and go back to the top in advancement of war.

If I want to expand my capabilities, I just have to work at. I have put in that work. I had to get comfortable with who I am and take a risk and move on. And that's what the Delta is all about.

ROY: Yeah, I think that is such a powerful and exceptional lesson for everyone to learn, but especially young adults. because I think that we go into even being a, student here at the Institute, we have a certain expectation. Not everybody graduates from this place. It may not be a good fit or we made mistakes along the way.

We got behind and overwhelmed. And so I think it's important for cadets to understand and have that perspective of tap in advance. And when it's just not within the realm of possibility to say, that's okay, I can be something new and different. Yeah. I love that you talk about that. That's going to bring about personal peace and joy.

I like that you talk about, the gratitude and how we can reframe another phrase that ties into it is the flipping your perspective to to find gratitude and to accept and embrace the moment that you're in yet, but that you can still move forward. we call around here, we eating the whale? Yeah, exactly. Same idea. Eat a whale one bite at a time.

SNYDER: That's exactly right.

ROY: Just do the next thing. Yep. That's in your control.

SNYDER: Yeah. One other aspect of the Delta. I'd like to kind of like bespoke for this audience. The cadets at VMI. I say this to midshipmen all the time, and I remember this as a midshipman myself. How I was just desperate. I couldn't wait to go and, like, prove myself, couldn't wait to go and do my military training and go on deployment and do my job.

And I felt like one of these days I'm going to feel like a real boy. I'm going to feel like I've made it. And my advice is like, you never actually make it. You're always striving for the next thing. So my advice is, don't be in such a rush. Going back to that delta, if you're always thinking about where you're going, you lose sight on where you are.

And I think it's really important you're never going to be a cadet again at VMI once you graduate. Just be here, enjoy this experience, make the most of it. Learn everything you can from your classes. Make the most of the relationships you have while you're here, and then go on and go into the infantry or go to the fleet and be a great, you know, junior officer, and then be a great senior officer and then be a great, you know, civil servant and whatever else you're going to do after the military.

But you can't do all of that at once. And don't be in a massive hurry to live your whole career all at once. Just be where you are and be good at it.

ROY: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for your time, Brad. This has been excellent discussion. I think, our cadet audience will certainly enjoy, what you've had to share.

SNYDER: Thank you so much for having me.

ROY: This has been a strategic outreach program of the VMI center for Leadership and Ethics. We educate, engage, and inspire the leadership journey of our VMI community and the nation. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast to follow along as we release new episodes. Follow the VMI Center for Leadership and Ethics on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. To learn more about our programs and events, visit our website at VMI dot EDU forward-slash c l e. Thanks for tuning in.