EP 448. Five Minutes: 300 Seconds That Changed My Life

 

An African Pygmy Goose Brings People Together

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season somewhere podcast. 5 minutes is really not a very long time if you think about it. 5 minutes ago you were probably still scrolling through the ads at the front of Duck Season Somewhere podcast. Then again, today’s guest, Mr. Jack Zimmerman from Minnesota is going to describe what 5 minutes can be an eternity. 5 minutes can be life changing. Jack, how are you today? Is it good and cold up here in Minnesota yet?

Jack Zimmerman: Good, Mr. Ramsey. It’s super cold. We’re making ice. I know ice fishermen are happy up here, but it was a lot warmer in Dallas where we were down here not that long ago.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it was. I don’t believe in coincidence. I just do not believe in coincidence. I believe everything has its place and it happens for a reason. It just so happened to be that you came into our booth. It was a little slower. One of the little red lights, I call it there at convention. We’re standing, we’re going green light, full steam ahead, and then you catch a little break. You can sit down and drink a cup of coffee and visit with some folks around you and do some stuff and catch up and then you come to the booth, and I heard you tell a story to somebody else that was in the booth, a little girl and her mama. After they left, you and I had a great conversation, and here we are. I’m glad to have met you, and I’m glad to have you on today’s episode.

Jack Zimmerman: What was that little African duck, or I’m sorry, goose that you had in the back of your booth there?

Ramsey Russell: That’s an African pygmy goose.

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah. The African pygmy goose is what brought me and you together. That’s what caught my eye. I got to go see what that is. I’ve never seen that bird before, and I want to go check it out and figure out what that bird was.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you for saying that, because it is a colossal pain in the Heine, bringing all that taxidermy and traveling with it. Lord help those poor little birds. They spend so much of their lives in styrofoam peanuts and bouncing around in the back of a trailer and everything else. We try to bring birds from around the world that that people don’t readily recognize that that little pygmy goose is technically a perching duck, but it also represents the smallest goose on earth. That’s kind of its claim to fame, and it doesn’t behave anything like any goose anywhere in the world you’ve ever seen. It behaves like very few ducks you’ll see anywhere else on earth. It hangs out in lily pads. It really doesn’t like to fly for extended periods. We have to kind of spot and stalk with a little Robin Crusoe boat. We have to push poll around and try to corner them up. But it’s a lot of fun and it’s down in, I think they’re in parts of Mozambique and anywhere you got a lot of lily pads in Africa, but down in Zululand where we hunt them, it’s on a very tiny part of the landscape and part of the landscape, even though it’s hotter than blazes down there, it’s their wintertime, so you don’t see the cobras and the crocodiles that they got when they’re out there cutting sugarcane in the summer, thank goodness. I might draw the line at cobras and crocodiles to go shoot anything.

Jack Zimmerman: Man, that’s wild stuff. I guess my curiosity, though, strikes again. I’ve always had a curiosity, and that’s what’s led me into most of things in my life, and it’s led me to sitting here with you, having a conversation.

Minnesota’s Waterfowling History

My buddy’s grandfather had a river bottom that we got to hunt a lot of flooded willows and stuff like that and shooting a lot of wood ducks, and we get a lot of divers and that on our sloughs, and that was always fun to shoot them. 

Ramsey Russell: Well, let’s talk about your background. Let’s talk about growing up in Minnesota. Minnesota has got a tremendous waterfowl history. You are a duck hunter, is that right? You grew up duck hunting?

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah, I grew up duck hunting. I always wanted to hunt. I didn’t have a ton of mentors growing up hunting. It was more of friends and friend’s dads and stuff like that, especially in the waterfowl world. Luckily, I ended up getting some really good spots to hunt growing up. We have a lot of little sloughs around here. I live in southern Minnesota, and it’s a lot of cornfields and little potholes and sloughs and we have lakes around here too, a bunch of those. Hunting all the sloughs and little potholes, I really didn’t get into field hunting until later on, but I ain’t getting to hunt a river bottom. I was super lucky. My buddy’s grandfather had a river bottom that we got to hunt a lot of flooded willows and stuff like that and shooting a lot of wood ducks, and we get a lot of divers and that on our sloughs, and that was always fun to shoot them. I just remember going out there and being so cold because we never had the right gear to be out there, probably like we do now. I just remember being so cold, but you wanted it so bad. That’s where I realized how resilient you have to be to be a hunter. If anybody knew what you were doing, they’d think you’re absolutely crazy. You’re out there throwing these decoys out in the water, it’s freezing, and just for a shot at one duck, and something I really enjoyed was being with my friends. I think that was probably the biggest part of it, was being out with my friends and getting to spend that time out in the woods and trying different things and problem solving and figuring things out with your buddies and when you see the plan come through with your friends. There’s nothing better than looking over at your buddy with the biggest smile on his face, and you knew that he just pulled off a sneak on some ducks.

Ramsey Russell: When duck hunting is good, it’s cold and wet. And back in the good old days, none of us had very good gear. I think our youthful exuberance made up for a lot of our shortcomings. We were just glad to be there and we were young. We could be cold, we could be wet. We knew we would live. We were bulletproof back in those days. I tell you, I miss those days a lot. Talk about a little bit who your friends were. Who were your duck hunting friends back then?

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah. I grew up in a really small school. I mean, I graduated with 24 kids in my-

Ramsey Russell: Wow, that is small.

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah. Just a little farm town school. Our class is really tight. We all played sports together. We all hunted together. We did everything together. So, we had a tight group of friends. We all built fish houses with our buddies, and we all fished together all winter long, and we always did everything together. So, it was a lot of fun. There wasn’t too many things growing up that those guys weren’t a part of those memories and it seems like all I remember is the good times. I don’t remember too many bad times back then. I just remember all the time, we’d just keep hunting as long as somebody had shells in their pocket, we’d keep going. It never got old, trying to find another duck with your buddies.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Who were some of your best friends and how’d you meet them and what became of them?

Jack Zimmerman: Well, growing up in such a small area, we didn’t have a whole choice of who your friends were. So, playing sports, baseball, playing basketball. That’s some of my earliest memories that I remember. I remember going out to hoy lake with my buddy one time after school. That was one of the first times I ever went duck hunting, and we went out there. It was awful, we did terrible. I remember almost getting stuck in the mud, and it was quite the day, but I remember wanting to go back out the next day right away, and I was hooked, and that was my buddy Andy, and my buddy Nate is who we always go down to the river bottoms hunting with. My buddy Chris was always around, and Mitch and just a good group of guys that we’d always go out, and whether it was ducks or pheasants or whatever it was, we were always hunting together. I remember I shot my first turkey with a bow right before our graduation rehearsal with my best friend Andy. Just cool stuff like that, that you won’t forget.

The Duck Gods Smile

Yeah, the memories that we make out there is what we’re living for.

Ramsey Russell: Do you still remember your first duck?

Jack Zimmerman: No, I don’t really remember my first duck, honestly, I really don’t. I don’t remember where it was or when it was. I feel like I started going out duck hunting so many times when I was younger that there’s so many memories. I think I went out probably 6 or 8 times before I ever got my first duck, and all those times end up clashing together really.

Ramsey Russell: What I remember a lot about those days, right after high school, starting a duck hunt, when I duck hunt a little bit on my own, was I didn’t have a boat. I didn’t even have an ATV. I didn’t have many decoys, but what I remember the most is walking. It was arduous how we hunted and where I hunted. It took a while to get back there, and you did it all on foot, carrying those heavy decoys, carrying everything you needed with you and across a beam field or through the woods, but it was okay. I was young. I didn’t have anything else to do, and I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t have a boat to throw it into or a pickup truck or an ATV or a buggy. I just put it on my back, and off I go and there was a lot of satisfaction and a lot of time in just getting back there. If you were real lucky and the Duck God smiled, all you had to look forward to, no matter how hard it took to get back there, was coming out with a heavier load because you had dead ducks swinging on your back. Something else I remember, Jack, is I’ve just learned this in age. You and I talked a little bit about this the other morning there in the booth, but I’m going to shoot a limit of ducks if the morning allows. Too many mornings, it does. Too many mornings, you can’t buy that limit worth of ducks. I’m going to shoot, but it’s funny how over the years, duck numbers don’t matter. I’m thinking of this one particular story. One of my very best friends for 30 years, we hunted together. We didn’t start off as best friends. We just started off as 2 guys going duck hunting, and one hunt after the next, over a period of 30 years. Next thing he knows you’re pretty good buddies, and he passed recently, back this fall and I went through some photo albums, just looking, going through, rumbling through the bone pile, working through the bone pile there, looking at old pictures. I found a picture of me and Mr. Ian hunting together for the very first time and it was such a definitive hunt. We hit it off in the duck blind. We became friends. We hunted all over the world together and it’s funny how, if I think back to that day, it was just a great duck hunt. It was an amazing duck hunt. One particular mallard gave me a story for 30 years when he fell in the water and destroyed a world’s toughest wader in his very first hunt, the very first duck he ever picked up with him and absolutely destroyed him. He couldn’t get in an ankle-deep water after that, but when I went back and looked at that photo, there were 3 of us, and we killed 5 mallards that morning, not 12, which would have been a limit. We shot 5 mallards that morning, and I guess it’s some respect, it’s really not the number of ducks you kill that you’re going to remember 20, 30 years later, it’s going to be just how you felt, who you were with. If you notice that, duck numbers matter, but they don’t in some way. I never would have guessed that. If you’d asked me, as great a morning, and as definitive as that morning was, I’d have said we must have shot full limits, but nowhere near did we shoot. It was just an average morning out duck hunting, and we had a great time.

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah, the memories that we make out there is what we’re living for. That’s what we’re out there chasing, and that’s what we’re going to see. I believe one day when we’re laying there on our deathbeds and our lives are flashing before our eyes, these memories that we’re making today. I believe it’s so important to go out and do something every single day. It doesn’t have to be significant, going out even duck hunting, it’s just spending time with your kids, but doing something that you’re going to remember, and having those experiences. I know me or you, I know we definitely want to make those memories every day that we can in the duck blind, with the people that we want around us, because that’s what life is really about, who we surround ourselves with and having those experiences. Boy, if the ducks work, it’s just a bonus.

Ramsey Russell: What year did you graduate high school?

Jack Zimmerman: 2007.

Ramsey Russell: Oh boy, you’re a kid. How old are you, Jack?

Jack Zimmerman: 34 years old.

Ramsey Russell: 34 years old. First question is, where in Minnesota did you grow up? Obviously not St. Paul. Minneapolis. You’d have been a little bit bigger graduating class than that. Where did you grow up in Minnesota?

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah, I grew up south central Minnesota. So I’m like, northeast of the biggest town around me would be Mankato.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Jack Zimmerman: Lots of cornfields and a few lakes here and there.

Ramsey Russell: Did your family farm?

Jack Zimmerman: Well, my cousins did. My family was in construction.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. What inspired you for military service? What was it going on in your life or what was going on that you left high school? A lot of people decided that your first obvious step was going to be a military career.

Jack Zimmerman: Not quite actually. So, when I graduated high school in 2007, I thought I was going to be an electrician, and I went to college for that for a year, and while I was going to college, I got a job working as an electrician here in Mankato. We were building a jail and courthouse called the Justice center and I was working there, and I started working there through the whole summer. I’d been watching the war go on now for a few years, and I knew a few guys that went, but I didn’t know them that well, and even I watched the bombings. When we started shocking on Iraq, and you watched the guys chasing bin laden around in the mountains, and you’re watching all this stuff happening on TV, and you’re seeing these guys fighting on the rooftops of Iraq on YouTube, and you’re seeing all this stuff happening, and that just kept building this fire inside of me is in this curiosity. Again, like I was talking about earlier, that’s what brought us together is that curiosity, but this curiosity of what was going on over there. So I kept watching what was going on over in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I always wanted to serve. I remember the guys that were carrying the flags into our school on veteran’s day and stuff when I was a kid and seeing those guys hanging out and those guys drinking beer together and doing stuff like that, I thought, man, that’s pretty cool. Those guys are pretty cool, and- Go ahead.

Ramsey Russell: No, go ahead.

A Fast Track to the Infantry

So, it’s just a mental game, really, at the end of it all.

Jack Zimmerman: So then, all this built up to me working as an electrician in Mankato. One day I’m sitting at the break table and I’m thinking to myself, I don’t want to be 30 years old and say I wish I would have joined, and all this things going through my head, and I really wanted to get out of here. I was getting this urge that I felt like I was falling into this thing that I was going to be doing the same thing for the rest of my life. This whole thing, life was already planned out for me, and I hated the fact of that, I was going to buy a house in town, get married and have a couple kids and stand on the same ladder, building the same pension for the next 60 years and then die. That’s what I felt like last set up to do. That scared me too much, and I needed to get out of here, and so finally, all this built up to me. Sitting at a break table, the guy across from me is talking about retiring. The guy next to him is talking about his shoulder hurt, and the guy next to him is talking about his kids, and I said, I got to get out of here. I left work that day. I went straight to the recruiter station, and I walked into the office and I said, I want to go to Iraq or Afghanistan. I want to get there as fast as I can. I want to be on the front lines. How do I do that? and from there I joined the military then in the spring of 2009. I worked throughout that summer. When September 1st came around, I left to join the army. I flew from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to Fort Benning, Georgia, and started my basic training in infantry school there. By the end of 2010, then I was done at basic training. Sorry, that was the end of 2009. In January of 2010, that’s when I started airborne school.

Ramsey Russell: Just a minute. Talk about small town, Mankato, Minnesota boy. Haven’t been too far out of your county, I’m guessing, except chasing a few ducks, maybe across county lines. What was it like stepping off that bus your first day at boot camp with all them folks yelling and getting you in line? And they going to get your little ass in line, son. That long hair’s got to go. All that stuff’s got to go. You’re in the army now. I remember when my son Duncan talked about, they drove those marine recruits all around, and the minute they stepped off the bus, that’s when the rubber hit the pavement. Do you remember those days? I mean, it had to be a shakeup.

Jack Zimmerman: I never been nowhere on my own ever in my life. Anytime I ever went anywhere, travel away from home, I was with somebody else, whether my parents or somebody, and heck, I was traveling down to Atlanta all by myself. I remember trying to make sure I got to my flight and this and that and didn’t miss nothing. Finally I got down to Atlanta. They get us on that bus, and then we’re driving down and I remember feeling like we’re driving. We got on post, and I felt like we were driving around forever. I later found out they do that so that if anybody decides that they don’t want to be there anymore, they don’t know how to exactly get a straight shot out the gate, they can catch up before they get away. I remember him coming on the bus and screaming at us and being up all night in processing us and you’re getting all your uniforms and getting measured for your boots and you’re going through all this and it’s just a long process. It’s called 30th AG. It feels like the longest week of your life, because you have this build up to leave for the army, and finally you’re in the army now. You’re on the bus, you’re headed there, and then you get to this place and you’re just stuck. You’re just stuck there for a week, just waiting for your basic training class to start, and they can’t do anything with you. They can’t really work you out. They don’t do anything. You’re just in processing, and it feels very slow to what you were anticipating. It just kind of stalls out. Finally, you get to go to your basic training class, that’s when all the chaos starts. When you get off the bus, they’re screaming at you, and you want your duffel bag over your head. It’s fun. It was the whole part of the whole experience. I think that’s the thing that people have to realize when they go to basic training, is when you get off that bus, they’re not going to kill you. They need you. So, it’s just a mental game, really, at the end of it all. So, they’re just trying to scare you, they’re trying to build you into something and if you remember that when you get off the bus you’ll be just fine. That’s what I remember when I got off the bus. It’s just a game, so put that duffel bag over your head and do what they ask you to do, and do it to the best of your ability, and you’re going to succeed.

Ramsey Russell: You must have had some sense of patriotism growing up, watching the war unfold. Do you remember 9/11? Are you old enough to remember?

Jack Zimmerman: Oh yeah, absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: Where were you sitting? In an elementary school classroom?

Jack Zimmerman: I supposed to be in the classroom, but I was already kicked out of class for the day. That’s the kind of kid I was. I was out in the hallway, and I remembered I got kicked out of technology or keyboard class or whatever you want to call it, computer class. I got kicked out of there and I was out in the hallway. I was down by the science room listening because he had the radio on down there, and I came back to the classroom and I said, hey, I think the Capitol got bombed. That’s all I could think of by what I could hear on the radio. That’s what I got. That’s what I collected, was the Capitol got bombed, but it wasn’t, the first tower had been hit. I remember my teacher, she kicked me out, and I was like, no. I think you actually really want to hear what I have to say for once and they remember turning the TVs on. They were all on stands, had to be rolled around and stuff. It’s not like every classroom now. It’s got TVs and all that in them. I remember spending the rest of the day then at school watching that, and then going home and continue to watching it all unfold on TV.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. I remember those days. I was a little bit older, but I think everybody can just about remember where they were today, those towers fell. I know I can remember that week of just glued to the TV and watching it and not knowing what was going on.

Jack Zimmerman: My world was so small at that point, I mean, I was just in junior high, that happened, so my point of view and my perspective of life is so small. You don’t remember how I felt during that. I can’t imagine something like that happening now, how it would make me feel as a person with the perspective of now having children and family and all these things. I really relate to a lot of those people that were killed that day.

Ramsey Russell: 5 or 6 years later, there you were at boot camp, going with the flow, patriotic. You’re going to serve your country. You’re going to participate in what you’ve seen unfold.

Jack Zimmerman: I was worried I wasn’t going to get there on time. Little did I know I was serving the longest war in US history. I thought this thing was going to be wrapped up by the time I even got to Iraq or Afghanistan. That’s why I wanted to get there so fast, is I wanted to say that I fought in the war.

Ramsey Russell: You joined the army, and did you say you went to the ranger school?

Jack Zimmerman: No, I went to just basic training in the infantry school, so I became an infantryman, and then I went to airborne school.

Ramsey Russell: Airborne?

Jack Zimmerman: Yep. Jumping out of planes and airborne schools. I always joke, the first week you practice falling down, you jump off a log, you practice landing on the ground. That’s how you’re going to land with your parachute on the next week, you jump out of these towers down a zip line to practice getting out of the plane. Then the third week is jump week. They always tell you if you can land and you can get out of the plane, you’ll figure out everything in between. So I did my 5 jumps, and I got my wings, and that’s when I got orders to go join the 101st Airborne Division in Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

Ramsey Russell: What did you have to do in basic training to qualify for something like that? What I doubt where somebody said, this guy belongs in airborne. He’s crazy enough to jump out of a good plane.

Jack Zimmerman: When I joined, I said, that’s all I wanted to do was learn how to jump out of planes. That was, one of the things that was so important to me that I wanted to do. So that was a part of my contract. I joined with an airborne contract because I couldn’t believe you could get paid to jump out of planes. So that’s what I wanted to go do.

Ramsey Russell: What was reality like? What did you think being an airborne and going to Afghanistan was going to be like? And what was it like, really? I’ve never been in the military, but talking to a lot of folks, it’s a whole lot of weight. Duncan don’t like me talking about him, but I’m going to say this anyway. I’ll never forget, after he graduated from boot camp, we were sitting there talking at lunch. He said, you see that spot on the wall, daddy? I go, yeah. He said, I could stare at that for 6 hours. I said, huh? He said, yeah, I could sit right here and stare at that spot on the wall for 6 hours. I’ve done it. They make you do it. But he said, I could do that, and that’s what you’re supposed to be able to do. What I saw in talking to him and some of these other kids is it’s a whole lot of waiting, a lot of hurry up and wait in the military. It don’t go quite as fast as it seems like on that YouTube video you see. It’s just a whole lot of waiting in line and waiting on orders and waiting on stuff like that. So, what was your disposition, what you thought it was going to be like and what it really was?

Jack Zimmerman: It was better than I ever imagined it was going to be. It really was for me. I really didn’t know what I was getting into. I just knew what I wanted to do, and I was willing to do anything to get to that point. But for me, I met some really good guys along the way that made the experience just an amazing experience. I met some of my best friends today in basic training, and going through that whole process together, and experiencing those things. Like I said, going in with the right mindset of, I know they can’t kill me, they need me, they got to feed me, they got to give me some water, stuff like that. I don’t know. I guess I’m a sucker for being miserable, too. I kind of like it in a way. I like to say to myself, man, I’m never going to be more miserable than this and then I always keep saying that my whole life, and then I find myself, hunting ducks somewhere colder. I said, dang, I’m never going to be colder than this or I’m laying out whatever it is. I feel like you’re in basic training, you’re walking, and you’ve been walking for 4 miles, and it’s the longest you’ve ever walked with this much weight on your back. You’re like, man, I’m never going to be more miserable than this and then you’re doing it in the mud, and then you’re thinking, man, but you just find that you’re building character every single time, and you think, what could I possibly go through now that that can be worse than this and it builds something inside of you. Once you, like I said, we’ll get into this later, but once you do something, it changes in something inside of you. Once you’ve walked 13 miles with 60 pounds of weight on your back and you do it once, it changes something in your mind that you know, that you can do it again as many times as you need to because you’ve done it before.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. It breaks down those mental barriers, doesn’t it?

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah. I mean, everything in life is possible. It’s just, you’re the one making it impossible.

Ramsey Russell: So you go through airborne school, then what? You’re going to the war? You’re going to Afghanistan?

Jack Zimmerman: Well, they told me when I first joined, because the surge was going on, so they needed guys, and one of the incentives for me to join was, that they’re going to send me to Italy, but as soon as I graduated airborne school, I was expecting to go for my packet and find that I was headed to Italy, but the army decided that I was going to 101st Airborne division out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, because they were getting ready to go to Afghanistan and they need more guys. So, I got there in February and in process with them, and as soon as I got there, they said, don’t unpack yourself. We’re headed to Afghanistan, and that’s pretty much what happened. I mean, I got there, got in process, met some of my guys. I got my gear set up.

Going in Blind

…but the one thing that never crossed my mind, you think when you come home, you’re going to come home in one piece, or you’re going to come home in a box. You know, you never think it’s going to be anything in between.

Ramsey Russell: What was it like stepping off the plane in Afghanistan? You’re a Minnesota boy, and it’s February back home, so even the deep south is pleasant. What was it like stepping off into Afghanistan? The smell, the sights, the temperature. What was it like when you stepped off the plane and hit the ground, your boots hit the ground? What were you thinking? What did it feel like?

Jack Zimmerman: I just got to Fort Campbell in February. I didn’t deploy until June, 2006. It was kind of cool. I got to deploy on D-day with 101st airborne division. Very historic day for our unit when we jumped into Normandy. So, I got to deploy that day, and those guys came and gave us speech of kind of a go kick him in the guts kind of a speech, and got us all fired up, and that’s the first time where I think I started learning how to face adversity in my life. I was getting ready to deploy. I was going to an unknown place to do unknown things. So many unknowns, I knew nothing. I was going in blind and never been to war before. You didn’t even really know what to feel. You’re just lost and just going through the motions and just trying to stay alive, honestly. Even getting there and I remember whenever I had those feelings, I listened to those guys that were giving us those speeches that had jumped in in World War 2, I thought to myself, how hard can it be to go walk onto this plane right now knowing that I’m going to go land in Afghanistan. I don’t have to jump into an unknown land into fire my first day in the country, and the adversity that those guys faced in World War 2 and the things that they went through, the things that they knew that they were facing, what they were getting into with the technology that they had. What I was about to do seemed pretty small compared to what they did and the courage that they had to go do what they did. If they can find the courage to do what they did, it’s pretty easy for me to find the courage that I need to find and go do what I’m about to do.

Ramsey Russell: Were you nervous? You’re military, you’re bulletproof, that you’ve gone through all that training, you’ve walked 13 miles carrying a heavy package. A lot of your self limitations, those barriers have been broken. Now you’re on a flight, you’re flying to Afghanistan, you’re fixing to go into combat. What do you think and feeling something like that?

Jack Zimmerman: My leaders did a pretty good job at pretty much keeping all the worry down. You just learn in the military too, that you don’t ask too many questions. You just go and do whatever they tell you to do. If you’re not doing it right, they’ll definitely let you know. So, I just keep my mouth shut and keep moving and work as hard as you can all the time and try to stay one step ahead of everybody else and that’s all it’s kind of doing. I mean, it’s just survival at that point of trying to survive your team leader from beating you over the head for doing something dumb or forgetting something or just trying to keep track all your stuff. You’re getting ready to go into Afghanistan, you’re preparing for war. You have no idea what you’re getting into. You have the nerves of what’s going to happen when I get my first firefight and how am I going to react? Am I going to freeze up? Am I going to go through the motions? How’s this thing going to go? So you have all these things going through your head, all the thoughts of IEDs, but the one thing that never crossed my mind, you think when you come home, you’re going to come home in one piece, or you’re going to come home in a box. You know, you never think it’s going to be anything in between.

Ramsey Russell: What was it like after all this stuff we’ve talked about? What was it like when you stepped off that plane into Afghanistan? I’m assuming you’re in formation, grabbing your bags and hauling ass to wherever you’re going, but still it’s got to be different. It’s got to smell different, feel different, be different. Could you smell gunpowder in the air? Was it just like you’re under a microscope with heat beating down on you? Now it’s getting real now. Now I’m here. I’m on location, I’m on site, the long flights behind me. I’m here. My boots are on the ground, they’re on the sand. What’s it like? What does it feel like? Did it even cross your mind? Did you even notice it?

Jack Zimmerman: Everybody has the same reaction when you step off the plane in Kandahar, everybody smells the lagoon. That’s the first thing to smell and you’ll never forget that smell. I remember Holland running across the tarmac there carrying my bags, and I’ll never forget how winded I got. Just wasn’t used to that elevation at all. We’re so up high then, in Afghanistan, that elevation wise, that it gets harder to breathe oxygen, it’s kind of like going up in the mountains in Colorado or whatever-

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jack Zimmerman: So, we had spent some time there acclimatizing training, doing a lot of training, talking to guys that have been in country for some time now and talking about what the tactics actually are on the battlefield currently, what they’re using, what they’re doing, what’s working, what’s not working. Just sharing information like that before we actually went out to our area of operations.

Ramsey Russell: What was your job when you get there, you’re squared away. You’re getting kind of broken in. They’ve given you your marching order, so to speak. Now you’re in Afghanistan, what was your day to day? What was your day to day like? What was your job over there?

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah. So, it was constantly changing, with whatever we were doing. But I was a saw gunner, so I carried a machine gun as an infantryman over there, and our goal was to go find the Taliban and push them out of our area of operations one way or the other, and-

Ramsey Russell: Find and encourage the enemy.

Jack Zimmerman: We got our area of operations. It was in the Zari district. It was the home of the Taliban. That’s where the Taliban first originated, and we were going to be the first Americans to really go in there and establish a foothold and take it all the way down to the Arghandab river and really disrupt the Taliban and their activities over there. We knew that it wasn’t going to be easy and it was going to take some time, and we were to be the ones to start the mission. If I remember right, it was supposed to take them like a year and a half or 2 years to get down to the river, and we began early that summer, right away when we got there middle of June, we landed out there and we started patrolling and we started getting in our first gunfights and we started getting mortared, and we were at cop terminator, and we got shelled there for 30 days straight while we were patrolling. We go on patrol, and we weren’t out walking around the villages looking for bad guys and doing that stuff, they were shooting mortars at us in our base, for 30 days straight and multiple times a day, we take mortar rounds and we’re chasing those guys around for a long time trying to catch those guys. I remember the night that we finally got those guys, how relieved it was that we got that recoils rifle that they were shooting those mortars at us with, and just little things like that are things that really stand out, is those big victories of when you knew you weren’t going to be getting mortar non-stop all the time anymore because we got that off the streets. We had some really hard nights sleeping in compounds laying your body armor down as your bed and using your helmet as your pillow and sleeping with the sand fleas waking up all night with those things biting you all night in the back and tearing you up all night. Then when you put your body armor on in the morning, you get that good burn as that sweat pushes into those flea bites and just little things like that about Afghanistan, and brushing your teeth in the dirt every morning you’re waking up in the dirt and using a bottle of water to brush your teeth with and everything that’s grit in it and how dirty you are out there, but that’s what I signed up to do, and that’s what I loved every minute of it, even though you were miserable a lot of the time, you loved every minute of it because the guys that you were with, especially.

Ramsey Russell: Do you remember your first firefight? Like, you had those doubts and those questions, how’s it going to be? Do you remember your first firefight? What was it like? What was the first time you hear a bullet whiz back? I can’t imagine.

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah. If you hear it crack, that’s good. It was close. If you hear it hiss, that was really close. Yeah, I remember a lot of parts of the day of my first firefight. I remember going out that day, walking out to the village.

Ramsey Russell: How many people? How many people are with you?

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah, there’s probably 4 in a team, there’s a saw gunner, a team leader, and 2 riflemen, and that’s a team. So we had at least 2 teams make up a squad. So we had at least a squad plus a gun team.

Ramsey Russell: 10 people total.

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah, 10, 15 guys. By the time you get radio guys and leadership and stuff like that, a medic and whatnot, an interpreter. So, yeah, 15 guys probably.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

The Intensity of Adrenaline in Your First Gunfight

After that one, after probably the first 3 or 4 of them, I could pretty much walk you through what happened in each one but that first one, you get such adrenaline dump, and you are just trying to remember your training, you’re trying to remember your job.

Jack Zimmerman: And we pushed out into a village. What we did is, we just kind of did what’s called movement to contact often you don’t just walk out until you find somebody that wants to fight, and you fight. We were out there that day and patrolling and ran into some guys that wanted to fight, and it kicked off and once the bullets started flying, I don’t really remember a whole lot after that, my first one. After that one, after probably the first 3 or 4 of them, I could pretty much walk you through what happened in each one but that first one, you get such adrenaline dump, and you are just trying to remember your training, you’re trying to remember your job. You’re trying to remember to keep moving. You’re trying to remember all these things keeping your head down, trying to keep the enemy suppressed, looking for your team leader, for direction. You’re trying to remember the training that you did, and next thing you know, you’re walking through the gate back to your base, and you’re like, what even happened out there? It happens so fast, and sometimes a gunfight goes on for 3, 4 minutes, and sometimes it goes on for 3 or 4 days. Most of my first gunfights are real quick, sporadic gunfights, more pop shots, us return fire, trying to get them and stuff like that. I really don’t remember a whole lot of my first gunfights, but as time progressed on, I do remember most of the gunfighting and the things that happened, and over time, it really starts to begin to slow down, and by the end, it becomes to feel very natural, honestly, in what you’re doing on the battlefield.

Ramsey Russell: Are you all patrolling every single day of the week? Is it every other day?

Jack Zimmerman: Just about. At least once a day, and every time.

Ramsey Russell: Every time you leave the gate, every time you walk through the gate going back out to patrol, it’s a pretty high probability that you all were going to encounter the bad guys.

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah, you’re going to encounter something with, even if you’re not finding guys, I want a gunfire. Probably can go out and find an IED or 2 or 3. There’s plenty of IEDs out there to find as well. Those were the kind of battle you had over there is you had to keep looking down and trying to see where you’re walking and making sure you’re not stepping on something you shouldn’t be. At the same time, you got to keep your head up and looking around for somebody that’s going to be shooting at you too. So, it’s a battle of looking up and looking down at the same time while you’re over there.

Ramsey Russell: What’s your demeanor like? I mean, how long are you out for? 8 hours walking around patrolling? Is it a work day that you’re out doing this normally or-

Jack Zimmerman: No, it depends on really what goes on. Like I said, sometimes gun fights can last longer than others. So that dictates on how long you’re out there. Otherwise, if you go out there and you don’t really find anybody that wants to fight that day, then I mean, you go out there for 3, 4 hours.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jack Zimmerman: Just long enough to annoy the Taliban as much as you can and ruin their day to make it easy for them to move around.

Ramsey Russell: Do you become a little indifferent to it? I mean, spirit, does the experience of being in that kind of conflict, the first time you got this big adrenaline dump, you barely remember it as your experience level increases. I can tell you blow by blow. What happened? Did this become normal? And how does it feel like that becomes normal?

Jack Zimmerman: No, absolutely becomes normal. I mean, you get pretty cocky. You get pretty arrogant. I don’t ever really feel like there’s too many times where I felt like Taliban got ahead of us on gunfight and I don’t ever feel like they ever beat us in that department. Most of our losses came with IEDs and –

Ramsey Russell: Talk a little bit about these IEDs. I’ve heard a lot about them in the news, stuff like that. Improvised Explosion Device. What are we talking about here?

Jack Zimmerman: Fertilizer with diesel fuel, soaked up in it, and they pack it into gas jugs and go bury them in the ground. Then they use a tow mine to initiate the homemade explosives that are in the jugs, essentially making it a pressure plate, that’s what sends you for a ride, and that’s-

Ramsey Russell: Sends you for a ride.

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: How would you all find them? They’d cover them with trash. Cover them with just something you take for granted. What are you looking for?

Jack Zimmerman: Yes, these are buried out in the middle of a field, buried in a walkway, buried everywhere. Buried in a wall. Buried in their separate doorway. You can imagine these things, they’re just everywhere.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, like a real crazy Easter egg hunt.

Jack Zimmerman: Oh, yeah. You find them most of the time with your eyes, sometimes you find them with your feet, and try to use a mine sweeper and just a lot of different ways to fight it.

The Day That Changed It All

There’s no reason whatsoever to run in Afghanistan, and so when you see somebody running up, they’re up to no good.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. Let’s talk about March 9, 2011.

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: How’d that day start?

Jack Zimmerman: I was up in a guard tower. I was pulling guard. We pull 4-hour shifts of guard, typically. So, me being a low man on the totem pole, I was up in the guard tower at a pretty rough time, about the worst time to pull guard. I think I got up there like 4:00 in the morning or something like that. I remember sitting up there as cold morning, and finally I came out of that guard tower. I just came off my leave, my 2 weeks of leave over there, and I was just back here in Minnesota, and I just asked my wife to marry me and came back in Afghanistan that morning, come out of that guard tower. I remember going into my tent. I remember walk up to the tent and my buddies always sit outside the tent, because if you were awake, you’d have to be outside the tent, because we all slept on different timelines so if you’re in the tent, you’re sleeping. If you weren’t sleeping, then get out of the tent. So, guys always hang out outside the tent. Remember, stop and talk to my buddies for a minute. They’re out there smoking and joking and having a good time, and I went back in the tent and I was looked at the whiteboard and see what’s going on for the day. I was going out on patrol that morning, so I had a little bit of downtime, so I went, laid in my bunk. I took my boots off for a minute and deleting old pictures on my camera, and the last picture I took on my camera, for whatever reason, was my feet crossed up at the end of my bunk.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah. I left there, and I remember my team leader came by and said, hey, let’s get ready to go out on patrol. Let’s go get a mission briefing, and we’re getting my gear on, went outside, got a bridge briefing for the mission. We had an idea where the Taliban had a cache, kept their weapons, or IED, making materials, ammo, all kinds of stuff. We had an idea where they were keeping it, and we’re going to go up there and steal it from them. I love doing stuff like that that I knew would really piss them off. That was our goal, is to go up there and steal that from them. So, we left that day, and my team was on point. I was out on the right flank all by myself. We were on Sergeant Hurley’s team, so 2 riflemen were off to his left, and there’s a bunch of support elements in between us, including a gun team and then a whole another team like that behind us. So once again, about 15 guys and we walked out there and we started making our way out there, and we popped with this one village, and they’re pretty close to where we were at, so they’re becoming somewhat friendly towards us, and we’ve been helping them out. We started making our way up around to the top side of this village and those villages are just mazes of walls, basically. Not many roofs on anything. These families live in them. They have the livestock, they have it living inside these. People live inside these, it’s just really amazing of walls, is what these are. We’re kind of skirting the outside of it, and we’re getting closer up to where that cache is, and it’s rather north end, the tip of this village, and at the top of the village is a giant dirt berm that runs across the entirety of the village, and it’s about 6 foot tall. I believe it was to fight the Russians off, back in the day, a berm. As we’re approaching this berm, our team leader says, hey, run up on that berm and make sure there’s not a bunch of guys landing on the side of that waiting to ambush us. So I run up on top of that berm, and as soon as I get to the top of the berm, I see 2 guys running into town, and nobody ever runs in Afghanistan for any reason. There’s no reason to run over there. I mean, there’s no appointments to get to. There’s no reason whatsoever to run in Afghanistan, and so when you see somebody running up, they’re up to no good. My buddy says, watch where they’re going so I keep an eye on the buildings they’re going into, and right about then, I look down and I see I’m standing right on top of an IED, and I jump off that IED, and I run all the way down to the end of that berm, and my team leader goes up and he puts a charge on that IED, and he blows it up. I think what they were doing is they’re putting that IED and they’re going to shoot at us a little bit, get us to crawl up on that berm and blow the berm up, I think was the idea, and as soon as we blew up that IED, they started shooting at us, thinking we were shooting at them, and we started gunfighting and-

Ramsey Russell: They’re down in the village in the rat maze of walls.

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And you’re just kind of out in the open?

Jack Zimmerman: No, we’re all up on that berm now. There’s another team that’s flanking from about, I don’t know, just about 90 degrees from. So, I don’t even see these guys coming from the side that’s how you got most people flanking them, and get them engaged, drawn in on one thing and vexing they get clubbed from the side, you know. As we were doing, my team was the ones that were engaging. They knew that we were there. They seen us and they were engaging us while the other teams were flanking and as we were engaged, it didn’t take long, and I heard everybody hold tight. Helicopters came in and started making pretty light work of that day, putting missiles on target into those buildings that needed to come down. We hung out there for a little bit and waited. The battlefield was pretty quiet, so we decided we were going to head back to our base and call it a day, and we’re going to take a different push towards that cache, a different time. We started heading out. We did what’s called reverse order movements and all my team was in the back, and we find a good place to cross this ditch and everybody starts jumping across. I’m the last guy across. Being a saw gunner, I’m pulling security for everybody, and as the last guy jumps across, he lets me know and I jump across. I’m the last guy to cross. I started heading out to the right flank where I’ve been all day and my team leader says, hey why don’t you get on the other side? That’s the side the village is on, and if we take contact, I want my saw my machine gun on that side of the formation. So, I hustle over to the left flank over there, and I’m starting to get in position. Rifleman, get over to the right. We’re walking on this field. We walk like flying geese, and as I’m walking across the field, my team-mate says, hey, we’re getting icon chatter, meaning we can hear the Taliban talk on their radios, our interpreters letting us know and he says, they’re getting ready to hit us again. I said, hey, Sergeant Hurley, where do you think they’re going to hit us from? He says, I don’t know, Jackie boy. Wham. I step right on it, on that IED out there, I remember myself taking off and I remember flipping through the air and just flipped.

Ramsey Russell: You stepped on an IED?

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Do you remember the sound?

Jack Zimmerman: No, I don’t remember anything. I just remember feeling like a rush over me. I couldn’t hear anything I just kept flipping and flipping like a dream,

Ramsey Russell: Like, how did it throw you, Jack?

Jack Zimmerman: Oh, 30ft probably in the air.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, man. Okay.

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah, and it was a big boom. I finally landed, I landed on my shoulder. I felt my shoulder break, and I was laying there and I was looking at my left arm and my whole left forearm is blown out on the bottom side of it and, I knew I needed a tourniquet and I was trying to reach back on my left side that, the side that I just broke my shoulder on. I was trying to reach back with that arm to get to my first aid kit to get a tourniquet out of there, but I was having such a hard time seeing anything honestly at that point because I had so much blood and mud smeared on my glass and there’s so much dust, I couldn’t really breathe because I had the wind knocked out of me so bad and I couldn’t really hear anything, like I said, with the step on that bomb. So that’s kind of senseless there. See my arm bleeding? I’m trying to get a tourniquet out. Finally, I see trace around, scoring my head. So, I know my buddies are shooting at somebody. So, I figured out I’m in a complex ambush. I’m lying there and all of a sudden I realize I’m not going to get a tourniquet out with my left hand so, I need to get one out of my night vision pouch on my right side. So, I’m digging over on my right side, I’m digging, I’m trying to get this tourniquet out, and I look over, I’m trying to figure out what’s going on. There’s just a little piece of skin about an inch and a Half wide at the top side of my arm that’s holding my arm on my arms, hanging straight down, and every time my heart beats, I see the blood spreading out of my arm. So now I have no arms. I’m laying there. I have no idea my legs are hurt yet my arms are bleeding pretty bad. I know we’re in a complex ambush, so I know my guys aren’t going to be coming to me too quick, because they got to go win the fight before they can take care of the wounded. That’s what we do, and all of a sudden, my boy Daniels, he comes sliding in on top of me, and as soon as he slid on in on top of me, he started trying to keep my arms off for me. And while he’s trying to keep my arms off, I kept telling him, man, you got to get off my boys. You’re pinching my stuff. I felt like he was kneeling right on my balls but what he was doing is he had his knees in my femoral arteries. He was pinching those off, and doc comes sliding in, and he cut all my gear off of me. And I was laying out there on the battlefield then essentially, basically naked I had basically everything blown off me, and now my plate carrier’s off. I just had that little piece of shirt that was left underneath my plate carrier on, and otherwise everything was clean gone, and I remember sitting up to get out of there because I wanted to find my rifle, and I didn’t know how bad I was hurt yet. I remember sitting up, and I remember seeing my right leg was completely tore off basically. My left leg from the knee down was pretty much gone and I didn’t know I was going to get out of there. I realized then how tough a shape I was in. I remember seeing how much blood there was, and I thought that I hurt somebody else because there was so much blood. I just couldn’t believe that was all mine. Remember those guys working on me? And doc got a ratchet strap around my right leg, and that’s probably what saved my life that day. He’s able to ratchet that leg down. I remember I always say, us guys, we find anything to complain about at any time. I remember he got that ratchet on there, and he got the bleeding to stop on my right leg, and I remember complaining about how tight it was. Doc’s got this tourniquet on my leg. He’s saving my life with it and I’m like, doc is too tight, it hurts and he’s like, well, it’s got to stay, and finally, I was just getting so tired out there, I couldn’t talk anymore. I remember shaking my head left-right, left-right, as a conscious effort to stay awake.

Death Defying Moments: 5 Minutes

…the surgeon then said to me, you can stay awake for 5 more minutes, I promise your life.

Ramsey Russell: The adrenaline’s wearing off. You’d lost so much blood, you couldn’t stay awake. Yeah.

Jack Zimmerman: I could feel this thing winding down on me I could feel closing in on me, and I just kept getting more and more tired. I remember the rate, how fast I was getting tired and how aggressively it was getting me getting tired, and I remember being so thirsty and finally, I was fighting doc long enough that he put a little water on some gauze for me, shoved it in the corner of mouth to give me some. Because that’s much dust and mud in my mouth from all that stuff in the air. Those guys were working on me, and I kind of just got to the point where I was like, I kind of accept the fact I wasn’t going to make it out of this thing. So I tell them, tell everybody back home, I love them. That’s all I could get out, and that’s the last words that I said.

Ramsey Russell: Tell everybody back home I love them. That’s what you told your buddies?

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah. Talk and get out. When you’re with those guys over there, you build such relationship with these guys you’re never apart. These guys know everything about you, inside and out and they might know you better than yourself. When you tell your guys that, they know who to tell. They know who I meant to say that too, and I started seeing my whole life start flashing before my eyes stuff a little, like 4 or 5 years old, like we’re talking I mean, we’re playing ball with my friends, remember riding around my buddies and truck and fishing and hunting and doing all that stuff, and the thing that I realized in my life flash before my eyes is it didn’t matter that me and my buddies weren’t playing in the Yankee stadium. It was the guys that I was on the field with. It wasn’t the fact that me and my buddies weren’t riding around in a brand new Denali Silverado truck. None of that mattered. It was the guys that I was in the truck with didn’t matter that we weren’t hunting the best hunting grounds for ducks in the nation. It was just the fact that I was out in the slew with my buddies earning it and that’s what I realized that life was about. I was like, man, I’m really figuring this part of my life out as I’m leaving here and I feel like I felt pretty blessed to learn that, but at the same time, disappointed I couldn’t apply it to my life, I thought. As my life is flashing before my eyes, I started to hear this and I thought it was a chopper coming in, and I thought to myself, man, I can’t be the guy that dies right before that thing gets here. I thought about, these guys have been working on me for so long on this battlefield under fire, and I remember reaching deep down inside myself, and I knew what I needed to get one more breath inside me and I remember drawing in the biggest breath that I possibly could. I’m sure that was less than impressive, but it’s what I needed at the time. I got this breath in me, and I remember those guys picking me up and set me on that litter and doc trying to get an IV going in my neck and then picking me up and hauling me across this field, and I remember how awfully painful it was. We bounced around on that litter.

Ramsey Russell: Was the taliban still slinging bullets you all’s way?

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah, the whole time they’re trying to get us.

Ramsey Russell: This is ongoing combat right now, okay.

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah. They slid me in that chopper, and I remember my medic saying to the flight medic I put 2 tourniquets on each limb, and I remember the flight medic say, I don’t give a shit, we got to go. Shot up and we picked up and we took off and I was laying there on the floor of that chopper. I remember the flight medic jumping on top me and he had his mask on. He took his mask off, and I remember him yelling at me, this is going to hurt. And I kind of was laying there. I thought, what can you do to me at this point that you can hurt me? I got all 4 of my limbs blown off, pretty much, in my mind I’m dead and I couldn’t even pick my head up to even respond to him or anything. That’s how lifeless I was laying there. I saw out of blood. I saw out of everything. He jumped on top of me, and he punched this fast one right into my stern it’s called, and it’s like 5, 10 gauge needles or something like that and he punched that thing right into my bone. That’s the only way to get a IV or fluids going into me was through my bone. You couldn’t even get it going through the vein at the time and just no blood left in me. He hooked up that bag of saline fluid? And he cranked that thing open, man and my body sucked that thing up. He is so fast. I remember him starting the second one. Starting the second one, I remember how much easier it was for me to breathe again. I felt like I didn’t have to do everything in my power to breathe. I could just kind of breathe a little bit. I remember I could talk a little bit. Remember I feeling like I was coming back to life and how I felt minutes before that, I got that fluid. I felt a million times better after that first bag. You know, we’re flying. We’ve flown to Kandahar and back a bunch of times. I remember going over the mountain, so I knew I was close to getting into Kandahar finally remember landing at the airfield when the helicopter blades shut off. They shut the helicopter off. I remember listening to the blades, and they kept slowing down slower and slower and slower, and it kind of gave me a chance to kind of collect myself and my thoughts and everything that just happened to me on the battlefield that day and pulled me out of the chopper and put me in the back of this truck. My anesthesiologist was on my left, and my surgeon was on my right, and the anesthesiologist said to me first, are you allergic to anything? And I was like, yeah, penicillin. I was like, if I get penicillin, I get hives I don’t have any hands to itch with. He’s like, not really worried about penicillin right now, and the surgeon then said to me, you can stay awake for 5 more minutes, I promise your life.

Ramsey Russell: Stay awake for 5 more minutes, you’ll live.

Jack Zimmerman: Promise your life. Yeah. I said, bet. I could do that. I mean, I’ve been awake this long. I’m feeling the best I felt in a while compared to how that’s when they put me on that chopper they just hauled me back to that hospital. I was doing everything I could to stay awake, stay alive, stay conscious, focusing as much as I could, because I knew my life depended on it. They pulled me out of that truck, and they brought me the operating room, and they put me on the operating room table, and I remember how cold it was. I was like, with all this technology we got in this world and we don’t have heated operating room tables. Are you kidding me? I remember hearing all the packaging getting ripped open and, people checking me out, and this guy was shaving spots on my chest and putting these stickies on me to get my heart rate and all that. Finally, guy came over and trying to put a mask on me, and I was fighting him, and he asked me what I was doing, and I said, hey, I got a bet with a guy, and finally he’s like, doc, insurgent came over. He’s like, hey man, your 5 minutes is up, and he was standing over top of me, and he told me to count back from 10, and not very politely, I told him, screw you. Basically, my last memories on earth aren’t going to be one. I didn’t know if I was ever going to wake up again, and I started thinking about all the best times in my life. I just seen flash before my eyes out on the battlefield as I drifted off into a coma. I woke up 6 days later in San Antonio. First time I woke up, I saw my ventilator in. The next time I woke up, my ventilator was out. My family was around me and I remember closing my eyes as fast as I could thinking, what are you guys doing in Afghanistan? I didn’t know they moved me to Texas. The next time I woke up, I was able to stay awake, and if I remember my dad getting my attention and he’s like, hey, you say something so I know you can hear us. My first words when I woke up were, what I got to do to get out of here. I didn’t want to be in the hospital. I did not want to be in the hospital. That’s the last place I wanted to be, and I was willing to do now whatever it took to get out of there, and that’s where I started doing most of my learning in my life. I had to do some, I shouldn’t say most of my learning in my life, some of the hardest learning I’ve done in my life, but some of the most rewarding learning I had to do in my life was in those moments right there after waking up.

Ramsey Russell: You fell asleep on an operating table in Kandahar, missing your legs, your limb, your life had flashed before your eyes. You stayed awake that 5 minutes and when you come conscious, your family’s around you, you’re in San Antonio, Texas. How long had you transpired?

Jack Zimmerman: 6 days.

Ramsey Russell: 6 days. Wow.

Jack Zimmerman: 6 days, 7 days, something like that, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: They got you stabilized and got you the heck out of Afghanistan?

Jack Zimmerman: Kind of. I was so packed full of mud and dirt and debris from the battlefield I was laying out in the mud when I got blown up, and all that debris and shrapnel and everything got pushed into my wounds from the blast when it went off. So, they’re trying to wash all that out of me as they haul me to San Antonio, and every time I did that, my vitals would get pretty bad. I got flat line and they get me to keep me alive, they’d say, move them. Get them out of here.

What Really Matters in Life

It was the people I spent my time with, and that seemed to be a recurring theme, a very definitive theme in your life and existence are the people.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. What next? You wake up, your family’s there, you tell your daddy I’m ready to get out of here, whatever I have to do to get out of here. I’m not meant to be here. Did you have any idea on that day at that meeting, did you have any idea the long row left to hoe for you at that point? Did you have any idea?

Jack Zimmerman: I had no idea what the rest of my life was going to look like. I had no idea. I knew nothing. You know, I didn’t know-

Ramsey Russell: Did you know you didn’t have legs at that point?

Jack Zimmerman: Oh, yeah. I knew I didn’t have legs. I know I really didn’t have arms. Last time I seen my right arm was hanging on by a piece of skin my left arm I seen that was pretty much blown out. I knew I didn’t have any legs. The first 2 weeks was pretty much in and out of surgery just operation after operation, and when I woke up I had to define the rest of my life. I knew that if I didn’t get up and move on, what was the point of saving me. I always say, be worth saving. I think about those guys that drugged me off the battlefield that day, that risked their lives to save mine now I need to get up and make my life worth living. Otherwise, you don’t be worth saving. What was the point of saving my life if I was just going to lay in bed the rest of my life. So, I knew I had to get out, but I got to define the rest of my life. I knew if I laid there and felt sorry for myself, it was a victory for the Taliban. I’m one of the Taliban. I know they didn’t take a damn thing from me. So, I had to get up and keep moving and I had to do whatever the doctors asked me to do. I had to push harder every single day because I had to create the best version of myself. I wanted to have a life worth living, and I knew the only way to do that was to work to that point, I mean, anything in life that you want, you have to work towards. Nothing’s given to us, and I had to realize that my legs weren’t coming back. That’s what I talk about when I.

Ramsey Russell: Jack, that’s a lot of information to process at one time when you’re laying in a hospital bed and I can talk to you because of my past experience. I ended up moving forward because I wanted to be worth saving. I had a life to live. I got a second chance of the way I looked at it. But that wasn’t my initial reaction. It ain’t like, right off the bed, I think of this thing. I have this epiphany, hey, I got to be worth saving. I’m going to move forward. Oh, well, life’s different, but I’m going to move forward. I mean, you had to have been processing all this for a period of time, huh?

Jack Zimmerman: I don’t think you understand how much I hate the Taliban and thought of them saying that they got one over on me. Whether that I felt sorry for myself or I felt like they got me. It was never even a thought. I thought that every moment of that day that the Taliban was going to walk past my room and glance in my room, and I was never going to let him see me frown. I was going to be smiling the whole time. He didn’t take a damn thing from me. That’s how I felt in the minute that I woke up. You got your whole family standing around. You got your fiancé that’s 19 years old standing there and looking at you. You got one or 2 choices. You can lay there and cry and watch everybody cry with you, and you’re going to lay there the rest of your life and you’re all going to cry together and feel sorry for yourselves. Or you can smile, pick yourself up, be a leader, and pull your whole family through something like that. That’s the choices that you have, and I feel like there’s more dignity, respect, and pride in the second choice of picking yourself up, driving forward, and being a leader, and letting these people know that no matter what happens today, I’m going to work as hard as I can to be the best version of myself. So, I need you guys to do whatever you can to be the best versions of yourself because that’s when you can help me the most.

Ramsey Russell: Get busy living or get busy dying, as Josie Wells used to say.

Jack Zimmerman: Amen to that, right?

Ramsey Russell: You talked about growing up in a small school with all your buddies, who you were surrounded with. You talked about out on the battlefield, on the patrols, who you were surrounded with. You talked about in the heat of combat after you stepped on the IED. It’s who you were surrounded with. These people coming in and helping you out. You wake up in a hospital room who you’re surrounded with your young fiancé, your family, the people in life that truly, utterly matter is who you’re surrounded with this entire time, and you’ve got this attitude of a soldier. You’re not going to let the Taliban win. You’re not going to let the Taliban deprive you of the second chance life has got you. That seems to be a very recurring theme about how important, even when your life is flashing behind your eyes, you have this epiphany that it really wasn’t the ducks and the trucks. It was the people I spent my time with, and that seemed to be a recurring theme, a very definitive theme in your life and existence are the people.

Jack Zimmerman: I think that’s the most of life is that we surround ourselves with. It’s the people we want to give our time to. Our time is so precious, I should have been dead that day. My best friend was killed over there. Land, he stepped on IED. The only reason we were out there that day was to get him home to meet his daughter.

Ramsey Russell: Was that after you had stepped on an IED.

Jack Zimmerman: Before. That was in October. I stepped on mine in March. So a few months before me he got killed and so you have the survivor skill from that I didn’t have much. I had a car and a fiancé. He had a wife and a daughter. You know, I mean, he had so much more to live for than I did and we both stepped on the same thing. I survived it and he didn’t, well what am I going to do? I could feel sorry and I do feel sorry, for myself is what I mean. I can feel sorry for myself and be like, why did he have to go? And why did I get to live? And you think about that, and I do feel bad, obviously, and I did deal with survivor skill for a long time. At the end of the day, these guys want you to go live and they want you to live the best life that you could. Anytime you don’t feel like you’re living up to your potential, you feel the heat of these guys on your back and you think about, man, these guys wish that they had an opportunity to live this life and to have this opportunity.

Ramsey Russell: Jack, even with the people we surround ourselves with, the tremendous amount of public and family and friendship support. When you go through something like that, getting through it, getting over it, moving on, really falls on your shoulders. Other than support and love, there is really not much anybody else can do for an individual that’s in a situation like yours. You’ve got to shoulder that responsibility, take self-responsibility and find the next step and the next step and climb those rungs into being the best person that you can possibly be. Would you agree with that? It’s a personal burden to move forward.

Jack Zimmerman: I think we owe it to ourselves every day to be the best version of ourselves. Every day that we waste not trying to become better at something whether it’s a better husband, a better father, a better dad, a better friend, whatever it may be. If we’re not doing our best every single day to try to become the best version of ourselves we’re not only cheating ourselves, we’re cheating the people that we love around us too. I strive every day to use the things that I’ve learned from every day that I’ve lived up to this point and apply them to today and try to use those things to become a better man today than I was yesterday. I think if we strive to do that every single day and we expect we set ourselves goals that we want to go out there and achieve and we want these things, we’re going to feel more satisfied at the end of our lives, and when our lives do flash before our eyes it’s going to be worth watching.

Moving Beyond Mental Barriers

Yeah, I had a lot of challenges. I had a lot of failures. I had to put my whole life back together, and I had to learn everything over again. My dreams weren’t the same. 

Ramsey Russell: You talk about the character building of boot camp and training and being in the military itself. What about the character building of having survived this, having moved past the mental barriers of what you can do, that you can live to see another day, that you can take another step, figuratively speaking, that you can continue to move forward with your life and play the hand God gave you. I mean, what does that do? It’s like I’m just being human here, Jack. I’ll just say it, man. There’s not a day goes by I don’t look in the mirror, wash my hands for the past 40 something years that I’m not reminded of a certain day back in 1982 myself, and it’s just a perfectly imperfect human being. There’s been a million times I’ve wished I could change and be ‘normal again.’ Get rid of these scars, get my full legs back, get my strength, get everything back just like it was. But as a grown man that’s moved on and lived 40 years and been the best version of me that I can possibly be, how vain and shallow that dream of some form of cosmetic perfection I want to re-achieve is in light of the character and the way I think. The wisdom or the benefit beyond looks that has come from my personal experiences. Do you ever struggle with something like that?

Jack Zimmerman: No.

Ramsey Russell: Never? Really?

Jack Zimmerman: I’ve never woke up and said man, this is terrible. First thing I do every morning when I wake up is I have to check my attitude because I get in a wheelchair. It’s the first thing I do every day. I have to get out of bed and get in that wheelchair, and from that, it’s a reminder of all the shit that I’ve been through. You can look at it one of 2 ways, is poor me. Look at all the stuff that I’ve been through, or I look at it as what can stop me now. Look at everything that I’ve been through. How can I have a bad day ever again after all the things that I’ve been through I’ve lost my best friend, I’ve lost my legs. What can I endure today that I can’t handle? There’s not too many things that I feel that you can throw at me anymore that I can’t handle. There’s not too many things that you can tell me that I won’t be able to process and feel like I’m not going to freak out because I’ve had so many things and so many things I’ve had to process in my life. I know how to do those things now. I put myself in a lot of situations that most people don’t want to find themselves in, and I don’t blame them and I never wanted to do them because I wanted to go be anything other than give my fellow countrymen somewhere safe to live and be willing to defend it, and to feel wanted and feel needed by my country was the greatest thing in the world.

Ramsey Russell: Amen. What is the best new version of yourself? You move ahead. You decide to get busy living instead of dying, you move ahead.

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: What is the best new version of yourself?

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah, I had a lot of challenges. I had a lot of failures. I had to put my whole life back together, and I had to learn everything over again. My dreams weren’t the same. I couldn’t carry a rifle anymore for 20 years in the military, I couldn’t go get back up on a ladder and be an electrician. Everything I knew was different, so I went and tried a bunch of different things. I went out and I sold insurance. I trained gun dogs. I did all this. I worked in politics. I did a bunch of stuff. But it really was, at the end of the day, what I found myself doing and enjoying the most was going around and sharing my story and talking about all the things I learned going through that. I became a motivational speaker, and I was out sharing my story, and things were going great, and as we all know, there’s this thing called COVID that came along, and during COVID I couldn’t go out and share my story because we couldn’t get groups of people together anymore. So, I decided to write my book during that time, 5 minutes: 300 seconds that changed my life. That’s what I did during COVID and once Covid was over, we were wide open again with the motivational speaking. I go to schools, I go to companies. I go all over the place where anybody wants to hear my story and share my experiences, and I guess my motto when I go out and speak is to build your attitude and to shape your perspective, so one day, when your life does flash before your eyes, it’s worth watching, and I love going out there and sharing my story and sharing my book. When I’m not out there doing that, I own a racing team, and we race all over the country, dirt track racing on circle track, and raise awareness for different veteran nonprofits and try to raise them a little bit of money along the way as we go. This year and how we met as I was down in Dallas this year with the organization, the foundation for exceptional warriors, and they were the nonprofit on the hood of our car this year and they take out guys that not only have been wounded, but anybody that’s served in an incredible capacity that have gone above and beyond, and they take care of guys like that. If anybody’s ever looking for a veteran nonprofit to go out there and support, the foundation for exceptional warriors is definitely a good place to look.

Ramsey Russell: It really doesn’t matter how we got here, does it?

Jack Zimmerman: No, it doesn’t. It just what you got to do to get your way out, I mean, there’s times in Afghanistan you find yourself in a situation, you’re like, man, this isn’t good, and it doesn’t really matter. You find yourself lying in a hospital bed, your legs blowing off and your arms blown off. It doesn’t really matter how you got yourself in that situation and the only thing that really matters is what you’re going to do to get yourself out.

Ramsey Russell: It’s not easy, but it’s worth it.

Jack Zimmerman: That’s pretty much everything in life. I was lying there and I knew that everything I had to go ahead of me I was going to be really hard. My arms didn’t work. One of the first things I had to do again was touch my nose, and that’s what I talk about. The first time you do anything is the hardest, and I remember trying to touch my nose again. My whole goal to touch my nose again was I could drink again and I could eat again, I could brush my own teeth, and my elbow was broken, my shoulder was broken, my hand was stuck shut but my whole goal was to touch my nose, and eventually I sat there for days, and eventually I touched my nose again or eventually stretched my neck out far enough to touch my nose again. I didn’t think I was ever going to be able to touch my nose ever again when I first started, but eventually, once I touched my nose, like we were talking about earlier, it changed everything inside of me. Once I touched it once and I could do it twice, and then I did it 6 times, and then I did a million times. Now it’s the easiest thing for me to do in the world but all I needed to do was in my head, proving myself that I could do it once, and it changed everything inside of me. So that’s what happened from there on out, is the first time I slid into my wheelchair on my own. Once I did it, I knew I could do it again once. The first time I took. I was able to slide the shower and take a shower on my own. The first time I did that, I was like, now I can do this, I know I can do it. I’m only going to get better from here on out, and that was the hardest it was going to be right there because I’ve never done it before.

Ramsey Russell: One of the most profound realizations pursuant to my own obstacles in past life was realization that everybody has adversity. It’s easy to look around when you’ve been through something tough, when people can look at me, look at my hands, look at my face and go, this guy has had a hard time in the past. When they see you come wheeling up without legs, they can look at us at a glance and go, he’s had some difficult challenges in the past. It’s pretty conspicuous, but one of the biggest realizations I ever had was that the human condition, it’s pretty damn tough. Nobody gets out of life without scars. Mine are very conspicuous. Yours are conspicuous, but everybody I know has scars on their heart, scars on their soul, scars on maybe their physical being, but life is tough. It’s tough. We all have adversity, don’t we?

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah. I mean, that’s what we’ve all done as people. Everybody’s climbing a mountain, whether it’s a personal mountain, whether it’s a mountain as a country. We’ve gone through the Great Depression. You’ve gone through your accident. I’ve gone through my incident. Everybody’s gone through something. Everybody’s got something going on in their life. Somebody’s losing somebody. Somebody’s losing a job. Somebody’s lost a pet, somebody’s lost something. Everybody’s going through something all the time. That’s life. You know it happens. But what we do and how we react and the way we push ourselves through those situations really defines us, who we are as people and that’s how I hope to be remembered is the way that I reacted when things didn’t go right. I reacted positively. I found a solution to the problem, and I overcame it, and I became a better man because of it.

Ramsey Russell: I guess as you get older in life and you’ve been through some of these hardships, we all begin to appreciate the little things in life. What does it mean when you say it’s the little things?

Jack Zimmerman: It’s me showing up to a meeting on time. That’s a victory. Me getting to sit on the end of the dock with my kids and talk about life didn’t cost us anything. We didn’t have to get on a plane to deal with. It’s little things, it’s that time you get to spend with the people that you really enjoy. Appreciating that time. Maybe it’s little things in life, like when you go through Mankato, Minnesota, here and you got to go down victory drive, and there’s 10 million stop lights, and you end up hitting all greens. It doesn’t ever happen, but once in a while, you hit all green lights. It’s those little things that, for me are those victories that wins every single day. Whenever I go and give my motivational speeches and I show up in a clean shirt and I don’t have a stain on it yet, I always say, look this is a win. It’s little things in life that matter but it really is. It’s when you’re leaving the house in the morning, you ain’t got to go looking for your keys because you put them where you were supposed to be. It’s the little things in life, just those things add up. It’s those little moments that for some reason, we remember for a lifetime, and they weren’t for whatever reason, they became special to you, but in the moment, that didn’t seem like you’re doing anything special.

Ramsey Russell: It’s like what you’re saying, the tortoise and the hare that the little bitty wins that seem like nothing really, over the course of a lifetime, surpass the big things, like getting hurt. It’s the little winds in life that really make up a life. The climb to the top, the race to the end. It’s just the little wins, not the big things necessarily. It’s the little things, isn’t it? That’s what life is.

Jack Zimmerman: I think if we take a moment, for me I journal every day. I write stuff down every single day, the highlights of my day and the things that I want to remember. There’s so very few that I ever write down anything bad that happens me that day or things that could be perceived as bad that happened to me that day, because really, at the end of my life, those things aren’t really going to matter because I really built up to add to be nothings in my life all those things that I thought were bad that happened to me. Hadn’t I stepped on that IED, maybe me and you would have never met and maybe me and you never would have met, hadn’t you ever gotten in your accident and you wouldn’t became the person that you are. Life is just a thing that we just have to accept the things that happen to us that we have no control over, but control things that you can we can control our attitudes, you can control our perspectives, and when you think of all these things, like I was just saying all the bad things, I don’t write any of these things down because they don’t really matter to me at the end of the day. That’s not what I want to remember at the end of my life are the bad things, and I feel like if every day we focus on writing down those good things that happen to us every single day, it becomes habit to look at the good things that happen to us in our lives and just ignore the things that we don’t necessarily like, but we can’t do anything about. We don’t like something in our lives and we can do something about it, then something’s wrong, but the things that we have no control over that we don’t like, we can’t focus on or give energy to.

Ramsey Russell: You got back into duck hunting. You’re a duck hunter still?

Jack Zimmerman: Can’t get enough of it.

Restorative Waterfowl Hunting

Anywhere anybody wants to go shoot ducks, I’m down to go shoot ducks.

Ramsey Russell: How long after you got home did you get back into waterfowl hunting?

Jack Zimmerman: Oh, man, it took me a little bit. I was rehabbing down Texas for a while down there, but as soon as I got right back up to Minnesota, I remember getting out in the cornfields with my buddies again and chasing ducks and super lucky now I’ve been lucky to go all over the country with different groups of people and a lot of combat veterans from east coast have been lucky enough to go up there and shoot eiders out on Cape Cod to hunting North Dakota potholes up at the Deuce Lodge with the Carlson family up there, all the way down all over the place, down Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, you name it chasing ducks on the Mississippi river. Anywhere anybody wants to go shoot ducks, I’m down to go shoot ducks.

Ramsey Russell: I can see dry field hunting. You’ve got one of the most kick ass wheelchairs I’ve ever seen.

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah, that Segway is pretty cool.

Ramsey Russell: It’s unbelievable. I don’t see how it works or how you stay balanced, but, but it gets around quicker than I can walk and, I can understand maybe rolling off into boats or, dry field, but you told me a story last weekend about hunting in a marsh in North Dakota and how thankful you were and how it really brought a message home. Will you tell that story?

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah. When I got wounded, I knew that’s going to do things differently, but things were going to never be the same and I just talked about those guys up in north Dakota at the Carlson Lodge. They bring a group of veterans up every year and take them out hunting. They invited me up this year, and they remember rolling up the edge of the slew, and they’re like, we’re going to get you out there, and I was like, how are you going to do that? Where are you going to put me? And this and everything else. Got a lot of I’ve never done this before. Every time I’ve been on the water hunting ducks ever since somebody’s always just set me in a boat. We stayed in the boat the whole time we shot ducks, and that’s just how it went, but these guys, now we’re going to get you out there in the reeds, all right, here we go. What they did is they put a dog platform out there in the water for me to sit on, and it worked absolutely perfect. They put me in this little, I don’t even know what you want to call it, sled, maybe and they slid me through the cattails. They got me out there on that platform, and I remember us sitting out there, and I smoke a cigar, and the divers started flying, we started shooting at them, and we started knocking some divers down and I looked to my left, and there’s guys that I not directly served with in Afghanistan, but I served with in Afghanistan. We were both there and I see these guys smiling, and I’m smiling. It’s the first time I’m back out on the water shooting divers in a slough again, just like I grew up doing, and it changed my life. These guys are wanting to go out of their way and burn one of their days at duck season to help me have that experience and I had to soak that in at the moment and really appreciate it. They pulled me out of that slough that night. We had a whole pile of ducks, and we had a great night, and I just remember reflecting back on that and how much that changed my life and what that meant to me and what that meant going forward to me and everything else. Those guys help fulfill a dream of mine that I want to do again I never thought was ever going to happen, but they made a way to make it happen, and I guess take grandpa out one more time. Take that kid out that has a dream of going hunting. Take him out because you never know how much you’re going to change somebody’s life by getting them out one more time. Get grandpa on the boat fishing one more time. Get whoever it is, get him out one more time, because I feel like at the end of the day really what really matters is our legacy of hunters is like we’re talking about earlier is nobody really gives a shit how many limits of ducks you ever shot. Nobody really cares how many bigger inch of deer you ever shot was. Who really ever cares about that stuff. What people really care about is how many people did you impact along the way? How much habitat did you impact? And are the species that you love to hunt doing better today than when you found them?

Ramsey Russell: That’s a lot of what you mean in one of the final chapters of your book. Every day is a chance to impact life. We play the hand that God dealt us, and we can impact lives, and we can leave the world a better place no matter what our setbacks have been.

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Every day is a chance to impact a life, and whether it’s me coaching a high school trap shooting team and trying to teach these kids how lucky they are to be here in America or teaching firearm safety or whatever those things are that I enjoy doing speaking at schools whatever it is, I really enjoy trying to inspire the next generation and tell them the stories about hunting, inspire them to want to go out in the duck bind and do it too. I want to make the habitat better and I want to make the lands better. I want to make the birds better. I want to make everything better. I want to make all the game better, but there’s nobody to appreciate it, then what’s the point. So, we need to foster the next generation of outdoorsmen and sportsmen so the things that we’re working so hard to conserve, somebody can appreciate.

Ramsey Russell: Jack, I appreciate you coming on board and telling your story. It inspired me. It did when I met you. Like I say, I don’t believe in coincidence at all. I feel blessed to have met you, and maybe had our life trajectories been different, we would not have met at Dallas Safari Club. Tell everybody listening how they can connect with you and where they can get their hands on a copy of your book, 5 minutes.

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah, the best place to go get a copy of my book is to go to my website, jacksonzimmermanmn.com (mn as in Minnesota). I’m on Facebook, too. Jack Zimmerman, 5 minutes: 300 seconds, and just go check us out there. If you’re looking for a better, come speak at a dinner or a school or a company or anywhere you’d like and you’d like me to come share my story and all things I learned going through it, you can reach out to me on my website so they get in touch and we’ll figure out a way to get me to come to wherever you are at.

Ramsey Russell: What are some of the veteran organizations that you work with?

Jack Zimmerman: Yeah, so the foundation for Exceptional warriors is who I was with when I were down at the Dallas Safari Club down there, and they’re a great organization. Patriot Catfishing is a nonprofit that has absolutely changed my life and was built around the fact that these guys got me out fishing catfish one time and I just was hooked, and they said, we can do this for other people, too. That’s how Patriot catfishing got off the ground, and veterans of field up in Maine is a great organization and so many great organizations really out there that support stuff like that. Of course, the nonprofit segs for vets, the nonprofit that gives me my wheelchair that everybody sees me on.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you, Jack. Folks, you all been listening to Jack Zimmerman, who joined the army because he wanted to serve his country. He has no regrets, even though it cost him his legs. He currently lives in Minnesota with his wife and 2 sons, where he actively serves the community and works with Veteran’s organizations. He speaks to groups frequently about his experience to encourage those of us who are struggling. Thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. We’ll see you next time.