It only takes 20 minutes for John McPhee, a retired United States Army Special Forces operator, to not only give one a glimpse of his journey from a hardscrabble, soot-covered twenty-year-old civilian to a lean, cerebral combat operator in an elite American fighting force, but paint it with enough color, detail, humor and perspective to leave an enduring recollection.

He also packs it with a mantra that can be applied to anything you dream of achieving that — as is the case with nearly anything worthwhile — has a finish line with many an obstacle, many jagged spikes before it (he calls it the best advice he ever got) …

“There’s nothing any day that you couldn’t do.”

In addition, he explains the difference between his experience in Afghanistan versus Iraq:

Shortly after September 11 ’01, I was deployed to Afghanistan. At the time I had a little bit of war experience in Desert Storm, but nothing like what was going on. We were in the Tora Bora Mountains, in the Battle of Tora Bora, kind of a famous battle in today’s day and age. We got to the top of the mountains that first day and there are just rounds going off, explosions, dust everywhere — kinda chaotic, couldn’t really tell who was doing what, where and why.

I was with another guy … a Panama vet. I was like well, he’s seen combat before … there’s explosions and people are running behind us. So I was just kinda curious like, is this incoming fire or outgoing fire? I’m not sure what’s going on here …

Iraq kicked off in early ’03. We were some of the first guys on the ground and … man, compared to Afghanistan — I’m eating rice and flies, crapping in a hole in the ground, luck to get a shower, hoping the water I drink doesn’t make me sick, in Afghanistan …

… to [Iraq] I lived in Saddam’s palace, I washed my face in a gold sink, I had a six-shower-head shower. I didn’t even have this stuff at my home.

So my first day in Iraq I was like ‘THIS is how you war right here. Lemme get more hot water in the gold sink.'”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYYO6Qp3X2Q

And how he got the nicknames “Shrek” and the “Sheriff of Baghdad.”

“Dude every time you wear that ‘Sheriff of Baghdad’ shirt, that sh*t cracks me up.”