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.'”

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.”