The Defense Department commemorates National Disability Employment Awareness Month at a Pentagon ceremony honoring the recipients of the 2019 Secretary of Defense Awards for Outstanding Department of Defense Employees and Service Members with Disabilities, October 3, 2019.

Transcript

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming our keynote speaker, Rob Buffer. (applauding)

Thank you, sir.

You ready? All right, before I start, let’s have a special thank you to our translators over here. (audience applauds) I’m gonna make her work today. Good afternoon and congratulations. It is truly an honor to be your guest speaker today. I know I’m looking out at an extraordinary group of Americans and you should all be very proud of your accomplishments. So thank you. So what’s my story? You’ve heard some of it already. As a boy, I looked up to my father and I wanted to be exactly like him. To do that, I made three goals for myself. First, I was gonna play football for Notre Dame and win a national championship there. And then I was gonna become a podiatrist and follow in his footsteps and take over his practice. As I progressed and grew of age, my athletic prowess grew also. And I started to get phone calls and visits from multiple coaches. And then come a very fateful day where the O-line coach from Notre Dame called and he informed me that they would not be offering me a scholarship. Shortly thereafter, I received a phone call from the Air Force offensive line coach who said he would offer me a full-ride scholarship. (audience laughing) I accepted. Little did I know, everybody at the Air Force Academy or any academy gets a full-ride scholarship. (audience laughing) But I was so proud. And, yes, I just said that I attended an academy to play football. I didn’t go there for faith of country, I went there to fulfill a childhood dream of playing football on Saturday afternoons in the fall. I soon learned, however, that I did enjoy the military and that I could appreciate the different components of its structure. Fast forward four years and I’m graduating with a civil engineering degree. Yes, I am not a doctor. I am O for three. (laughing) But hey, I had a job, I did well, grades were so-so, but I did well for myself. How did the Air Force thank me and reward me for my time at the academy? They sent me to Minot Air Force Base. (laughing) Why not Minot? Yes. I quickly learned, however, that this was not about assignment and I did enjoy my time. I got to use my degree and I was task to deploy not once, but twice. Before my second deployment, I met a gorgeous, smart young lady who was also a pharmaceutical sales rep. (laughing) We hit it off and quickly fell in love. We decided that when I got home from that tasking that we would get married. So yeah, and that’s not all that bad. In Iraq, I learned that I really loved the Air Force and my job. I felt like I was actually making a difference. And those two tours over those three years, they really cemented my passion for service. With those tours and time in Minot came multiple awards and recognition. So where did I get to go next? Cavalier Air Force Station. Anybody. Find Grand Forks, drive until you hit Canada and hang a left. (laughing) Yeah, mother Air Force for the win. Thank you. (laughing) This assignment turns out to be not too bad. We actually really enjoyed it. But my time in Cavalier is when I started having my fuzzy spells. They started about one a month and as my time progressed at that assignment, one a month turned into one a week. One a week turned into two weeks. And then I got my next assignment. Finally, I win one: Lagos, Portugal. Yes. So as we were preparing to PCS, we go on our going away motorcycle ride and spend all day in a nice hot July afternoon, riding around the roll hills of North Dakota. And when I get home, I can’t cool off. I don’t know what it is. I’ve been drinking water all day. Water. And I continue to drink all night and I couldn’t cool off. Finally, I figured, “You know what? “I’ll fall asleep and that’ll help me.” I wake up fifteen minutes later with a fireman holding my wrist and my wife mortified in the corner, just absolutely scared. I don’t know what’s going on, but once they realize that I’m good enough to walk, they usher me to the ambulance, I spend the night in the hospital. They do an EKG to determine that I had a grand mal seizure. And then they let me PCS. When I landed at Lagos… in-processing checklists. The other was my out-processing checklist. I had been tasked to deploy to Afghanistan. Yes. I had just spent two years at Cavalier… buddies do work down range and I missed it. And I was back I the fight and I couldn’t wait. So I went around base in-processing and out-processing. And I get a phone call to come see the surgeon general. It was on my checklist, I went and saw her. During that meeting, however, she tells me, “You’re in the base, but you’re not allowed to deploy.” You didn’t have a med board. You’re… go down range. You shouldn’t even be here. It was everything I could do to make it out of her office, the twenty steps to the bus stop before I broke down and cried huge alligator tears. I spent 30 minutes weeping. Got myself together. Got back to my office. What’s next? What happened next was a four-month circus of misdiagnoses, therapies, poking and a plethora of drugs. Nobody could figure it out. No one knew what was going on until one day I was sitting in court, juror’s box, and I had a fuzzy spell. I had an episode. When I came out of that episode, the OBGYN next to me was taking my pulse. She was looking into my eyes and she said, “Yeah, something’s wrong with you.” (audience laughs) “Thank you, ma’am.” The next day, I had a flight to Walter Reed where I spent 10 weeks undergoing treatment. Am I good, CJ? (laughs) The first day I was here at Walter Reed on that 10-week TUI, I was diagnosed by a third-year resident. Baffled me at the time, but hey, I was diagnosed. I had complex partial seizures and I was having enough of them… And how we’re gonna fix that is drugs. You guys know when you see that commercial and there’s a guy sitting in a tub on the top of a hill overlooking a valley and there’s soft music playing? (laughing) And then the narrator goes, “Side effects may include, (blows lip bubbles). They did the same thing for me with my drugs. Irritability, anxiety, weight gain. I had everything. Ultimately, it took 10 weeks before… I was on two different drugs at or above the recommended FDA limit on both of them. Or, as my neurosurgeon says, “A manly dose.” They determined that I was too drugged up to stay at Lagos and that the best course of action for me would be to come and PCS to Andrews locally and ultimately have surgery. So they said you can go back to Lagos for two weeks, pack up all your stuff, and come right back. So that’s what we did. Sorry, I lost my place. January of ’13, I went in for a temporal lobectomy. And that’s where they took out a piece of my skull, electrocuted me for a week, saw how my brain was reacting, and then went in and took out a piece of my brain before they put my skull back on. Before that surgery, the surgeon came in and said, “Hey, just so you know, side effects of this surgery “might include (blows lip bubbles).” “Thank you, ma’am. “As long as it makes me seizure-free, let’s go.” My son was born in April of that year and I started the medical board in May. It was a horrible experience, as I know some of you have been through or are going through. And I love the Air Force and I wanted to stay in, but all signs were pointing to no and to being removed from duty. In April of 2015, I was placed on the temporary disability list. My career had been ripped away from me. I rebounded and I got a job as a facilities project manager for the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. This was going to be a great experience for me. My boss’s boss was a retired Air Force civil engineer. I knew it was gonna be good. Nine months into that, he came to me and said, “Hey, “so it’s not really working out and I’m gonna offer you “a 90-day severance package if you resign today. “If you don’t, your boss has every right “to fire you tomorrow with zero-day severance.” No-brainer. Unfortunately, I was a failure. So we have this anxiety, we have this depression, and now on top of it, I’m a failure. Nonetheless, the beat goes on and I gotta move forward. I find a job as a project manager for a VA hospital in Columbia, Missouri. I get to help veterans. I get to be an engineer. This is gonna be great. I went down one weekend to search for our house and I came home. And that five-hour ride home, something didn’t feel right. When I pulled into my driveway, something just didn’t seem right even more. I opened the garage door, my wife’s van was gone. She didn’t tell me she was going anywhere, but okay. Opened the door into the living room, everything is gone. My wife had packed up and taken everything, including my son. Those tears in that bus stop, nothing compared to that night. Absolutely nothing. My life as I knew it was over. Enter a dear friend from the first day of basic training, 10 years prior. Having been a coach for the Air Force Warrior Program before, she had seen how adaptive sports and resiliency recovery had healed many others with visible and invisible wounds. She encouraged me to attend my first event at Offutt Air Force Base that summer of ’16 and I got to go. And I got a little bit of what it was, but not the full flavor. That following summer, AFW2 returned to Offutt and I got to go again. I was accepted to come back to the program. This time I attended the ambassador track. Ambassadors are a group of individuals within the Air Force Wounded Warrior Program who go out and share there story with groups of individuals at the base, out in the community, or in a auditorium like this. That single week transformed my recovery and kick-started my climb out of that deep, dark hole I had been living in. In learning to tell my story, I had to learn my story. And that just shot me out of the hole. I got to attend further camps where I learned about adaptive sports and how we can take everyday people or everyday activities and allow individuals with varying levels of disabilities to play on an almost even playing field. That week reignited my competitive spirit. And then I learned about the Warrior Games and the Invictus games. I couldn’t lose and I had to do it. So the Warrior Games are an Olympic-style event over a week where each service has their own team. I was selected to represent, and I got the honor to represent, the Air Force. Did fairly well for myself, got picked up to be on the US team for the Invictus Games So the Invictus Games are a version of the Warrior Games, next level high. 18 nations attended with different levels of teams in Sydney, Australia of October of 2018. I got to be one of the lucky 70 members on team USA. At that even, I got to compete in my three main sports: power lifting, shot put and disc, and rowing. But I also got to sail. A month or two before the games kicked off, I got phone call from one of the leads saying, “Hey, “you have an opening. “Have you ever sailed before?” And I said, “No, but I’ll be on the team. “Whatever ya need, ma’am.” And so I sailed. It was fairly easy and low profile in terms of how much pressure we had because we were told all we needed to do was finish the race. We had three Airmen and one Marine. Thank God the Department of the Navy was on the boat. (laughing) ‘Cause us Airmen didn’t know what we were doing. (laughing) I learned to enjoy sailing and I found it to be calming and relaxing. It provided me a physical toll, a physical tax on my life, but there was more to it. And that’s the underlining meaning of adaptive sports and recovery. I furthered my growth and recovery this past year at the 2019 Warrior Games. Again, I competed well and I won… Oh, I’m almost done, sorry (laughs). Think I’m getting the signal. Sorry. Are we doing good? Okay. (laughing) But more importantly, as was mentioned, I’m back in blue. I am now a GS employee at Offutt Air Force Base, using one of those programs that was mentioned earlier. So they work. Ironically, I’m doing the same thing I was doing before I was told I’m unfit for duty, minus the uniform. Now, as a civil engineer at Offutt, I’ve been tasked with managing their runway replacement and this is taking 1950s-era piece of pavement that has been limped along for the last 30 years, we’re ripping it out and we’re installing all brand new. And I’m also the project manager, or I’m one of the project managers, helping with the flood recovery and multiple MILCONs associated with that minor water problem we had back in March. To say life is hectic and pressure-filled would be an understatement. I’m reminded daily of the importance of these and the other projects I’m working on. But whenever life gets stressful, I simply step back and remind myself of the lessons I’ve learned through AFW2. That’s my story; it’s still being written, but what is yours? Each of you have had your ups and your downs I’m sure, and you’ve each reached an apex this year. Again, many congratulations and celebrations should be had, but where will you go from here? I would challenge each of you to find some sort of activity over this next year and use it as a resiliency tool. It might be starting a new sport, trying something new, or it might be learning to play a musical instrument. Maybe painting a rock. You would be surprised at how such a mundane, easy activity can be so relieving to your mind, body, and soul. Thanks again for your time today. I applaud each of you as you have excelled in your careers. Keep it up and enjoy the week. (audience applauds)