As a Navy SEAL leader,

I've always chosen light and fast over slow and heavy.

As such, I rarely wore my side plates into battle.

But on this one mission

to neutralize a high-value Al-Qaeda leader in 2007,

I had a little voice in my head say, "Wear your side plates."

Well, I tell you what: thank God that I listened.

Because that night, we were ambushed.

And I was shot eight times by an enemy PKM machine gun

to my body and face,

leaving me for dead

in the middle of one of the fiercest firefights of my war.

A little over 96 hours later,

I found myself in a hospital bed in Bethesda, Maryland,

struggling as the doctors filled me with overwhelming information:

"Lieutenant Redmond, you have no use of your left hand.

We don't know the extent of the nerve damage.

Your elbow is destroyed.

We're thinking about amputating your arm.

You are trached, you're wired shut,

and we are feeding you through a stomach tube.

Lieutenant Redman,

it's going to take years to put you back together."

As this information began to sink in,

I suddenly was hit with a stark realization.

My military operational career is over,

I'm going to be permanently disabled,

and I will be forever disfigured.

As I was trying to process this,

I suddenly heard a conversation close by, and it sounded a little like this:

"What a shame. What a pity.

We send these young men and women off to war,

and they come home broken and battered,

and they're never going to be the same.

They're never going to find success.

They're never going to be able to get back out there

and achieve the American dream."

And as I digested all of this,

I couldn't help but think to myself: