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00:00Welcome to Operation Healing Heroes. Join us in the beautiful Florida Keys as we
00:08feature US Navy rescue swimmer Christina Hoyer. These are the faces of heroes, many
00:17still bearing the invisible wounds of war, PTSD and trauma. I left Vietnam but
00:26Vietnam never left me. That's how I'm living. Why did I come back? Why are they
00:34gone and I'm not? You know, what have I done to deserve to be here? Our mission
00:42is listening and hearing, helping and healing for those who sacrificed and
00:50those who continue to sacrifice. The mission today and every day is
00:57Operation Healing Heroes. Brought to you by Great Clips.
01:06In the Florida Keys, healing begins where turquoise waters meets endless sky. Each sunrise a quiet promise
01:18that pain can soften, breath can deepen, and broken spirits can mend on the tide.
01:25Beneath the endless blue horizon, veterans discover a profound sanctuary of stillness,
01:32turning scars into stories and silence into strength. So tell me about life
01:39growing up in Colorado. Oh man, I mean Colorado, Colorado is still hands down one
01:45of my favorite states. I grew up with an outdoorsy dad, not as much of an outdoor mom, but she
01:52she came around for the ride. And you know, we got outside as often as we could.
01:59My hopes and dreams as a kid were to be a medical doctor. So I drove really, really hard academically for
02:06my whole career. Ended up going on to get like full ride academic scholarships for college. I went to
02:13school for molecular, cellular, developmental biology with an intent in pre-med. Of course.
02:17Yeah. You know, because who doesn't love that? Right. Right.
02:20That's the first thing I would have thought about. That's what I'm saying.
02:22I love learning about cells, but I don't feel like I'm on the right path. I'm not on the path God wants
02:30for me. I started praying, and at first, you know, just casual praying, and then I got really serious
02:38about it because it just kept aching. I'm in the wrong place. I'm in the wrong place doing,
02:42I'm not doing the right thing. And the more serious and more hearty my prayer got, the more loud the
02:49signs and the signals became. And eventually I had, this is the third person, third stranger that came
02:57up to me and talked to ask me if I will ever thought about joining the military. And this last one,
03:04I was quite literally standing in the grocery store holding a cantaloupe. So she said, she
03:08talked, I'm just, do you need any help? This is not even a grocery store worker. I'm like,
03:12yes, can you help me figure out how this is good? So she talks me through that. And then she's like,
03:16you know, I just feel like I need to ask you, have you ever thought about joining the military?
03:21And at this, at this time, I'm like, you know, I took that as, all right, God,
03:26loud and clear. Got it. Here we go. Took that and walked into the recruiter's office,
03:35I think just a couple days later. So have you ever been shark fishing before?
03:41You know, I didn't even know that you could fish for shark.
03:44Us Midwesterners from Illinois don't get to shark fish very much, so.
03:47Oh, I figure you want to avoid them. Yeah, exactly.
03:50Yeah. But instead, we're going to go out there and try and attract them.
03:53So yeah, I'm ready. Let's do it. I'm excited.
03:55It's going to be fun. Are you going to catch one?
03:58Perfect. This is where you're going to reel them in.
04:09Put the scent in the water and now we wait.
04:12Operation Healing Heroes is brought to you by Great Clips,
04:17Hawks K Resort and by Suzuki Marine.
04:28Operation Healing Heroes is a nonprofit organization dedicated to documenting the lives of our U.S.
04:33military veterans. In addition, we also provide financial support and treatment for post-traumatic
04:39stress. Your donation will help heal our heroes.
04:52Is that the most important thing to do?
04:56Yeah!
04:58Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
05:01Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
05:02Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
05:05Yeah. Yeah.
05:06Yeah. There we go.
05:08There we go.
05:17Wow.
05:19He's like sandpaper.
05:22Yes!
05:22Got it.
05:23Wow! What a fight!
05:24But that was...
05:25So I go home and I watch this movie, The Guardian, which is about Coast Guard rescue swimmers.
05:31And then I fall in love. I come back into the office. I'm like, what's it take? Let's go. Sign me up.
05:48In order for me to become a Navy rescue swimmer, I had to qualify. And in order to qualify,
06:02I had to pass a PST, a physical standard test.
06:05Christina knew the Navy rescue swimming pipeline started with one brutal gatekeeper,
06:11the physical screening test. Pull-ups and the 1.5 mile run became her personal hell.
06:19For five grueling months, she trained through blisters, doubt and exhaustion, leaning on her teammates
06:27and an iron wheel.
06:29Once I got to that PST, that I had finally gotten qualifying numbers to be put out into the national
06:37lottery. So you'll get out of boot camp. You'll go to crew, like air crew school.
06:43There, you'll do like some basic air crew requirements. Like, can you swim a mile in your
06:47gear? Some more basic survival stuff. And then once you go to rescue swimmer school,
06:53that's where like, okay.
06:55Hardcore stuff, but come kicks in.
06:57Yeah! This is where Ashton Kutcher, Ashton Kutcher's movie come into play.
07:01That is, so it's three weeks for air crew, six weeks for rescue swimmer school.
07:07Upon graduation of rescue swimmer school, then you move on to A school. And A school is basically
07:16like your primary education school. And we walk into the classroom and there's sonograms.
07:22And then they'll tell you what their course of speed is and then you log in. That's when you pass it.
07:26All right.
07:26What is this? This doesn't look like a helicopter or like life
07:31saving equipment. And they're like, welcome to your job where you learn to be a sonar tech
07:39and read sound underwater. A huge part of our job as swimmers is to read and understand sound underwater.
07:50Sonar techs like Christina, trained to track the unseen. Mines, subs, shadows in the blue.
08:04But the ocean's sharpest ears? Dolphins. Navy trained for mine detection. Their biosonar unmatched.
08:11Today at Hawks Cay in Florida, this retired Navy dolphin embodies the calm after the storm. A reminder
08:19that healing comes in waves. So it's pretty amazing that Hawks Cay Resort has this experience where you
08:26can swim with the dolphins. But what's even more amazing is that we found a Navy veteran dolphin.
08:31From one Navy veteran to another Navy veteran, they're going to get to interact with one another.
08:35How awesome is this that we get to share this experience?
08:45Specific operational history and missions remain classified for retired U.S. Navy dolphin Chinook.
08:53One thing is for certain, he is living retired life to the fullest at the Dolphin Connection in Duck
09:00Key, Florida. Operation Healing Heroes is brought to you by Great Clips, Craval Boats, and by PowerPole.
09:25If you'd like to see more behind-the-scenes footage, follow us on social media and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
09:43If you'd like to learn more and go deeper into the subject of healing,
09:46tune into the all-new Operation Healing Heroes podcast, Feel the Heal.
09:50Hear from veterans, first responders, doctors, nonprofit leaders, and Gold Star families as they
09:56share powerful stories of hope, healing, and resiliency. Tune in and Feel the Heal.
10:07And so you finally graduate and you are like a United States Navy rescue swimmer air crewman.
10:14And then six months later, I get a call from my leading petty officer and he's like,
10:20Hey, you want to go to Japan?
10:25I remember just like having so much fear around it, but again, like knowing that this is the right direction.
10:32The first six months I was in Japan, I hated it. I really hated it. I had left my family and my friends,
10:39my best friend. I had left a relationship. All together, I was in Japan for about three years.
10:45And my time out there, I was the only female air crewman in my shop.
10:52Every single one of my sisters are wildly attractive athletic women. Almost all of us had stalkers at some
10:59point. Almost all of us had like actively people who just had almost like a sickness in their head about
11:06it. And learning how to navigate that as a woman is part of what you learn in the service.
11:12You can't escape it. You can't. And that's why there's so many
11:17sexual assaults that happen on boats because it is close quarters. There's damn near no way to get away from it.
11:25So I guess this is kind of like the part in my military career that gets a little bit more challenging
11:30emotionally, not to say that it wasn't hard up to this point.
11:33I ended up being medically retired after six years. And I had some severe pelvic and abdominal pain
11:44that began developing while I was on deployment in Japan. So as I'm going through this whole process,
11:51not only am I medically trying to figure out what's wrong with me, but my current identity is being
12:00ripped away from me. Some of the pieces of the puzzle that maybe have been a part of the cause
12:08were potentially some sexual trauma and just some holding on to that. And I still don't really talk
12:15about it a whole ton, but you know, like military sexual trauma for anyone is a big deal.
12:24About a year ago, I hit the lowest point I've ever had in my life.
12:31Like I still had a lot of stuff. I was dealing with like anxiety and depression, but this was like different and it just kept getting worse.
12:39I like couldn't interact with my environment. Like it was like nothing brought me happiness
12:43or peace or rage or anything. And so I got to a point where I was done. I don't want to be here anymore.
12:54And I think what I learned from that is that at least in that moment for me, suicide happens
13:07not when we're so sad or we're so emotional. It happens because we're not feeling anything anymore.
13:16I was sitting on my bathroom floor, um, with my partner. And I was like, I can't do this anymore.
13:26I am ready to go. Like I'm going to kill myself. I just have no care left.
13:35He looked me in the eyes and he said, don't you dare. He literally looked at me and he was like, don't you dare.
13:48And I had never had anyone meet me with like such like furious energy towards it, which was so powerful.
13:56I was like, I'm going to kill myself.
14:03You ready?
14:07Take your time.
14:09Okay?
14:09Okay.
14:10And we need that.
14:25We need people who like will not let us go there or stay there.
14:30We need to be resourced with those people.
14:36And it's just so crazy because I had never understood suicide like that, you know?
14:42And I, I, I like get it now, you know, like I really get it and not even in a like, you know, sometimes
14:49you're like, I have no hope. And you're like sad about no hope. You're just like, I have no hope.
14:54It's just a matter of fact. I have no resources. It's just a matter of fact. I got nowhere to go.
15:00And it doesn't even matter at this point that like, people are going to miss me. I don't,
15:05I love you guys, but I don't care.
15:14Defenders of Freedom empowers donors like you to honor post 9-11 veterans from emergency cash relief
15:21and morale boosting adventures to life-changing TBI treatment. They're bridging the gap to civilian
15:28success.
15:29If you'd like to personally thank a veteran that you've seen in one of our episodes
15:33or nominate a veteran to be featured in a future episode, log on to our website,
15:37OperationHealingHeroes.org.
15:41Operation Healing Heroes is brought to you by Battle Born Batteries, Hawks K Resort,
15:49and by Flat Out Guide Service.
15:52And if it wasn't for people like that in my life, like who no matter what I have left,
16:04like they're still there. He ended up going on to like win this, this SIGARC competition.
16:12And so that was where he, he got my buy-in to go to this brain clinic.
16:18It's called Resiliency Brain Health. It's down in Coppell, Texas, I think.
16:23And they do functional neurology there and the results that they like get out of these programs
16:28are like crazy. It feels like it put my brain back together.
16:32And three months after that, I started to like feel my reality again.
16:38From that moment until now, it's like my life has like completely opened up.
16:44like pts tbi concussion any brain injury it's like a slow drip and you don't know it's there
16:55until you feel like man i got hit by a mac truck of reality at this point in my life i'm a human
17:02performance coach i help all kinds of people but primarily women ceos and entrepreneurs become
17:11their most optimized version of who they are and that was genuinely born out of my time in the
17:19service it was genuinely born out of the journey from point a to where i am now i mean i'm living
17:28the dream life doing this work oh yeah yeah yeah there you go go go go go go i got this one
17:38uh let me go get the oh my gosh she's got it
18:00worth it you know even though i messed that up that was just like the best count sitting in the
18:07beautiful florida keys i want to thank operation healing heroes for giving me this opportunity to
18:17really tell my story for the honestly like the first real time and even as i'm going through the
18:29conversations around it and reflecting back and feeling into and thinking and actually giving
18:36voice to so many pieces of this that had so much more meaning than i originally assigned
18:46i want other veterans to know that if you're feeling that that you're not broken there's not
18:53something innately wrong with you and there's something that can be done about it because i had
19:00no idea i didn't know that this is something that happens when you had a brain injury i didn't know that
19:09that detachment from reality and that muted feeling wasn't just me being psychologically broken
19:18it was my brain has some sort of dysfunction and that function can be restored
19:24in spite of how my career ended and the pieces of my journey that i endured
19:35the opportunity to serve was one of the greatest gifts of my life well if you don't mind i want to
19:44get you a little something to commemorate our trip together here
19:46so i've got a rod here for you oh my god thank you rod custom made by thorn brothers it's got your
19:55name on there it says christina hoyer in appreciation of your sacrifice and service
20:00all the branches of logo on there this is amazing and your own christina hoyer
20:05operation healing here is crazy i just saw your name on the background i was like oh that's so
20:11cool thank you so much for sharing your story thank you this is so beautiful i appreciate you
20:18and never deprive somebody of hope because it may be all they have right yeah just know that there's
20:22always hope out there there's always hope out there right thank you
20:31if you'd like to personally thank a veteran that you've seen in one of our episodes
20:34or nominate a veteran to be featured in a future episode log on to our website
20:38operationhealingheroes.org and click on the nominate button
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