Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Vet Voices, a podcast produced by Warner Enterprises, where average is for other people.
Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, coast guard. Let your voice be heard on Warner's veteran podcast.
Now buckle up and get ready for the host of vet Voices, Greg, Johnny, and Adam.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Vet Voices, the Warner Enterprises podcast, spotlighting the stories of veterans across our company and community.
Today we have a special guest with us, Tod Krause, one of our professional drivers and also a 22 year veteran of the US army. He's a finalist for the prestigious Kenworth transition trucking driving for excellence award. And today, we're going to get to know him a little bit more.
Todd, let's start with your time in the army. You want to give us the basics about when you entered.
What did you do? All that good stuff. Give us the two minute rundown of your army service.
[00:01:10] Speaker C: Wow. Two minutes for 22 years. That's pretty good. I think I can manage two and.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: A half if you want.
[00:01:15] Speaker C: All right. So in 1986, I was already a year out of high school. Didn't know exactly what I wanted to do when I grew up. I thought about truck driving back then with a couple of buddies of mine.
Thought about being a chiropractor. My next door neighbor and I talked about being a chiropractor together, and I still didn't know what I wanted to do. And I was delivering newspapers one day.
I had four jobs at the time, and I decided between jobs, I was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and the commercial came on. Be all that you can be. So I called in sick to my next job and went straight to the recruiting office. It was about 430, and they were getting ready to close down for the day. I walked in there and talked to Sergeant Sexton, I think was his name. And I looked at the coast guard and the Navy. I really like the boats, and I didn't want to wear bell bottoms, so I wasn't going to go in the Navy.
And the coast guard had recently done some downsizing of different jobs. And as delivering newspapers every day, I saw that as a headline that they had downsized like 10,000 people for some reason. And I didn't know the bigger picture, that there's still over 100,000 jobs in the coast guard. But at the time, I was like, yeah, I'm not sure about that, but I went into a supply field in the army and ended up at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and I did the aerosol course there. They sent me to airborne school. I got deployed to Egypt after that.
[00:02:47] Speaker B: How tough of a class is aerosol.
[00:02:49] Speaker C: Aerosol, I think, was a tougher class than the actual airborne school. There's all kinds of things you have to learn with the aerosol class. Sling load operations, how to safely sling load cargo and equipment, putting those big trucks and things underneath the helicopters.
[00:03:07] Speaker B: It's all helicopter focused.
[00:03:08] Speaker C: It is.
And the static discharge, the blades going through the air is creating a huge static field. So if you don't have somebody with a grounding rod in the ground and then discharge the static off of the hook underneath the helicopter, you can get blown like 40ft off the top of the rig that you're on. So you got to make sure that the timing is right for the two people up there. One person is going to discharge the static, and the next person is going to put the hook on the bottom of the helicopter. Otherwise, it could be a bad deal for you.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: I would imagine that's a pretty tough thing for the normal run of the day average army soldier. I know that we have Greg ham on the podcast a lot, and he struggles with some of the simple tasks quite often.
[00:03:50] Speaker C: I understand know the more difficult ones. You think about it a lot more, and then the simple things that you think is so easy, it's like, what the heck am I doing wrong? If you're not trained and don't have the gist of what you should be doing before, it looks simple when these guys do it, just go up and slap a hook on the bottom of the helicopter. But you don't realize that the other guy up there touching the bottom, the hook with a grounding rod that's in the ground, that's going to save your life.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: I love Tod's. Wholesome answer to the shade that Adam was trying to throw at his fellow coworker. Nice job.
[00:04:28] Speaker B: All right, so Aerosol airborne. I derailed the conversation there a little bit. I apologize.
[00:04:35] Speaker C: No problem. That's what it's all about, kind of learning and getting to know each other, right?
[00:04:39] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:04:42] Speaker C: Then I got stationed in Egypt, and in know, I learned to scuba dive. I actually got to float on the dead Sea, swim in the Mediterranean Sea, and scuba dive in the Red Sea. All in the same deployment out there.
[00:04:56] Speaker B: Remind me, what year did you join and what year was this? In Egypt?
[00:04:59] Speaker C: I went in the military in 89, 86, and then I went to Egypt in 89 and 90, so I did 18 months in Egypt.
[00:05:08] Speaker B: 86 was a good year. Also was the year that I was born.
[00:05:13] Speaker C: Thanks for that.
[00:05:14] Speaker B: You're welcome.
[00:05:17] Speaker C: That's all right. Yeah, so while I was there, I learned to scuba dive, so I'm Aerosol airborne scuba. The scuba wasn't a military operation, but it was recreational. I did 18 months over there in the supply field, and when I was getting ready to reenlist, that was the end of my four years. And a budy of mine that happened to be over there, he enlisted for or reenlisted for the army's watercraft field. I'm like, are you kidding me? The army has boats.
Tell me more.
And so I ended up reenlisting for the boat field. I ended up at Fort Eustace, Virginia, and I was a sergeant, a coxon of a LCM eight, which is the mic boat. That's the boat you see coming into the beaches on saving Private Ryan.
That's where I started.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: Has it changed at all since we used it in World War II, or is it the same. It's the same principle.
[00:06:12] Speaker C: The same principle. They've upgraded the engines. It's no longer four six cylinder engines. It's 212 cylinder engines.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: I think the guy that made that originally for World War II was a Nebraska native. I think that whole idea originated out of the great state of Nebraska. I'll have to fact check that.
[00:06:30] Speaker A: Is that why it's Omaha beach, you think?
[00:06:32] Speaker B: I don't know. Maybe, yeah.
[00:06:35] Speaker C: They had plenty of place here in Nebraska to test drive those vessels. Correct.
[00:06:41] Speaker A: It's so much water here, right? Land of 10,000 lakes, they call us.
[00:06:47] Speaker B: Give us the problem, we'll solve it.
[00:06:49] Speaker C: That's right. I guess they could do the dry run here. Right.
[00:06:54] Speaker B: Okay. So you were a coxon on these landing crafts, right.
You originally enlisted in the army. Correct.
Due to our conversation yesterday, I know you became a warrant. When did the warrant happen?
[00:07:09] Speaker C: A couple of years after being in the boat field. And I actually have a really good knack for operating the vessels.
I just decided that it was time to step up and go to the larger ships.
We got the 128 foot tugboat that was designed to be a 151ft. But they wanted to save some money, so they chopped off 31ft of it, I guess, and added another deck higher. But because of the draft restrictions of where we were docking in fort uses, Virginia, up the James river, they couldn't add any draft. So that makes a whole lot of sense. You've completely changed a tugboat to where it's got a higher center of gravity but not putting it deeper in the water. So when a zodiac went by, when you tied to the pier, you could still feel it rock you pretty good on the bridge of the ship.
[00:08:03] Speaker B: That's crazy.
[00:08:04] Speaker C: So, yeah, we took that out around Cape Hatteras and down to Venezuela, towing a barge that had a micboat on it, and we were giving the micboat to Venezuela at the time.
[00:08:19] Speaker B: How long does that trip take?
[00:08:20] Speaker C: I can't imagine. That was a couple weeks, right? No, it's not really a fast mover, and depending on the season conditions, it can slow you down. If you've got a lot of swell, you've got to adjust the distance between your barge and the vessel so that you don't get kind of the spring action back and forth. You want it to fall down the wave at the same time that you're going down a wave further ahead of it, so you're not kind of snapping back and forth and it'll ruin the lines and cause all kinds of damage.
[00:08:51] Speaker B: Just for the record, I am going to refuse to call it a barge, a vessel or a ship just to make my granddad roll over in his grave.
[00:09:00] Speaker C: I will be calling it a boat, a boat.
[00:09:02] Speaker B: The rest of the podcast, because he was a navy man through and through, and I was corrected for 30 years of my life about calling it a boat. It had to be a ship.
[00:09:11] Speaker C: A boat drags its belly on the bottom. Submarine in the navy as a boat.
[00:09:16] Speaker B: Oh, there you go. Sounds like what you have is a boat, too.
[00:09:20] Speaker C: Yes, that was a tug boat. It was 128 foot tug boat. We also took a barge, a water purification barge, to the Virgin Islands down in the Caribbean. It's a rough job that we had in the boat field.
[00:09:36] Speaker B: Sounds like a great place to continue scuba diving.
[00:09:39] Speaker C: It was. I did scuba diving all over the know. Being in the boat field and access to oceans wherever you go, man, the.
[00:09:46] Speaker A: Navy really missed out on you.
How does that reconcile?
[00:09:50] Speaker C: Well, I tell people I was in the army's navy. I was stationed at an air force base in Hawaii, Hickam Air force base.
We hauled the marines back and forth from the big island to Oahu. They couldn't do any of their excavation training and their big gun training on Oahu, it's a little bit too populated for that. So they did all that training on the big island. And at our school in Virginia, we actually taught celestial navigation courses to the, you know, our little piece of the pie had the hand in everything except for the space force, and that happened after I retired. So they may be doing something with, you know, collecting something that falls off things out in the ocean when they launch from canaveral or whatever. I like my feet firmly planted on the ground or on the deck of a ship underway.
Okay, ship, boat.
You can put a boat on a ship, but you can't put a ship on a boat.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: That makes sense.
[00:10:50] Speaker C: There you go.
[00:10:51] Speaker A: Unpack that one, Adam.
[00:10:52] Speaker C: Yeah, there you go. I've got pictures of all of the boats in the army, a lot of them on the deck of the cormorant, which was a ship that would sink down into the water and you float your boat onto their deck and they'd secure it as the ship came up out of the water and they transport them to different places, like when they took stuff to the middle east, they're a lot faster than us. Our vessels were moving.
10 kt was a good high average for us, which is great for fishing. We've caught Marlin all over the world, caught 53 tuna in 17 hours in the Persian Gulf.
[00:11:33] Speaker B: You were showing me some of those pictures earlier today. It's just talk about a morale boost of running a fishing line off the back of a boat and getting to catch something that big. And then I would imagine in short order, it ends up on some type of barbecue grill on the boat.
[00:11:49] Speaker C: Yes, because it wasn't FDA approved and all that, we couldn't have our cooks do it in the galley, so we either did sashimi, eating it raw or on the grill on the back deck, where we grilled our own, or grilled for the whole crew, depending on which vessel I was on and who was interested. We had fish constantly solid. I had run out of recipes and I asked my older brother, I said, you do a lot of fishing. What do you use for a recipe? He says, you're going to think I'm crazy, but get peanut butter. Okay.
[00:12:25] Speaker B: Yes, you're crazy.
[00:12:26] Speaker C: And mix it with soy sauce so it's really smooth and creamy.
[00:12:30] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:12:30] Speaker C: And then you spread it over the fish and you grill it that way. It's really a good fish.
[00:12:36] Speaker B: Is there much peanut flavor left over?
[00:12:38] Speaker C: There is. There's enough.
But he didn't let me know that. Beware. Peanut butter is highly flammable.
[00:12:47] Speaker B: Peanut butter as in the actual edible food?
[00:12:51] Speaker C: Yes, it's very flammable.
When I had that on my tuna steaks, I had about six inch and a half thick tuna steaks on the grill covered with this peanut butter and soy sauce mix.
I had the grill lit. I put the lid down and all of a sudden the flames are coming out the side and it's just roaring. And I lifted the lid and I'm glad that I didn't have to pay for those steaks.
[00:13:15] Speaker B: Tuna is done.
[00:13:16] Speaker C: Yeah, they were well charred. So if you decide to do this, if you're out there listening, make sure you put foil down under the steaks, because as soon as that sauce starts dripping off of the tuna, it will ignite.
[00:13:30] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:13:31] Speaker A: Some people pay extra for that.
[00:13:35] Speaker C: Well, it would have probably been about $300 worth of tuna steaks that I just went up in flames.
They were quite large. Yes.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: We got to go fishing some more.
[00:13:45] Speaker B: Yeah, by this point in time. Bigger boat. And you're a warrant. Yes. What was the process to transition from enlisted army to warrant army? What's that like? Is there a class?
[00:13:58] Speaker C: It's a warrant officer basic course. Woeback. You go down. I think it's harder than basic training.
You have a bunch of people that are the blackout instructors that do their best to break people. I had actually had a sergeant major in my class that was trying to transition over to warrant officer school. And when you have a point in.
[00:14:22] Speaker B: Your career, why would you.
[00:14:24] Speaker C: Exactly. And he's sitting there with these much younger warrant officers standing there screaming at him in his face and belittling him and degrading him and trying to break him. He's like, screw you, I'm done.
Those that have been in their career or in the military for quite a while were some of the earliest that fell out. I actually had one guy that was in my Woback course that he was in the high school to fly school program. So his flight aptitude scores were high enough that he went from entering the military basic training, didn't go to an AIT. He went straight to warrant officer basic course to be a pilot.
His senior drill sergeant from basic training was in the same program. So he's like, it took a while for him to shake off that. Yes. Senior drill sergeant. He was really nervous around this guy.
[00:15:21] Speaker B: Is that the normal path is enlist first and then become a warrant? Yes.
Most individuals don't come off the street and go directly to warrant. Correct?
[00:15:31] Speaker C: Right. If you have flight aptitudes, you can do that from the high school to flight school program.
[00:15:36] Speaker B: But that's pretty rare.
[00:15:38] Speaker C: Right. And then the boat field, you had to have five years of watercraft knowledge. You had to have a senior warrant officer, a couple of senior warrant officer letters of endorsement to recommend you for the school before you could even get in.
[00:15:56] Speaker B: Five grades. Right. For the ranking system, is it one through five?
[00:16:00] Speaker C: Five being the top w, one for your initials, your warrant officer. And then after you get two, it's CW two, chief warrant officer two, three, four, and then five and five started toward the end of my career, they didn't even have a five until, gosh, I don't know what year it was, but two or three years before I retired is when they had the CW five rank come out.
[00:16:24] Speaker B: And fives are pretty rare.
[00:16:26] Speaker C: Yes, they are.
[00:16:27] Speaker B: Okay.
Air Force vet, right? 18 years in the air force. Just shy 18 years in the air force. We don't do warrants anymore, so I'm always just fascinated to talk. The one experience I've personally had was Iraq deployment with a warrant. We were working for the army as an air force contingent, and the chief warrant, he was a three or four, I think at that point in time. I was very young in my career, and everybody just. He walked in the room, and it was instant respect period from everybody in the army. And it was just interesting to watch from the air side.
[00:17:07] Speaker C: The warrant officers are the technical experts for the military. So while the desk officer, the captain, the major might be a transportation officer, where he's in charge of truck units or boat units or train units or plane units or whatever, it's a transportation officer position.
The boots on the ground, the vessel master, the chief engineer, the ones who have got the technical ability to operate the machinery or to work the process. That's the job of the warrant officer.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: So I think that the respect is definitely tied to that. I think there's another component of it. Every time I ever wanted to find a drink, an alcoholic beverage in a place, I was not allowed to have one, I just had to find my nearest warrant. And somehow they always had a foot locker full of it. Had a locker full of it or whatever the story is, right? So I think that plays into the respect piece a little bit. Is that ring true in your neck of the woods as well? Or is that just an uneducated Air force veteran speaking out of turn?
[00:18:16] Speaker C: Well, I was never stationed anyplace that they didn't have any liquor bands or anything.
[00:18:22] Speaker B: You were a chief Warrant officer, right.
[00:18:26] Speaker C: When we did our trips to, say, Puerto Rico, the rum down there was extremely cheap, the liquor. So all my guys would go out there and load up as much of this cheap. Well, inexpensive liquor and stuff. I went more toward the. They had the tenderloins at the costco. Down there was $17 versus $60 for the same tenderloin at a Costco in the United States.
[00:18:49] Speaker B: It's crazy.
[00:18:50] Speaker C: So I loaded my cooler with tenderloins, and everybody else is loading their foot lockers with the liquor. So they spend $500 on liquor. That would have been a couple of $1,000 worth of liquor on us soil.
[00:19:03] Speaker B: So he's not denying my perception. I just want that notice. There you go.
[00:19:06] Speaker C: The warrant officers are, like I said, the technical experts. So if there's something you need, see a warrant officer.
[00:19:15] Speaker B: Amen. Okay, we've talked.
I feel like, are we halfway through your career yet? Where? We've talked about Egypt, we've talked about Puerto Rico, we've talked about Venezuela.
Where are we at in timeline? How many years do you have in by this point?
[00:19:34] Speaker C: That's about the halfway point. I went into warrant officer about my eight to nine year period in the military.
Then I deployed to Hawaii. After that, I first went warrant. I decided, let me try and get this Hawaii assignment. And they're like, yeah, good luck. There's a whole lot of people ahead of you. Well, most of the people in the army's watercraft field wanted to homestead in Virginia, and so I went from bottom of the list to top of the list and into Hawaii within just a couple years of making warrants. So I've been a third mate on an army ship. Third mate was basically the supply officer on the ship. Substance. We got all the food and any of the supplies that the ship needed, and then a second mate was the quartermaster of the ship.
Not the quartermaster. The navigation officer in charge of the quartermaster of the ship. The quartermaster did the charts and all the navigation.
[00:20:40] Speaker B: I thought the quartermaster was all supply.
[00:20:43] Speaker C: So, in the quartermaster corps, that's a supply field. The quartermaster on a ship or a boat, a vessel is the enlisted navigation soldier on the ship. Okay? The navigation officer is the second mate position.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:21:04] Speaker C: So in charge of getting us from point a to point b and figuring all the points in between that takes to get there, that's the navigation officer's job, making sure everything's plotted and gets ready to get you to the finish point.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: These bigger boats that you were on, you were a warrant at the time, how many warrants were on versus what's the crew makeup look like, how many enlisted? How many warrants? What's that look like?
[00:21:31] Speaker C: So we'd have 30 to 31 people on board the vessel, including, if we had our medic, our three cooks.
We had eight warrant officers, the chief engineer, the senior engineer on the engine side, usually a w three or w four, and then the first, second, and third assistant on the engineer side. The deck officers would have the skipper of the vessel, the first, second, and third mate. So eight total warrant officers. The first mate position is the cargo officer, where you handle any of the cargo operations. You're in charge of making sure we've got enough deck space, we've got enough donenage, we've got enough equipment to tie down the water purification barge or the mic boat, or the whole deck of the ship is strapped down with bombs going to the middle knee.
[00:22:24] Speaker B: Tuna, right?
[00:22:25] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:22:26] Speaker B: Whatever you're carrying.
[00:22:27] Speaker C: 53 tuna. There you go. So that's the first mate's job. And then the skipper is in charge of the whole ship.
[00:22:35] Speaker B: And the skipper is a warrant.
[00:22:36] Speaker C: It is.
[00:22:37] Speaker B: Okay. So no commissioned owes.
[00:22:39] Speaker C: No, on the boat, they're passengers.
[00:22:41] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:22:42] Speaker C: All right. We've had several of them on board that want to be a passenger.
[00:22:47] Speaker B: I would prefer to be a passenger, in my experience.
[00:22:49] Speaker C: Yeah. And you could sit back and watch the fishing lines. And so one of them gets tight or the rubber band breaks to let you know you got to fish on. You just hit the button on the walkie talkie, let the bridge know, fish on. And so we're all back or all stop.
[00:23:02] Speaker B: Seems like an important job.
[00:23:04] Speaker C: It is a greatly important job.
[00:23:06] Speaker B: Okay, so halfway through your career, how'd you finish out? What did the back half of your career look like?
[00:23:11] Speaker C: Well, a lot of that took me from the mid to the back end of that. I retired out of Hawaii as a CW three. I actually did operations officer out of Hawaii. When I was finally winding down, I did a shoulder surgery, so I wasn't on board the vessel anymore. So I took the operations job to start scheduling and planning all the missions and retired as a chief warrant officer. Three.
[00:23:37] Speaker B: In Hawaii, what's rank progression look like for warrants?
There's never any timeline from one rank to another that's reliable across everybody. But how do you go from one to two to three to four to five? What's that process look like?
[00:23:51] Speaker C: Well, it's basically the one to two is pretty much an automatic thing after two years.
Two to three, you're boarded like an enlisted soldier going to different boards. It's almost a given to three, but if you're passed over the first time, you've only got one more time to make it. So if they've got 100% CW three s in your field and you're up for promotion and there's no slots for you, the first time, you pray that somebody retires before you're coming up for your second shot next year, if there's no slots available for you, you don't have a chance. You're done.
[00:24:33] Speaker B: You might not know, and it probably is dated information.
How many warrants are there? So your field. Right. How many are you competing against for rank in the boat service?
[00:24:45] Speaker C: I really couldn't even venture a guess. I know we had a couple of the large ocean tugs, we had 34 lcus.
We had a bunch of the small tugs, the harbor tugs, seven lsvs, or I guess six active duty lsvs. When I was in, I know the reserves had one. I think they've probably done a few more since then. We actually had a high speed vessel, HSV.
When we got that out of Tasmania, it was a fast ferry and the army used that. I guess they did a trip. The maiden voyage from Tasmania to Virginia was a 17 day trip. And that thing just would really cruise.
And we shared that as a joint venture with the Navy for the first year or two. And then we got a couple more. And so that's one of those operational platforms for the command out in the Middle east. They ran that for a while. I don't know. I didn't actually get to be on board that vessel.
I got to tour it.
Near Australia.
[00:26:04] Speaker B: Correct. And they've got the entire island. Is Tasmania off of. One of the islands off of Australia is Tasmania?
[00:26:11] Speaker C: Yes, I believe so. I didn't get to go down there either.
[00:26:13] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:26:14] Speaker C: Unfortunately, that would have been an awesome trip.
[00:26:17] Speaker B: It's just not a country or I guess it's a state of know you never hear talked about.
[00:26:24] Speaker C: It's. You know, they. They say we got this vessel from Australia, but it actually came from Tasmania. So maybe that is their state of Australia.
[00:26:32] Speaker A: Unless you watch Looney tunes, because the tasmanian devil, there's a lot of discussion. He spins around and smashes everything up.
[00:26:40] Speaker B: Okay, you mentioned shoulder surgery, retirement, moved into ops position, and then. Retirement. What did you do after you got out?
[00:26:50] Speaker C: I was going to be a police officer. I planned on it. I had everything submitted to the King county sheriff's Department in Washington. Because that's kind of your foot in the door in Washington to go through there. And it was all set and ready to go. And my wife know, you've done four tours of the desert. You've come home with no holes in you.
[00:27:12] Speaker B: Fate. Please.
[00:27:13] Speaker C: Yes, please don't go piss off some crackhead that stabs you or shoots you or something. And I'm like, okay, now what am I going to do? And so my wife, she said, please do something else. And I was already on my terminal leave. I had my own home repair business in Hawaii, doing quite well. But my wife and kids wanted snow, so we moved.
[00:27:37] Speaker A: Wait, what?
[00:27:39] Speaker C: Yes. They didn't want to stay in Hawaii. My wife is from Hawaii. My kids were born in Virginia, and they wanted snow, so we moved to Spokane, Washington.
[00:27:49] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:27:50] Speaker C: And we got plenty of snow the first year. Actually, we landed June 10 of 2008, and there was four inches of snow when we landed in Spokane.
[00:27:59] Speaker B: And at any point, did your wife admit that maybe it was a mistake?
[00:28:03] Speaker C: Not a chance. She still loves it.
[00:28:05] Speaker A: Oh, my God. I can't just imagine that conversation, like, hey, honey, I'm kind of sick of hawai. I would really like snow.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: Honestly, though, I think I side with your wife.
[00:28:16] Speaker A: There might be something there.
[00:28:17] Speaker B: I think I want some colder temperature.
[00:28:20] Speaker C: She wanted four seasons, not just snow. She wanted four seasons.
[00:28:23] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:28:24] Speaker C: And my four seasons are scuba season, fishing season, surfing season, beach season.
And unfortunately, I was outruled. It was three to one. So happy wife, happy life. We moved to Spokane, Washington, absolutely. That winter. So we had the first five years we were there. We had the five winter records set for the first five years. The latest winter, June 10 snow. And then the coldest winter, the deepest snow on record.
I talked about when I was a little kid in Rexburg, Idaho. We were sledding off of the top of grandma and grandpa's house because the snow had drifted so much, they buried the house.
[00:29:04] Speaker B: You're still married to the same woman I am.
[00:29:08] Speaker C: Almost 30 years. Yeah. She's a saint.
[00:29:10] Speaker B: Wow, that's impressive. Sounds like you might be a saint, too.
[00:29:13] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:29:14] Speaker A: Breaking records no matter what. Pretty amazing.
[00:29:17] Speaker C: Well, so that winter, my kids like, yeah, you didn't sled off the house that winter. We were sledding off of our house in Spokane, Washington.
It was, you know, deepest, wettest, coldest, and latest winters on record for the first five years we were there.
[00:29:35] Speaker B: It's crazy.
[00:29:37] Speaker C: So we can fast forward a little bit to my decision to go into trucking.
[00:29:42] Speaker B: Yeah, real quick. Let's cover your fairly large stint at the postal service, because got talked out of being a cop wisely. And then there's still a pretty significant gap between eight, nine time frame. And when you came to Warner, what did you do in between?
[00:30:03] Speaker C: I got hired onto the post office. My brother in law said, hey, I've got a guy that works for me that the post office is always calling, trying to get him to come back to work. And so I got a hold of this guy and says, who's calling you? And he gave me the name of the postmaster that was calling, trying to get him to come back to work. I called her, and I could never get through because she was always busy. So I drove to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and met with her at her office as she was getting ready to leave. And she says, I am absolutely excited that you're wanting to come to work for the post office. This is my last day at this office. I start tomorrow in Spokane, Washington, at the north point office.
Could you be there at 03:00 in the morning? I'm like, sure, absolutely. At the time, I was living at my brother's house out in Elk. My family was still in Hawaii because we wanted to wait till the end of the school year before we brought them down.
[00:30:54] Speaker B: Made you move into the snow by yourself?
[00:30:56] Speaker C: Yes, I moved January of 2008.
So when there was five inches of snow at my house in Spokane, there was 5ft at my brother's house in elk. And so a half hour drive turns into an hour drive with all the extra snow.
[00:31:11] Speaker B: Five feet's a lot.
[00:31:12] Speaker C: It is. I didn't know he had fencing around his property. He had these five foot high cattle panel fences to keep his goats, and I didn't see fences. It was buried.
[00:31:21] Speaker B: It's wild. Where are the goats in that situation?
[00:31:25] Speaker C: He had a pen, a barn and pen that buried? Yes. You had to go across the drifts and down into the pen. It was quite interesting.
I made it into the post office. I started there. I was a casual clerk at the post office.
[00:31:42] Speaker B: So work in the desk?
[00:31:43] Speaker C: No, I was actually sorting parcels and sorting the trays of mail. I would sort them off of the cart that came from the plant.
[00:31:51] Speaker B: When you say casual, does that get to mean you wear t shirt and shorts to work?
[00:31:55] Speaker C: Yes, absolutely.
I was not a face of anybody, so I didn't have to see customers.
[00:32:03] Speaker A: Is this at 300 too?
[00:32:05] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:32:05] Speaker A: Okay. So, yeah, there's nobody there to even see what you're bearing, your pjs.
[00:32:09] Speaker C: So the clerks, there was full time, regular clerks that actually had pension and vacation time. Earning a casual doesn't earn anything other than their paycheck. Got you.
[00:32:21] Speaker B: All right, so it is a scheduling thing. My wife is a nurse practitioner at the hospital, and she's considered casual status because she only gets the paycheck. Zero benefits. It's just the paycheck. Right. And they call her a casual non career. Okay, got it.
[00:32:37] Speaker C: And then I went from there. I offered a career position as a mail handler at the plant. So once again, I was going in at eight or 09:00 at night and staying till four in the morning.
And then coming the holiday time, you're in there 2 hours early, you stay 2 hours late. So you're doing twelve hour, days, every day.
[00:32:59] Speaker A: Tod, I'm interested, too. The US Postal service is obviously another government agency. I mean, did they look at your time?
Enlisted?
What was that like? Did they bring that up? Was that a pro or was that a con?
[00:33:12] Speaker C: It could have been a pro if I would have brought my paperwork with me.
[00:33:18] Speaker B: Your wife still had it in Hawaii?
[00:33:19] Speaker C: Yes, it was still in Hawaii. But I scored well enough on my test that I still was at the top of the. You get five extra points for being a veteran, another five extra points for being a disabled vet. So it would have given me ten more points on my hiring to put me above my peers. But I scored well enough on my exams or my tests for the post office.
[00:33:41] Speaker A: They give you tests like how many stamps you can lick.
[00:33:44] Speaker C: There's all kinds of tests to show that you're able to sort mail, to be able to figure out what street it's going to be on, what route it's going to be on, what zip code. Gotcha. Right.
[00:33:54] Speaker A: So there's, I imagine, like american gladiators.
[00:33:57] Speaker C: Is it in back?
[00:33:58] Speaker A: Is that really what's going on back there? There's somebody with a foam dart that's like blasting you as you're trying to put stuff in boxes.
[00:34:05] Speaker B: Todd just did. We have the United Way going on right now. Yeah. So Tod just battled a whole bunch of aliens in a virtual reality game. And he would probably crush american gladiator.
I think he set a record on the score for this shooting alien game.
[00:34:23] Speaker C: And for the record, I've never had a virtual reality headset on my head. I've never done it. I've seen people crack tvs on commercials on tv, but I've never done it.
[00:34:33] Speaker B: I have it on video.
[00:34:34] Speaker A: I think the more I learn about Tod, the more I feel like secretly he's in SEAL team six. And this whole thing has been a cover. Like, oh, yeah, I just deliver things like the tug he gets out on like a submersible and darts out into tasmania and takes out a bunch of terrorists and then zips back.
[00:34:50] Speaker C: Maybe a long time ago, but now I look more like a Seal than the SEAL team walrus.
[00:34:57] Speaker B: I like Todd.
[00:34:58] Speaker A: It's good times.
[00:34:59] Speaker B: Okay, so at some point in time, you went from casual status at the post office to full time GS scale employee?
[00:35:08] Speaker C: Yes, I went to a mail handler at the plant and then I was offered a full time position as a mail handler. At the same time I was offered a full time position as a carrier. We actually did everything that came through the plant. I ended up being a forklift operator, a tug operator the tugs towed.
Looks like the roll tainers that the dollar general account has, but it's a GPC or an OTR over the road containers that we hauled them.
[00:35:36] Speaker B: It goes in the back of trailers?
[00:35:38] Speaker C: Yes. It goes back into the back of the 53 foot trailers and loaded and taken across the state to different actual mail units at the stations from the distribution centers. And then I ended up being a carrier and carried mail for a few years, and then I was asked to go into management, and I figured, well, it's a good time to do that. Get me off the street. And as much as I like the snow, I don't want to go wading through it to deliver mail every day.
[00:36:07] Speaker B: How was carrying mail? How was that having a route, getting to know houses, all that stuff?
[00:36:12] Speaker C: I enjoyed it. I delivered mail as a carrier to most every station in the Spokane district.
[00:36:19] Speaker B: Part of me thinks that I would really enjoy just being a mail carrier.
[00:36:25] Speaker C: It's a lot like being a truck driver. The solitude of you're doing it, you're in charge of what you have to deliver.
[00:36:32] Speaker A: Well, it almost feels like you got to be a cop after all. Like, that's your beat. Your beat cop. You run your route and get to.
[00:36:39] Speaker C: Know all the people on the route.
You could see where the trouble spots were. I mean, I did call in a couple of places that you could see that they were stripping cars in the back. So I called in. I've got a lot of friends or police officers. So I called and said, hey, there's a spot here that has got some cars that are being stripped down, and this is a third one I've seen this week. I don't think that they're doing it because they're trying to rebuild a car.
[00:37:01] Speaker A: Postman detective.
[00:37:03] Speaker B: Well, with some field team six, with some of the news coming out of Oregon and Washington these days, I don't think you did good enough. I really think that you could have really nipped this in the bud better, so got into management. How many years did you have with the post office?
[00:37:22] Speaker C: Just right at 16 years.
[00:37:23] Speaker B: Okay. And then what was your transition from that to ultimately landing at Warner?
[00:37:31] Speaker C: Well, I was right before my final eight months as a supervisor and postmaster in the post office, I did a stint on Whidby island over Christmas 2020, 116 weeks of being a postmaster. Over there, we had ten routes, four full time regular employees as carriers. We had carriers from all over the states. We had a guy from New York.
I think he came in the furthest to volunteer to help out, because there just weren't enough people to deliver the mail there.
Living on an island, and it's an expensive island, so the people who lived on the island weren't interested in delivering mail. And so we had people from all mean. I was volunteered to be the postmaster from Spokane to go over there. We had higher level people just to deliver packages. We had mechanics and custodians delivering packages.
[00:38:30] Speaker B: It doesn't count as volunteering if they told you to do it, right?
[00:38:33] Speaker C: Well, I did volunteer.
[00:38:35] Speaker A: Is that volunteered?
[00:38:37] Speaker C: Volunteered versus volunteer. That's military. Volunteered. There you go. But I did volunteer to go and help out and try and just help the organization out a little bit. So I did my 16 weeks over there, and during that time, I realized that I just don't get paid enough for what I do. And I decided. I talked about going into trucking in my early high school days, and now might be a great time to do it. So I went to the truck driving school, sage truck driving school out of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and decided, I'm going to get my cdl while I was still working at the post office, and was able to get that on some off time. And while I was at Sage, they had several different posters around the office. And I started applying. I applied at close to 50 truck driving places, and I got responses from around 40 of them. Good responses. Hey, we'd love to have you, or you have to have a year of practice and behind the wheel before we hire. You have to have at least a year, some of them, two years. So I had 40 offers, and so I started asking director of the school there, what would you suggest? She goes, well, with your military background and looking at what you've done and how well you're doing, there's a couple of them that are really good to the military and Werner enterprises. It was top of her list. And so I started looking at it, and the posters on the wall there, the big freedom trucks that they were showing in the pictures, I said, that's what I want. I want to drive one of those freedom trucks. And she, you know, if you want to talk to somebody, here's a recruiter's number for Werner. I talked to them, and I got an offer right away from a.
Of the. He says, you're a know, you don't have any accidents. You don't have any.
[00:40:37] Speaker B: You live in Washington state.
[00:40:39] Speaker C: Yeah, live in Washington. So all across the board, I was checking the boxes for him, and so I was like, heck, yeah, I'll go to Werner.
[00:40:48] Speaker B: And you're in a freedom truck today, correct?
[00:40:50] Speaker C: I am. I guess the way they saw how much I cared for my truck, the pride in my ride. I was always cleaning at it and taking pictures and posting it online with the Werner, and just always enjoy having a clean truck. And so that might have been part of it. I am driving the operation freedom red, remember, everyone deployed truck, keeping it shined up as good as I can when I'm not traveling through Montana, ice and snowstorms.
[00:41:22] Speaker A: Todd, for those people that don't know what the operation Freedom trucks are, could you quick just kind of describe what Werner's operation Freedom trucks are? And then kind of what they mean to was when you saw it, you said, that's what I want to be a part of. What is it that you saw?
[00:41:38] Speaker C: Well, it's an ambassadorship tool for Werner, showing that we have pride and actually support the military. They have all different kinds of. They remember everyone deployed. They have firefighter trucks, they have autism trucks, breast cancer awareness trucks. But they actually get behind an organization. And support of the ambassador truck or the freedom truck shows that Werner supports the military. Werner wants to employ military as they're transitioning from the military into the trucking industry. And so that's a real eye opener that, hey, if they're going to wrap the truck, spend all that money to wrap a truck, to show their support, you know, that they're going to back their military personnel and really support you when you come to work for Werner.
[00:42:36] Speaker B: So 18% of our current fleet are military veterans. So the value proposition is definitely there, right. Veterans show up on time. Veterans get the mission, they get it knocked out. And most of the time, we do it really well.
24%, 23% ish of our million mile fleet, of our active million mile fleet. Those that have driven with us for 1 million or more safe, accident free miles are military veterans. And I think that really speaks to what veterans bring to the table. And that also speaks to, one, supporting our military is the right thing to do, period. Two, we're seeing the results on the back end, that it's a safer driver. It's a driver that shows up on time. It's a driver that takes pride in his ride. Right. Keeps it clean, all that stuff, which is the image that we want to portray as well.
[00:43:37] Speaker C: I agree. Just the pride aspect. The people who were in the military that had to have their dress uniforms exactly right before going through your Inspections, you had to have that image that you showed to the public when you were out there. I see the truck convoys that go through the gas stations and the truck stops. And I've actually talked to a lot of them that their profession is truck driving for the military, and have talked to them about what's your thought when you get out of the military? This is a great career. I'm doing really well, and Werner Enterprises is a great company to work, you know, keep us in mind. If you're getting out and decide that you want a job as a truck driver, you're doing it right now.
And there's a track to get past the CDL aspect. You don't have to go to school if you're already doing it as a professional driver for the military. So being able to talk to them and see how professional they look out there and enjoying what they're doing there, it's a natural progression and transition into the trucking industry.
[00:44:48] Speaker B: So those veterans that are in that space now, those activity service members, any advice that you would pass on to what you've learned in your last time with us? What advice would you have for the next generation that's coming after you?
[00:45:01] Speaker C: Wow, that's a tough one.
Advice, just really transition into what you love doing. If you're loving it in the military, I absolutely love it. You're your own boss. When you're out here on the road, you don't have to worry about the 75 employees that work for you that don't want to come to work because they have 8 hours of sick leave on the books. You did your time in the military, and now being out on the road as a professional, there's so many different kinds of jobs within even Werner, where you can have home daily routes home, weekly routes home every few weeks. My first job with Werner, I had 18 days on the road and five days at home.
[00:45:48] Speaker B: What's your current day to day? What do you do today? What's your normal schedule look like?
[00:45:52] Speaker C: Well, I just bid onto a costco account out of Tumwater, Washington. So I've only got a week of driving, one full active week with them.
From Tumwater, Washington, to Belgrade, Montana, back to Tumwater and then to Missoula, Montana, and to Belgrade, Montana again, then back down. Took a load to Spokane and back, and went to Eugene, Oregon, and back. All my first week. Okay. Wow. When I go through Spokane, it just happens to be that's where I'm living. It's time for my ten hour break. By the time I get there, I get to take a ten hour break. And after my trip back from Belgrade, I made it to Spokane again for my 34 hours reset. So I get to see my wife as much or more than I did when I was in the post office, because I was on all kinds of details that kept me out of the office.
[00:46:42] Speaker B: So, Todd, you've recently been nominated for this award. Talk to us about this award that you've been nominated and a finalist for. Tell us about that process. Tell us about what that award is. Tell us about what it means to you.
[00:47:00] Speaker C: It absolutely means the world. I've never really been nominated for anything in my life. Never won anything. My beautiful wife and children are the biggest reward I've ever had in my life, other than a couple of wrestling tournaments in high school, that I was able to win that 98 pounder in high school. But I got a phone call from one of the senior people here at Werner Enterprises, and he says, hey, so what are you doing different? How is this going for you? I'm like, I'm just doing my job. What do you mean different? He says, well, this award. I'm like, what award? Well, you've been nominated. Well, what is it?
So he explains that it's a transition trucking award. And he says, you didn't even know what it was. I was like, no, I had never heard of it. I kind of keep my head down and do my job. And so he told me about this award, and I had a two or three week long grin on my face where I was like, holy cow. Somebody's noticing that I'm doing my job and enjoying it and being a part of this company. And so being nominated was absolutely mind blowing.
[00:48:05] Speaker A: What is it? What is the transition and trucking award is your understanding?
[00:48:09] Speaker C: Transition trucking award is basically taking care of military members who are transitioning from military active duty into a civilian career. It doesn't actually have to be active duty. We've got Eric that is deployed now. He's a reservist who's a military member who's driving for Werner, but he's just deployed for a year long deployment to the Middle east. So you can be reservist, active duty, a guardsman transitioning into a civilian, you know, that's where the transition trucking comes from.
Transitioning in for me, I did the postal service first, but I still had that desire to do something different. So Werner actually, they paid my truck driving school back. They actually gave me my GI bill. I was in apprenticeship program, apprenticeship program through Werner, where I got my GI Bill money paid back to me in a monthly installment.
So the way that Werner has taken care of me. Transitioning into trucking, it is so smooth and just a flawless entry into this field of trucking. This career.
People can go out and get jobs. You can go out and get a job doing anything. There's thousands of jobs available open all over the United States. But to find a career that will be able to continue to support me and my family at the level that I was expecting to is just a fluid transition right into this.
[00:49:54] Speaker B: Wow. So this award is no joke. So, year long competition. The winner that will be selected, it's not just a plaque or a participation ribbon or anything along those lines. You're getting a brand new truck. That truck is 150,000 plus dollars. Truck signature edition t 680 stamped aluminum cab sleeper.
It's just a phenomenal award that really recognizes your truck driving school, right where you got your CDO, the company that you work for, but also the veteran that wins. It's a big deal to be able to transition out successfully. It's something that those that are transitioning often struggle with. But to be able to step into a role and be successful in your first year is an awesome thing. And then to be able to compete on a national level is impressive.
[00:50:56] Speaker C: I was just flabbergasted when they told me that was nominated. And then when I found out that I was in the top 17, we all went to Columbus, Ohio. We had an award ceremony, a veterans center there, and got to see. They talk about all the vets and what we have done in our careers and our transition into the trucking program.
We all got these really awesome trophies with a plaque on them talking about our transitioning excellence. And then at that point, they named the top five. And when I found out that I was in the top five, just tough to even hold back the tears.
I've won the nomination. I've won a semifinalist nomination. Now I've won a nomination to be a finalist. They said, well, you can take your badge off now because you're not a semi finalist anymore. And I'm like, well, if you think about it, I am a semi truck finalist.
[00:51:58] Speaker B: Any idea how many applicants were there? How many drivers were nominated? Any idea how big that field is?
[00:52:05] Speaker C: I have no clue how many people were actually nominated, even from our company.
I don't know how I was seen as a nominee. I don't know who initiated the nomination, and I don't know how many people. I mean, there's supposedly from any veteran truck driver, from any truck driving company in the United States was eligible to be nominated for this award. But I don't know how that is.
[00:52:33] Speaker A: Had to have been thousands.
[00:52:33] Speaker B: I think it's safe to say the pool was very large. To go from the initial pool to just the semifinalist round of 17, that was a lot of cutting went into that. From the company perspective, all our eggs, one basket. You were the nominee for Warner Enterprises this year. So, from the company perspective, you're one of approximately 10,000 drivers. Not all those drivers are veterans. Not all are qualified for it, but large portion of those drivers are veterans. So you were the one nominee from Warner this year. So to be able to go from that initial pool to 17 semifinalists to five finalists, it's awesome, right? I don't know how to describe how that feeling must feel.
[00:53:20] Speaker C: I still don't know how to describe that feeling.
It's one of those things that pinch me. This has been a dream for a whole year. I've been in a coma and trying to wake up from something, a bad accident somewhere.
[00:53:32] Speaker A: But, man, you took it all the way to the end. And, sadly, we didn't cross that finish line. But what do they say? No matter if you win or lose, it's how you play the game. And I got to tell you, listening to your story today and seeing where you came from, and you said it yourself, you already feel like a winner with your wife and your kids. That, to me, that's what I'm taking away from today. What are your thoughts, or how do you think about it?
[00:54:05] Speaker C: I am absolutely a winner. I didn't win the truck, but I am a winner all the way across the board. I mean, I've had a year long journey getting to this point, and I have been writing on cloud nine this whole year. Finding out that I was nominated was just above anything I'd ever expected. And then to make it to the top 17 as a semifinalist and then being a finalist and getting to go to Washington, DC, and doing the wreaths across America and visiting the tomb of the unknown Soldier and Arlington National Cemetery, all of these things, even though I didn't get to walk away or drive away with the truck.
I have won so much this year that it's beyond even trying to explain. I've been walking on this cloud all year long. So I've had a year long journey of excellence with Werner enterprises and this transition trucking program.
[00:55:03] Speaker A: Well, I do have to echo your sentiments there. I do feel like, truly, Werner Enterprises is winning, because we have an amazing driver in you and everything you bring to the table. And we just want to say thank you. For everything that you do each and every day and doing it safely and just being here at Werner, we can't thank you enough, and we're just so proud of you for everything you've done, and we're just so happy that you're driving the journey each and every day.
[00:55:32] Speaker C: Well, greatly appreciate mean. It's been an amazing adventure, and Werner is an amazing company that has just supported me and everything.
You know, like I said, the nomination is way more than I would have ever expected out of any other job or career that I've had in my life. So this is amazing.
[00:55:51] Speaker A: So that should wrap up our here, our vet voices podcast here for Werner Enterprises team. Thanks so much for listening today, the brave men and women of the United States armed forces and our allies all over the world, we salute you. Make sure to buckle up and drive safe out there.
