Family Talk

Guest (Male): Welcome everyone to Family Talk. It's a ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute, supported by listeners just like you. I'm Dr. James Dobson, and I'm thrilled that you've joined us.

Guest (Male): Well, welcome to Family Talk. I'm Roger Marsh. You know, Memorial Day is a time to remember the men and women who paid the ultimate price for our freedom. And on today's Family Talk broadcast, we have a story to share that brings that sacrifice into sharp focus. In 1993, Sergeant Jeff Struecker led a squad in the Battle of Mogadishu, Somalia, an intense firefight in which a few hundred soldiers faced somewhere between 10 and 20,000 armed combatants. Multiple Black Hawk helicopters were shot down. 19 Americans were killed, 73 more were wounded. You may know this battle from the 2001 film called Black Hawk Down. But the story you're about to hear here on Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, actually goes far beyond what any movie can ever capture. Jeff Struecker served actively for 22 years before retiring as a Major and a Chaplain. He holds a PhD from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and is the award-winning author of six books, including *The Road to Unafraid*. Here now is Dr. James Dobson to introduce today's guest here on Family Talk.

Dr. James Dobson: Well, hello everyone and welcome to Family Talk. I'm your host, Dr. James Dobson, and as I hope you know, you should if you don't, today is Memorial Day here in the United States. And I have, and he won't be comfortable with this, but a military hero having served with the Army Rangers in Mogadishu, Somalia and other places during horrendous battles. The one I'm referring to is called Black Hawk Down today, where how many helicopters went down?

Guest (Male): About five of the six troop-carrying Black Hawks were shot down that day.

Dr. James Dobson: And how many helicopters generally?

Guest (Male): We had about 18 aircraft in the skies. Several of them were shot down.

Dr. James Dobson: My goodness. I'm anxious to hear the details of that. That was in 1993.

Guest (Male): That's correct.

Dr. James Dobson: And 19 men were killed and 73 were wounded in one day. That's one of the most unfortunate or horrendous military losses in American history, isn't it?

Guest (Male): Well, in a modern generation, yes, sir. I mean, since Vietnam. Those casualty numbers in Vietnam were much higher.

Dr. James Dobson: Well, I'm talking about Sergeant and later Captain, and then Chaplain, and now retired Major Jeff Struecker. Jeff, when you look back on what we were just talking about in Somalia and what took place in the loss of many men who were obviously your friends, a lot of them. What what thoughts come through?

Guest (Male): Well, it's Memorial Day. I miss some of those men. I still remember the pain that those families felt. And really, there's not many days that go by that I don't think about some of those men who fought and bled next to me, and some of them really who gave their life for me. But I thank God for creating those kind of warriors for us. Because we wouldn't be the country we are today without them.

Dr. James Dobson: You won a competition that gave you the title, the Top Ranger, because you were a Ranger, in the infantry, or in the Army, or throughout the military itself. Is that correct?

Guest (Male): That's right.

Dr. James Dobson: Uh, you got to explain. How did that competition come down?

Guest (Male): For the listeners, maybe best for you to go out there and to look at the Best Ranger competition. Just do a web search for it. But the Best Ranger competition's been around for about 30 years. It is a three-day, non-stop event. It has endurance events throughout the Best Ranger competition, and then sprinkled in, there are highly technical events. The competition is conducted with two-man teams, and it is all branches of the military and foreign services have been asked to compete in the past.

Dr. James Dobson: A team consisted of four men?

Guest (Male): A team is two men. Me and one partner. And generally, it's considered one of the toughest endurance competitions in the world.

Dr. James Dobson: When you described it to me earlier, it kind of reminds me of the decathlon in the Olympics. Is that?

Guest (Male): It's kind of like that. Yes, sir. It starts on Friday morning, usually at about 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning. It starts with a long distance run through the woods, an obstacle course, from there, they'll swim, they'll start jumping out of a helicopter, go to doing a number of shooting events the rest of that day. They'll spend all night long moving with heavy loads on their back and on Sunday afternoon, the competition ultimately ends. There's no sleep programmed in it, and over the course of those two and a half or three days, most of those two-man teams will move somewhere between 60 and 100 miles on their feet with a lot of other physical events sprinkled in throughout.

Dr. James Dobson: What kind of shape did you have to be in to do that?

Guest (Male): Well, that was a while. I won in 1996. I was in much better shape in 1996 than I am today. I know your listeners can't see me, but I I generally get disappointed with how my level of fitness today compared to what it was then. I had the privilege of being given all of the assets and all of the opportunities that the US Army had for me to train and to compete almost exclusively for about 90 days, and I competed at the same level that most Olympic athletes. In fact, um, this competition generally will start about 50 to 55 two-man teams, and only 20 of them will still be around on the second day.

Dr. James Dobson: What'd you do to train? That involved all the strength events, all the running events, explain.

Guest (Male): The Best Ranger competition has a couple of hidden or secret events. Some of them are technical, some of them are physical, so there's no way that anybody can completely train for everything. I spent literally a year running and walking long distances with heavy loads on my back, getting ready for this dedicated training period. And then during that dedicated training period, I would usually work out 12 or 14 hours a day with um sprinkling in some technical events or some shooting in between workouts to give myself a little bit of a physical break, but it was uh the greatest level of fitness I've ever held in my life.

Dr. James Dobson: Name the battles that you have been involved in. I guess Panama is one of them.

Guest (Male): Yes, sir. I started in the Army in 1987. So the first combat operation I was in is Operation Just Cause in Panama in 1989. In 1991, I was sent to Kuwait as part of Desert Storm. 1993, my unit was deployed to Somalia as part of Black Hawk Down. And then starting in 2003 to 2009, I went nine times to Afghanistan and five times to Iraq.

Dr. James Dobson: Uh, the Lord obviously preserved you. You've seen a lot of combat, haven't you?

Guest (Male): Yes, sir.

Dr. James Dobson: What'd it do to you? Did you come home with PTSD?

Guest (Male): Uh, no. I have never lost a night of sleep over anything that I've seen or anything that I've done in combat. But I am a very different man today than I was before Somalia, and I don't think that I have a disorder, but I have been impacted by the death and the killing that I've seen around me. And I think it's very natural for a warrior to be impacted. Many warriors who as a chaplain or now as a pastor ask me, how do I make the dreams go away? I tell them, you don't. You probably are going to live with those for the rest of your life. And then they'll ask me, how do I go back to being the man that I was before I went to combat? Because I'm different today. And I say, you can't. You can't unscramble eggs.

Dr. James Dobson: It will change you.

Guest (Male): But you can make an omelet out of eggs, and what you have to figure out how to do is to make a new normal, a different normal. And I consider myself, I think my family would tell you, I'm a bit of a different man today than I was before I went to combat for the first time. I have changed. But by God's grace, I'm maybe um a better man today for it.

Dr. James Dobson: Did you and your wife survive?

Guest (Male): We did.

Dr. James Dobson: How long have you been married to her?

Guest (Male): I I married my high school sweetheart. I retired from the Army in 2011, and at my retirement ceremony, I said, of all of the things that I've had the privilege of doing in the Army, all of the awards and decorations, all of the awesome travel that I've had a chance to do, the only thing that I'm proud of is that my wife and our five children are on the bench in front of me, and I'm still married to my high school sweetheart, and I have a great relationship with our five children.

Dr. James Dobson: You call her your hero.

Guest (Male): Mhm. She really is.

Dr. James Dobson: You feel that way about her?

Guest (Male): I do. Yeah, I don't think America really understands the sacrifices that military families make, and she is my hero.

Dr. James Dobson: You've got five kids.

Guest (Male): Yes, sir.

Dr. James Dobson: And you spent a lot of time away from them during their high school years, I guess?

Guest (Male): Yeah.

Dr. James Dobson: Do you regret that?

Guest (Male): Um, yeah, I hate to use the word regret. If I were to do it all over again, I think I'd do the same thing all over again. But it, there's consequences for the amount of time that I've spent away from them, and I did the best that I could to be a good dad and a good husband 10,000 miles away from my family. I felt an overwhelming sense from God that as a father, I have to still show my children that I love them, even though I'm on the other side of the globe. And I have to lead my family, even though I'm on the other side of the globe. And I didn't always do that well. I wish I would have done it better sometimes, but I'm proud of the relationship that I have with them today.

Dr. James Dobson: You know, my father was an evangelist, and he was gone a lot. My mother really raised me. Uh, even though I was very, very close to him, and when he was home, he was mine. You know, when he would come home, we'd hunt and fish together and he'd he made up for a lot of it with me. But I remember being at a train station one time in particular when he was leaving for six weeks, and I had that lump in my throat. Have you ever had a honest to goodness lump in your throat where you couldn't breathe, where you were forcing tears away from your eyes?

Guest (Male): One of the memories that I'll carry with me to my death is my first deployment as a father of children that are going to be old enough to remember that dad's going away to war and may not come back was in 2003. I was deploying to Afghanistan with the Army's 82nd Airborne Division. And the day that my family was dropping me off to put me on an airplane, I prayed with each one of my children separately. And my oldest son, Aaron, I remember standing next to our family van, and I got so emotional that I couldn't finish the prayer. In fact, I'm about to get emotional here. And he was weeping because he realized how serious this was. And I really just couldn't get the words out of my mouth that I I was placing my son in the Lord's hands and asking God to be his father while I was gone. And um God was gracious and fathered my children much better than I could father my children at home when I was halfway around the world. But the lump that was in my throat, I almost couldn't finish a sentence because the pain was so deep, what I was about to do. And as a warrior, I knew I didn't really have a choice, but it hurt really bad.

Dr. James Dobson: Yeah. What motivated you, Jeff? You know, you could have succeeded in many areas. In fact, you have a PhD now, and a master's degree and then you have been successful in what is it now a new career that we're going to talk about. So you had choices. Why this one?

Guest (Male): Great question. Um, this is going to sound morbid to some of your listeners, but what ultimately led me to the Army is my conversion, my faith in Jesus Christ. From my earliest memories, I had this terrifying fear of death, and it kept me awake many nights. This lingered for years, and I was totally aware.

Dr. James Dobson: Because of the combat situation?

Guest (Male): No, this is when I was a young child, at seven or eight years old. So when I was a teenager, my next door neighbors came to meet me and to share the Gospel with me. And to this day, I don't remember that couple's last name, but I am a follower of Christ today because of a faithful couple that lived in the apartment complex next to me. They sat down at my dining room table, and they explained to me about Jesus and about sin and about death and about hell and heaven. And they, for the first time in my life, answered questions that nobody else could answer because I didn't grow up in a family that went to church. And immediately, supernaturally, the night that I surrendered my soul to Jesus Christ, at a 13-year-old boy, he took away this fear of death. So as a senior in high school, I was looking for something to do with my future. I was looking for excitement. I wanted to know if I was tough enough to serve with the best. But what I wasn't really willing to tell an Army recruiter or even the soldiers that I worked with for the first year is, I wanted to go to war and I wanted to see if I'm really over this fear of dying. And I specifically.

Dr. James Dobson: So that stayed with you.

Guest (Male): I joined the Army for the purposes of going to war and seeing am I ready to die? Am I really over this fear of dying?

Dr. James Dobson: And is is that related to the title of your book?

Guest (Male): Yes, sir.

Dr. James Dobson: *The Road to Unafraid*?

Guest (Male): Yeah, I don't consider myself an expert on much, but fear and dying, I have a lot of experience with.

Dr. James Dobson: In Mogadishu, Somalia, when everything was on the line, people were dying all around you, you did not fear dying.

Guest (Male): Yeah. I don't want to give you.

Dr. James Dobson: That's supernatural.

Guest (Male): Well, that's exactly right. I was just about to say that. I don't want to give your listeners the impression, oh, Jeff is this amazing warrior because I'm not. There is a moment in the battle where I became certain, I'm going to die. There's no way out of this alive. All of us are going to die. And I had this perfect peace knowing, I'll spend eternity with Jesus in heaven. So if tonight is my last night, so be it. And for the rest of that night, I fought with this supernatural sense of peace, the kind of peace that the Bible says passes all understanding. It doesn't make sense.

Dr. James Dobson: Well, it also says to live as Christ and is to die as gain.

Guest (Male): Yes, sir.

Dr. James Dobson: I I I never could identify with that. I I'm embarrassed to say that because everything that's in the Scriptures is there for a purpose. But with little kids at home, the thought of leaving them, I couldn't deal with that. I could deal with death, but uh my job was not done. Did you not?

Guest (Male): I felt exactly the same way. Um, part of my story in Somalia is the moments where I was totally convinced that I was going to die. I literally just put my future in God's hands and said, if you want me to survive, it's going to take a miracle. But if it's your plan that I die tonight, I know exactly where I'm going to spend eternity. And when I started looking at it through those lenses, if I go home to my family, great. If I die in Mogadishu, Somalia and go home to be with Christ, even better. And from that moment forward, death really had no more hold on me. I make a statement or years later that, I think this life started to lose its appeal to me in Somalia when heaven and eternity became a lot more real to me.

Dr. James Dobson: I really think that Americans owe all the people who have fought for this country the understanding of the price that was paid. You know, I I have mentioned on on this broadcast before, I've written about it uh that I am an amateur uh military historian. I haven't had any academic training in that area, but I'm fascinated by the price people paid to protect us. It's one of the things that frustrates me greatly today where the American people are whining and groaning and complaining and and dividing this country and hating each other and I don't understand all that because the price that somebody paid to make this stability, this greatest country in the history of the world. I mean, it is. The Founding Fathers gave us a Constitution like none other, and we're we're about to destroy it. So that uh is one of the things I'm I'm interested in hearing from you. On that occasion where you said there's no way out, we're all going to die. What was occurring then?

Guest (Male): Well, I was a combat leader at this point. I had a squad of men, about 10 men on two Humbies that I was responsible for, and immediately my next thought was, I'd already lost one of my men. Several of them have already been wounded. My vehicles were already shot to pieces at this moment where I just basically surrendered my life.

Dr. James Dobson: superior army against you?

Guest (Male): Yes, sir. Well, the intelligence was kind of sketchy that day. It's not that we didn't know this was going to be bad, we just didn't know how bad was this going to be. So we put on the ground about 200 guys, and in the air about another 100 in helicopters. And somewhere between 10 and 20,000 armed Somalis were who we were fighting against. That math, it doesn't matter who your military is and what your technology is, you're not going to win. And about 45 minutes into this battle, all of us realized how bad the math was. And we were all saying, none of us are going to see the light of day. I had the unfortunate um experience of losing the first man in that battle on my Humbie, sitting in the seats right behind me, when Dominic Pilla was shot and killed instantly. And I had to make this radio broadcast telling everybody that one guy has just been killed and everybody on the radio when they heard that broadcast understood, uh-oh, it could be me next. In fact, it could be my buddy standing next to me. It's this bad. And um when the moments came that I really surrendered eternity, not I didn't surrender my faith, but I really surrendered my life here on earth. It no longer belongs to me. If I survive, it's going to take a miracle from God. From that moment forward, I was absolutely convinced that I was going to die, but all I could think about was the rest of my men. And I started to feel like all of my men are going to get killed tonight. So my prayer for the rest of that night was, God, give me one more chance. One more chance to tell them about my faith. And if we all die in Mogadishu after that, so be it, but just give me one more shot at sharing my faith in Jesus with these guys. And um we went through a lot of battle that night. I don't have time to tell you about all of it today, but the next morning, my men were shot to pieces, but none of them were killed. And most of us should be dead. All of us really should be dead. And I think if you were to ask any of us that survived, we would all say, there is no explanation for why I'm still here other than God supernaturally protected me.

Dr. James Dobson: Is that moment depicted in the movie *Black Hawk Down*?

Guest (Male): A very brief scene of it is between me and one of my soldiers. When I come back from the battle the first time and I'm dropping Dominic Pilla off, and one of my soldiers who came back with me, he understood that we may be killed in the next few moments and we're about to get on the vehicles and to go back out in the city streets again. He walks up to me and he says, hey, Sergeant, I can't go back out in those city streets. I know I'm going to die if I do this. And it took a lot of courage for him to be able to say that to his boss. Rangers generally don't say that to each other. Definitely not to their boss. And I looked him in the eyes and the movie *Black Hawk Down* depicts this scene pretty well. But I looked him in the eyes and I said, I'm scared too, man. I know you are and I am and all of us are. But those men that are stuck out in the city streets are fighting for their life and if we don't go back out there, there's no chance at survival. And I told him, I need you to get on those Humbies. He got back on those vehicles, absolutely certain he was going to die and spent the rest of the night on those vehicles with me. And for the rest of that night, I was thinking, that guy essentially said, I'm going to go out there and die tonight so that somebody who's out there has a chance of coming back alive. And he was married and had a lot on the line. And I can tell you, to this day, I don't think I've ever been more proud of a soldier than that guy who was on the back of those Humbies with me in Somalia. He stayed in the Army, by the way, and became an incredible warrior for many years after that.

Guest (Male): Well, what an amazing testimony of courage and sacrifice in the face of death. And we will continue to hear Dr. James Dobson's conversation with Dr. Jeff Struecker about his experience of Black Hawk Down coming up on the next edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. Now, if you'd like to share today's program with a friend, go to jd.net. And once you're there, you'll also find information about Jeff Struecker's book called *The Road to Unafraid*. Again, you'll find the audio as well as the information about the book when you go to jd.net. The broadcast you've been listening to has been made possible by the generous support of friends just like you. For over 15 years, the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute has stood for the things that matter most, strengthening marriages, equipping parents to raise godly children, defending the sanctity of human life, promoting religious freedom, and sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as possible. That work touches millions of lives each and every day, and if you are one of those that Family Talk has touched, we invite you to stand with us. Your prayers and your gift of any amount help us continue to provide these conversations on the air for families all across America. You can send your donation through the US Postal Service by writing to Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, PO Box 39,000, Colorado Springs, Colorado, the zip code 80949. You can also visit us at drjamesdobson.org, or if it's easier, just click on to jd.net. Or if you'd like to speak with a member of our constituent care team, that number is 877-732-6825. That's 877-732-6825. Before we leave the air for today here on this Memorial Day 2026, we want to take a moment to honor the fallen. During the American Revolutionary War, 25,000 Americans gave their lives so that this nation could be free. During the Civil War, more than 620,000 lives on both sides were claimed. World War I, it was over 116,000 Americans who paid the ultimate price. World War II, over 405,000, and in Korea, 36,000. The Vietnam conflict resulted in the casualties numbering 58,000. And behind every one of those numbers is a name, a family, and a sacrifice that made our freedom possible. For that, we are truly grateful. I'm Roger Marsh, from all of us here at Family Talk and the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, thanks so much for listening today. Be sure to join us again next time right here as we continue Dr. Dobson's fascinating conversation with Dr. Jeff Struecker talking about life beyond Black Hawk Down. That's coming up right here on the next edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love. This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.

Guest (Male): With another Dr. Dobson minute, here's Dr. James Dobson. Today is Memorial Day, and once again our hearts are turned to the men and women who have given their lives in defense of our country. Memorial Day was first celebrated on May 30th, 1868, as a result of a proclamation that was drafted by General John A. Logan. General Logan wrote, we should guard their graves with sacred vigilance. All that the consecrated wealth and taste of the nation can add to their adornment and security, is but a fitting tribute to the memory of her slain defenders. This Memorial Day, I encourage you to take time to reflect. Let's not get so caught up in thoughts of summer and barbecues that we forget what this special day is all about. This is a time of mourning and remembrance as well as celebration. For more information, visit Dr. Dobsonminute.org.