Can't Hurt Me

Can't Hurt Me

*David Goggins*

He was six years old when his father first put him to work. Not as a child helping out on a slow Saturday afternoon. As labor. Trunnis Goggins owned a roller-skating rink called Skateland, and above it a bar, and every night David, his mother, and his older brother were required to be there -- serving customers, wiping down tables, scrubbing the toilets -- until two in the morning. Then they slept in the back office. Then they went to school. No one at school knew. David sat in class barely able to keep his eyes open, and when he struggled to focus, adults called him a problem child. They never asked why he was exhausted. They just labeled him and moved on.

Years later, he was 297 pounds. He was driving a truck through the back alleys of restaurants, spraying cockroach poison under refrigerators, pulling dead rats from glue traps, breathing in pesticide all day. He wore old clothes because they were going to smell like chemicals by noon anyway. Every morning he got behind the wheel and thought about what his life had turned into. He had tasted something better once -- he had actually made it into the Air Force, had briefly been the star recruit in his class -- and then he had run from the hardest part of himself and ended up here, in the smell and the dark, going through motions that led exactly nowhere.

That man -- the roach killer, the sixth-grader who fell asleep at his desk, the boy who wet his bed from fear of what his father might do next -- became the only person in American military history to complete Navy SEAL training, Army Ranger School, and Air Force Tactical Air Controller training. He ran 100-mile ultramarathons across Death Valley in 50-degree Celsius heat. He broke the world record for pull-ups, completing 4,030 in 17 hours. He finished races that nearly killed him, sometimes with broken bones and kidney failure, and he kept going anyway.