The Last 10 Years
From Combat to Calm to Community
The last decade of JD’s life has been about more than recovery. It has been about rebuilding a way of living and teaching that makes people better shooters, and better humans.
After a career in Special Forces and years of high-intensity deployments, JD had to confront the hidden cost of that life: post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, and the mental weight of years spent in conflict. Stepping back from the fight, he committed to a long-term journey of healing through holistic, whole-health practices. During that time he slowly returned to what he loved: teaching shooting, tactics, and survival.
What changed was how he taught.
JD discovered that mindfulness, breathwork, and emotional regulation were not abstract wellness ideas, but practical tools that improved self-awareness, clarity in critical decision-making, and the ability to stay present when preparing for violence. The same practices that helped him sleep, think, and connect better also made him faster and more precise when it mattered.
Today, as a wellness and Whole Health educator, suicide-prevention CRP, and senior mentor in mental-health support, JD has dedicated his life to helping others walk a similar path. Drawing from both combat experience and deep training in mindfulness, he integrates wellness with tactical performance: teaching performance shooting, self-preservation, and survival with a constant emphasis on calm, clarity, and intentional action.
His method is grounded in a simple belief: the practices that heal also enhance. They improve decision-making, precision, and tactical effectiveness for law enforcement and armed citizens, and they develop better leadership, accountability, and humanity along the way.
From Combat to Coaching: What It Takes to Be a Quality Firearms Instructor Today
After a career in unconventional warfare, combat, foreign internal defense, and more than 17 years teaching armed citizens, JD has learned that being a quality firearms and tactics instructor today is about far more than technical skill or trigger time. It is about presence, purpose, and the humble ability to transfer knowledge in a way that builds comfort, confidence, competence, and long-term capability.
As a retired Green Beret, he spent years training and fighting alongside elite warriors, then empowering partner forces in complex, high-stakes environments. Those experiences taught him how to teach under pressure. His own healing journey from the effects of war – the PTS, TBI, and the inner battles that followed – taught him something deeper: real instruction requires humility, gratitude, mindfulness, patience, clarity, empathy, and balance.
In the modern world, a great firearms instructor for law enforcement and armed citizens must be more than technical and tactical; they must be grounded and present. Over the last decade JD has immersed himself in holistic practices not only to heal himself, but to enhance performance for other tactical athletes. Tools like breathwork, mindfulness, brain-body awareness, emotional regulation, and stress reduction now form the foundation of how he teaches performance shooting, decision-making under stress, and self-preservation skills.
JD’s method blends the hard skills of combat with the soft skills of human connection. He trains the tactical athlete not only to shoot better, but to live better, to survive with purpose, act with clarity, and protect with intention.
Being a quality instructor today means staying a student forever. JD is still learning, still training, and still passing it forward – and that lifelong commitment is at the heart of the OSS² method.