Ukraine Relief Veteran Mark Turner | Mike Ritland Podcast Episode 119

About this video

Former Recon Marine Mark Turner recounts his unconventional path from a small Scottish mining village to the U.S. Marine Corps and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Turner describes his childhood emigration to Chicago at age 10, discovering wrestling and BJJ in the late 1990s, and his service in Recon during intense Iraqi insurgency operations. He shares how studying Judaism and Torah helped him process PTSD after contracting work, and discusses his current work running BJJ Lab academy and co-founding OverWatch Foundation for disaster response.

Key takeaways

• Turner attributes his turn to Judaism and Torah study as instrumental in helping him work through post-military PTSD and anger issues, seeking what he viewed as the original intent of biblical texts
• Turner’s guest recounts deploying during early Iraqi insurgency operations involving vehicle-borne IEDs, beheadings of Iraqi police, and evolving insurgent tactics, with his unit using shotguns on approaching vehicles as force protection
• Turner discovered Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in 1997 through a training partner who submitted him despite Turner’s wrestling background, leading to obsessive training in Chicago’s early BJJ scene with ill-fitting unbleached gis on carpet

Episode details: published November 21, 2022 · 1.2M views · 3:52:55 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Stories told by Mike Ritland’s podcast guests are the guests’ own accounts, attributed to them — not independently verified. Commentary is Ritland’s, presented as his analysis.

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