Video: Watch Retired Green Beret’s Speech From Managers’ Conference

One of the highlights of the recent Retail, Food and Service Managers’ Conference was a guest-speaker appearance by Sgt. 1^st Class Greg Stube (ret.), author of “Conquer Anything: A Green Beret’s Guide to Building Your A-Team.”

Stube, a Green Beret who trained as a Special Forces medical sergeant, was wounded in Afghanistan during the Battle of Sperwan Ghar, which lasted more than week. He spent a year and a half in Army hospitals recovering from injuries received from a detonated improvised explosive device (IED) and from enemy fire. He retired in 2011 after 23 years of service.

Stube threaded his presentation with his memories of how the Exchange supported him before, during and after his military service. At the end of Stube’s talk, Exchange Director/CEO Tom Shull presented him with a Patriot POG plaque. You can view Stube’s entire talk and the plaque presentation in the video below.

“I’m a lifelong AAFES junkie,” Stube said. “I’m a Navy brat. My dad was in the Navy for 30 years, and AAFES was always the thing. All my birthday presents, Christmas presents had AAFES price tags on them. Everything I’ve ever know came from AAFES.”

Stube said he spent the majority of his Army career doing “crazy stuff that usually wasn’t on a base anywhere.” But the Exchange brought him comforts of home.

“When we passed through a base, I cannot tell you what it meant to have a piece of home waiting for us there,” he said. “We knew it was going to be hard, we knew we were going to lose people. It was hard to find morale. But it’s amazing what a Snickers bar can do in Afghanistan. It is amazing what you provide, what you do.”

Even while he was in hospitals recuperating, Stube said, the Exchange was there for him.

“There was a team of people between AAFES and the Wounded Warrior Project, which was brand-new at the time,” Stube said. “The first thing they did was hand me gift certificates to AAFES. I was taken from the hospital in my wheelchair, and it took great work on everyone’s part to get me in the vehicle from my wheelchair and then store the wheelchair and get it back out again.”

He choked up as he continued his story.

“They took me to the PX, and I got a rod and reel and some line, and I went fishing with my toddler son at a time when I wasn’t sure I would be able to do anything again,” he said. “I’ll never forget the team in that sporting goods department. They became aware of who I was and what had happened, and they wanted my experience to be the best it could possibly be. They did everything they could for me and my family. You did everything you could for me and my family at a life-changing point where things could have turned so bad, where if I hadn’t gotten into the outdoors, which I relate to and I love so much, I might not have seen a bright future after that sunny day. You gave that to me.”

Stube had more to say about Exchange support in his talk, which mixed humor and pathos, sometimes within the same sentence. He also connected lessons he learned in service and on the battlefield to managing teams in the workplace, especially in areas of training, building the bench and appreciating and celebrating the different skills people bring to a team. For more, check out the video above.