Scott DeLuzio: [00:00:00] Thanks for tuning in to the Drive On Podcast where we are focused on giving hope and strength to the entire military community. Whether you’re a veteran, active duty, guard, reserve, or a family member, this podcast will share inspirational stories and resources that are useful to you. I’m your host, Scott DeLuzio, and now let’s get on with the show.
Scott DeLuzio: Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Drive, On Podcast. Today my guest is Dan Lombard. Dan is. Army Combat Veteran, who is a co-founder of Project Refit, which is working to change the negative connotation around getting mental health support. Today we’re gonna be discussing Project Refit and all they’re doing to help support the military veteran and first responder community.
Scott DeLuzio: So welcome to the show, Dan. Glad to have you here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely. So, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background. Just to kind of fill in the listeners who may not be familiar with you and what you’re doing to kinda let us know who it is that [00:01:00] we’re talking to.
Daniel Lombard: Absolutely. Yeah. So, so I’m, like you said, I’m Dan Lombarda, co-founder of Project Refit. I’m 32. I I’m a, I’m an infantryman, was an infantryman. I was in the army. I enlisted 2013 and I got out my retirement. Medical retirement date is November 12th, 2017. I deployed to Afghanistan 2013 to 14 for nine months.
Daniel Lombard: And then I waived my dwell time stayed home, stayed back at Bliss for four months, and then went to Jibouti Africa for seven and a half months. Yeah, seven and a half. So AF Afghanistan was the start of all of this. So I was fresh out of basic training like two months out of basic.
Daniel Lombard: And they we went to Afghanistan, so I didn’t do N T C. None of, I didn’t do any of those fun schools. We were a heavy weapons company. So when we went to, we were in RC West. So we were in Shinan province. So where we were, they hadn’t patrolled the units that we had replaced and up like five years prior to that, they hadn’t patrolled that area [00:02:00] really outside of the wire.
Daniel Lombard: So the Taliban had really overrun the majority of where we were at. So when we got there My leadership I guess started pushing for more direct missions and not just FOB security, at least go into patrol do some screen lines, go and patrol some villages at night, see what’s going on.
Daniel Lombard: So we inevitably got that. We got the with the go to do that. So we got there, I wanna say this, it’s early December. Yeah, I think early December in 2013. We had our first firefight January 28th. There’s five dudes there. So that was like the first time, like that was my first. Combat experience period.
Daniel Lombard: And they were there five Caliban dudes. They were in a they were just running through a field. They, we had like our IR lights on and everything, so they didn’t, they could hear us coming, but they didn’t see us. They fired R P G at the front. I was in the. The lead vehicle, I was a passenger in the lead vehicle.
Daniel Lombard: They fired an R PPG at that missed us missed the front of us by 10 feet. We had p tis watching us the whole time. We were like two clicks off a, off, off a base, I think, something like that. So they had a dragon off. They had a R p k sorry, [00:03:00] pkm K and the. The the launcher obviously. So, I mean, I was in a couple firefights here and there.
