SEAL Team 10, DEVGRU, surgery & successful entrepreneur: Cole Fackler's Resilient Story

He broke his leg in Fallujah then made it into one of the Navy's most elite units...

Cole Fackler was a Navy SEAL and member of the elite Naval Special Warfare Development Group, racking up 3,000 skydive jumps, three broken legs, operations on both shoulders, and losing one testicle but still managing to have four kids. Cole has a story of Resilience to say the least.

Cole enlisted out of high school in 2002 and served multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Fighting bad guys and jumping out of airplanes with 450 lbs of gear eventually caught up with Cole and he medically retired in 2020. After leaving the service, he managed to build a successful business.

Chad sat down with Cole at the Ironclad Studios, near where Cole grew up in Virginia Beach.

While Cole may have the relaxed demeanor of a surfer, he didn’t hesitate when it came to making difficult decisions to defend the United States.

“I remember the first time shooting my gun like live. It was somebody under 18 maneuvering on us with an AK, a double tape mag, and a chest rig [a suicide bomb]. Luckily, before he could get a shot off I did.”

“Did that change you in any way?”

“No.”

Even after breaking his leg in Fallujah, Cole found a way to make it to the “top 5% of the top 5%,” an elite group of tier 1 special operators called DEVGRU, known more popularly as SEAL Team Six.

How did he make it from the operating table to one of the most qualified groups in the entire armed forces?

Cole summed up his Resilient mindset like this, “hard to kill, yes. It's not a physical ego thing, it’s a mindset. If you have a dream and a vision stick to it. There will be people that say ‘you'll fail,’ ‘you can't make it,’—your best friends, parents—who knows? Stick to it keep that mindset yeah you're capable of anything.”

Tune into the full episode here!