- Have you ever shot an MSG?
- No, I don't even, what is an MSG?
- A submachine gun.
- Oh, yeah, of course, I've shot a submachine gun.
Sounds like you know more about guns than I do.
- I play a lot of Fortnite.
- Okay. (laughs)
I don't, yeah.
(soft music)
- Hi.
- Hi, how are you?
- Good. My name is Crystal.
- My name is Kevin Flike.
- Nice to meet you, Kevin.
- Nice to meet you too, Crystal.
- So since you're a Green Beret,
aren't you like
French
because berets?
- Oh, yeah. - Yeah.
- No. (everyone laughs)
So the reason why we're called Green Berets
is because of the headgear that we would wear.
That's our nickname.
We're actually the Special Forces.
- Oh.
- Is that Navy?
- Navy?
- Air Force?
- Come on.
- Person with tank?
- [Kevin] Army.
The Army Special Forces.
- Yeah.
- It's cool.
- [Kevin] It's pretty good on your there, nice.
- [Woman] How does it feel?
- It feels great.
I feel the power.
- Yeah. (laughs)
- Feel the power!
- Is that the symbol of the Green Berets?
- Yeah, it's called our unit crest.
It says "De oppresso liber"
and that means "To Free the Oppressed".
- And what's the "Oppressed"?
- So there's bad people in the world
being mean to certain people.
So we try to protect those people from the bad people.
- Oh, so you're kinda like a superhero.
- I guess that's one way to put it, yup.
- So what do you know about war?
- I don't think war is a good solution
'cause then lots of people end up dying,
getting hurt, losing their home.
- Well, so I would agree with you
that war, it's not a great thing.
But that's the Green Beret is,
I would say that our mind is our most important weapon.
We wanna think first and we wanna shoot last,
so we wanna try to solve situation
without having to do anything bad.
- That is actually really clever.
- Have you ever held a minigun?
- I have, yes.
I've short a minigun before.
- Whoa. - Yes.
- Have you shot every gun?
- No, definitely not.
- Are you retired?
- I retired in 2013
because at my second Afghanistan deployment,
I got shot in the stomach.
- What was that like?
- Yeah.
- Getting shot? - Yes.
- It hurt. (laughs)
- Did it like (mimics explosion sound)?
- No. (laughs)
It's so different than what the movies show
of you just getting shot
and then all of a sudden you're like,
"Yeah, I'm okay."
I definitely was not.
I was in so much pain.
I was just trying to keep conscious.
- But did you get up,
and then you're like (mimics shooting sounds)?
- No, I couldn't move.
- But you're good now?
- I'm good now.
- [Tom] Okay.
- It's all right, you know the end of the story.
It's awesome, right?
Like, spoiler alert, you know? (laughs)
- If you didn't get shot,
would you still be in the Green Beret?
- You know, I'm not sure.
It was a really great experience, I loved it,
but it was really tough too
because I was gone a lot
and I was married the whole time,
so my wife never really had much of a chance to see me.
So I'm not sure if I hadn't gotten shot
if I would've stayed in or not.
- When you're in war, did you have to do anything
that you didn't wanna do?
- There was never anything that I thought was bad.
You know I always felt like I was doing the right thing.
I would say there's things I didn't wanna do
like just be really (laughs) tired all the time
or be hungry and being away from my family.
Those are some tough parts of being deployed.
- That's really sad.
- What's the worst thing you've seen in the war?
- Seeing children that got hurt or affected by the war
was probably the worst thing that I saw.
- Do you ever cry?
- Yeah, I definitely did.
When one of my teammates was killed, I cried
and that was very hard for me
to have to deal with, you know.
- Do you have any pets to help you, like dogs?
- No, I don't have any pets.
- No, like at the army?
- Oh, when I was in the army? - Yeah.
- Yeah, we had dogs.
They're German Shepherds.
- We have a German Shepherd.
- Oh really?
- But it passed away. - We used to.
- Oh, yeah.
- What did the dog help you with?
- So the dog could smell bombs,
and if there was any bombs in the area,
the dog could smell that and it would let us know.
- How do you speak dog? - [Boy] How?
Dogs can't talk.
- I don't speak dog, but the person who worked with the dog
could speak dog, though.
- Oh. - Oh.
- [Kevin] Yes.
- What was the percentage of women to men
in the Special Forces?
- When I was in the Special Forces,
actually, only men could be in the Special Forces.
Currently, women are allowed
to try out for the Special Forces.
However, no women have made it through the training yet.
- That's why boys are stronger than girls.
- That's actually not true.
- There's definitely some girls out there
that can do it, for sure.
- [Woman] Crystal, what do you think your parents would say
if you wanted to join the army?
- No way. (laughs)
I don't wanna fight.
- Well, there's a lot of things in the army
or in the military where you don't all have to be fighting.
You know we would help bring clean water to villages.
We'd dig wells.
We'd provide medical treatments to people.
So there's a lot of other things like that for you.
- Okay, if I'm in the army,
I'd say more to the medical treatment or digging wells.
- All right, that sounds good, yeah.
- That's more me.
- Yeah. (laughs)
- Tom, it's been awesome bud.
- Cool, bye. - Thank you, yeah.
- Bye, bye.
- (laughs) Thank you.
Oh, other hand, other hand.
There you go.
Nice.
I'm Staff Sergeant Retired Kevin Flike
and I wanna thank you for watching
Kids Meet a Green Beret.
So if you wanna learn more
about how you can support Green Berets and their families,
please go to greenberetfoundation.org,
and click on the link below.
If you wanna learn more about me,
you can check out my Instagram @woundedbywar
or go to my website woundedbywar.com.
Thank you very much.