Ten years ago this Saturday, Brian Mast’s life changed forever.
On that day, Sept. 19, 2010, the 30-year-old Michigander who enlisted after finishing high school was in the Afghan province of Kandahar, serving as an explosive ordnance disposal technician in the Army. Mast and his unit, a part of Joint Special Operations Command, were on a mission after acquiring the location of a high-value target when Mast stepped on an IED. Mast lost both of his legs at the knees, part of his left forearm, and his left index finger that night.
The decade that followed wasn’t always easy, but Mast continued to serve his country.
The recovery took 2 1/2 years. During that time, Mast remained on active duty and began assisting the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. After 12 years in the military, Mast retired from the Army and worked as an explosive specialist with the Department of Homeland Security. He then went back to school and got a degree from Harvard University in the spring of 2016. Four years ago, he won a seat in Congress and is now in another fight to keep his seat.
In a phone conversation with the Washington Examiner this week, Mast talked about how he woke up in Walter Reed National Military Medical Center days after the explosion. He has a faint recollection of how he got from Kandahar to the hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, but it was his first clear memory that powered him through his recovery and rehabilitation.
“One of the first things I truly remember was when my father came to my bedside and he was tearful. He was emotional. You know, his son is laying in front of him with no legs and an arm almost blown off and fingers gone,” Mast said. “The first thing that he said to me after he told me that he loved me and that he was proud of me and he was glad I was OK was that I had to get back to work. He said, ‘Brian, you can’t let this keep you down. You’ve got to find a way to pull yourself up and get yourself out there and get back to work.”
The elder Mast invoked his responsibilities as a father, and given that he was himself a new father at the time, the congressman said that this “drove me just as much as my training in the military to never quit.”
That conversation with his father drove him during long days of physical therapy, but Mast explained he did not quite completely understand the ramifications of his injuries.
“I don’t know why I was naive to it, but I was for a while there, I thought, you know what, ‘I’m going to slap on a pair of prosthetic legs. I’m going to do physical therapy for, you know, a couple of weeks, a couple months, and I’m going to be out the door with my guys again on the next rotation, over to Afghanistan, continuing to do the work that I was doing,'” he said.
Mast, who was awarded the Bronze Star Medal, the Army Commendation Medal for Valor, the Purple Heart Medal, and the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, described this internal reckoning as something to “schizophrenia.”
In reflecting on how he managed through his recovery, Mast said his physical injuries were not his “handicaps,” but rather, he was being held back by uncertainty.
“I might’ve had the physical ailments of losing two legs and a finger and some of my arm, but my handicaps were still the same two things that I had before I was injured,” he said. “And the handicaps were: Did I have courage in my life to try something that was uncertain, that I wouldn’t know exactly if I could complete it and do it, but did I have the courage to be bold, daring, brave, whatever, try something that was in the unknown?”
He said that he went back to get his college degree with a concentration in economics after being “a terrible high school student” who focused more on “chasing girls, drinking beer, and playing sports,” because it was “one of those things that I had to look reflectively and say, could I do it?”
Looking back, Mast said he wasn’t “a bad person when I was in the military,” but “I can’t sit there and say that I was the most compassionate person by any means.”
It was that old mentality that got him into trouble last month when comments resurfaced from around a decade ago in which he joked about rape and sexual relations with underage women. Mast apologized for the “disgusting and inappropriate jokes” he made, saying he wants to be a better example for his children.
It wasn’t an immediate change, but Mast said that coming to terms with his injuries and the life-changing nature of what happened 10 years ago has made him empathetic toward others than when he was in the military.
“My job was to go out every night and either kill or capture our enemies,” he said. “And I don’t want to say those two words lightly. That’s not pretty work. And in the midst of doing that more specifically, my specific role was to disarm or place bombs onto the battlefield. And that’s not pretty work either because I’ve seen my friends blown up with tripwire devices and pressure plate devices, and I’ve seen it for myself. And so, the point is I was not the most compassionate person when that was my life. I just had a more morbid life at that time.”
Mast ran a successful first campaign for Congress in 2016, flipping an open seat for Florida’s 18th Congressional District to the Republican Party. Mast won his reelection bid two years later in a tight race. He is currently in a tight reelection fight in which he’s running against Democrat Pam Keith, who is a former U.S. Navy lawyer, but the district is listed as a “likely Republican” district, according to the Cook Political Report.
Mast’s priorities in Congress have been both strengthening the economy as well as national defense and veterans affairs, which is why he was reportedly in the running to be nominated for Veterans Affairs secretary in 2018, but the nod was ultimately given to Robert Wilkie.
When the congressman was asked to predict what the next 10 years would hold for him, he first brought up how important his wife, Brianna, and their four children are to him. As for his professional future, Mast doesn’t plan to be in Congress “forever,” but he does have an objective in mind in the meantime.
“I have a goal. I want to be chairman of the transportation and infrastructure committee someday, and I want to help everything that we do work on that front. And I think that’s the next goal that’s out in front of me,” he said. The panel is currently led by Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon, and the GOP would have to snag control of the lower chamber in order for a Republican to take his place.
“That’s not something that happens immediately,” Mast added, “but that’s the next place that I want to find.”
