For Veterans Day, Celebrate Nick Zinani's Journey to Wake Forest
11/11/2019 8:53:00 AM | General
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By: Steve Shutt
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The rocket propelled grenade sailed over his head by about three feet before exploding against a wall.
At that point, Nick Zinani knew he was far, far from home.
Zinani today is in his third year at Wake Forest as a sports performance coordinator. In his role, Nick works with the Wake Forest football team, providing guidance and instruction as the Demon Deacons train and prepare for each week's game.
But Zinani's journey to Wake Forest has more twists and turns than an Afghanistan mountain trail. And Zinani is intimately familiar with Afghanistan mountain trails.
A self-described "behavioral issue," as a youth, Nick never graduated from high school. Though he attended several, he was routinely asked to move on after another fight or scrap. At 17, a guidance counselor advised him to drop out and get his GED. He followed that by taking the SAT and searching for a college. He ended up in Arizona, spent a semester enrolled in a university, then dropped out and went to California.
Zinani spent a number of months couch-surfing, staying with relatives, cousins, even his biological father.
"I got to California and I had no education," said Zinani. "I was good for manual labor and that was about it. I didn't speak Spanish and, in Fresno, that was pretty huge so I couldn't get a job. I picked up a magazine one day and said 'I'm going to join the Army.' I walked down to the recruiting office, walked right in, it was 2004 and the peak of the Iraq war. I walked in and they said 'can we help you?' I said 'yeah I want to join the army.' They were like 'alright, what do you want to do?' I was like 'I don't know, what do you do?' The guy is like 'I shoot things.' I go 'awesome, what does he do?' He's like 'he blows stuff up.' I said 'cool, I'll do what you do, man.' Two months later I was in Fort Benning, Georgia. Went through basic training, went through Airborne School which they asked me when I got to basic training if I wanted to do. I ended up in the 82nd Airborne."
Life in the Army wasn't quite what Zinani expected, initially. His unit was deployed in Iraq at the time and he was told to wait for its return at Fort Bragg before resuming his training.
And how did he fill that time? Nick Zinani (2nd from left)
"I sat in the barracks for two months waiting for everybody to come back from the deployment," said Zinani. "I was cleaning, cutting grass, raking rocks. Just run of the mill, the stuff that no recruiter would tell you you would do in the military because nobody would join the military if they know this was part of it. No training was going on because everybody who fights in the unit was gone so there's no train-up necessary. They are like 'you'll train when everybody gets back. So get things clean and get everything ready for everybody else to come home.' And that's what I did, then everybody came back."
Zinani's training picked up considerably when the 82nd Airborne returned to Fort Bragg from deployment. And he was soon taken under the wing of his squad leader, Jamon Bagget.
"I was in a great unit", said Zinani. "I was surrounded by really good soldiers and great friends, we were all real tight knit. Jamon one day said 'Hey Zinani, I want you in scouts (recon)' and all of a sudden, I was moved to scout platoon without trying out or anything. Which was super unusual. I get over there and they say 'All right, Bagget said you're good but, you got to go to Ranger School now. If you fail Ranger School we're sending you to support and transportation which is pretty much packing ammo and driving trucks. I had to pass Ranger School to stay in the platoon. There was a whole lot of pressure."
Zinani started in pre-Ranger School which is a four-week course to prepare you for actual Ranger School.
"(Pre-Ranger School) was pretty miserable," said Zinani. "I went with a couple other guys from my platoon and I was the only guy who graduated. I got sent off down to Georgia after that. Here I am in '06 now and I'm going to Georgia to go to Ranger school. A 62-day course, and I was there for six months. Because if you fail something in Ranger School they say 'Ranger, do you want to start over?' And in the back of your head you're like, 'No, I want to go home, I want to sleep in a hot bed, I want to drink a beer, I want to eat some good food, I'm not coming back' and then your mouth opens and you're like 'Yes sir, I want to try again.' I did that three times. I had to say 'yes, I want to do this again' three times in a row. So I had this abnormally long stay at Ranger School and I graduated in 2006. I got back to my unit and my platoon was completely different because we just had a huge clean sweep of who was in our platoon. Six months is a long time in the military. "
Zinani returned to his unit as a Ranger-qualified paratrooper. He found new leadership in his unit as Bagget had moved on to Special Forces and to become a Green Beret. Zinani's unit went to West Point and trained cadets for the remainder of the summer of 2006 and prepared for an eight month deployment starting in January, 2007.
"We got back and gear up and we hop on a plane and we go to Afghanistan," said Zinani. "It was just surreal. I've been in the Army for a couple years now and hadn't deployed which, in this time period, is unheard of. Most people who had been in at that time and been in as long as I'd been in had already been on at least one deployment. So here I am, I've been training and training and training and finally now I get to go to the party. So I get overseas and we ended up in Ghazni, Afghanistan. We were over on the border of Pakistan, eastern side of Afghanistan, about maybe an hour and a half to two hour truck ride south of Kabul, a couple hours north of Kandahar. You're right in the middle of a lot. It was very much the wild west at that time."
Zinani's unit was brought in to relieve the 101st Airborne which had deployed during the winter. In the mountainous area of east Afghanistan, the Taliban was not very active during the coldest months. The 101st's deployment had been rather uneventful with very few skirmishes.
"Then all the snow melts and everybody comes out to play," said Zinani. "In '07 we had a very quiet first few months there. We were doing what is called a 'movement to contact,' where our mission was to drive around until somebody shoots at us. We had this combat photographer with us one day and we hadn't been shot at, we hadn't made any contacts. All of a sudden, one of the trucks has an issue and breaks down so we stop. About an arm's length over my head, an RPG comes and blows up like 20 feet behind me on a wall.
"We get into a firefight for like an hour. And my legs are shaking. I'm on a .50 caliber machine gun and I'm shooting back. We had a couple guys pop out of the truck and shoot back. Firefight ends, all of our guys are okay. My buddy looks over at the combat photographer and is like 'hey man did you get any cool pictures of that?' He's like 'nah, I ran out of storage space on my camera a while ago' and we're like 'man you're useless.'
"That was my first firefight ever in the military. I remember driving away after everything had calmed down and my legs were still shaking. It was like the adrenaline was still pumping through my body and I couldn't get my body to relax. Then finally you come down from it then you're just exhausted.
"After that, most of our missions were a lot of recon missions where we would go out and do a route reconnaissance or an area reconnaissance. We would have a place they would want us to go watch. We'd de-truck somewhere like another little itty bitty outpost that some other company was holding and we'd watch a road and see if people were going to plant bombs there. And every now and then you'd get in contact. One time we rolled up on Alpha Company in a firefight. The Taliban is using tracers so we don't know who's on which side. That was actually the day I realized that I was way too comfortable in a firefight. I remember I got out of my truck, I lit a cigarette, and they're like 'Zinani, come up to the front.' I'm like okay, I came up and I'm like 'what's up, Sergeant?' He said 'I need you to drop a couple grenades over that wall.' So I put a couple in there and I come back down and say "What do you need, Sergeant?' And he's like 'nothing go back to your truck.' And I got back and my friend and I just picked up our conversation we were having before we rolled up on the firefight."
Zinani spent all his time in Afghanistan in Taliban-controlled areas. As his time in Afghanistan rolled on, contacts with the enemy became more frequent. One particular mission stands out.
"We start marching out and we get a few miles out there, maybe five or six miles out there," said Nick. "We were used to moving 10-15 miles per night, that was kind of like the normal thing for us. We go find a waddy, which is like a ditch, to go sit somewhere and post up and do our job. This time we roll out there and it was weird, I ended up driving this day and I never drove. This is the only mission I've ever driven in my whole entire time in the military. So I'm like 'why am I driving today? What's going on?' We leave our stuff with Alpha Company, I think we were at Four Corners, maybe we were at Muri. It used to be USA-controlled but it's all under Taliban control now.
"We get marching out and we get to this big crevice in the ground and a little itty bitty way across we decide that's where we're going to cross. I'm like the third guy across this thing and as I'm walking I took a step and the ground gave out from underneath my feet. I fell back with my foot behind me and trapped that foot and down I went.
"We were going out for a couple weeks. I had water, food, batteries, ammo. I was carrying quite a bit of weight. I had well over a hundred pounds on my person plus my whole body weight. I fell but my foot stayed in place so I snap my foot away from my ankle, fall down to the bottom of this hole and I just laid there looking up at the sky, being really quiet because this is not a good place to be.
"Down this little ravine comes my buddy and he's like 'hey Zinani, you good?' I'm like 'nah, man. I'm pretty sure I broke my ankle.' And he says 'can you walk?' So I say 'I don't know, help me up.' So he helps me stand up and audibly you can hear my leg break in the other direction and down I go. So he gets on his walkie and calls the medic.
"The medic comes sliding down. I used to hang out with the medics, the medics were like my best friends. So we always had a thing where if the medic goes down, Zinani's going to take care of him. I would hang out with the medics and play dominos and cards and stuff like that with them. I'd be in there and they'd get these mass casualty evacuations to their med tent and I'd be the helping hand. So I had a lot of trauma care under my belt at that point. So here I am, down on the ground and the medic cuts my boot off and my foot just kind of dangles there and my leg's poking out that way. I say 'that looks pretty bad, Doc' and he's like 'yeah, it does.'
Nick Zinani
"The worst part is I'm in a stupid freaking hole. Everybody's pissed at me because it's not like I just got hurt and they have to carry me but I got hurt and they have to get my ass out of a hole and then they have to carry me. A bunch of dudes come down and put me in a pole-less litter which is the worst thing ever. You pretty much bring a pole-less litter when you're sure nobody's going to get hurt. That is the worst way to carry a human being. The pole-less litter is like a sheet with six handles. There's a handle in the middle and there's a handle on each corner. They roll my butt into the middle of the sheet and they pick me up and I'm going to say the word carry because it's a generous word, but they really dragged my ass for three and a half miles. They dragged me for three miles through a combat zone in a bad place on a really crappy night. We had no air support, there was no way to get a helicopter in the sky because the air is what we call black that night. We had to do a truck link-up so they had to get me to the nearest road which is three and a half miles away from where we linked up with Alpha Company. One of my guys, Shorty, refused to put me down. I'll never forget that, he's a good dude.
"From Four Corners we had to drive an hour and a half back to Ghazni. It took forever to get me back and now I'm broken. I get back to the medic station they've put bets on which guy got injured and I was not one of them. And they're like 'you? You're not supposed to get hurt.' I was like 'yeah, I know, man. My bad.' They'd given me so many IVs that I had no more veins left in my arms and legs to use because every time they carried me in this pole-less litter, it punctured my veins. They ended up giving me an exterior jugular IV. Now I have this IV sticking out of my neck. They gave me morphine and they say I just erupted laughing when they did that."
Zinani was destined to return to the United States for surgery, but his trip back was not direct.
"We stopped in Kabul then I stopped in Landstuhl, Germany. Every place I went was super interesting. I get very dark when I'm out in the sun for a long time and I grow a beard pretty quick so I look like I might be from Afghanistan. In Kabul, I woke up with all of the Afghan military people. They had stuck me in a room with them. I'm in this room and nobody speaks English. I said something to the nurse and she's like 'oh my God, you're American' and I'm like 'I sure am.' Then I got to Germany and I'm sitting in my hospital room and all a sudden some people pop in and say 'we are here to take American soldiers out and show them Germany.' I have a splint and my leg is still broken, nothing's been fixed. These people bring me out and give me beer which they shouldn't have been doing because I'm on painkillers. They get me back to the hospital later then they fly me back to D.C.
"I end up back in Fort Bragg and they operate. I've got seven screws, two plates and a wire in my leg. They say 'you may not ever walk right again. You'll be lucky to pull your toes back up towards your shin again.' I get out and I go to physical therapy and the first thing I say to my physical therapist is 'when can I go back?' She's like, 'you're not going back overseas' and I say 'when can I go back?' and she says 'you're not going back.' I say 'what can I do to make my foot better?' She said 'next week you'll get all of your stitches out and you can go to the pool and you can start walking lightly in the pool.' So every day I get my butt up at 4 o'clock in the morning and crutch myself down to the pool. All the Special Forces guys would be down there doing their scuba stuff. And there's myself in the shallow end walking back and forth doing my thing. Then I crutch back down to formation at 6 a.m. and be there.
"I was home for five or six weeks and every time I went to physical therapy I said 'so when can I go back?.' One day she looks at me and she says 'you know what? I'll sign the paperwork and say you can go back if you can hop on your bad foot from here to the other side of the room and back and show me you're not in pain.' I said 'that's it?' And she said 'yeah.' I put on a smile, hopped up, hopped my butt all the way to the other side of the room, hopped all the way back on my bad leg, sweating bullets with a smile on my face. And she said 'you're an idiot.' I said 'But I get to go back, right?' and she said 'yeah, sure.' She signed my paperwork."
And was it as painless as he made it seem to the physical therapist?
"That hurt a lot. That hurt a whole lot. After that I got on a plane, like a week later, and they fly me back to Afghanistan."
Zinani returned to his platoon which had not any contact with the Taliban since his departure. But once back, the unit received a mission for an assassination for a person who had been killing local officials. Prepping for the mission included practicing on a makeshift compound that was built to resemble the compound where the target lived.
"We show up and walk and it's like the most brutal walk for me because my ankle is still super jacked up," said Zinani. "We do this whole huge walk around and I end up on the backside of these compounds. There's three compounds, there's not just one. We get there and take a knee and we're trying to figure out which compound we're supposed to hit when somebody says 'I think there's someone on the top of that wall.' And that turned into AK firing and grenades being thrown at the squad. These people were trying to lob a grenade over the top of the wall, and luckily for us it bounced on the top of the wall and went back into their own compound. It blew up on the inside of the compound instead of the side of the compound where our guys were stacked. Then we started getting AK fire and we ran up a mountain side, called in an Apache (attack helicopter) and let that thing do most of the work. Then the next day we had to go ahead and not just clear the compound, we had to clear the whole village and that was like two miles down through the valley. That was my first mission back, that was like the 'welcome back, Nick' mission.
"My deployment was intermittent firefights and a lot of just killing time which is more realistic for the majority of people. I have some friends who had some crazy stuff happen and I have some friends who went overseas and spent a year over there and did nothing. We went for an eight or nine month deployment and that turned into an 11-month deployment and that turned into a 15-month deployment. So at the end of it all, we were there for about a year and a quarter. We got to do some cool stuff, we hung out with Special Forces a lot.
"One day, I sat on the back of a four-wheeler with a .240 machine gun and that was probably the coolest thing I've ever done in my life. Sitting on a four-wheeler as it drove off the back of a freaking helicopter with a machine gun in my lap. I mean it doesn't get much cooler than that, when you're checking off the boxes of cool stuff that happened in life."
Zinani returned to the U.S. in 2008 and began the process of assimilating back into civilian life.
"We had to take all these courses that taught us things like don't beat your wife, don't beat your dog, you can't kill people in the United States, welcome back, set your expectations low so you're not disappointed by everything. What happens sometimes, it's like you don't have something for a longtime and you forget about all the negatives of it because all you remember are the positives. Like that's awesome and it's only awesome and your expectations are like this (high) for stuff when it really should be like this (low) for stuff because that's where it's going to land. (You have) super high expectations and you end up being let down on a lot of things. So when we got back we were allowed to leave on the weekends and we went to Myrtle Beach and we had spent all the money we had saved that year. (People were saying) 'I got like $30,000 in the bank now, let's get jet skis and limos and go party.' That's what we did for a couple weeks. I separated (from the Army) in 2008, I moved in with my older brother later that year in Boston."
Despite the military training and his time overseas, returning to the United States still had some challenges. Though it was an older and more mature Nick Zinani who approached this part of his life.
"My plan was that I was going to get out and I'm going to go back to school. Everybody said to collect unemployment for the first couple of weeks or months so you can go ahead and get all your stuff together. My brother gets me a job interview which went horribly, one of the worst job interviews that I ever had because I'd just been in the Army for four years and just been in Afghanistan for a year. And (the interviewer asked) 'tell me about a time when you had a job to do and it went way better than you expected.' I'm like 'one time we caught these guys putting bombs in the ground.' And the guy is looking at me like 'yeah, that has no relevance to this. I need you to make sandwiches.' That was funny. I worked in the kitchen a little bit and my brother went through a divorce. We moved down to North Carolina and things were a little bit rocky for me. I fell back into being old me for a second. Then I got called back into the military and I was psyched, I was really excited. I was like 'thank God' because being a civilian doesn't work for me, the regular world doesn't work for me. Then they told me I was nondeployable because I am legally deaf."
The disappointment of not being able to rejoin the military set Zinani on yet another personal journey. He jumped on his Harley and drove to New York to see his mother and stepfather.
"I went out and got a job as a personal trainer," said Zinani. "Best thing I ever did in my life. I'm comparable to that overactive dog that chews on everything and rips the house apart if you don't let it out and exercise. That's what I turn into. Getting that job was huge for me so I ended up being a personal trainer for New York Sports Club."
While working as a trainer, he had a client who, unbeknownst to him at the time, was the vice president of a large company. The VP recommended Nick for a manager's position.
"Here I am, still a kid with a GED, and now I'm getting this job. Next thing I know I'm managing a gym on the upper east side of New York and I'm doing really well, so well that I'm promoted again."
The promotions kept coming and the salary kept climbing. Zinani was supervising a staff of 36 personal trainers by 2010. But Nick eventually grew tired of the daily grind and moved out to Long Island with his fiancé.
"So I'm living in Long Beach, New York and I'm like 'I don't know what I'm doing and I had to figure out the whole GI bill.' I went to Nassau Community College for a semester or two because I had (not been in) school since I was 16. That was my first full year of school in like 10 years. I got there and I did really well. I had to take super remedial math because I hadn't done a math problem in I don't know how long. I did really well in all my classes. I had a friend from the gym and he was like 'hey Nick, you should come to school where I go to school. I can put you in with a lot of the strength staff.' He was an athletic training student and he was just finishing his master's at LIU Brooklyn. So I went to LIU Brooklyn and my academic advisor was awesome."
Nick eventually wound up meeting Tony Ritchie, a strength and conditioning professional with ties to the boxing/MMA world. From there, Nick's contacts grew and he started to work with well-known fighters who helped direct the next step in his journey.
"I end up in the master's program for athletics training. I'm on this accelerated timeline program to get my master's degree and I'm way older than everybody so that helps. I go to class and I end up doing really well in school which is super unusual for me. I graduated with a 3.8 or something like that. At the end of my master's program, I really wanted to work in football. I didn't know how to break into football. I took the mailing list for every NFL team, every NCAA Division I Power 5 school and I hit them all up. NC State hit me back. They were like 'hey, we'll take you down here,' and I was like 'awesome.'
"Justin Smith, the head athletic trainer, and Alyse King, they helped get me down there and into an athletic training role. I went down there, interned for them and I really enjoyed it and they seemed to like having me, they were really good to me. While I was there, I would hang out with the strength staff and they would do presentations on a regular basis for continuing education purposes and they would invite me to those and they would ask me to present a couple of times. Different therapeutic modality kinds of things, that way they'd have a better idea of what an athletic trainer is doing. Then they said 'do you want to stay and do a conditioning internship?' and I said absolutely. I got all my certifications done and I was working as a strength and conditioning intern for them. I had just finished my athletic training internship but now my fiancé was not super happy because I was supposed to be coming back to New York. The assistant director of strength and conditioning had met with (Wake Forest) Coach (Brandon) Hourigan up in New York at this gym. They got to talking and I got the job interview and here I am."
It has been a long and winding road for Nick Zinani. From high schools in Massachusetts and Maine to his deployment in Afghanistan, every road has led him to where he is today.
Now 34, you can find Nick Zinani on a daily basis either on the Wake Forest football practice fields or inside the sparkling new Sutton Sports Performance Center. His life journey has set a map for him to continue to lead and train the young student-athletes that he works with at Wake Forest on a daily basis.
He's a long way from Afghanistan and RPGs. And finally safe at home at Wake Forest.
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