David Gerig joins us at Golden West Humanitarian Foundation carrying a long history in explosive ordnance disposal (EOD), humanitarian mine action (HMA), physical security and stockpile management (PSSM), and a worldview shaped as much by compassion as by combat. You can read his full biography here.
We sat down to learn more about David, and what has made him the man he is today. This is the latest in our ongoing series of interviews with our colleagues, documenting their remarkable lives.
Today, as Program Manager, EOD Weapons and Ammunition Destruction Operations, David is helping Golden West build a foundry-based weapons melting capability in Cambodia, completing what he sees as the full life cycle of disarmament: weapons made for destruction are rendered safe, melted down, and recycled back into useful steel for infrastructure. For him, that matters. The weapons are no longer circulating, no longer sold, no longer passed from one conflict to another, and can instead become part of something constructive. It is a form of moral closure, and that instinct to see the human meaning inside the work has been with him for a long time.
Origin Story
David grew up moving through New York, Kentucky and Ohio, the son of a pastor. By the time he graduated high school in 2002, America was already reeling from 9/11, and he was compelled to service. He joined the U.S. Air Force a month after graduation and entered EOD training, drawn by something that, in his own words, “simply seemed cool”.
There was probably something deeper in it too. As a teenager he had once blown up his hand with gunpowder at a friend’s house, ending up in hospital with second-degree burns. It was reckless, small-town stupidity by his own telling, but it also foreshadowed the strange direction his life would take: toward explosives, toward risk, and toward the places where other people froze.
The Realities of EOD
After graduating from the Naval School Explosive Ordnance Disposal in 2003, he was posted to Okinawa, Japan. There, the island itself became part of his education. Large parts of Okinawa still held the buried remains of past wars, and for a young EOD technician, it was a place where history sat just under the surface.
He was raised there professionally, learning the craft in an environment where old ordnance could still be found in the jungle. One of his first operations as a training team leader involved an active unexploded ordnance item discovered in that terrain. He had to identify it, render it safe, and destroy it, not as an exercise, but as a live Second World War munition with real consequences.
That experience helped him understand that explosive remnants of war are not abstract hazards from the past. They remain present, dangerous, and deeply tied to the communities living around them. It also reinforced for him the importance of realistic training, because in EOD, the first real test may not wait until someone feels ready.
Self-Discovery: Afghanistan 2005
He was first posted to Afghanistan in early 2005. David was no longer learning about explosives in controlled training scenarios. He was responding to real improvised explosive devices, real rockets, and real attacks aimed at bases, towns, and people who were counting on him to make the danger safe.
That first deployment introduced him to death in a way no schoolhouse ever could. On one of his first calls of the tour, he watched five people die in a horrific explosion. In that moment, something inside him changed. He felt true fear. Not nervousness. Not stress. Not the kind of fear people talk about casually. This was the kind of fear that makes it hard to move even an inch. The kind that enters your body when you realise, with absolute clarity, that death is not an idea anymore. It is right there in front of you, and it can take you too.
He kept himself together until they made it back to base. He did his job. He did not break in front of the team. But when he got back to his room, the weight of it finally caught up to him. He cried. He prayed. He asked God to never let him feel that kind of fear again. Although he had done nothing wrong, the hesitation he felt in that moment made him feel like a coward.
There is a line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: cowards die many times before their deaths, while the valiant taste of death only once. In that moment, David understood what that meant in a way he never had before. He did not want to spend his life dying over and over inside because fear had taken control of him. He wanted to do what was right, even if doing what was right cost him his life. He prayed for courage. He prayed for the strength to move when others froze, to act when others needed him, and to choose duty even when death was standing close enough to touch.
That day gave him a kind of resolve he had never known before. From that point forward, he would never feel that same fear in the same way again. The rule became simple: do the right thing. The real fear was no longer death itself. The real fear was failing someone who needed help.
But there was a price to that kind of resolve. EOD teaches you to accept that one mistake can kill you. The training is built around that truth, but war makes it personal. Over time, David learned how to function in the presence of death. He learned how to shut parts of himself down so he could keep moving, keep thinking, and keep others alive. It made him effective. It made him dependable. It made him brave. But only much later would he understand what it had cost him emotionally to survive that way. Because when you numb the dark long enough, you do not just silence the pain. You begin to lose the light too.
Even in those early years, his humanitarian spirit was emerging. Before that first Afghanistan deployment, David went to Thailand in the aftermath of the tsunami and helped at an orphanage. It was his first real exposure to that world, and it stayed with him. Service was never only about the battlefield. The work that affected him most deeply was often the work involving the vulnerable, the displaced, the forgotten, and especially children. That thread would return again and again throughout his life.
Bronze Star
After Afghanistan he moved to Scott Air Force Base in St. Louis, where he worked in munitions, logistics and training, and from there deployed again, including to Iraq and then Afghanistan in 2011. By that point he was older, more seasoned, and harder. He worked extensively with U.S., Canadian and Italian special forces, becoming deeply embedded in high-tempo operations in places like the Panjwai Valley. He was brought into command centres to interpret drone feeds, identify bomb-making activity, and advise on lethal decisions in real time. He disarmed improvised explosive devices under pressure. He operated in spaces where competence was not theoretical. It was immediate, visible, and often all that stood between order and catastrophe.
It was during this period that he earned the Bronze Star.
The award, as he tells it, was not about one neat act of heroism, but about an accumulation of combat leadership, technical skill, and nerve under sustained pressure. Still, one mission stands out. His team had been advancing through a fiercely contested area for hours, taking contact, waiting on air support, and pushing through difficult terrain cut by six-foot-high grape rows. They were tired, low on water, and operating with soldiers who were new to combat and not yet acclimatised to the environment.
After air support broke the enemy position, the team moved forward and David disarmed two improvised explosive devices. Then came the order to recover the bodies of two dead fighters and bring them back. David knew immediately it was a dangerous decision. The ground was exposed, the route was narrow, and once the air cover disappeared, they would be hit again. That is exactly what happened. Under renewed fire, now carrying the additional burden of recovery, the team moved roughly 800 metres back through the grape rows, up and down the same difficult terrain they had just fought through. They were exhausted, exposed, and at greater risk. In that moment, David took control, overrode hesitation, and drove the team back to cover. It was ugly, traumatic, and yet his decisive action saved lives. That kind of decision leaves a mark that no medal can mask.
The Aftermath of Deployment
When he returned home, the military was only beginning to understand what happened to people who went from combat one day to family life the next. In earlier wars, men often came home by ship and had time to decompress before stepping back into ordinary life. In modern deployments, they could be in a war zone one day and back with their families almost overnight. The rising rates of suicide, divorce, and emotional breakdown told their own story.
David became part of the Air Force’s Deployment Transition Center effort at Ramstein, where operators were paired with therapists to help them process what they had just lived through. But combat veterans did not always trust clinicians who had never experienced war for themselves. How could they fully open up to someone who had never been shot at, never felt the fear of death in combat, and never watched someone die in front of them?
David could bridge that gap. He could walk into a room full of angry, guarded, often traumatised men just coming off deployment and speak to them from a place of truth. He did not have to pretend to understand. He had lived it. By sharing what he had carried, he gave them permission to start talking about what they were carrying too. Once they began to open up, the therapists had a more natural and trusted way in.
It was one more version of the same calling: step into the place other people avoid and make it possible for something better to happen.
A Deeper Understanding of Death
In 2014 he moved to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, where he learned large-scale leadership, helping manage a unit of around fifty EOD technicians on a range base where F-16 pilots trained and dropped live ordnance. It was another chapter in management, structure and operational responsibility.
It was during those years that he went looking for a deeper understanding of death. That search took him to Kolkata, India, where he served with the Missionaries of Charity at Prem Dan, one of Mother Teresa’s homes for the sick, destitute, and dying.
The experience affected him as deeply as anything in war. There he encountered people at the very end of life. Homeless men picked up off the streets, ravaged by infection, addiction, neglect and abandonment, their bodies already failing beyond recovery. They had been starved not only for food or medicine, but for touch, dignity and human presence. Heads were shaved for lice. Rotten limbs were amputated.
David remembers one man in particular, a man who had lost both legs and an arm and whose chest wound bled through the bandages. They shared no language, but they still understood one another. In his final hours, the man asked for David to sit with him in the quiet room where they went to die. David sat with him, held his hand, spoke to him even though his words could not be understood, and stayed with him as he passed.
It gave him perspective, he says. It taught him that he was lucky, blessed even, whether he had been in combat or not. It taught him not to think of himself as a victim. In India he saw people dying without the protections, comforts or assumptions of the First World. It sharpened his compassion and stripped away self-pity forever.
Looking Beyond the Horizon
After India came more service: a deployment as a flight chief in Saudi Arabia, then a major shift in 2019 when he moved to Ramstein, Germany as HMA Program Lead for Europe and Africa. This period widened his lens. He was no longer operating only as an American EOD technician inside a warfighting structure. Now he was working with several countries, ministries, institutions and systems.
He worked across EOD, HMA and Weapons and Ammunitions Management, helping assess national capability, adapt training to local conditions, and think from inside other countries’ constraints instead of imposing an American template. He helped rewrite the HDTC EOD Levels 1, 2 and 3 curriculum, training that would go on to be widely adopted. He supported the development of the PSSM Foundation Course. He helped bridge technical knowledge across communities that did not always speak the same professional language. And he came to think about countries the way he thinks about bomb problems: each one a puzzle piece that has to be understood properly before you can help fit it back together.
He was the kind of person who could move between the operational and the strategic without losing credibility in either. That mattered. This was also the period when his reputation brought him into closer orbit with Golden West.
There were other moments too, some of them brief but telling. During the Afghan evacuation, he helped manage part of the largest humanitarian movement of people in U.S. history, dealing with logistics, base infrastructure, sanitation and the brutal realities of emergency transit. In Senegal, during an HMA engagement, he stepped in to save a woman having a seizure and choking, clearing her airway and stabilising the situation before moving straight back into the work. Even outside formal combat, the pattern was the same. He noticed fast, acted fast, and did what was needed.
Found & Loved
While leading PSSM missions in Zambia, he met social workers and local organisations and began asking practical questions about what it would actually take to open an orphanage. Not in theory. In reality. Buildings, staffing, salaries, governance, oversight, money flow. He had seen enough bad systems by then to know that good intentions were worthless without structure. He had also seen enough suffering to know that waiting forever was just another way of doing nothing.
When he retired after a twenty-three-year Air Force career, he approached a fledgling orphanage working with children caught up in the fallout of parental incarceration and poverty. It was on the verge of collapse. Could he help? He stepped in, asked hard questions, contributed his own money, brought in embassy contacts and trusted local people, and restructured the organisation, rebranding it as Found & Loved, a deliberate inversion of “lost and found”. He became President of the new organisation. Today it supports more than twenty children. Found & Loved is one of the clearest expressions of who David has been his entire life.
The Reason to Keep Going
There is one final thread that matters most in understanding David Gerig, and it has nothing to do with ordnance.
He is a father, and he will tell you plainly that it is the most important thing he has ever been. Through the years of carrying combat, death, trauma and the scars that come with war, raising his daughter pulled him back toward love. After so much darkness, coming home to a child he loved completely gave him something pure to focus on. Fatherhood became an anchor. Being a single dad, he says, is the best thing that ever happened to him.
She has saved him more than once through his struggles with post-traumatic stress. Not by doing anything extraordinary, but simply by being his daughter, and by giving him a reason to keep going, keep healing, and keep trying to become the kind of man and father she could look up to.
She has grown up through moves, different countries, new schools and the instability that military life places on families, and she has carried all of it with a quiet strength beyond her years. Knowing that she now has the chance to stay in one place, build stability and shape the future she wants has given David a peace he did not expect to feel.
Compassion in the Face of Death
On paper, David Gerig brings exactly what the role at Golden West demands: EOD expertise, combat leadership, and HMA and PSSM experience across multiple regions. He understands how to manage people under pressure. He understands how to work across governments and programmes. Now he is applying that knowledge to demilitarisation operations that ensure weapons do not return to circulation at all.
But that is not the whole story.
What runs through David’s life is compassion in the face of death. He has seen fellow service members fall in war and in depression. He has held the hands of the unwanted and forgotten in their last moments. He has helped veterans come home to themselves after war. He has saved strangers in passing.
In every chapter of your life, circumstances change. Face what is in front of you. Do the right thing. Help the people who need help; and if you can turn something made for destruction into something that gives life back, all the better.
David Gerig, Program Manager, EOD Weapons and Ammunition Destruction Operations
This article discusses combat trauma, post-traumatic stress and suicide. Veterans, service members and their families in the United States can reach the Veterans Crisis Line 24 hours a day by dialling 988 then pressing 1, by texting 838255, or through the chat service at VeteransCrisisLine.net.
