9/11 altered Stann's life path

Brian Stann was at the Naval Academy barber shop when the Twin Towers went down. He was called into a room not knowing anything was amiss. When he saw the tape, he didn't believe it was real.

"I don't think anybody, nobody expected something like that, something out of a bad movie," he recalled. "How does a plane get taken over and crash into our buildings? It was unimaginable. We were used to suicide bombers, assassinations, but something as complex and as vivid as seeing a plane crash into the skyscrapers, a plane crash into the Pentagon, that's why people were so outraged and sad, which was the full intent of our enemies."

Up until that point, Stann, who was born on an Air Force base in Japan but grew up in Scranton, Penn., figured his future looked to be as a military leader who would travel the world.  He was two weeks ahead of his 21st birthday and enrolled in the Naval Academy. As a Midshipmen middle linebacker, his main focus had been on the team's next game.

"All of a sudden, we were a nation at war," he said. "Things changed quickly. My junior year, the guys I played football with who I knew very well were people preparing for combat. When I was a senior, I knew my future was in Iraq."

After his 2003 graduation, Stann rose to the rank of captain in the Marine Corps. Three months after being deployed to Iraq, his platoon came under heavy attack by insurgents near Karabilah on the Syrian border. The fight lasted six days, during which Stann coordinated air and tank support that ultimately ended the battle.

All 42 of his men survived. His work under the most extreme of pressure was even mentioned in a speech by President George W. Bush. For his heroism, Stann earned a Silver Star.

From there, Stann went on to become a star in MMA, winning the WEC light heavyweight championship. He's presently one win away from a UFC middleweight title fight, which he would earn with a victory over Chael Sonnen on Oct. 8.

It's impossible for Stann to figure out where his life would have taken him had the attacks on 9/11 not happened. There are only two things he knows for sure: Had the terrorist attacks never occurred, he would have never fought in the UFC, and a number of his closest friends would still be alive.

"I wouldn't call it the defining moment of my life, but a paradigm shift," Stann said as he reflected on 9/11. "I was no longer going to school and preparing for my future as a football player. Now everyone on the football team knew, that while football seemed so important or classes seemed so important, everything was different.

"When the [military] leaders tell you that you are about to become a leader, you take on a huge amount of responsibility – a higher level of maturity. It's no longer about you. It was an absolute paradigm shift for all of us. When your friends graduated, you think when you see them, 'Stay safe, be careful.'

"After graduation you'd get a phone call. 'Johnny lost his legs.' 'Ronnie died.' We got hit one time, a large group of my friends. In one weekend we lost two friends. It got to where you'd almost fear a phone call."

He said there was a major misconception from people who are not in the military about the reaction enlisted soldiers have about going to war.

"The common mistake is that because I was in the military, that I cheer on war and I want to see war take place all the time," he explained. "I don't think anybody in the military who has been in war wants to see it continue. Nobody who has seen lives lost wants it to continue. We understand it needs to happen at times, but we sure as [expletive] don't want it to happen.

"Nobody wanted to be the officer who looks a parent in the eye and tells them that their son or daughter isn't coming home. I've got three lives on my conscience for the rest of my life. It's never been the same."

Everyone has different ways of dealing with what they had been through in combat. For Stann, he needed something all encompassing to focus on so the nightmares stayed out of his head as much as possible. That thing was MMA.

"I wouldn't have ended up fighting," he said. "Fighting was an amazing hobby. I did it before I went to Iraq, but it was to do something really cool, have a few fights as an experience, walk to the cage or the ring, but I never saw it as a career. But after my first tour of Iraq, when I got back, all I could think of doing was to get a fight. I wanted to get back and train. It was a release to maintain balance in my life. Each time I came back, the first thing I did was want to fight.

"You deal with so many things emotionally as an officer. You reflect on different decisions. Would this young man have been safe had I done this? Would this man still be alive had I done that? MMA was something to keep me balanced and keep the darker side of the war from taking over me. I started a program at Camp Lejeune [in North Carolina] for guys with post-traumatic stress and I'd train them to deal with it so they didn't go home to their families like that, to let out any frustrations."

Of course, no matter how hard he tried, it was impossible to keep the world he used as his escape separate from the world he was trying to escape from. Just before his third amateur fight, he got word that a friend of his, J.P. Blacksmith, had been killed in action. Stann lost the upcoming fight. A couple of years later it was a friend names Manion. Last year it was his roommate, Brendan Looney.

Manion, Looney and Stann were best friends. Looney, who died in a helicopter crash, was buried at Arlington National Cemetery next to Manion. In a speech over Memorial Day weekend, President Barack Obama specifically brought up the two, saying, "The friendship between 1st Lt. Travis Manion and Lt. Brendan Looney reflects the meaning of Memorial Day. Brotherhood. Sacrifice. Love of country."

Less than three months after Looney's death, days before what was the most important fight of Stann's career(against Chris Leben on Jan. 1), he got word that Garrett Meisner, a soldier who served under him in his second tour of Iraq, had died in combat from an improvised explosive device.

Unlike in his amateur fight years back, Stann came out against Leben with one of the best performances of his career. He knocked out Leben in 3 minutes, 37 seconds – only the second time in Leben's nine-year career that he had ever been stopped by strikes. (The other time was against the man widely considered the world's best pound-for-pound fighter, Anderson Silva.)

Stann spoke about Meisner both in the ring and at the press conference after his win over Leben.

"During my last year in the service, Garrett would come to my martial arts classes for Marines for posttraumatic stress," Stann said after the fight. "He was one of the most professional Marines I ever met. I believe he volunteered to deploy again, his third or fourth time going overseas to combat. He could have been an instructor and stayed teaching. … It's tough. I'll miss him.

"That's part of being in the military and having so many friends in the military," he continued. "It hasn't stopped and it won't stop for a long time. None of this would have happened if [the 9/11 tragedy] didn't happen. Before, this guy, he'd be in Australia, Thailand, Europe – it was a completely different military, a different lifestyle. You saw the world. After 9/11, everything changed."