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Operations, cobert Os Spionage, The Team House with your hosts Jack Murphy and
David bark. Hey, everyone, welcome to episode two hundred and seventy eight
of The Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave d back there producing somewhere,
and the guest on tonight's show is Matt Stevens. Matt served as a
Navy Seal officer in a number of different seal teams, ended up as a
squadron commander and development group, then went on to a few other assignments,
and today he is the CEO of the Honor Foundation, which we'll talk about
in depth before we jump right into it with Matt. I just want to
take a moment to tell people about our Patreon. There's a link down the
description. You subscribe and you get access to all of these episodes, video,
audio, ad free, and you support the channel. We really appreciate
all of you guys who have stuck with us and help us continue what we
do here, so please check out the Patreon and the link below. Matt,
first question, Man, I want to ask you about your origin story.
Tell us a little bit about like where you grew up, what your
upbringing was like, and how that took you towards the Navy eventually. Yeah,
well, thanks for having me on the show. First of all,
I grew up started growing up in upstate New York, bingham near Binghamton,
New York. Was there until I was about ten, and parents split up
when I was maybe eight or nine, and then moved. I lived with
my dad and my sister and we moved to Charlotte, North Carolina in the
fourth grade. So continued in Charlotte through high school and you know, like
everybody. There are a lot of people in our community. Divor's parents,
Varsus the athlete. I played baseball. Thought I was going to be a
Major League baseball player. More than anything. The military doesn't run deep in
my family. Had one uncle who was an aircraft mechanic in Vietnam, and
then he moved. He got his education, joined the Navy as a maintenance
officer, and who was a teen squadron as a maintenance officer right around when
Top Gun came out, which is about a year before I graduated from high
school. And so I went on one of those Tiger cruises with him where
they used to take families out, like it was pretty cool. You go
on to just for a day free nine to eleven, standing on the flight
deck watching the flight ops. Pretty pretty intense as a you know, fourteen
fifteen year old kid. And really, but like I said, I really
wanted to play D one baseball. In retrospect, I wasn't any good,
got no scholarship offers, and that wasn't gonna happen. But along the way,
a kid a couple of years before me got a, you know,
at the end of the year, an award for getting an appointment to the
Air Force Academy, and it just sounded really cool. When they read this
little thing for him. He's like, hey, this kid's getting like a
three hundred and fifty thousand dollars scholarship. He's going to go fight jets when
he's done. And I just didn't want to do what everybody else did,
and that kind of interested me, so I mailed away for Naval Academy catalogs.
I graduated high school in nineteen eighty seven, so no internet, nothing
on TV, no books about Navy seals or not a lot of them,
and just started digging into all the service academies just to do something different.
All my buddies were going to you know, UNC Chapel Hill and NC State,
smart ones were going to Duke and so I just kept digging in and
looking at it and worked my ass off to get into a naval academy.
And you know, everybody wanted to fly in my year, but I think
the year before I got there, remember the Sunday Sunday magazine, Parade magazine.
It was like an insert in your Sunday paper. There was one article
in there called the Cuffsman Alive. And then again this is like nineteen eighty
six, nineteen eighty seven, and it was about Navy seals. I'm like,
holy shit, this is pretty cool. I've never heard of this before
because up till that point, all the movies were about green berets. Right,
we're gonna put in. All the books were about delta force. Uh.
I just want to say that it's changed now. But so I was
like, man, that's that's pretty cool, and I think that's again,
not a lot of people want to do that or know about it. So
I think I'm gonna go that route. And so I went all in when
I got to the academy, and you know, it's just lucky to uh
persevere and get a billet and then get the buds. It's uh that like
a atypical pathway for an officer that you can In the army, we would
say branch into there's probably a different term for naval officers to go straight from
the academy into the seal pipeline. No, it's it's that's the way it
generally is in our community. I know, you guys have like need to
be almost a captain to go s F s fas or anything like that.
But for us the Naval Academy gets a certain number of billets where you go
straight in and we have, you know, slots for junior officers as the
assistant officer in charge of a platoon, not the platoon commander, so you
know, your first pump. You're kind of the two ice versus the oice.
So very typical. There are other pathways where you can go, you
know, if you get stuck on a ship or something and you want a
laterals transfer, you can do that up until you're a lieutenant and that capsid
around then O three cool. So the Navy seal question you always have to
ask the Seals, was your BUDS class hard? Yeah, it's hard for
everybody. Anybody it tells you it's not hard. I think you're lying.
I mean, I don't think anybody max is everything not that I saw.
So you got to your first team in nineteen ninety one, Can you tell
us a little bit about like what the culture was like and the seal teams
at that time, Like what what you guys were training for, what you
were preparing for. Yeah, so I actually I went to BUDS in ninety
one and then I went straight there from the academy and then we had we
graduated in January of ninety two, and then I had to do some temporary
duty out in San Diego for like six weeks. So I think I checked
in the Seal Team four in March of nineteen ninety two, and so this
was right after Desert Storm. It was right after a Tia Airfield and the
whole Panama invasion, and so me thinking like, hey, what do we
want to do. We want to go to combat. I'm going to go
to Seal Team four because they were the guys on Patilla Airfield doing and at
the time, the Seal teams were regionally aligned like the SF groups, and
Seal Team four was Central and South America. So I put on my wish
list, you know, Seal Team four number one, and somehow I got
it. And you can never chase conflict, as you probably know, right.
So all we did was aim, advise and assist our partner nations in
the you know in those regions, really on basic tactics for the current counter
and Narconics mission. But I'll tell you a funny story about the day I
checked in. So you know, Ands Stevens checks in the Seal Team for
I'm in my dress uniform. You know, you get to the we call
it the main area where you go is called the quarterdeck, even at the
seal team, and somebody has to stand watched, you know, twenty four
to seven watch and I check in and there's a petty officer, I think
second or third or first class in blues on the quarter deck and he had
a big frogman mustache. Half of it was shaved off, and he's got
grooves shaved into his eyebrows, and I think I'm not sure if he was
bald or not, but like, that's the first guy I see, and
I'm like, uh, you know, reporting for duties. He's like,
yeah, man, you gotta go down to admin and like, well,
what what the fuck happened to you? And you know, at the time,
hazing was not an uncommon thing. And I think he's getting married or
had a birthday and he got hazed and they shaved his mustache off, and
to punish him for not ratting out his buddies, the command leadership put him
on watch. Didn't like shame another half of the mustache look any any way
presentable. It was. It was hilarious and that was the like, that
was my welcome aboard and a few minutes later I saw, you know,
a big bad lieutenant and let a bronze star and he's like, hey,
new guy, be at you know this bar at six o'clock. You're buying
beer for the CEO of the EXO and the command Master Chief. I'm like,
okay, I didn't think anything of it. And the dude called me
at my home or my apartment like at six o two and goes, where
the fuck are you? We're here, you are showing up at buying beer.
So I drove my ass to the to the bar and you know,
bought the commanding Officer and command Master chief a couple of rounds beer. And
that was. That was day one at the team. So the culture was
like it was, it was pretty wide open. Uh, work hard,
play hard, yeah kind of thing. I mean they were great tactically.
I thought I learned a ton there, but it was like, no matter
who you are and what rank you were, you could not escape the wrath
of you know, the E five mafia. In fact, a couple of
weeks later, it was the CEO's birthday, and I remember we used to
go to a place called JB's Gallery of Girls. My Virginia Beach compadres will
know that it's like a super low class topless bar and the CEOs, you
know, on a Friday afternoon spread eagle being held down by a bunch of
dudes getting smacked on his belly with a big ut teeth in. That was
the culture. When speaking of the culture, like what year did you go
through? Buds ninety one? Mostly a graduated in early ninety two, so
so Navy Seals had been out for a little while and it was like kind
of like the big introduction, right of mainstream culture to the Navy Seals.
What was it like in San Diego as a young frogman to be when you're
hanging out at the bars telling girls that you're gonna be a Navy seal?
Had that was that? Like was that a big thing for you know because
like tap gun obviously pilots would never go out anywhere without their their flight jackets.
After that, Yeah, well you're assuming I go to bars and uh
and would sorry that like number one until you're a seal, Like it does
not be hoovey ever say I'm gonna be a Navy Seal. Yeah. We
used to go to Miramar, you know, after seeing the movie we go
to the Oak Club. Yeah, whatever night they had a ladies night.
But you know, I don't think it was actually that big of a deal.
Yeah, I don't think beyond the people like us who thought movies like
that were gonna be good. Yeah, nobody else on the planet watched that
movie because it's sucked. Now. Rob Low's movie Finest Hour. If you
haven't checked that one out, that's a real winner. I don't know if
I've seen that. I'll have to check it out. Any uh, from
from that like early nineties time frame, any fun stories from Central or South
America you'd like to share or or maybe not one? Uh, you know
one actually interesting thing. When I got to Team four, we were we
were short officers at the four level in the community, so they put a
couple extra, you know, junior officers in there kind of grow the pipeline.
So we had a few too many officers and uh, some of the
teams were putting three officers in a platoon and the third officer, like guys
I went to buds with would get go to sniper school and you know,
breacher school, I'd get They sent my my EXO at the time had just
come from DEV Group and he was like, hey, you know, there's
there's something about something important with this joint operation stuff, and we're aligned with
seventh Special Forces Group. So he he made a bunch of us go to
deployee with seventh Group for you know, I think a three or four month
deployment cycle. And then he made a couple of us, a couple of
guys went to ranger school. They actually sent me to the whole Special Forces
Qualification course. So I had to you know, I did not want to
do it, and this was nineteen ninety three. To trust me, it
was like, all I want to do is get in a seal platoon after
you know, getting to the team, doing seal tactle training and all that
stuff. But it was awesome deploying with a seventh Group oda to Ecuador doing
high altitude mountaineering. They were awesome guys. And then the day I got
back, you know, of course, we got delayed in Panama for a
couple of days because the aircraft was broken. Literally I showed up back at
Fort Bragg at the time at zero one hundred on a Monday morning. I
started the course at seven thirty for the next six months, which you know,
again, I was not. I didn't volunteer to go. I didn't
want to go. But in retrospect, having gone through with the guys,
a lot of guys who were then, you know, senior officers, Battalian
commanders when I deployed Afghanistan, was like, hey, you remember me,
and it was just like easy, you know, handshake, Yeah, whatever,
that's cool. The same for them. So they had you go through
the eighteen Alpha course. Yep, yep, that's interesting. I didn't know
that seals ever got to do that. So my choice, yeah, well
my choice rangers. I knew that they advent sent to Ranger School as punishment,
but yeah, but I didn't know that either. About Yeah, there
were a couple of guys before me, and I think I was the last
one to go through the whole thing. Yeah, and again great, I
mean, we spent a lot of time in the field, all the things
that you know, you guys did, but it was it was a great,
great orner experience. And then you moved over to Seal Team eight.
Yeah. Yeah, so I wanted to stay operational as long as possible,
right, So I did an AOI c at Seal Team four. I went
and asked if I could go to Seal Team eight and do another AOI CE
job to extend my operational career, because you know, a lot of guys
would tell us like, hey, you're gonna do two platoons and then you're
done. And I was like, well, we'll see what we can do
about that. So I went over there. I was single, no responsibility
at the time, started another platoon as an AOI C of a strike platoon.
We put guys on carriers at the time, and uh, halfway through
the work up, my boss decided to get out and I just fleeted up
to the beat the platoon commander, which, in retrospect, like doing a
second AOI see was probably not the right call. I was ready, you
know what I mean. It's like, oh yeah, he was a great
guy, but it was like I would have done it this way, but
I'm still in a C. So did a full work up, deployed to
the med in the Middle East on a carrier with a carrier air wing,
and that was a lot of fun. You know, we we didn't really
do anything. Was right after Bosny. I think that the platoon I took
over was on Ready five with the Marines during the Scotto Grady Rescue from Ugoslabia
back then. But you know, really nothing went on. It was just
a presence and a lot of exercises at the time, but great, great
experience working with the fleet and uh, you know, learned to stay off
as many ships as I could. And so when does the thought process enter?
Oh no, I'm sorry, one more thing to get to you spent
some time with the STVS also, yep, again to extend my operational career,
I wanted to to go to SDVS and try the mini subs and the
explore the undersea world. So I went over there as a platoon commander and
got a second platoon commander job. And you know, we did a full
work up. A lot of this stuff you do with subs is done off
at the time was off of Puerto Rico because they have really deep water.
But you gotta get qualified, is you know, first go to STV school,
which at the time was in San Diego. That was three months,
and back to the team, do a full work up with all these exercises
with the sub and then we deployed to the Med and did you know,
again, just a lot of exercises with our partner nations, but gained a
real appreciation for what clandestine truly is. You know, I used to think
that coming across a beach with like four zodiacs, you know, from ten
miles out, was pretty sexy. But you know, you can hear them
five miles out, so you know that's not clandestine. But when you can
launch off the back of a submarine underwater, go into a harbor or a
beach all underwater, and you can go over the beach without even surfacing the
STV, you know, all you see is four dudes or however many guys
you have with zero sound. I mean, that's that's clandestine, and it's
hard work. Like, don't get me wrong. STV says they're wet or
they were wet at the time, so it could be an eight to ten
hour dive. But yeah, some of the guys we've had on here have
like described it as being like really hilacious that you're just like freezing on those
on the mini sub. Yeah. Yeah, it's you know, hopefully you're
smart enough to dress appropriately, but you get cold even if the waters seventy
five eight degrees. The worst thing for me was, you know, when
we're diving all the time, my sinuses were pretty jacked up, so I,
you know, it was right when camel bass came out. I'd put
a camel back on over my dive gear or under my dive year stuck on
that on the insert in and about halfway through a dive, I had a
little zip loc bag with two extra suit of head and I'd have to take
those midway through the dive and try to you know, open the bag up,
grab them before they disintegrated, put them in my mouth, suck it
down with some fresh water, just to keep my ears clear for the for
the you know, for the next couple hours. And that was guys did
it all the time. It was super boring if you weren't driving or navigating,
like if you were in the back show four dudes in the back with
all your kit four rucksacks, all your weapons that and it's not quite like
jockh. Custou where you're seeing like dolphins and stuff like that. It's probably
just pitch dark, right, Yeah, it's it's pretty dark. A lot
of times we put a chem light right above us, a green chem light.
And of course back then the dudes in the back didn't have good comms.
Nobody had good combs, but you'd have that heml on a basically on
a on a wire that went to the front and they had a chemlight on.
So if you like pulled it twice, it means hey, with we're
okay. If you pull it like five times, like you got to get
to the surface. Now, that was kind of the extent of how good
are concert soup cans? Literally? Yeah, yeah, No, it was
hard work, but it was like again appreciation for like the stuff we do
and what it takes to succeed in the special apps community. It's like,
guys, guys nowadays are I mean, they're doing amazing things from the STVS.
I'll tell you funny story on that. We were doing our final workup
in STV. We were down in Puerto Rico before we deployed, and we
had a My platoon had a super long insert into the harbor and then a
super long extract. It was probably like ten miles each way, and of
course on the way back to the sub, you know, you got to
figure out this rendezvous underwater kind of thing which I won't go into, but
put it like this. We were late and we tried to cut a corner
and you don't cut the corner when you're you're trying to link up with a
you know, nuclear submarine. Yeah, yeah, he's that periscope depth and
ostensibly you can see him on your little sonar. And again this is like
nineteen ninety seven, ninety eight, No, this is ninety eight ninety nine.
They just weren't that good and uh and they get banged up along the
way, you know, so they don't always work great. But after like
a ten hour dive, we're coming back. We're hauling asked for us like
six seven knots and we hit the side of the submarine because we cut the
corners going to like six knots, which when you're not expecting it is a
lot pretty gallacious. Yeah, And of course we thought, like what you
know, we knew we hit the submarine. The question was can we still,
like, can we ballast up if we need to? So my swim
buddy, I was in the back with another guy and his door was bent
so he couldn't open his door. So I opened my door and all I
see is the propeller. It was it was night, but the visibility was
awesome in Puerto Rico, and I could just see this thing like getting closer
and closer and closer. I like, you know, we got about five
seconds before we got a bail. Of course I can't talk to him,
but i'm you know, starting to grab him. And then we we eventually
surfaced because just to check out the boat and see if we were like they've
sunk them before out there, and there's some big trenches where you don't want
to be in a sinking STV even if you have dagged here on because once
you go below a certain depth, you're you're you're screwed up for a long
time. So were you able to eventually get that back into the dry dock
on the sub. Yeah, we we had to do a uh basically an
emergency crank down where the sub comes by and kind of does like the Fulton
recovery going like one ny. It's not sex, not sexy like a C
one thirty or anything, but you know, they hook you and then they
get the line down to a winch and they basically just crank your ass down
because you can't there's no way to get a broken STV onto the back of
a surface submarine. You got to get it down. And so yeah,
they winched us down and then eventually you know, got us, got us
into the shelter. I had I had heard that, particularly in like the
the mid and late nineties, that the STV teams didn't get a lot of
respect from the regular teams, and like being sent to an STV team was
you know seen as oh, you're like b team. Has that was that
your experience? Experience? Was that actually going on? And has that changed?
I think in some cases it was like if you were a brand new
seal coming out of Buds, you generally didn't want to go to sdb's in
my estimation, because they weren't going to war. Nobody even if the very
few things that were going on back then there were a couple of high end
things going on that nobody talked about, but you had to have been there
for a while. For me, it was a decision of like how do
I extend my operational career? So you know, that was you know,
by choice for me and a lot of second tour guys. You know,
they saw the value of it if you were really into diving, like you
get all the diving you want there. Nowadays, I don't even think they
take enlist the roarer officers straight out of buds and you have to scream to
go there, which is a good thing because number one, it demonstrates who
wants to actually be there and work hard. And number two, they don't
have to take everybody, So just because you're a seal doesn't mean you're a
good seal. And they're doing some amazing work across the world that will never
know about. Do you think that technology has sort of made that difference that
it's enabled the stvs or do you think it's just the mission parameters have changed,
which is allowed the stvs to be like more you know, valued.
I'd say yeah, I think it's both. But I think over the years
a lot of super hard work. I think our officers and leaders got smarter
where like, hey, you know, nobody's going to come and hand us
the golden ticket to go on this like super high speed operation. You have
to demonstrate capability, earn credibility, and then build trust. And the decision
makers are generally in the Pentagon or other agencies that have the authority, and
I think we just got way better at working that system and over time built
up the credibility to be asked or if you demonstrate or offer a solution to
a tough problem that they may not even know about, because not even in
the Navy especial ops, like most guys don't know really what a SDV can
do or what an SDV platoon. So it's a lot of education in different
settings with you know, a different audience. And now the guys have the
dry sub too, so increased range and not freezing to death. Yeah,
you know, it was always like I think in the early two thousands,
like you see like an E five STV guy with a legion a merit and
like, how'd you get that? Like that's normally for six and No.
Seven's, you know and super senior enlisted d'es Like I can't talk about it.
You're like, oh, that's cool. I want to go there.
Yeah, it's awesome. That's that's like one of the capabilities that only only
you guys can do. Nobody else has that. And I imagine nowadays I
don't want to say it's the main effort, but I mean if we're moving
into a time of you know, state conflict, I can see a renewed
emphasis on it undred percent. Yeah. It's uh, they're busy. Well,
and what we know about Mission Creep is it if if, like any
of their successes ever become public, then pretty soon every other, every other
uniform service special operations unit will have their own underwater delivery vehicles. They'll all
want to get in on the mission. Yeah. Well, even after being
there, just I realized that, like most sealed platoons and even other special
mission units, like the diving is a perishable skill, and like you're not
just going to do a two week training block and then like, hey,
you know, we got the big miss over wherever. You know, it's
going to be a very focused thing from people that dive all the time,
right, And really the only people that do it all the time are the
STV teams. So that's my opinion. It's not doctrine or anything like that.
So yeah, and now we're getting to about the year two thousand.
Tell us about when this idea. I mean, what I'm sensing is you
want to stay as operational as you could as long as you could. Is
that how you got the idea to go and screen for development group? Absolutely?
Yeah, No, I had always wanted to go. I just had
to pick the you know number one. I I don't think I was mature
enough to even apply after my O Platoon Commander John at Seal teammate and I
got married right after that, so I wanted to extend it. And you
know, that was the next the next great step. I think a lot
of us want to go there, and I'm just super lucky. You worked
hard to get there, and then yeah, got selected to go through selection
assessment training in two thousand, went to the boat side of it. The
Great Team signed, but we did a combined selection assessment with assaults and boats
for most of it until we had to break off and kind of specialize.
But yeah, I went through that awesome process in the year two thousands.
Yeah. Any funny stories from training with Green Team, they're all funny,
you know. I mean, it's not funny when you're his audio cut out
here. Yeah, oh, then it's just me go ahead, go ahead,
sorry, Jack's hearing cut out. Okay, you guys can continue?
Yeah thing, Yeah, sorry about that? Want me to wait? No,
no, please go He's not more than yeah, you know, it's
uh, it's a very different environment, very professional for the most part,
where you know, it's not a lot of yelling and screaming. It's like
the standards at the standards and I hope you meet him, but if you
don't, you know, see you later. Yeah, there were a couple
of funny things that I don't think I should go into them, but you
know, it was it's not funny when you know you're what happens, you
fuck up and you're you know, one of the big punishments we had,
especially like c QB is a big thing for us, and it was you're
either dragging a tire, big heavy tire long ways or you're climbing a ladder
up a tree. Isn't fun to do with kit. That happened, you
know, quite a bit. And you know, I can tell you that,
you know, I probably will never be asked back to Great Team to
be a throttleman on an h shack. I can tell you, you know,
everybody rotates through the three positions on those boats, or at least back
then we did. You know, you got the NAV slot in the kind
of the port seat, the middle dudes the wheelman, and then the starboard
side guys the throttleman. Because it's so intense, one guy has to concentrate
on just keeping it straight. One guy's like throttling, and there's a there's
an art and a science to it. I found myself one night we were
going up doing a really easy training exercise, like going up a river,
and I was the throttleman on the number one boat, so I didn't have
to navigate. It was awesome. It was just like like wide open,
pin them down, going fifty knots. It's class. You know, there's
a big moon out and they've told us how to overtake a ship because there's
a big wake. There's like big cargo ship going into Norfolk Carver and I
couldn't remember exactly what they said. It's like come off the throttles a little
bit and then gun it, you know, get over the lip. But
you don't want to like go into the face of the of the wake.
So I did it absolutely backwards and we were again lead boat. I don't
even think I had my nods on. They were like flipped up and everybody's
maps are not even in a waterproof thing because it was so nice. And
I came off the throttles, the nose came down and then I gunned it
and we stuffed right into the back of thea this wake on a completely calm
night. And you know, if you've been in a boat that stuffs.
You have this huge green wall of water that comes over you. I almost
broke my nose. I had this big hump on my nose from my nods
smashed me in the face. Everything's wet, and all we could hear when
we came up was everybody in the other boats laughing at us. I stept
my boat. They were super pissed. So yeah, I have that.
So it's it's it sounds like it's basically like when you're in a when you're
speeding in a car and going over like a bump, like the breaking to
put the pressure on the front. So it's basically the same concept for you
guys. It's interesting, it is, yeah, and you know again,
you know, we all rotated through, but I wasn't ever very good at
it. And uh like this selection and training for the boats, Like the
first couple of times you go out, it looks really cool. When you
launch off wave you count like one one thousand and two one thousand, and
you're still in the air because when you come down, you know it's gonna
hurt, especially if you're you know, anting a little bit and everybody gets
smashed to the side. I've seen guys get really fucked up, not through
anybody's fault, but just like it's it's a dangerous business. Yeah. Yeah,
and this is all pre nine to eleven. So your your first assignment
was over to Bosnia. Yeah, the first cool thing I got to do
is go to Bosnia for for for a mission we had over there, and
it was, uh, it was great, you know, first first kind
of real thing that we were doing. But yeah, I uh had a
short tenure in Bostnia. We had uh some guys who enjoyed the bottle and
and ship rolls uphill and uh I I promptly got kicked out of Bosnia with
my senior list of leaders uh after about a month. So it was a
low point in my career. I thought I was completely done. This was
like May June of two thousand and one. You know when it when a
two star conventional army guy who owns the base tells you to go home,
like get on a plane now you dip ship. It's pretty humbling as a
as a young guy, yeah who thinks he's pretty hot ship, but uh,
it was. It was a pretty good lesson for were for me to
you know, how we are perceived matters and how we will be employed.
Right. If you can't earn respect and keep respect and credibility from those that
you work for, even if you're just a tenant on their base and not
actually working for them, it's a it doesn't go well, Matt. This
is a discussion we've had a lot on our show about about officers and what
they are and are not responsible for. Like, you know, if if
your Joe goes out and gets drunk and makes an ask of themselves on a
Friday night, you know, and then the officer is getting relieved. It's
like it puts a lot of pressure on officers to maybe cover things up or
you know, or whatever. But also officers have a tendency to influence culture
a lot of times, so there is some responsibility or there should be some
responsibility for certain things like and you suffered because of what some of your guys
did. Where for you? Like where is that line for what an officer
should and shouldn't be held accounted before? And like when is it detrimental to
hold an officer accountable for everything the guys or people under their command do.
Yeah, you're exactly right. If that hadn't that wasn't the first incident from
our group, and so then it becomes a pattern. And you know,
I can although I didn't agree with the decision, I can I can see
where they came from. Right, I'm not a fan of like, hey,
Joe Schmuckntelli goes out and gets the dui. Therefore we're going to lock
everybody's livery down. Not at all. But that was kind of an operational
role. It wasn't back in Conus, and it was you know, our
credibility as an organization was online. And you know, I I one hundred
percent believe that. You know, if you're the O c R commander,
then you have ultimate ability and accountability. You know, that's why commanding officers
of ships in the Navy maybe it's a little more draconian in the Navy when
you have that kind of autonomy, when you're like Ford deployed and all that
stuff. This this wasn't that. But still as a commander of the small
unit, it was my responsibility to influence, if not direct, people to
you know, be smart about things. And we weren't seat totalers by any
stretch, but you know, that was what happened across the line and put
some things at risk, and it was it was not unacceptable, So I
was like, yeah, I'm not sure that. So so the second part
of that question, then, I guess, is you know, you have
your big army or your bigger your bigger military, like you say, like
a ship or you know, an infantry, a battalion or whatever. But
when you are the officer in a more mature, a smaller and more mature
element, how do you influence you know, like these E six's, E
seven's without them just saying go fuck yourself. For adults, you don't like,
we can we can handle our own business. Yeah, I mean that
is probably the million dollar question that everybody wants to know the secret sauce to.
And I think it's number one being tactically technically proficient incompetent. Right,
you don't have to be the best shooter, guver, everything, but you
got to be pretty good. So you got to earn respect. And I
think most guys like honestly know, like, hey, you're you're in that
position, right, it's and they're going to do their best to also succeed,
not to make you succeed, but they want the unit to succeed,
right, So they want you to be good at what you do, which
is not generally being the number one man in the door, right, And
so if you respect the expertise around you, you know, and build camaraderie
and in over time earn respect, then it should sort itself out as long
as you're not a bumbling idiot where you know. So again where some guys
get sideways as they I think they try to come in and be g I
Joe and take like I got to make all the tactical calls. You No,
you don't, like you have these guys who've probably been there for a
decade longer than you like. You gotta let certain things flow and then make
adjustments to the flow versus being indirective, you know what I mean. Like
the guys are so good at certain units that you know, you gotta let
it. You gotta trust, uh And if you don't trust other guys there,
then you got to take action and hold them accountable for for not performing
it, which which we you know we did. So it's uh yeah,
I mean my opinion is like at the end of the day, there's there's
gotta be one dude in charge, right, just stay called warfare and how
to do what's been going on for several thousand years, and generally there's one
dude in charge, and you know, like it or not, that's generally
an inexperienced officer. Maybe it's not an officer like you got the squadron commander,
the troop commander, and team leaders. That's that's kind of changing plan.
But you got troop chiefs and squadron master chiefs in there too. If
you're not listening to those guys, you're an idiot. Yeah, I mean,
so it's a it's a fine a fine balance. But yeah, there's
no easy answer. Yeah, it's earned respect, it's not given, Yeah,
for sure. And then you were in the unit when nine to eleven
happened. Can you tell us a little bit if you want about, you
know, what that experience was, like, how things changed in the unit
and sort of where you ended up. You know, where was the next
place that you touched down at. Yeah? Yeah, So I was actually
briefing the commanding officer at the time of the first plane strike on a training
exercise we had coming on, you know, when the first plane hit and
I think somebody came in and said something, and the second one hit and
like, all right, this is done, you know, let's get on
the horn. And so what we thought was that we were we were potentially
gonna go like something needed to happen, right once we figured out, hey,
this was a terrorist act al Qaida, We're gonna go find these guys,
hunt them down and kill them and it's gonna be over in about a
month. So we need to fight to get on the first mission, like
one hundred percent. That's like everybody's like there were fistfights going on in the
locker room, like hey, motherfuckers, we're going. You know, it's
like nope, we're going, like we're on alert. Yeah, we're not
on alert, so we're gonna you know, you got to stay on alert.
You know, there's all these like angles being the well, honestly,
we thought we were gonna go on this like worldwide hunting spree and just you
know, try to do what we could to root out al Qaida, and
it was gonna be easy and done quick, obviously, you know when I
was lucky that I got on the first the first appointment, but it wasn't
done quick right in it, you know, the first one was we were
pretty kinetic, but it was you know, in and out and mostly we
were on the giving and and then the guys that relieved us, you know,
we had a guy step on the land an anti pank mine, uh,
and then some other guys get hurt, and some things happened very quickly,
and it became like, Okay, this is not gonna be an easy
fight. This is the longer term slog, you know. And I went
back, like within a year I was, I mean, within nine months
I was back in the theater doing other stuff. And it's like, okay,
you know, this is the new normal. Like three months on,
you know, or four months on and six months off and you're off your
your training. And it elevated the seriousness of like the training trips that we
took, and and while you were at home really getting focused on some of
the mission profiles that we had signed up for, which we're pretty intense.
Right. I love jumping. I love free falling, or I used to.
I'd never in a million years thought we would, you know, use
free fall on an op, and we used a ship out of it.
In fact, on our first real op, uh, we had a one
of our troops ad a halo unmarked unknown DZ at night with nods, you
know, and we're like, holy shit, we used to go jump all
the time, but here we are like, yeah, we get paid paid
for and yeah, and you better fucking pay attention to it because it's it's
it can go wrong really quick. Can you tell us a bit more about
that initial push that you guys didn't taft stand what that was, like,
you know what you experienced. Yeah, so, you know, we were
with some our Army sister units and they actually did the first real operations and
I don't know if you guys the Rangers did the big jump Omar's House right,
Well, they jumped into a dry lake bed hunting grounds. But yeah,
and and we were on a ship at the time, and we watched
everybody fly away and come back and it was pretty humbling. And we were
supposed to go cock recock for a mission the next night and it was canceled.
We're like, all right, we need to be creative then and figure
out what we can do. And we all went to a land based location
and started conjuring up, like how can we affect the situation on the ground,
right, what are the rules of engagement? And you know, you
had the big ring road and at the time, anything coming into condohr with
fuel or anybody in with a gun going in was probably a bad guy.
And so we we said, hey, we can do an armed reconnaissance to
the west of Conda hor So you know, we didn't have vehicles there.
We had boats. You know, again I thought we were We're we're the
maritime guys. We of course we were. We brought boats on this operation
to Afghanistan on the ship and they're like, okay. So we went up
and uh like, we need some of these desert mobility humbi's that are in
the war stock up in Kuwait. So sent some guys up there, got
a bunch of vehicles we had ATVs with us for some reason, and figured
that we could get in and do an armed reconnaissance for a couple of days
with you know, uh, you know, a rat patrol kind of thing.
So we we did. But you know, a dumbbe desert mobility humby
fits on a MH forty seven with that one inch on either side. And
they don't really like that. I'm told, like, if there's not more
rooms, did you actually squeeze by? Because your fucked. If if you
have a hard landing or something gets cock guyed you know, it's just like
you don't want to sit on the hl Z doing the ten thousand point turns.
So we we conjured up in an opera. One troop was going to
free fall in do a survey of a dry lake bed, set up a
desert landing site where we bring in two MC one thirties land and then my
troop would roll off go do this arm reconnaissance for as long as it took,
ended up being about ten days. And uh so we had a sniper
element with us. They were on ATVs and we had my troop which was
on the four Humbies, and we just you know, found the best location
to set up ops and drop bombs on bad guys and then uh you know,
hunt for targets of opportunity if I R came up with any any potential
longer sites for bad guys. So we took advantage of that. And at
the time I thought it would be this is like late October early I think
it was November of two thousand and one. You know, I thought it
was gonna be like a you know, exercises and okay, there's bad guys
here. I got to send up a you know, conop of course,
all we had at the time was like really crappy HPW like dot com you
can send like just words, and I remember sending up the first one.
It is just like quick five paragraphs, you know, who, what,
where, why? And when it's like, hey, we want to hit
this target at you know, twenty two hundred. We're gonna take four vehicles
and this is it, and like it was approved within thirty seconds, We're
like all right, we scratched it out in the dirt and we went and
did a classic you know, ambush on on a target that was the first
real one, and then the snipers were doing their thing, wrapping bombs on
bad guys. So it was it was fulfilling, ye say, the least
were you How was that for you guys in terms of I know that your
training covered a lot of things, and you guys tried to remain proficient across
a number of fields. But out here you're out there doing desert mobility ops
in vehicles. Are you saying kind of the old lap patrol type of stuff,
probably working in larger teams than normal I imagine, or no, slightly
larger, But I mean, honestly, we we in the uh the mobility
side of it had trained to do exactly that, just like weeks prior,
yeah to nine to eleven, and it's like we didn't have to train,
but it's like, hey, this is this fire maneuver, fire movement.
Yeah. Yeah, bigger platforms, bigger guns, slower than us on on
ground. It's the same tactics to use on the water, quite frankly,
and it was like we had just done it, and so that brought some
credibility to to us, like yeah, of course we can do this,
uh and we can. You know, we were being sneaky and at the
time, like we didn't have any flear systems on on vehicles or anything like
that. So we took the one we had from our boat, stuck it
on to a hum V and it worked great. Yeah you know, we
had three sixty rotating gimbal yeah you know. Yeah, eventually became standard on
the vehicles because you guys did it. It was Yeah. So it was
just like creative dudes in the in the troop, like hey, fly to
Kuwait and figure out how to get these vehicles from some army. The Schiff
six dude like you know, of course he had the backing of of the
task force behind him, but you know, bring them back here, figure
out the air, and then what do we need on those things? Like
we pulled out the windshields, pulled off the doors. You know, we're
welding like machine gun turrets to passenger side. You know, so I had
M sixty in front of them I face the whole time. It's like,
awesome, Yeah, it's cool. You know. Of course it smacked me
in the face a bunch, but they'll talk about that. You know,
you mentioned this when you're talking about STBs, about you know, sort of
advocating for yourself and educating people. Did you find that to be the case
here too, where you guys wanted to find a way to make yourselves useful,
you kind of created these use cases and then sold them. Yeah,
well there's so much work to go around at the time that it wasn't hard,
but certainly there were some whisperings like why are these guys doing this like
water locked country? But we were you know, special mission unit, and
we trained to that and then the basic task that we trained to for other
missions led and allowed themselves to be used one hundred percent for this. So
I mean for us, it was like yeah. You know, SEAL stands
for it's an acronym for sea, air and land. You know what.
The three lightning bolts on a s F patch are sea, air and land,
right, and so it goes both ways. And you know, frankly,
it just it didn't last that long. There might have been a little
more consternation between us and the Rangers because you know, there's always there was
always that kind of you know, difference of opinion. Right, the Rangers
are the premiere light infantry guys of the army, and they're pretty, they're
really good. Are they the same as who we were? Like? No,
the different missions, different age groups, right, but everybody has their
roles, and frankly I used to get really sick of it. And some
other things happened later that can talk about, but it was, you know,
the more after that, I think when I heard that kind of stuff
is like, yeah, yeah you are. You're a closed minded dipshit go
over there and you know, playing to somebody else because we're here to get
work done. Yeah. I mean, what I really took from that from
what you just said is is the Seals and SF go both ways. It's
not gay if you're underwet. Everyone knows that. No, no, but
it is interesting because really obviously, you know, with with seals, you
have the swimming aspect as part of the selection, you know, with you
know, with other with army units, you have a lot of the land
based movements as But at the end of the day, they're really the same
guys and their training may be focused in different arenas. And obviously the SMUs
do probably get a level of training, well they do. They get a
level of training and funding that you know, the Rangers and s F M
not good or whatever. But they're the same guys. Couldn't it be with
anymore? I mean we are all up from the same cloth, and you
know, you might have a different colored cloth, but you know we are
we are the same, and yeah, that is It's pretty awesome actually when
you think about the community that we come from, right, yeah, we
all want to like everybody has a little click of I'm a seal, right,
so if given a choice, I'm probably gonna hang out with seals.
But you know what, if given the choice for me to hang out with
a you know, Ranger, SF or somebody else in the Navy, I'm
hanging out with lakes special ops guys. You know, so the circle is
concentric and you know, my much better friends you know, who are in
the Army than some of the teams, right, And I'm sure it's the
same way going. Yeah, the way it's about the person, not not
what you're wearing on your sleeve or anything like that. No, I was
just going to ask how was it for you guys learning, you know,
because Big Army obviously controlled a lot of the battle spaces. Big arm me
you know, is used to you know, working working out that chain of
command in there and there. And I know that you guys probably went to
like the j r x's and things like that where you were used to that
also, But but how was that for you, like learning to work in
like with conventional forces in those battle spaces and things like that. It was
I think it was generally good, you know, as long as you didn't
approach it from a perspective like, hey, I'm a I'm an operator,
you're just like guarding the gate kind of thing. Like we all have those
guys in our units who are just dicksed no matter what. They typically didn't
get a lot done. But if you respected their mission and where they were
coming from like, hey, you know what, you just killed the mula.
I know you didn't. Like we worked for a different chain of command.
We had to coordinate with the battle space owners, but we didn't have
to get permission from them, right, and that was a tough tool for
them to swallow. So in some cases, but if you took the time
to like go visit them since you got in country and like shake their hand
and yeah, like hey, here's who I am, this is what we're
about. We'll always try to coordinate. Okay, we might need a q
r F from you guys or somebody on standby, and if, by the
way, if you need anything, let me know because I might be able
to get something for you. You know, they were generally awesome to work
with. In my opinion, there were a couple of guys who were just
so conventional that they're just like, you know, the assholes are standing on
both sides of the fence quite frankly, and I can understand their perspective.
I couldn't agree with sometimes decisions just based on doctrine and you know, this
is the way we do it in the army or by you know, infantry
doctrine where it's like, well, that's not the way we do it.
Just what I'm telling you, what we're doing as a courtesy, you know,
if that's what it really comes down to. But I'm not asking your
permission, so not stepping on them and not trying to make their lives harder,
but trying to work and come to an understanding. And generally it worked
out really well. Yeah, like that, and after that, pumped to
Afghanistan, you then got sucked into some of the more like clandestine work that
the unit does. So what are you able to say about that? Yeah,
I mean we just had smaller groups a raid in different places, trying
to actually develop the intelligence picture. You know, this is early two thousand
and one, two thousand and two, which you know became a bigger thing
later, and it was super important work. But you know, I think
we all learned early on, like hey, the big target intelligence package isn't
going to be delivered to your desk with a bow on it and be like
accurate. You have to actually go figure out what's going on on the ground,
working with other agencies. And so we were doing a lot of that
kind of stuff, you know, partnered with very small units other government agencies,
just trying to be the eyes and ears and then reporting back up what
we were seeing. So you know, that's that was great, great learning
experience. And then that led into working in the Jaysox staff with General Miller.
Yeah you guys, yah, yeah, yeah, you're freezing up a
little bit. It's okay, Yeah, your signal is kind of going down
a bit. I think my kids are probably on the internet. I'll text
them to get off. But yeah, I was sent to the staff again,
one of those things that I didn't ask to do, but I was
told I was going to the staff for a couple of years, and it
was a great learning experience. You know. I was supposed to go to
the the JA three and just you know, be one of the the main
planners, but I got sucked into some stuff General or at the time,
Lieutenant Colonel Scott Noer was doing, but you know, kind of on that
operational preparation of the battlefield line of effort. And so worked for him for
two or he was there for I think for a year, but stayed in
that that entity for for about two years. So I went back and it
was it was great. I mean it was hard because I was gone probably
more there. Then I was you know, well not more but just as
much. Moved the family down to Fort Bragg and uh and then you know,
certainly the there were a couple of blowouts where you know, the pager
goes off and I didn't come home for three months. You know, that's
the real thing. But I learned a ton, gained a huge amount of
respect for our partners in the Army, worked with them quite a bit as
well as well as the great people who run the staff like it is.
Again, I didn't want to be there. I never went to school again.
I had I had not gone to school up until this point, so
I'm hitting like fourteen years of you know, I stayed pretty operational, and
you know, the army officers just running circles around me in particular about like
hey, like how do you how do you plan something and then run it
up the chain of command and speak the staff language that army majors know how
to speak, right, and then of course the colonels know like that was
that was a huge learning curve. So going to the staff at Jason actually
helped with that. Like okay, I gotta I gotta up my game because
that's the language everybody speaks. And back to that credibility thing. If I
want to have credibility in my next job and continue to get our unit employment,
then you need to be able to speak that language. So learn the
language and learn how they talk and still kind of work your your angle into
it. So it was it was great in that regard, But I also
got a lot of good I mean operational time even while on the staff,
working with with that crew of guys. Yeah, and the teams we had,
were there any of those uh you know, uh counter terrorism's aworts or
anything that you're able to talk about that were interesting experiences. I'll tell you
one funny story. I mean, during the invasion of Iraq. It wasn't
necessarily a blowout, but you know, I remember going. I was the
first guy from our office to go, and it was like it wasn't on
the invasion, but it was right after it. And again our role was
to do the U you know, Ope. Nobody was interested in OPE.
So I remember talking to the J three and giving him a brief, uh
while I'm over there, got a table side brief at the an undisclosed location
about what I'm supposed to do. And he's he's the J three and he's
an O six and I'm an O four. I think maybe an now I
was an four. But he's just he's throwing the brief on the floor and
the guy hadn't probably slept in three months. He's got probably a whole can
of Copenhagen in his mouth and he's yelling at me, well FlexAID Copenhagen,
getting you know, hitting me in the eye, and he throws the entire
brief and the get the fuck out of here. You're not doing any that
you're doing this and he completely retasked me to do something completely different, which
was great. Happy to do it, yes, sir, and uh called
my boss back like, hey, uh, he didn't go. So I
don't think we're doing what you want me to do, at least not for
a couple of weeks. Maybe you should give them a call and see the
good retasked to go do something else, which was you know, it was
fine, but it was you know, it's just different priorities for different people,
and so that whole it was all pretty new at the time for what
we were trying to do, and it was not well understood and not well
accepted, and you know, that was on us to educate people, and
we ultimately did. But yeah, it was a flaring. Did you see
that capability grow throughout you know, your career and some of these assignments you
had, because I mean, I don't know how in depth you want to
get with the OPE stuff, but as I understand it, that has a
lot to do with sort of like moving the puzzle pieces or moving the chess
pieces into the right place to enable operations. Yeah, I'm no expert at
this, like, trust me, I'm the wrong guy to go deep on
this, but it was. I mean, we saw several commands with enable
special warfare stand up to do this. We saw and teas within the ranger
units. We saw fourth battalions in Special Forces get stood up all to do
this kind of stuff, and it was so I think it was and there
were other units that were way better at it doing it already on a higher
level. But we're trying to kind of, you know, bridge the gap
between no ship, what's going on in the battlefields and what what the tactical
intel is not strategic level intel, but how do we affect tomorrow or the
next day versus the big strategic piece of you know, China, Russia and
this and that. So it certainly it was satisfying in that regard, and
I think we we played a role probably by what we did wrong and the
lessons learned that then kind of you know, led to the good thinking and
design of what a unit that does this at the top door the level should
really look like. And so it was it was super interesting. Was it
challenging for you guys in the beginning as you're developing this capability? Could because
I imagine that in a way, like you're serving many masters, right,
You've got Jasock, You've got Inscom, You've got State, You've got you've
got all these people out there who want to have the final say. I
imagine it was that what you experienced or is that not quite accurate? Not
at the level I was at? Okay, and I was I was way
lower than than I mean. Certainly, we had battlespace owners that you talked
about, We had foreign partners, we had you know, white side soft
units that we were aligned with other agencies. But you know, it was
generally on the ground. It's like if you were a good dude, you
were just trying to do the right thing. It worked out really well,
yeah, there were a couple of people that showed up that you know,
we weren't. We weren't in the in the main bases with the you know,
the green Bean Coffee or whatever that place was. Uh, we were
getting massages from the the ladies on uh Bargra Mara base, going to that
burger king. We were in austere environments where you know, hey, if
you got like some fresh food once once every so often, it was it
was a great thing if you could score a goat, you know. So
on the ground you built tight relationships pretty quick by sharing and just being authentic.
But occasionally we we or the other entities would send me completely wrong person
there, you know, yeah, maybe somebody who's used to the job in
Paris or something like that. Yeah, but there were massages at There were
massages at one point. I had no idea. It was pretty early on.
I think, yeah, I love it. So I've been told I've
never been there, but I've been told that around that two thousand and four
five time frame that there was some sort of tie massage parlor. Yes,
friends of mine may have gone. Yeah, yeah, I've heard about it
too. You must have done a good job, though, with some of
these assignments, even if things didn't go the way as they were planned,
because so your next assignment, you got to become a squadron commander in Development
Group. I mean, I must, I mean that's a huge achievement.
Yeah, I mean I was lucky to lucky to have gotten there and certainly
honored to do it. But yeah, you know, came back and in
typical fashion, you know, I was my boss is down at the headquarters,
were going to give me a couple of months to do some turnover in
my last couple of months actually there. So I was actually back at the
back at the beach doing a turnover like underway training. I remember, I
was all jocked up. It was probably March, so the water was still
pretty cold, getting ready to head out and just to get back into it
and get a call from the quarters like, hey, we need you on
a plane tomorrow morning. It's leaving out of Hope. You're gonna go be
our len o, our first len o to the first Marine Division. I
was like, you guys, don't get it. I'm I'm going out here.
I'm prepping for you know, taking this over and like yeah, playing
planes wheels up at you know, nine am so fed back. It was
like seven o'clock pm. I'm at the beach like okay, so I d
jack drive home for four hours, pack all my stuff, get to the
airplane, and sure enough, like I get sent over to be the the
len o from our headquarters to the first Marine Division out in Ramadi, which
was you know, again I didn't want to be there, you know,
but again they're not called a request, they're called orders. But the cool
thing was like it was General Mattis is the division commander. General Kelly I
think was the deputy in Dunford was the chief staff. Like that was their
leadership line up. In Eric Smith, who is now the commandant, was
like current offs officer. He's just been shot in the leg and he's in
the you know, with his leg up, losing blood and he wouldn't go
home. So working with those guys for a couple of months was actually pretty
cool because you know, that's you know, what works when you're with guys
like that, we're true pros and they're like, hey, we need a
QRF. Here's the con op. And I like, we don't need to
see the con op. Just tell us where and wind to be we got
it. You got it. It's like, wow, this is great.
So there was mutual respect there. But yeah, then I so I did
that, and then of course I get back to the beach like on July
first, and we deployed on July fourth, so there was zero turnover and
it was straight straight back into it, which was which was fine, you
know, but it was at that time we had you know, there were
multiple theaters now and we were in Afghanistan. But yeah, it was I
mean, it was great. And this was the time. You know,
you're the squadron commander. You had told me earlier when the Operation Red Wings
happened, and you were the ground force commander, uh for for the squadron
when that happened. Yeah, in one of the deppoyments, we were over
there and again we you know in the in the as you guys know,
but there were multiple change of command, right the whiteside guys worked for Siejasota,
who worked for the two star or three star Army guy that was you
know, the overall battlespace on our we worked for a different chain of command.
So we were kind of watched the planning going on for for Red Wings
and they needed some helicopters. So they came over and you know, requested
permission to use the helicopter. So I kind of watched the planning going on,
but we weren't directly involved, so you know, we had zero skin
in the game besides you know, giving them advice on where not to go,
what not to do, which is what they did. But like they
so we watched the planning and I remember, you know, they like I
didn't think of it, anything of it. And we were working nights,
so we'd wake up around lunchtime. And uh remember the day June twenty eighth,
two thousand and five, Like our bee, we were still using pagers.
Beepers went off, you know, right before lunch, like hey,
you know, report to the jock immediately, and we mustering the jock and
like what's going on? Like they a bird has just been shot down one
of our assassts, like but like not tracking any of it, Like holy
shit, like how does that happen? You know? And come to realize
that they had inserted the night before they got compromised. Big firefight. And
this is the four four man Reki team, which is a pretty light wreki
team, and uh and then they had launched a QRF in the middle of
the day, and uh, that's when we kind of got notified because although
we were all one task force, you know that the aviators were tracking what
was going on, but the C two was over at Siege of Soda and
so like we just weren't tracking. So then it became, okay, we
need to send a QRF up there. And it became a a fairly interesting
thing to watch for me because we could have gone right away, but after
having a siege of soota of QRF launched in the middle of the day and
get shot down, nobody was really keen on sending anybody else right back in
there, especially during the day, and so we waited a long time.
So the seat in time, the task Force and Seed of Soda were both
those sixes, and then you went straight to the you know, either sentcom
or or the conventional battlespace owner, and so there was a lot of fighting
and politicking going on there. We waited around for quite a while and finally
my boss said, hey, how long we'll it take for you guys to
get up there. And we had pre positioned them an entity up closer earlier
in the day and It's like, wait, we can be air born in
forty five minutes. It's like Roger that you're you're now the ground force commander,
go and so are really what we wanted to do the first night was
just get a smaller element of rangers. So we had this joint Strikeforce Enstein.
It was most of my squadron and a company minus of rangers from two
seven to five. And so Mike, you know, I had a troop
basically plus company commander with most of his company whatever birds we needed, and
you know, pre stage get closer and get to the craft site. And
it was pretty cool because you know, we talk about operating with commanders and
tent like. The mission brief was they rescue any survivors, recover any remains,
and kill as many bad guy as you can. Any questions, No,
Sarah, we can work with that. So you know, we flew
up to Jabad and sent the first guys up got weathered out so they had
to come back. So now we're on the ground, like what do we
do? But we had everybody coming out of the woodwork. We had assets
along the border, other guys hats assets. We basically said hey, can
anybody get there on foot and so you know it was you know, where
the crash site was was in a valley. But to get there, like
if we drove north from Jabad to a Sadabad to get to the crash site,
we have to cross like two ridge lines. So it wasn't an easy
traverse. And so but we we said, hey, we're gonna we got
to figure this out, like hedge our bets. So we will send entities
to walk, uh, and then we will fly in the next night.
And so they started the journey. A lot of guys had to turn back
because it was so mankey. They all ran out of a bunch of them
ran out of water. And then we flew in the next day about five
clicks south, uh, you know, kind of back into the same area,
but not the exact area. And we had I don't know, we
had about sixty guys seventy guys combined force of rangers and seals, and we
had brought a couple of the guys from the troop, the White Side troop
with us because they were pitching to get into the fight and we needed some
more manpower. So we had about a ninety foot fast trope. You know,
I think it was I I think sire Sierra Nevada's you know, I
tall pine trees, beautiful country, but probably some people with some nerves.
Like it was the highest rope I've ever done in my life. Yeah,
and I just remember, like, you know, I was up near the
cockpit talking to the pilots, and so I'm the second to last guy had
to come out of the bird. I had a dog guy behind me.
You know, it was faster with his dog, and man, it just
kept going and going and going, just going faster, faster and faster.
I remember hitting like the sack of shit and just like a little days remembering,
oh god, the dog guys right behind me. So I rolling out
of the way and he comes fucking flowing in and then we had to you
know, walk about. We kind of linked up everybody did this monster patrol
up to the crash site and sent the the pj's and some other guys from
the Ranger entity down there to secure the crash site. We set up C
two No. And started looking for survivors, and you know, they they
did a really good job, and it was really significant terrain and steep and
so we probably set up our CT note around probably nine thousand feet when the
crash site was probably a thousand feet below us, because I think the way
it happened, the RPG had hit the back of it and it kind of
rolled down this this hill that didn't look like much on video, but when
you get there, you're like, oh my god, Like just getting there
and back is going to be significant. But if the guys got down there
to the crash site while we were sending out patrols trying to find the REKI
team because at the time we had no idea where they were, you know,
kind of doing the forensic analysis of like, okay, a firefight happened
here. We can see all those shells from both sides. Which way did
they go, but couldn't really determine that, And a lot of singing and
other things are coming in indicating that maybe they were over in Pakistan at the
time, because several of the radios had from the had been taken some people.
What I think happened is people are like clicking the mic and things like
that, and we weren't exactly sure where it was coming from. But you
know, first order of business, get the guys. Unfortunately, there were
no survivors from the helicopter. You know, sixteen of the there were eight
crewmen in eight seals had perished. We couldn't determine one guy because his remains
were pretty burned and mangled. There was a fire down at the crash site,
but got all their remains, had to blow an HLZ so they could
come in. So you know, we had had to get resupplied. It
was another issue. So we fast roped in with like minimal kit because we
thought we were kind of get going to get into it, and we were
at nine thousand feet, so you weigh mobility versus like security, and if
you were kitted down with body armor and things like that, you would you
would have been spent before he even got there. So we most of us
didn't have body armor on fact, some of the guys. It was pretty
funny on the rope, thought they were going to do a typical like pen
foot rope onto the you know, a roof of a building, and when
they did a ninety foot rope, were just like flight gloves or batter's gloves.
I saw a young ranger his entire hand was double the size the next
day and it was just a blister, and but he pressed on another kid
had a broken arm. He you know, hit real hard. He pressed
on. Nobody nobody asked to get meta act, not that they could have
anyways, But we got everybody out, I think all the remains out the
next day and continued looking for you know that whoever was you know, still
a lot. We didn't know if any of them were alive, of the
four Rekie elements, and we did know where they were, so we looked
and looked and looked and going on wild goose chases for several days. And
then you probably read the story that a guy who was housing Marcus chev walked
to a Sadabad and basically said, hey, I have this American in my
home in whatever village it was. And so you know, that was like
day seven or eight, I forget exactly what it was, and uh,
and that lined up with some other intel that we were receiving, and so
then we had a pretty good idea that yeah, he's probably there and we
need to go rescue him now. And again we don't know what's going on.
We had seen goat herters, you know, and not a lot of
enemy contacts, some harassing fire things like that that we would just kind of
suppressed with acy Win thirties or mortars and and so we launched a rescue and
it was a little interesting. The way it went down is we had a
small small team of SF guys in Afghans had it in the area a couple
of clicks away, like, hey, this is the grid of where we
need to go. Can you go do this? And they said no,
Like, we have five Americans and five Afghanians who were wearing like four frams
and you know, you know, pajamas and they have one magazine piece like
okay, And so we took a pause, sent a ranger element up there.
They went up, took charge, and led the rescue into the ground
while we kind of set up a suppression of enemy air defense, you know,
kind of planned to precede the rescue helicopter that came in there. So
they went in there, they secured Marcus, we knew he was there.
Then we launched everybody else in to get him and did that whole uh suppress
suppressive fire, which was pretty pretty cool. And they could only take out
like two people, you know, Marcus and like one other because we wanted
to bring the guy's family that they were going to get killed and they're like,
sorry, you can't do it, but you can walk out with with
our our elements. So once Marcus got back in you know, debrief,
then we started figuring out, hey, this is what happened, here's where
we were. And right away we went out and found two of the other
guys Murphy and uh Danny Death, but we couldn't find the last of the
reky element I think is Matt Axelson. So we actually had been up there
for eight or nine days, uh, and we're supposed to go home,
Not that that is going to drive anything, but we did a relief in
place because we could not find the last of that four men recky element.
So we did a relief in place with another squadron and some other rangers came
in, and by that time we had some other conventional forces helping us out
too. So uh, they found him I think two days later and then
Xfield and we were mission complete, and uh yeah, it was a I'll
tell you what. A couple of the guys that walked in, like from
from the Balian Reconnaissance Detachment of two seventy five, like those guys or some
tough, tough dudes, and we had a lot of people quit on that
hump, including some of you know, some some some people from my community.
A lot of the Afghans quit. But those guys showed up. I
think like two days after we were there, out of water, out of
food, stumbling in. I'm like, oh my god, you guys are
the biggest bad asses on the planet. It was. It was pretty cool,
and I gained a lot of respect or you know, again, there
was always this stupid kind of rivalry even when we were working together, like
mutual respect. But you know, after that, it's like we truly are
the same, Like these guys are awesome. Yeah, yeah, guys are
awesome. It's also one of those moments where it was all these different units
working together, working together to repatriate Americans, you know, I mean,
it's kind of an incredible moment in that sense. It was, you know,
there were some things early on that like when I got to JBAT,
I had a I was you know, I didn't wear any ranks at the
time, but I was only an O four and I had some Lieutenant Colonel
s F guy kind of come into my jocks and tell me that he was
in charge. It's like like, I don't why don't we just get this
job done. Like we have guys out there, like, we don't need
to fight about who's in charge, right. I told him to get the
fuck out of my jock and go talk to his boss, and I would
talk to my boss just to make sure I was clear who was who was
in charge, not not that I cared. Uh. He came back a
little while later like, Okay, you're in charge, but you know those
are my guys up there. It was like, come on, man like
like things like that happened early on and we had a battle Space owner come
up onto the mountain to check on his guys, you know, because we
had some hundred and first guys working with us and they were they were really
good soldiers, and you know, he came up there like for a battlefield
circulation visit, you know, in the middle of this operation, because at
that point where you kind of get resupplied, and he told his dudes to
put on like the old style body armor, like the Vietnam stuff. Yeah,
black jackets. I mean it probably weighs twenty five pounds. Yeah,
you guys are going to be immobile. And sure enough, the next day,
like one of the guys got heat exhausted and wanted a metovact in the
middle of the day. I'm like, hey, dude, drink water.
We're not We're not metavacting you in the middle of the day. Like You've
got to figure this out. Like, yeah, I don't know why the
fuck, you know, you would even put that body armor on. But
you know, he subsequently wrote some nasty articles about the seat two and you
know, the way we did raw and things like that, like just stuff.
I mean, good, good to look at the lessons learned, for
sure, but you know, like again, this is not a conventional fight,
so ye have a little flexibility. Yeah, And so after this,
you're you finally went to school. You went to Marine Staff College. Yep,
I was, Uh, I was pretty smoked. I got I got
to stay for a couple extra months and be the the J three of the
task force after this, while all my boys went home and uh, it
was kind of a change of command anyways, like and they didn't have anybody.
So I got back and you know, stayed for the J three and
then by that point I was like, I did one more pump and then
I was you know, I think that was eight deployments for me since nine
eleven maybe nine, and that was like I was, I was completely smoked.
Yeah. I went to the Command of Staff College for what is it
ten months or months and that was It was great, great school. It's
where I learned that the Marine Corps single handedly won every battle that the Americans
have ever thought. A marine invented peanut butter, the cotton gin and and
uh an internal combustion engine. I mean they pay pay credit for almost everything
that ever happened in American history. But it was a great school. What
what what is the school and what benefit is it to two officers to go
to it? Yeah, I went to the intermediate level education, you know
for fours and uh it's what I should have done probably before I went to
the Staff. It's where most like the Army has CGSC uh, the Navy
has the Naval War College. You know that they have two levels the four
to one and then the five O six one at every school. The Air
Force has maxwell or forced face racing guys and so what it is, it's
it's where you kind of combine the art and science of theory and planning in
warfare. So you do a lot of historical studies, you have a small
group like ten people conference groups. Sorry, Seria just took over, but
it's a it's a good reset to think about, you know, what you've
been doing and how you can do better and you can get a master's out
of it if you do some extra work and write a thesis. And they
were very good about allowing us to pick any topic you wanted. Some guys,
did you know the French and Indian wars? I did pro dev you
know, for the for the Seal officer community because I had none up to
that point, and I was like, I'm like, it was great,
but maybe sprinkling in a little bit of pro dev would have been prior to
that. So that's that's the theory. And at the time, this is
six to seven, you know, we had just I think in Iraq,
we had just kind of done the surge Marines. You know, it was
joint, but a lot of Marines in there, a lot of those guys
were they were beat down and just they've been getting crushed and tired. So
it's a good break as well, yeah, for sure. And from there
you uh served on the staff with the Sealed Teams, did some time in
Bahrain and then kind of coming full circle. It sounds like boat team commander.
Yeah, I came. My final real deal was NABLE Special Warfare Group
four, which is the surface maritime mobility component of Naval Special Warfare the boat
teams. So in charge of all the boat teams, and it was an
awesome tour working with Swicks Special Warfare Combatant craft crewmen and doing really taking some
of the like getting them into the some of the stuff that stvs were doing
previously with some of the platforms they had. Was a lot of fun and
in a long time overdue. It's really cool. Yeah. And then you
know you're coming up on retirement. Tell us about that experience run off to
your retirement and then transitioning out of the military. What was that like for
you? Yeah, So I was when I was in command. You know,
we often had to do speaking engagements, and I was in Virginia Beach
and I think everybody else was out of town. So I got told to
speak at something for the Honor Foundation, which is a transition institute. When
they started in San Diego, but they were coming to Virginia Beach. I
didn't know anything about it. I asked them to come talk to me,
like, tell me what the deal was, what I was speaking about,
and my role was to talk about the state of affairs of the community,
not about anything else. So they gave us good brief. I was like,
wow, that sounds too good to be true. And you know,
I was in the middle of command, but shortly thereafter decided that I was
going to transition out after my command tour, and so I decided to go
through this Honor Foundation program. This was a four month program at the time.
It's not three months, but it's all about transition, right, how
what are the tools you need? And my mindset was I'm going to audit
this course and see if it's worth the shit, because again, the brief
sounded really too good to be true. And I went through it, you
know, just with a mindset of learning because I hadn't thought about me or
my family really in twenty five years at that point. So and it was
game changing, right. It was phenomenal program and I'm happy to tell you
about it what it's morphed into. But you know what, did a lot
of introspective work on who I was as a human, what was going to
make me happy? You know, what my purpose on the planet was.
When I no longer am a seal, and then exposed me to a lot
of what's out there where I might fit in, gave me tactical tools and
yeah. So I went through it. Figured I wanted to be in the
tech startup world. My family wanted to stay in Virginia Beach, which was
fine because I had two kids in high school at the time and that doesn't
really align super well because I didn't have the million dollar idea. But found
a really cool tech startup up in Boston making drones and worked for them for
about eighteen months. I didn't have to move up there. I just commuted
a couple of times a month and it was great. Meanwhile, it stayed
stayed involved with the Honor Foundation, was on the board of directors, and
and about eighteen months after I got out, the founder of the Honor Foundation,
who'd been at it for hard five years, decided he was going to
move on, and I threw my name in the hat to see if I
could help out. All the good guys were gone, so they chose me.
Well, you've been there for five years and it sounds like the program's
going really well, so you're doing something right. Tell us about you know,
what it has morphed into over the last five years. What is it
changed into? What do you guys do? How can people get in touch
and get involved? Yeah, so we exist really because what DoD offers you
in any service, whether it's you know, Army, Navy, Air Force,
Marines, it's I don't know called a week long transition assistance program,
Soldier for Life, whatever it is. But they all are equally mediocre and
frankly doesn't meet the mark for the men and women in the special ops community.
And it's kind of kind of intuitive, but you know, you would
think that guys who've gone through selection assessment training once or twice, volunteer,
three time volunteers, would have easy transitions. But what happens sometimes is identity
and purpose are so tied into what you do. I am a seal,
I am a Green Beret, I am a arranger, that it becomes almost
harder to transition effectively out. That's why we exist and that's what we get
after. So when I came in, we had San Diego. It kind
of started with naval special warfare really in San Diego. Then we grew to
Virginia Beach, all covering on naval special Warfare. Some of the Marine Raiders
from Pendleton were coming down to the San Diego class and the Marine Raider Foundation
asked us to stand up a campus in camp was June, so we did
that, and that's about when I came on. The Navy Seal Foundation really
was helping us out for the Naval special warfare community, and they're awesome,
but I really wanted to see what we could do to give it to anybody
in the special ops community who wanted it or needed it. And so you
think about the Joint Force and where the predominance of force is right it's Fort
Bragg, now, Liberty, Fort Campbell, JBLM, Pampa, EGGLN for
av SoC, a couple other places, and so we've grown. We started
a virtual program first for anybody not located where one of our physical campuses are.
We grew to Fort Bragg and then we the next year we grew to
Eglin and Tampa all in one year. Last year we expanded to JBLM and
Campbell and we have a second virtual program running now, so eight total programs
and it's about a three month executive education program. We encourage folks to come
about a year to eighteen months before they get out so that they can they
can do the work themselves. Right, nobody's going to hand you a job,
but if they do it that far out, then they can put the
tools into practice and have a great transition as long as they want to work
at it. And yeah, so it's really grown. We you know,
we will never degrade quality just to grow numbers, like I don't really care
about that. But it's been pretty a fun, fun thing to do and
really great to get back to the community and continue to serve them quite frankly,
because you know, everybody's going to have a transition at some point.
And so now we have those served about seven hundred and one people last year
through this full thing, probably do eight hundred this year. We do one
day seminars all over the planet. And we realize that spouse's played a big
role in this too, so we actually started a workshop for spouses to come
through as well. And you know, it's all about communications, and so
we do spouses by themselves, then we pair them with the service members and
incluies them together. It's it's pretty cool to see that. So that's kind
of where we're at now. A couple more places to go probably you know
you can. You can figure it out where where we need to grow to
names. I didn't mention locations, but that's the goal, be able to
serve anybody in the Special Operations umbrella who wants our services. I just want
to add, also, you guys have one hundred percent rating on Charity Navigator,
which if you look at a lot of the veteran organizations or veteran you
know charities, they don't you guys get you've had like one hundred percent transparency
rating for like the last three years. Like if you if anybody listening to
this wants to volunteer, or if you have a few extra bucks to throw
their way, it's it's you guys are like a very legit and very worthy
cause. And yeah, thanks thanks for pointing that out. Yeah, we
we work hard to be transparent on how we're spending the money. And yeah,
you can call ask a questions. Check out our website on a dot
org if you want to learn more. But we we operate. We we
kind of like the Special Operations. Guys like me don't teach everything. We'll
go out and find the best person to teach X, Y or Z.
We pay them. We fly them in and that's kind of the program costs.
We feed the guys and gals on class nights so they don't have to
get a you know, a gas station burrito. But it also serves the
purpose of breaking bread together. Yeah, and we do this over three months
intentionally, you know, we don't cram it into a weekend because you know,
we could do probably do it in a week, but you you wouldn't
retain ninety five percent of it and indeed time to marinate on a lot of
the things we throw at people. So yeah, yeah, for what we
say we're going to do. Yeah, any of the veterans out there who
would like to go through your program, where can they find you? What's
the process for them to like get the ball rolling on enrollment into your program?
Yeah, so right now, like we don't have the capacity to do
everybody, so we're focused on the special ops folks, right And if you
were an operator in special operations, you can come through at any point.
If you're a combat support combat service support while transitioning under the so CAM umbrella,
then you can come through. But the website is Honor dot org and
you can apply right online there. You can hit our info line, like,
we do look for great Americans to help us coach, to be mentors,
to help with some of the other things, you know, resume reviews
and mock interviews and things like that. So we're always looking for great people
who have some experience to help them seut. So I think we have some
viewer questions for you before we let you go here. Matt. We got
one question from JB. He asks how often did you interact with Delta's squadron
commanders. Was there any notable difference between the thought processes, any notable differences
between you and them or same old, same old. Yeah, we interacted
all the time, and I would say they are phenomenal leaders. I think
they do a great job but selecting assessing who they're going to bring in,
like we talked about earlier from the same cloth and UH. At the time,
I was a squadron commander, I was an four. I was the
last four squadron commander. UH. We have since in our community bumped them
up to oh fives, like most commanders are. UH. And and so
maybe you know, they were a little more experienced than we were at the
time, but by and large, you know, it was pretty great relationship.
Yeah, we've got one. It's from JB. Thank you very much.
I just want to say thank you Jack and Day for all you guys
do. I guess this is about us, so give us just a second
here, sir. Uh, there's nobody that that does what you guys do.
I finally got some money to spurge on you guys can't wait for days
with the five o'clock shadow. Thank you very much, and we'd appreciate it
if you split some of that slurging between us and Honor dot org. If
you got something to splurge like, will always happily gladly for sure. You
know the veteran community. It was gonna say, buy some whiskey, but
yeah, links in the description, but Honor dot org is the place for
that. So yeah, thanks JB. We really appreciate your support. And
Matt, thank you for coming on the show on a Tuesday evening and sharing
your life and experience with us as well as you know, uh, letting
people know about the Honor Foundation. Any final thoughts, anything you want to
put out there before we get going tonight. Yeah, well, thank you.
I'm sitting here drinking some on your sixth bourbon, which is a relatively
new one. A couple of my buddies are involved with that, so we'll
have to look for that. Yeah, it's uh, it's pretty cool.
It's so I love that dog tag. That's very cool. Yep. Anyways,
as I kind of finish off with transition, I once her to senor
officers, say, hey, you know, your last act in the military
is going to be one of rejection. No matter how you leave, whether
you get killed in action, whether you decide to leave on your own terms,
or whether the military tells you to hang up at cletes. It's time
to go, whether after a couple of years or after forty years, but
it's gonna be one of rejection and it's coming for everybody. So you know,
I just encourage people who are transitioning out to do the hard introspective work
figure out what's up here before you just go chase money or a job,
because you want to be happy and you deserve to be happy in the next
chapter. So if it's our program, if there's there's lots of great ones
out there that can help people, you know, do the hard work,
because this is transitioning out is probably going to be your biggest transition in life,
you know, besides getting in, this is your next biggest one and
you got to do it well. But you got to put in the work,
and you've got to treat it like a combat operation, and you know,
plan it and and work on it. It's not easy, but it's
absolutely doable, and there's tons of opportunities out there. So you know,
I hope everybody goes out there and crushes it. And we will be back
on Friday with war journalist Robert Young Pelton, so we'll see all you guys
then, Matt again, thank you. Check out the Honor Foundation. There's
a link down the description for you guys who are listening to this podcast or
watching it on YouTube. Yeah, Matt, thanks for joining us. We
really appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. It was fun, all right,
have a nice night everyone,