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send us an email and we'll talk about special operations Cobert ask me and h
the Team House with your hopes. Jack Murphy and David Park, Hey everyone,
welcome to episode two hundred and fifty two of The Team House. I'm
Jack Murphy. My co host Dave Park is out tonight. He'll be back
next week. Thank you for joining us. It's been a it feels like
it's been a long spell since the holiday break, so I'm glad to be
back. Our guest on tonight's show is Mike Halterman. Mike served for twenty
years in the Marine Corps, was part of the standing up of MARSK and
all kinds of other interesting stuff we'll get into. And he also works with
the Honor Foundation helping transitioning veterans, so we're going to talk about all of
that as well. So, Mike, thank you so much for joining us
tonight. Hell yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely, man,
it's great to have you here. And you know, I'll start off
the interview the way we start off almost all of them, asking about your
origin story. If you could tell us a little bit about like how you
grew up and how that took you towards a path of military service. Yeah,
so I was a small town kid, grew up in a really small
town on the central coast of California. And central coast California is like the
dead zone between La and San Francisco. No one's ever heard of it unless
you unless you grew up there. It's very different, right, It's not
like the rest of California. It's a lot of red, white and blue
and football and backyard barbecues, so I grew up doing that. But it
was also California, so I got to surf a lot too, and ride
skateboards. And you know what I realized was although I lived in a cool
small town, it was small and my life was going to be small,
and if I was going to stay there, that was I kind of saw
the writing on the wall. And so as I finished high school and all
those things I wanted, you know, I want to go adventure young man
stuff. You want to go see the world, go travel. And I
had a couple of buddies who joined the Marine Corps, and I thought,
well, if those guys could do it, I could probably do that too,
And so you know, I found myself following suit. Joined the Marine
Corps in nineteen and joined more or less right after high school as I was
early late teens, early twenties, and man, it was the exact thing
I needed at the right time of my life. I was a bit of
a wayward child that wasn't great in high school. And the discipline you have
to get up at this time and you're doing this and this is your job,
was was what I needed at that time. Plus I got to play
with guns and I got to make a lot of new friends. So that
was pretty cool. So I found myself going through boot camp and in San
Diego and then they're like, hey, so you're from California, let's go
ahead and send you to North Carolina. Right. So I had more or
less did my first five years in North Carolina, which was great because I
never would have, you know, been in a platoon or been around,
you know, a bunch of kids from New York, a bunch of kids
from the South, a bunch of guys from Miami, you know, and
from all these different places, and so you're thrown into this mix of America
and it's just a great growth opportunity, learning new culture, learning new interesting,
different perspectives on life, and then learning how to survive. The infantry
is young e nothing's together. Where're you're being challenged? I'll say in the
in the late nilies, late nineties, early two thousands, a lot of
tree lines, and a lot of things happened in those tree lines. And
you know, in the first four years, I made such good friends.
I was like, Yeah, I could do this for twenty years, no
problem. I was having a great time. Yep, those first that first
enlistment in the Marine Corps during quote unquote peace time. What was that like
for you? I mean what was there? You know, do you go
on training to like okay, nahwa, I mean I know the Marines definitely
get around a little bit. Yeah, yeah, it was. It was
a lot of travel. It was I think we'd only you know, I
checked in and it was like, hey, you're going straight to the field
and we started doing nuclear biological chemical one training like immediately, like that was
the very first thing. Getting gassed. Getting gassed in the in the fleet
as a young infanstrument is way different than all of the safety protocols that they
put in boot camp. So that was that was an uphill learning experience,
but builds character. And so being a young infantryman a lot of a lot
of travel to places we probably don't go to as much anymore. Greece and
a couple of other spots that I can't really recall off the top of my
head. But what we did a lot of shining boots because we had the
old black boots that you shine, and uniform inspections and a lot of standing
in formation waiting for the word right, so what are we doing tomorrow?
You know, and then okay, throw your pets on and go pet So
I mean, you're having a hell of a good time, and the Marine
Corps sounds like you're decided you want to do this for a career. And
then it must have been around I'm guessing around the time when you re enlisted
that nine to eleven happen. Yeah, so I'm out. I'm on the
USSQRE Sarge and we are floating around the Mediterranean and somewhere around I guess July
August. They drop us off in Kosovo because Coastvo was the hot thing still
going on. So we go into Kosovo and we're going to do interdiction operations
on the Macedonian border, make sure drugs and moneys and things are not going
one way and you know, guns and human slaves are not going the other
way and all of those things. So first real world op and we're setting
up defensive positions. We're kind of out in the hinterlands doing kind of old
school infantry stuff, patrol based operations, and I'm patrolling around. I'm literally
taking out my very first patrol for the first time. We had been there
a couple of weeks since my first pl lead, and we get a call
across the radio that's America's been attacked. Return to base. And I'm like,
come on, man, you're messing with me. Nobody attacks America.
Like come on. They're like, no, seriously, return to base.
And so I'm thinking, you know, I get the boys together. We
all take a knee face outboard. I'm like, all right, drink water.
We're gonna hump it back. We're gonna move pretty quick. Sure enough,
we get back to our little patrol base and it's already being torn down.
Army forty sevens are coming in, already taking platoons out. My platoons.
One of the last ones to leave takes us back to Bond Steel,
and the Bond Steel chow hall is just raucous. Every time you walk in
there. It's Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, all of
the K four forces. It's loud, just all kinds of nonsense going on.
I cracked the door open, and I'm still thinking like this is crazy,
Like what's the real story here. I cracked the door open and you
could hear a pin drop, and so we slide in quietly, and they
have these big old school TVs and it's just the repeat over and over again,
and the planes flying into the towers, and it was just it's surreal
and just to see like two hundred you know, guys and gals in uniform
just in complete silence, like no one's even serving food or anything. We're
all just standing there in shock. Jump back on the cure sarge, and
we're like, okay, we're already out here. What are we doing?
Where's the fight we're getting into? But it happened to be right at the
end of our deployment, the next MEW had already spun up. They had
already done their final exercises and stuff, and they're like, no, you're
steaming home. The next MEW is going to come out, and whatever happens
next is it's going to be their game to play. So I steamed home,
not knowing what was going to happen next. We were home a couple
of months and commanders started saying things like, you know, be prepared.
You're probably gonna find yourself in a desert here shortly, so you know,
let's start getting our things in order, make sure you know where all your
stuff is. You know, Will's power of attorney started happening, and all
of those things. And then yeah, two thousand and three, we found
ourselves in the desert of Kuwait staring north, going, man, is this
really happening? Yeah? I mean you could you expand on that a little
bit, like as a young marine and like you're about to push across the
berm line, right, yeah, yeah, And it was so you know,
at the E five level, nobody's telling you nothing, especially back then,
and it's not like I'm able to just jump on the red side and
figure some things out that's not even available to me. Right, I'm living
in a GP tent, sleeping on the desert floor one hundred and ten,
one hundred and fifteen. It's pretty much the norm for Kuwait around that time
of year. And we're all just wondering, right, And we're in this
giant grid square with a berm around us, with lots of other units,
and we're all just kind of wondering, is this thing really going to happen?
And sure, you know, and then we're doing the gas mask drills.
You know. That's why I alluded to my very first training op ironically
was NBC nobody cares until they care because nuclear biological chemical is bad. Right,
So we're doing all the drills, throwing on gas masks, throwing on
Saratoga suits that are green, ironically, and here we are in the desert.
And then we get the call like, okay, this is the order
of March, this is the vehicle you're in. Here's where everyone's going to
be. We're driving north, you know, here's here's probably where we're going
to stop, and so on and so forth. And I remember it taking
off, you know, zero dark something and driving and we did it for
three days, four days. It's been quite a while. I don't really
remember how long it was, but it was a long time. Driving twenty
four hours straight night and day, non stop, switching out, drivers just
keep moving, and massive trains just in parallel of vehicle, American vehicles going
over the Berm and through the southern deserts, and you know, even crossing
through the Berm was pretty surreal because it was literally this giant sand dune of
a Berm with giant you know, ditches on either side and Constantino wire and
all kinds of things that had already been cleared out, and we're going through
those breach points. It was, you know, it was surreal. I
what was it like when you when you crossed over the berm and got into
a rack, and I mean it's like this is war mm hmm yeah,
right, is okay? So have I checked the box yet? Is this?
Yeah? Yeah? Is this? Did I do it? Am I
doing it? Yeah? It was. It was a lot of that,
literally, you know, because what do you have, you know, thinking
back to the movies and the books that were available back then, you're comparing
yourself to like Commando Rambo, Predator, Delta Force, you know, Charlie
Sheen jumping off the bridge and Navy Seals and you're like, you know,
Platoon, like okay, none of this equates, right, Like what am
I actually doing? You know? And then you you know, a couple
of days later with some broken vehicles, you know, and all the madness
that happens in a really long log train movement, All of it happened right.
Literally, wheels fell off of vehicles because they were just were just grinding
them up. Was all the weight of all the things we're carrying and so
on and so forth. And then there were also times where we would see
you know, Patriot missiles going overhead and gas gas gas like throw everything on,
let's go and we would just be riding around a gas mask for six
hours, seven hours, eight hours straight, just waiting for someone to say,
like, it's real, it's not real. That was just a really
good drill. Good job, buddy, you're still alive, so keep going.
And then we pulled into southern nazarea and well, excuse me, before
that, we we gotten just south of the third largest city in Iraq nazarea,
and it was our artillery with Iraqi Artillery kind of trading rounds back and
forth. We just weren't moving forward. That was the flot at that point,
I guess, and they're just kind of figuring it out, just throwing
rounds back and forth. And we're a truck company, so we moved pretty
quickly through the desert. And this is just it probably allude to this a
few times through my telling and my own story. There's these little moments that
happened that at the time you have no idea how impactful it is, but
then they become something that is it changes the trajectory of the rest of your
life. And so because we had to stop because those aready rounds were getting
tossed back and forth between those two units, it allowed an AAV track company
to catch up because the AAVs don't move as fast, but they were able
to catch up. So when we continue to push forward, the AAVs took
our mission to push into the city, which literally saved our lives because they
got eight up hard when they hit the city. But they were in armored
vehicles, so they took a brunt of that off the armor. As if
we would have been in trucks, that would have been a that would have
been a whole different story about the entirety of Iraq because the amount of instant
casualties that would have happened, and just prior to that, So then you
know, the artillery goes back and forth, that kind of ceases. They
pushed the tracks up, we kind of follow behind. And it's the first
time I'm sitting in the southernmost portion where we entered was really the city dump
and so we're just getting swamped by the flies for the very first time.
And they're like, oh, little did we know that is Iraq. That's
that's what you're going to experience the rest of the time you're here. Welcome,
Welcome to Iraq. And it was the first time I saw American vehicles,
bullet holes in them, on fire, tipped over American uniforms. This
is no longer training. This was okay, we're in Warnow. This is
real. And I want to say, less than forty five minutes later,
we took a contact Left and it was one of the coolest things I ever
got to be a part of. We dismounted, got online as a company,
a rifle company, and pushed through. It was just total mayhem.
But it looked exactly how it's supposed to look like on range three hundred at
what you know, whatever complex where you do that. And I was like,
wait, we did it like that? That actually went really well,
Like I saw all my parts, so I'm like, like, everyone's okay,
oh that was cool. So you guys did like a like a bounding
overwatch as a company, like moving forward. Yeah, yeah, the machine
guns sixty orders got out and three ms in and a little bit you know
about how many Who was the the OP four? I mean, what was
the ambushing force composed of? I couldn't tell you. E five Halty had
no idea. I just heard bullets come from this way and we said contact
left. I was an anti tank assaultment. So I'm running around with a
eighty three milimeters recoilist rocket launcher, and I just remember my company commander saying,
that building hit it, Roger. That what I forgot during that little
piece was, you know, we put in earing protection at the range.
Yeah, I went hot with a small for the very first time in combat
and didn't put in hearing protection. And I felt like my head, my
head was gonna melt. For about the next three five days, it was.
It was pretty narly, and and then you came to find out if
you could tell us a little bit about like what you found out after the
fact about like the vehicles you came across. It wouldn't come together for another
couple of weeks. I mean, there was a you know, beyond that
first contact left, there was some legit gunfights. We got to experience lots
more probing the lines as we dug in the defense and kind of held the
southern inn asarea. And it was a couple of weeks to a month.
I mean, the timelines are sketching now at this point, it's been you
know, a couple decades. I'm standing on a rooftop though. This is
after the major rain storm where we I'm on a rooftop again doing firewash,
and I'm a slide off the roof because of the amount of rain, and
those mud buildings are just coming apart underneath us. But a couple of days
after that, we got intel that some of the survivors of those vehicles were
local to the area and they were correlating their position and trying to find them
in the city. And we had done shaping operations and a couple of other
things that I knew I was a part of to just to attempt to make
that happen. So fast forward, I'm standing on a roof again. It's
zero two. I'm kind of reflecting on all I experienced up to that point.
I'm loving my infantry career. I'm reaffirming this is a twenty year thing
for me. This is awesome. Wars pretty cool as a young man.
It's a mixed bag of e motion, but it's it's mostly pretty cool.
And I see three tanks and they just face abrams and they just face their
their cannons outboard, go over the bridge and just start lobbing rounds into buildings
because it was a free fire zone because of the the gunfights that had been
happening. I'm like, okay, I've seen some stuff, never seen that
happen. That's that's a bold move, Cotton. Let's see. Let's see
how that plays out. Some other vehicles start laying out some some pretty heavy
twenty five millimeters rounds into the into the city, and then basically what happens
next is I hear a C one thirty pull into orbit over a set of
compounds and then the wump wump wump of forty sevens and little birds come screaming
in and it just lights off. And it would take me several months after
that fast forwarding to realize that what I got to watch on a monocle device,
so it's not like I was watching it like we're seeing each other right
now. It was highly grainy, but I got to see the big muscle
movement. So it essentially the raid to get Jessica Lynch back. And the
whole time I'm standing up there, I'm thinking, I'm really enjoying combat.
I think I'm actually kind of good at it, and we're performing well.
I'm enjoying it. I'm gonna do this forever. But whatever that was,
I've got to go be a part of that I've never seen anything like that
was the cool stuff ever, Like, I didn't know that, so calm
was a real like a real thing. I thought it was movies and books
and all of those things. So that just put me on a completely different
path after that. How did the rest of that deployment to the two thousand
and three deployment to Iraq? How did that continue and then eventually wind down
for you? Mm hmmm. It was you know, we thought incorrectly upfront
that you know, we had we had defeated the Iraqi army, that we
had liberated the people, and so they started ex filling forces pretty rapidly.
We were probably only there about three months was probably the total total amount of
time in country. I think I was there, and uh yeah, we
x filed. I got right back on the cure sergeant, and steamed home
yet again. And then it right, it just slowly unfolds, and then
it starts to turn in this meat grinder that just doesn't end. And then
I'm thinking, well, going back in the fight, coach, get me,
get me in there. But I'm also in this career point in the
Marine Corps where they're like, that's not your it's not your future. That's
not the needs in the Marine Corps. You're going to go be an infantry
instructor at the School of Infantry, which I also felt pretty I felt really
good about because I was my experience at the School of Infantry was not a
great one. I learned a ton, but I felt there was a lot
of room for improvement over what I experienced, and I was excited to go
back and give back meaningfully to my my job field, my MOS. And
now that I have combat experience, I've I've done something, I can bring
something relevant, and this thing's going to continue. I mean, I know
that I'm sending these young men straight into it, and I'm one hundred percent
in, like, if I've got to do this, then all right,
let's go. Yeah. So that's where I went next. Yeah, I
mean, it sounds like you were pulled in two different directions, or maybe
more than two. I mean, part of it was that you wanted to
get back in the fight, but part of it was also you were realizing
how big an impact you were able to make on these young marines. It
was I mean, it was the impact portion was in retrospect, right,
because in my early twenties or mid twenties or whatever it was at that point.
I didn't have the prefrontal cortex at that point to have enough understanding and
really think that completely through. But it was it evailed itself, I would
say, over my time as being an instructor, and the relevance of it
was really tough for all the instructor cadre watching like the big things like Fallujah
unfold and we're getting it, you know, on the very early version of
YouTube and all the other different platforms and things way back when. Yeah,
and so tell us about like your pursuit of Special Operations and at the time
at the time, we have to also mention for viewers that the Marine Corps
was not a part of Special Operations Command at that time, yep, yep.
So, and I knew that I wanted to pursue a different path and
I started, really I had to do the research to figure that out.
So I'll also remind everybody Google didn't exist yet, so doing the research was
actually really tough. SOCOM didn't have a public facing web page, so it
was a lot of books and research and talking to a buddy who had done
this thing, who had a cousin who was a ranger who in all of
these conversations, and I figured out, Okay, if I was going to
get to SOCOM, I was gonna have to leave the Marine Corps. Inner
service transfer is an option. And so when you say that as an E
five, you don't get treated real well. You it's not the most popular
thing to say, and First Start will be the first ones to let you
know that is not going to happen in fact, and there's a whole lot
of other things I now have for you to do right now. Yeah,
So I got to learn the hard way that I was gonna have to be
a little more strategic about it. And I saw the opportunity also going to
School of Infantry to be an instructor. They would lower my op tempo and
I could really start to work out harder. And I knew I'm a terrible
swimmer, so I knew. I knew regardless of the selection process I was
aiming towards, I'd have to get better at that, and I'd have to
get better rucking and all the other gambu of skills. And so I started
trying to layer those things on and that allowed me to be mentally and physically
prepared for what eventually happened in two thousand and seven. I'm again right time,
right place, and it's one of those fortuitous moments you just don't know.
I'd made really good best friends and one of my brothers to this day
with another instructor who's very close to a bunch of force recon guys, and
they by named him over to the unit that was going to become MARSK on
the West coast, and he by named a couple of other people, and
I got to be one of those other people. He said, check it
out, this outworks. I'm gonna vouch for you one time, and the
rest is on you, Like you have to show up and do the work
and do the rest, but I'm gonna vouch for you this one time.
And I was like, all right, let's do it. I'm all in
because just before that, him and I had already gotten our orders. I
knew him and I both knew where we were going. We had already talked
to our infantry platoons that we were going to and the commands and all of
those things. And they're like, yeah, we're sixty days out. You
know we're gonna you know, we're gonna go do the right thing and say
hello first and get acquainted with everybody, and then that way it's a super
smooth transition. And then this thing just kind of pops up and we went
for it. We had to, We had to do a lot of work
to fight the system to make it all happen. Get orders changed like that
doesn't that is That's a rarity, I would say. But we got lucky
and him and I both got to stay for twenty years, which is also
very fortuitous. Yeah, I want to ask you about the birth of MARSK,
but I'm going to give a quick shout out to my friend at Costa
Carabeo Cigars. They keep us well stocked over here. I hope you guys
go check them out. Really love what they do. Cosacarabeo dot com is
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we of course really appreciate your support and it keeps the show going.
So Mike walk us through a little bit about the birth of Marine Special Operations
and also like your personal experience what you were kind of going through to get
that, because I mean, standing up any unit from scratch like that is
a huge, huge pain in the ass. Yeah. Yeah, but such
an opportunity and I'm I'm so grateful that I got the opportunity to do it.
And it was so that, as the legend was told to me,
old old Donnie Rumsfeld is trolling around the different Special Operations communities and asking the
Solcom commander what else do you need? And he said I need more bodies
like it's a war. And he goes, okay, well how do I
how do I facilitate that? And I think he probably kind of said Marine
Corps is not Yeah, Marine Corps is not helping us out none. And
I think he pretty much turned to the left and said, hey, Marine
Corps, you have X amount of time to get this done. So Debt
one, the very first so COM test unit, was stood up. They
went out and they were catastrophically successful, is the best way to put it.
They did some great work that I hope goes down and chronicled in So
Calm history and especially in all of those men who paved the way for us.
And so then that happened and they that was the left seat right seat
essentially, so com said, yeah, check, that's a check in the
box. We'll take them. And then the command was stood up on the
east coast, and the year late was in six and then in seven,
uh, the command was stood up. First Marine Special Operations Battalion was stood
up, and I had just showed up, Nick, the new guy,
brand new, looking lost and not knowing uh what to do, and I
find myself in formation where they traded the first Force Reconnaissance guide on for the
first Special Operations Guide on. And the other thing that happened in that formation
that really changed my perspective and understanding of what the rest of my career would
be like was there was I don't know three four silver stars in that formation,
and there was at least as many bronze stars, and I think every
single one of those dudes was also getting a purple heart. Plus there was
a whole section another guy is getting purple hearts and calms and everything's with v's
And it was just I had done some really cool things in the infantry,
and I had worked with some of the best infantrymen possible, some of the
best machine gunners that taught me invaluable skills, mortarmen and great guys. But
now I was definitely in a different place, and I was to hear those
citations. It was just like, these are the things of legend, and
I'm standing in formation with these gentlemen shoulders shoulder, and I realized instantly I'm
not working hard enough, I'm not smart enough. So I've got to fix
both of those things as fast as possible. So shut my mouth, listen,
and do everything as best I can. Could you explain also a little
bit about like, you know, this is a brand new unit, I
mean, what's what's the what was the mission as far as it came down
from higher I mean you must have had, you know your mission essential tasks,
and how did you go about beginning like training for those and getting prepared
eventually for deployment. Mm hmmm. Luckily, again, I was young enough
of my career where I didn't know any of that piece. I was a
staff sergeant by that by that time, and still a very young E six
staff sergeant. Uh So I was literally just doing what I was told when
I was told, and doing it to the best of my ability, and
when I was asked how can we do it better or ask for my opinion,
I was trying to provide really good feedback. So my experience was more
of one of go to a school, pack all of your things, because
as soon as you fail anything, you're gone, you're getting orders and you're
leaving h And so my very initial experience was people would show up to formation
and meetings and I would never see them again. And then new people would
show up and they would be around for a while, and then I would
never see them again. And I would go to a school, come back,
go to a school, go to a training package, come back,
and people were just in and out, in and out, in and out
because the selection process was pre having a hammered out selection process in place,
and it was happening at the unit level, so it was very It was
a free market economy if you were not playing and putting in, but again,
your your number of points on the board and you were gone. So
that that happened quite a bit. And so that's how I got to experience,
and I got told more than once, you don't belong here, You're
not an O three twenty one recon marine that this place was built on recomrine.
You're just an infantryman, and just make it easy for us fail something
so we can get rid of you. And that got said to us,
me and my buddy, who vouched for me to get over there. Uh.
And the master sergeant who said that to us. I don't think he
realized the effect that had on us, because as soon as he walked away,
me and my buddy looked at each other and we didn't have to say
a thing. I already knew what he was thinking. You're gonna have to
kill me and drag my dead body out of here, like I'm I'm here.
So that was my initial experience, but then after that, once I
kind of earned my place and my ability to have an opinion, it was.
It was well received, and it was a very entrepreneurial environment, figuring
out the uniform, figuring out how to where, what, where when and
how and how much all of those things were being figured out in the moment
at the at the ground level, and it was it was It was really
again just grateful to be there at that time, even like what what you
guys were going to be called, like now you're raiders, but I mean
it took some time even to get to that, didn't it. It did.
So the original unit was Marine Special Operations BETIME because the Marine Corps wanted
nothing to do with standing up the raider battalions. Again, it's very against
the culture of the Marine Corps and so even calling ourselves raiders was highly hoopooed
upon. I would say, uh, it was or or in other words,
it was illegal. So we couldn't use like the skull and stars that
you see behind me. Guys were getting it tattooed and they were literally getting
kicked out of the Marine Corps, out of Munich for those things. M
jps and all kinds of things couldn't use raider and so it was. It
was very much, Uh, Marines are who we are, special operations or
what we do where we're more than a one trick pony. We're willing to
do windows and and I understand why all that was happening, Stay humble,
work, hard check got it and then over over the course of a couple
more years later, we were able to procure the device, change the name,
get an MOS, you know, we didn't have an MOS upfront,
and and secure the MS for officers, so they didn't disappear and they were
able to stay as well. So all of those were critical steps in the
years following. And how long do you think it took the stand up,
like your task organization, get all the equipment and weapons and everything you need,
and start to go into like that pre deployment cycle. The GWOT money
was flown in pretty hot and heavy, even from day one. I mean,
just Duffel bags of gear and trying out lots of new things. If
you're going to sniper school, you got another Duffel bag of things to try
out. You're going to free fall, another Duffel bag, and it was
very okay, this works, this doesn't work, these combinations things, and
we were doing that for a lot of my initial package. My initial workup
was probably probably the longest one at about eighteen months, where it was just
our company together doing the work up, going to schools and all of those
things. It contracted considerably after that, and then in terms of the too,
like what does the team consist of? That changed from we went from
a three four team model, excuse me, four team, three fourteen four
element model to a three team model, just like deployment. After deployment were
changing the model, changing the model, and in terms of as I roast
the ranks, understanding enablers, when they're added, who is added, how
many were added, that changed considerably, So the construct of the entire company.
It was just an ever changing model, I would say up until about
twenty sixteen. Then it got very solidified and it became very yeah in stone
at that point, and I'm sure they're changing again now. For the world
is changing. It's fascinating and like you said, I means, as challenging
as it is, it's also a big opportunity to create something new, a
new model, you know, because there's nothing said in place already, Like
right now, there's a there's a you know, internal debate and Special Operations
Command about changing the twelve man oda to potentially the sixteen man oda. And
this is like sac religious, you know. The twelve man oda is like
the rider or die for a lot of people. But I mean, and
I only bring that up just to talk about, like institutionally, how it's
interesting that you know, you're able to kind of like mold this block of
clay. Yeah yeah, and to be at the team level really, you
know, my humble contribution was really more at the tactical level and being able
to you know, to attribute in that way. But there were I mean,
some of my peers and mentors were really doing the hard struggle with big
marine corps, you know, fighting for being able to be called raider,
renaming the battalions no small thing, fighting for the mos and and all of
that. And of course, as a young enlisted do this is my chance
to eat humble pie and in a live broadcast or in a large way like
I was probably one of the complainers back then about all of that. It's
not happening fast enough, and it should be this should be that the device
should look like this and all that, and it worked out the right way,
and I appreciate all of those, yeah leaders who fought for all of
that. Ahademy. Yeah, I mean the military is a huge ship that
takes a long time to change its as myth. Yeah, absolutely no getting
around that. So tell us about you know, going into when you I'm
sorry tripping over myself, but when you finally get orders to deploy as MARSK
and what was that like training up for that and then getting deployed initially that
workup is probably one of the best and most comprehensive because it had the longest
timeline and lead up to it. It was probably the most schools I got
in terms of going to sniper school, going to jump school, and so
on and so forth, because they just all kind of fit in because we
had the time to do it. And then driving driving schools with your team
and shooting schools with your team and all of those things. We were playing
with a very funky model because we didn't know how the command structure was exactly
gonna work above us, So we still had Marine Corps tasking us and thinking
they could task us all the way through the deployment, along with SOCOM,
you know, asserting no, no, no, no, there ares once
they deployed, they're they're deploying under our deployment orders, and so my team
ends up back on boats where they're not supposed to be, and I do
half of my first deployment with my team on a boat out in the in
the Pacific and heading towards yeah, Asia. And finally, over all of
that, it was a little bit like dad slap slapping mom at the dinner
table, who's super awkward? When SOCOM came over the top called the boat
and said, where's the commander. Hey, commander, get your team off
the boat, get them to quit. We've already logistically planned all of that.
Then you need to figure out how to get to Afghanistan, where we
told you to be three months ago, ready to execute. Oh okay,
yeah, yeah, now go ahead. We show up on the you know,
and we're taking up half the boat too, because we've got all of
this cool guy so Calm equipment. We've got vehicles and quad cons full of
stuff, and we're taking up way more than our fair share of the boat
because we're ready to world deploy. But we didn't follow the basic quarters,
which was you're supposed to be in Afghanistan. So when we left the boat,
the boat was happy. And when we left the boat so Calm was
happy. The only one that wasn't happy was the Marine Corps. But they
got over it. Yeah yeah, I mean, it's not exactly the correct
way to employ your brand new special option unit to put them out a fleet
like that. So logistically, how did that work getting from the ship to
Afghanistan? Lots of planes, trains and automobiles, lots of borrowing flights and
flight space got the majority of the guys to quit and then got everything into
I'm pretty sure we were in Bastion. We started in Bastion, got the
whole company collesced there, and then spent the next three months doing you know,
because we show up late, you know, what do we what do
we give the guys to show up late? We'll give them whatever's left,
right, so all the good jobs were taken. They said, you know,
basically, why don't you guys go out west and disrupt. That's that's
your mission statement. So that's what we did. We we went out to
Farra Province where they told us to go, and we disrupted. Yeap,
how did disrupting go? Disrupting was awesome. We did a lot of We
did a lot of driving around waiting to be shot at and just annihilating anybody
dumb enough to shoot at us because we're you know, we're in gun trucks.
Fra Province was not full of IEDs yet, it was. It was
mostly uh level shooters, low level fighters, I should say. So we
weren't doing anything or shattering by any means, but it was a great way
to get our feet wet and to really shake out how do you operate in
the desert with new Vick's new guns and all the things, And so what
did you think of the unit itself? Of like this unit that you,
you know, you helped stand up even though you were a pretty junior guy,
and now you're getting to see it in action, what was that like?
It was because it was such an entrepreneurial Guys are leaving at any given
moment. You never see them again or even no one even talks about them,
like they're just gone. I was doing the best I could to keep
my head down and just kick ass at whatever any task I was given,
do it better than was asked for. But the caliber of humans I got
to be around, I mean, so calm and being in the teams,
and it's interesting. I don't hear this talked about enough, but I find
it fascinating. Is you run in to all the genetic freaks, right,
it's a gene pool of genetic freaks to end up in this one place.
They're just super athletes who are also extremely intelligent. And so the level of
conversation in the infantry, I would just say, is a little different than
the level of conversation in a team room with a bunch of guys who have
to have a standard IQ that's a little above the norm, and so being
around all of that made me raise the bar of my performance. And I'm
just again, I don't know that I helped stand up. I can't claim
that, but just being able to be there, like, I just feel
grateful, you know what I mean. Yeah, I mean that must have
been such a cool experience to like get to see it all come together after
you know, all of you guys put a lot of hard work into that,
I know, yeah, absolutely, and then to see the way it's
progressed, you know, watching the selection process come together and seeing literally bigger,
stronger, faster, more intelligent young guys come into the unit and you're
like, oh man, this whole thing's working. Like this is working.
Yeah, And so readaploying back home and then is it like getting ready to
go back back into the breach. It was it where we kind of figured
out that that initial hiccup, if you will, That was Afghanistan one of
three, and I'm pretty much the next one. I hopped the rotation because
I didn't I was still on the edge whether or not I was going to
get to stay in the unit. Because I was not a recomerne and that
was what it was predominantly fielded by. We still didn't have an MOS yet.
I was too senior to go to BRC. They were, you know,
basically reconstance course. So they were not gonna they had They had no
reason to let me in. They had every reason to let me fail,
which I totally understand. And so I snuck away to some of the special
schools because I had a team sergeant that looked out for me, a team
chief that looked out for me. Said hey, you know, we're just
going to make you too valuable that they you know, we're gonna invest too
much money in you, and they were going to make it dumb for them
to get rid of you. So I did some of those special schools that
are hard to get into. And then like free fall, Like you can't
put a free faller out in the fleet, Like what's he going to do?
And so I got very fortunate because I got taken care of my great
leadership honestly, and in all of that, Yeah, it was just amazing
experience. What was the what was the second trip to Afghanistan? Like,
how did it differ from the first? We actually knew what we're doing.
Yeah, that made a huge difference, and we were given a legit mission
and so VSO had just started and we got to be one of the first
VSO teams. Not not popular, but it needed to be done and needed
to be executed well. And so we ended up in a little village call
them Sao and Man. We took a ragtag group of local indigenous villagers and
turn it into a police force, and we built bridges and we built a
school. We got to kick that school off before we left, so we
got to actually see like the first class start, you know, dug some
Wells, the kind of the stereotypical stuff, and we we made a you
know, it wasn't a it wasn't a quantum change, but it was certainly
a step change in the right direction. And it was Yeah, it was.
It was really good to be a part of and to have you know,
we used to call it, uh season two, right, season one
is your first season, kind of like the TV shows, and so season
two is just very different because you you have a much better sense of what
is right and wrong what to do, and so we just operated much better
and a lot of far more efficiencies. I would say how do you think
the Marines did transitioning from you know, where combat were meat eaters and now,
hey, you're fighting a counter insurgency. You need to make friends with
the villagers. We're trying to build of security. Uh, you know,
security apparatus around this area. What what was that sort of transitional or if
there was one, what was that like for you guys? Yeah, I
would say the general consensus at my level again, I was I was like
a brand new East seven at that point. Kindery sergeant and everybody, you
know, my my rank and below was like, nope, we're here to
kill people. Like, what are you telling us to do? There's there's
a war going on, and you want me to buy and sell goats and
dig wells Like this seems like not the right job for us, seems like
a job for somebody else. So it was not overly popular. Uh.
And we were still looking to get in gunfights no matter what, and so
we pursued that fairly heavily on the side while trying to you know, train
and do the right you train our indigenous forces to do the right things and
all of that as well. So not not overly popular. Well, what
was what were your thoughts by the end of the deployment. I mean,
and it sounds like you did make a tangible difference in that village. Mm
hmm. It was kind of like I alluded to that only in retrospect.
You know, it's really hard to do when you're in the moment and you're
hot, tired, eating, you know, terrible food and all of those
things, and you just want to be in gunfights. But to see a
school open, right, and it was a burnt shell that was like literally
just like ashes, and to rebuild that and see the first class kickoff and
and all of those things, it was you can look back and go,
okay, like I don't know if that school is still there, but I
mean, you guys, did you did good while you were there? Yeah?
Yeah, yep. And then third trip to Afghanistan? How did that
one differ from the previous two? Third trip was I would say the tactical
pinnacle of my career by far. I got to be on a commando team,
so we're just doing raids. Uh was seven commando KANDAC out of Bastion,
all all helicopter raids, so seventy two hours ish was was kind of
the sweet spot to go into you know, if a VSO, a village
village stability operation was having a hard time because they're doing the handing out soccer
balls and doing all of that stuff, and they're they're having a hard time
with fighters and I eights and all those things. We'd go in and smash
the problem for him. And so that is just a lot of fun,
that's all. Yeah. Yeah. And so finally getting to ride on black
helicopters on a on a very regular basis and then interfacing with I mean,
hats off to the one sixtieth. They're just what an amazing unit that is
so professional and totally made me rethink the way I approach, how I speak
to other units and how I coordinate with them because the professionalism that they showed
at every step of that. And in a small short story aside from that,
we we had a guy that was injured. I happened to be injured
at the same time. It was a twisted ankle and Mike guys love beat
me up about that, but they're like, well, you're the most useless,
so you got to take this other useless guy and you're gonna take him
back to the hospital. So I ended up taking that ride and I show
up, you know, Candahar, and I have no idea. I get
rid of my dude that I'm responsible for. It's a local national and I
kind of I don't know what to do next, but the soda shows up
and then right on the heels of the soda is the one sixtieth guys,
and they're like, we got your brother, like, come get some hot
child with us, Like we knew you were coming. We've been tracking the
whole thing. And I go into the one sixtieth talk coolest thing I've ever
seen to this day. And one of the dudes actually gave it to me
at the end of the At the end of the operation, they were tracking
on paper the entire operation, and they were they had my guys on you
know, because you can listen to them on satcom, and they're tracking every
fighting position, They're tracking every gunfight, they're tracking every movement and everything that's
happening on paper and on it because they're like, well, yeah, if
everything, if we lose you know, electricity or whatever else, why of
course we do this. But it was just in like we do it too
in our own talk, but just to see the level of detail and care
that was being done amazing, and they're like, hey, you want to
go back, Yes, get me out of here. So they had a
bird going back, so you got to go back into the gunfight. It
was good. Any particular stories from that deployment that like stand out in your
mind where you know you thought that you know, your team really kicks some
asks. That day. We had one particular gunfight we had been in zone
for. It was we had been in an area where a bunch of the
red dots had kind of come together. So we were chasing red dots and
there was some bigger red dots that were important there, and so it was
my team and an ODA and to do a joint operation. And then I
just happened to be in just one of the best gunfights of my career.
And I'm I'm a team chief, so I'm really just tagging along with my
element leader who's doing all the all of the real work, and a hell
of a dude Modronso wherever you're at, I hope you hear this. You're
a badass. He let me tag along, right, And so I'm supposed
to be runing the radio because I'm the GFC, the GFC for the gunfight
and all that, but we get lit up pretty good and we just happened
to have a bird overhead, sort of like, oh, you boys aren't
getting away with this one. And it was the first time I'm wearing a
garment and I can fully track everything that's going on, and we had great
comms with the bird and like everything was just clicking and it was still daytime,
so they're just yeah, we tuned them boys up, we chased them
for then they didn't They had no idea what we were chasing them, and
so we end up catching them boys, and they had called in reinforcements,
so we tuned up their buddies who came into reinforce and then they made some
phone calls and got some more buddies and yeah, it just it was.
It was a great day. Mayhem, absolute mayhem. Yeah. I think
we may or may not have stacked all of their motorcycles after we took care
of them and lit it into a large hire. It was great area pacified.
Yes, it was very quiet in that area after that, you know.
So, I mean, it's super cool that to hear your story about
going from being this young marine on the rooftop watching the Jessica Lynch raiding like
now you are that guy. I mean, did it dawn on you?
Like I'm here, I'm doing it. I've honestly never thought about it that
way until you just said that. Really it's surreal. Yeah, I mean,
I'm a small town kid who grew up riding skateboards and then fast forward,
I got to have these experiences and yeah, it's amazing, grateful I
got to do it. You also, when we were talking earlier, you
mentioned that you got to do some J sets with Morisak mm hmm yep.
So in between those Afghanistans, we managed to find some time to go Philippines
and some other places to do some J sets and work with you know,
local country police forces atfs FBIS and all of those and really you know,
worked on their shooting capacity, working on their intelligence gathering capacities and all those
things, and doing the kind of the classic foreign internal defense kind of stuff.
And yeah, and it was It's a great way to kind of decompress
from a from a tougher deployment from an Afghanistan to go do one of those.
It's a little bit of an Ada boy and still doing good work.
Talk to us a little bit about. I mean, we get up to
twenty eighteen, you know, the years, the years are ticking by here,
and I mean, you've had a pretty amazing career, and it sounds
like you had a hell of a lot of fun after you know that those
deployments. I mean, what's sort of like the next step for you?
Yep. So I find myself too senior to have fun anymore. I find
myself riding the desk and you know, future ops or somewhere upstairs in the
s you know, pick a number, probably last three, and I'm I'm
coming to work one day, I'm a little bit late. I'm I've like
spilled my coffee. I'm trying to find my badge, like where's Where's how
do I get it? You know, trying to get into the building.
What's my code? Again? I get to my cubicle and you know,
my left knees hurting, my right shoulder's hurting. I'm already late for the
first meeting, and I'm like, hmm, am I still here for the
right reasons? Or am I now part of the problem? And I spent
the rest of the day not really tuned into the meetings, but I realizing
I was at like the seventeen and a high fear mark, and maybe twenty
was the hard stop. Maybe maybe it was time because like I said,
I saw the selection process working and that the new young guys coming in were
jack studs man and they were smart, and so it felt it felt like
a good, really good transition point in twenty years. So I started looking
around. I started really paying attention to my peers and mentors who are kind
of a couple of years ahead of me. You know what are they doing?
What's successful? Would what does success even look like? You know what
do they recommend? And starting to have those conversations about I'm thinking about dropping
my papers and all of those things, which makes you super popular too,
by the way, right you So you got to be very careful how you
have those conversations because no one wants to hear that you're a quitter. Right.
But I started having those conversations, and I really start realizing that the
longer the runway and the more my finances are locked down, that's going to
predicate my best possible transition. So I started working on those things. Is
that was in my sphere of control. And then on the weekends or at
nights when I could go to a networking thing or something being put on by
a veteran support organization, I would go do that. And then what I
got told though, right around that same time, U the Honor Foundation was
standing up and it was primarily aimed at seals and swick down to Coronado,
and they had opened up the first couple of seats to raiders, and the
first couple of seats that went, and one of them happened to be one
of my former commanders. Great guy, Andy, wherever you're at. You
did a hell of a job. And then another guy, Matt, one
of my seas who still mentors me to this day and is a really good
friend. They both said essentially the same thing. No matter what you do,
you have to go through the Honor Foundation as your that's your men force
for infill to civilian life. If you don't do that, like you're you're
you're making the wrong choices here. So follow tute with that. And so
I I had done a couple of other things. I had a resume I
felt good about, and I had all of these other I kind of figured
out how to talk about myself a little bit, and all these things and
then I'm in the seat very first night at the Honor Foundation, and the
director says, Okay, we've all introduced ourselves all of that. You're going
to introduce yourselves. And I'm sitting in the room with thirty other seals and
Swick and there's the odd green bray in the background somehow, I don't know
how he snuck in and because there's not a lot of green brays in southern
California, and it said. The director says, so check it out.
You're going to introduce yourself. But here's the catch. You can't tell us
your rank, and you can't tell us what base or what you you know,
what you used to do. We want to know who you are,
not what you did. Ready to go. We're all just like, wait,
what what do you mean? So what did you What did you say?
Yeah, yeah, I'm Master Sergeant Halterman, like I worked in can't
pedal like all of these things right, And he stopped us. He's like,
don't we know you don't know how to do that, not yet.
That's what the next three months are about. So then I go through the
program and it's just a absolute change. I mean, it's it's completely different
than anything I experienced to that point, and it is at the level that
you would expect for so coom, like all of the things that takes you
to get in and be and stay on the teams at whatever level. This
is the next logical step as you're transitioning to the next phase, and it
is at the level of professionalism and done in such a way that you're like,
oh, yeah, this is this is what looks like. So I
finished that and I was ready to go be a tech entrepreneur, like I
knew that's what I was doing next. And I got offered the opportunity to
stay at the Honor Foundation as a staff member though, and they're like,
we have a tech problem that we're trying to solve. You seem to have
a propensity for it. Why don't you solve our hard tech problem and you
know, continue to serve And I was like, Yes, let's do it.
I had I had no idea I could have even had a chance to
work here, like absolutely So in September of twenty eighteen, I hit my
twenty year mark, I got my DD two fourteen, I'm retired. And
then January second of twenty nineteen, brand new Civilian brand new employee showing up
the Honor Foundation as a staff member. Yep, Wow, what was that?
I mean, it sounds, first of all, like you were very
smart about how you transitioned out of the military and made a lot of really
good choices to kind of set yourself up for success those last few years.
But nonetheless, I mean even more so for the Marines that that's just like
such a part of your core identity. I mean, what was it like
when you finally got that DD two fourteen and you know, leave the base
for you know, the last time in uniform? Anyway, Yeah, it
is. It's another surreal experience, especially if you do twenty years. Yeah,
I'm sure even a ten year or beyond. It's a surreal feeling because
at that point I had as much time in the Marine Corps as I had.
You know that that was half my existence on the planet, and a
good chunk of that was spinning war, and a good chunk of that was
So it is a It is a It is the most mixed bag of emotions
you can possibly have, of joy, excitement, pure fear because you don't
actually know what you're doing next. That really right, because you haven't done
it yet. It's easy to talk shit about being a good gunfighter and then
you go go get in a gunfight, though, because training and reality don't
always match. So all of those things are churning. And I was just
trying to you. You are correct. I did the best I could with
the information I had to make the best decisions to posture myself for best possible
outcomes. Yeah, and if you're in special operations and you're transitioning the Honor
Foundation, I would to you, is is that step? Well? Yeah,
let's let's take a moment right now. I'd love to hear you tell
us. I mean, you talked about your interaction with Honor Foundation, but
if you could kind of give us the elevator pitch or you know, the
thirty thousand foot view, like what is the Honor Foundation, what's their mission?
What do they do? Sure, so the elevator pitch, and then
I'm gonna transition from that and give you kind of the real real Sure.
The elevator pitch is it's a three month executive style education and we're gonna bring
you in two nights a week. And if you're in a physical campus,
which we have eight of, you're we're gonna feed you dinner because we know
you're coming from your challenging day job. We're gonna ask you to be in
civilian attire and business business casual at that at that caliber, We're gonna feed
you dinner because you know you haven't had time, and we're gonna have some
interesting people in the room anywhere from executive coaches to business owners, to executives
in corporate to entrepreneurs, and then you can just naturally have some conversations.
And then from six pm to nine pm you're going to grind over the actual
curriculum, and then the doors don't close intil the last person leaves, might
be a couple of a couple of drinks. But then you start to have
sign of the other conversations and you do it over the course of three months.
Each phase or each month is a phase. Excuse me, So each
phase is one month long. And where we start, which makes the Honor
Foundation very different from all other veteran support organizations, is we make you work
on you, and so you know, if you're wearing ranks and titles for
a good chunk of your life, it's hard to remember who Jack is again
and what does Jack actually like? And what does he actually want to What
are you good at that you never want to do again? That's a really
good question to ask yourself in transition. So we work on a bunch of
those things, a bunch of introspection. We don't let you flounder. We
put you in a cohort of other like minded, high performing individuals who are
also in transit. So now you've got battle buddies or swim buddies, you
know, depending on who we're serving. And then we give you an executive
coach that you've got to check in with once a week, who's a civilian
more often than not, who's volunteering, who's going to help you figure out
your transition because your needs are going to be a little bit different than mine.
Even though we're both we could both be eights getting out twenty years,
been in gunfights together, all the things. You may have kids and you're
moving back to New York and I'm single and I want to go be at
Google. Right, those are just very different outcomes. And to facilitate that,
we give you a coach so that you can get really down and in
on what those individual needs are. So broad curriculum that helps everybody with individual
one to one care if you will. And then the big proposition, without
going into all the rest of it, is we serve you for life.
Once you graduate with us, you're in a growing population. There's two thousand,
five hundred and fifty plus alumni right now. So if you're going to
get in the company as soon as you graduate, you have access to a
ranger or somebody at Google. You've got to access to a switch or a
seal who's an entrepreneur in the industry you want to be in, and on
and on and on. If it's a company you've heard of, we probably
have a connection to it at this point, either directly through one of our
graduates or through our great supporters, or the company is actually donating to us,
or a myriad of other things. That's the elevator pitch. But I'll
tell you what we're really doing, and we never expressly say it. We're
helping guys deal with identity, community, sense, making, purpose and meaning
in life when the uniform comes off. And because even though you're gonna have
to do a really long checklist to get out of Army, Air Force,
Navy, Marine Corps or Space Guardian, and you're gonna have to do another
really long checklist to get out of your individual unit, and you're gonna have
to do all of these things for medical, and you're gonna have to do
all these things for the VA, and you're gonna get a job. None
of that is transition. That's change management, right, That's all that is.
Transition happens in your heart and in your head. It's how you feel
about all of those things. It's how you make sense of it. It's
how you figure out who you are and who your new team is going to
be, and then what is my purpose? And how am I going to
find meaning from all of that now? Because if you're wearing the uniform,
all of those things are answered like instantly and then it's gone. So that's
what we really try and help guys and gals grapple with. I'm really glad
to hear you say that so explicitly and that the Foundation helps guys with that
issue, with those that series of issues, because you know, I've been
out long enough now, what fourteen years, long enough to kind of reflect
back on my own transition experience, and I mean I really think that you
know, we'll take special ops guys. For example, you have to fight
as hard to transition as you did to get into that unit. You know,
like you talked about your fight. You know that to get into special
operations as a big, uphill battle for you. In my opinion, it's
just as big a battle to transition out of the military and find that purpose
and find that identity that you mentioned. Absolutely, and hey it's hard.
Yeah, Like I'm just like, if anybody's listening, you're not there yet,
but you're thinking about transition. Yeah, it's hard, but that's not
a bad thing. It was hard to get in, it's going to be
hard to get out. And the things that are the most meaningful to us
in life, the things that have the highest amount of value, are the
things that we had to struggle through, that we had to grind over and
that we eventually found a solution to. So when you do it, and
you do it right, it'll be one of the most gratifying things that you
one of the most gratifying things you accomplish. Now, it's super cool.
Well, and it sounds like right now, the Honor Foundation serves the Special
Operations community. I mean, is there a specific We are ten years old,
and that's that is our that's what we are charted chartered to do as
a national five oh one C three nonprofit. The dream or the vision really
not dream. The vision has always been, though to serve, how do
we effectively make a bigger impact than that? And so the vision has always
been what would it look like for us to take our knowledge and look,
we do all the other things too. We do resumes, and we do
LinkedIn because all of those things are required. You have to have all of
those things to get in and through a hiring funnel, start your own company,
or go on to be a college student for a while. And those
are kind of the three big buckets most guys gals fall into. But how
do we how can we contribute to the greater two hundred thousand who get out
of Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps in every single year.
And so we think the unique area that we can provide a real meaningful difference
is in the areas I talked about working on identity, community since making purpose
and meaning in life, because we really feel like that's an area that's not
being touched at all because everything is focused around the necessity of getting in and
through a hiring funnel or getting to a school or starting your own company.
But to do that effectively, knowing who you are first is starting with the
self, we would submit to you is the best place to start. And
so we're currently piloting a program. We have about one hundred pilot participants right
now from a wide swath of military experience who are in the transition process.
They're going through this curriculum with us right now, and once we get done
with that, we're looking at launching and making it available potentially in May of
this year to all transitioning veterans, so that we're really giving them that,
you know, we would call it phase zero, like, here's the initial
step you need to take before you can navigate to a point. You have
to know where you are. So let's help. Let us help you figure
out where you are, and now you can plot a course with all these
other great foundations who've already figured out best in class, you know, building
the best LinkedIn, building the best community. You know, Bunker Labs already
figured out how to do entrepreneurship. And we're going to hand you off closer
to a whole human who knows who they are, so you can chart a
better path. I mean, it sounds incredible. And you said you served
or the Honor Foundation served seven hundred troops last year. Yeah, we served,
Yeah, about seven hundred. We will serve about eight hundred ish,
you know, depending on how it goes this year of special operations individuals.
And that's Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, jaysock and enablers.
And what has your role been at the company since you took the job
there in twenty nineteen, I got hired to be the virtual director was the
very first virtual campus, So I got to be director of the fourth campus
in existence at that time, and it was literally figuring out is it possible
to deliver high quality content over zoom or over another digital medium so that we
can scale it and do it for you know, we've got guys and gals
in SOCOM who were all over the map, not co located with the base,
and we hadn't we hadn't really grown at that point yet either, and
so we knew it was a capability we needed, and so I got to
prove the concept. I got to there was already pretty much an eighty percent
solution that was handed to me by it's people that did much harder work than
I had to do to figure out a lot of the base stuff. All
I had to do was get it over the goal line, and so figuring
out out, yes, it is possible to deliver high value, high touch
quality content over Zoom is possible. Although we all now hate it because of
twenty twenty. It's just the reality of the world we live in. But
it was fortuitous, right, and that I got to figure it out in
twenty nineteen so that when twenty twenty happened, the entire company was able to
pivot and we served about two hundred more service members in twenty twenty than we
did in twenty nineteen because of the team just going okay, Halty, you
already figured this out, like how do we do it, and just having
great team members, just like in special operations, who know how to feel
flow and go make it happen. Do we have any questions for Mike?
We do we have. One of the interesting things about doing these interviews live
is some of the viewers chime in with some questions, Awesome, yeah,
yeah, go ahead, please date, thank you. Jackson asks do you
ever foresee a more sock Tier one element being stood up? Kind of like
dealt the Force, but for raiders or is it unlikely. Oh man,
that's a great question and so contentious. It's a spicy question. Yeah,
that is a spicy one, and I'm thankful to not be in uniform be
able to answer this honestly. You know, it's been talked about since the
very early days, and we we do have an allocation and opportunity to go
that direction under other already formed Jasock commands currently in terms of the future,
that's a that's a big you know, it's easy to say the men are
capable, it's easy to say have the experience. It's hard to say that
is standing up something very different that is also a big budget somebody much higher
than any decision maker and the d OD is gonna have to make and all
of those things. So I don't know the actual reality of that. So
yeah, I'm I'm hopeful though, because I think I definitely worked with some
genetic freaks who are also highly intelligent and would fit in over there, and
there might be one of one or two of them over there. Right now,
that's it for the questions I have a question. Yeah. So we
heard from journalist Matt Cole, who wrote the book Code over Country that at
some point during the gat. I guess so Calm or Jasock was wanted to
bring in like a bunch of marines into buds and like flood buds with marines.
I remember this story. Do you know anything about that? Like,
was that something that came across your radar when you were there? No,
that's the first time I ever heard that. And I don't know if I'm
I don't know if that's awesome or terrifying or a bit of bowl like.
No, I mean, the closest thing that I had and experience, it's
and it's it's only mildly close to that was eighteen Delta got opened up to
us for like a heartbeat, and I got to be on a short list
to potentially go to eighteen delta, and then that got shut down very quickly
because when you talk about how do you how do you sustain that over long
periods of time and all of those things that we had, I think the
command had no answers for that, and so that got shut down. So
what's what's next for you, Mike? What's the next step in your transition?
I guess you're transitioned out now, but in your civilian career and life.
What's the next step for you. Yeah, So after after having the
privilege of being a director and serving cohorts for about two and a half years,
and I transitioned into being the vice president of operations. So I've been
doing the super sexy behind the scenes stuff like insurance and hr and it,
I mean, just the really cool stuff everyone when you get out wants to
go do. And I say that obviously because a knuckle dragon, door kicker
infantrymen like myself is probably the wrong choice. But I have an amazing CEO
lets me run with scissors, so thank you, Matt, You're awesome.
And he's let me figure out a lot of things. And so I've pseudo
gotten an OJT NBA along the way and learned a ton some of it the
hard way, most of it the hard way, and I really enjoy I
get to be the one person now second person on the team, because I
have a teammate who's joined me in ops in earnest, so she is she's
kind of like current ops and I'm doing future ops as best as possible.
And we're the two people on the team who really get to focus on the
team because most of the team are kind of inside culture or motto is fellows
first, and the fellows are the ones who are in transition going through the
cohorts. We do everything for the fellows, like, no matter like if
we've got to pay for it, or if we've got to bring in a
world class instructor. You know, we don't have special operations guys teaching LinkedIn.
We have LinkedIn professionals teaching, you know, and for all the classes.
So we put fellows first. And because the team does that, they
burn themselves out and they work extremely hard. I mean, it's it's really
no different than a special operations team. I mean they work really hard.
So being able to focus on the team trying to make their lives easier that
is very meaningful to me. And if I can get little wins for them
to make their lives easier, like that's I'm still really enjoying that. So
I kind of don't see myself leaving anytime soon. It's awesome. Yeah,
well, Mike, I mean I really appreciate you coming on the show,
and I really appreciate what you're doing today and what the Honor Foundation's up to.
I'd actually never heard of them until tonight, so I'm gonna have to
push that out to people. When people ask me and friends are transitioning out
of the military, I'm going to have to make sure to mention this to
them. Yeah, I appreciate you putting up on the screen too. If
anybody wants to learn more, we have a ton more information on there.
I literally touched like the snowflakes at the tip of the iceberg. There's a
lot more to it, and I'm hoping in May of this year we're gonna
have a big announcement. Do you want to give the website for the listeners
who check out the podcast? Absolutely, h O N O R dot org.
That's Honor dot org. Hopefully it's up on your screen right now.
If you go check that out, it gives a lot more information on the
program and if you're interested get involved. There's a lot of different ways to
get involved. There's some easy ways to sign up as a volunteer if that's
interesting to you. If you've been working in corporate, if you're an entrepreneur,
if you've been working in finance, if you've managed a hedge fund.
Those are all things and opportunities and industries that guys and gals who are transitioning
are looking at and they would love to have a converse with an individual like
you so they can understand that. And it's one of the big things we
push is don't just research it online, which is also important, but go
have a conversation with somebody who's doing it nine to five and find out what
they're actually doing each day before you say you want to be at SpaceX,
because you might get yourself into something you're not ready for with your three kids
and all the rest. So if you're you know, if you're out there,
you're a great American and you've been working hard in the private sector,
and if you're a veteran and you've been doing the same, love to have
you come contribute as volunteer. Yeah, and you can find the links down
in the description and the show notes if you're listening or watching. Definitely it's
right there for you. Thank you, Mike. Any final thoughts. Is
there anything I failed to ask that you really want to talk about? No,
I really appreciate this opportunity. I mean, I see the caliber of
people that you have on the here, so I'm a little bit shocked you
allowed me on here. I just really appreciate it. Yeah, No,
you're welcome anytime. And like I said earlier, if you know, the
Honor Foundations have an event and some of the guys are coming through New York
City, we'd love to have you guys here. That'd be awesome. Absolutely,
We'll get together and smoke some of these cigars. Yeah, hell yeah
absolutely. And next episode, next Friday, we're going to have Travis,
who served as a Special Operations weatherman weather technician uh Dack's dream come true finally.
Yeah, we've been talking. We've been talking about it, and you
know, it always comes up, you know, and usually there's a joke
being made about special ops weathermen, and I figured, instead of making the
joke, let's actually half one of these people on here and talk about their
profession and what they do. Oh quick story, I will not make a
joke about those guys ever, because my very last jump was into the Yellow
Sea on the border between North and South. Obviously pretty far south of the
border, but it was in the Yellow Sea. This guy figured out the
weather like cllling six years of data and he called the weather to a t.
It was exactly what he said it was gonna be, and we were
able to jump it was amazing. That's awesome. That's the kind of stuff
I want to hear. Like I said, it's interesting to learn about career
fields that you knew nothing about before, so I will never talk trash about
them. Yeah, good dudes. Awesome all right, So Mike, thank
you, thank you everyone who joined us tonight, and we will see you
next Friday. Take care out there and have a nice weekend. Thank you.