Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about
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the Team House with your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Bark the two hundred
and fifty seven of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park
and we have tonight in studio our guest Dan Runyon. Dan is the author
of Disciple of Chaos. He served in military intelligence and then went and served
in special Forces. Had two team leader positions and ODA five five five and
Ohda five to five to one, participating in both the invasion of Afghanistan and
invasion of Iraq. Dan, thank you for joining us tonight my opportunity.
I appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah. So let's uh, let's start
at the beginning. Man, tell us a little bit about like what your
upbringing was like and how that kind of brought you towards the military. So
watching a bunch of your previous episodes, it kind of the same way.
You know, I grew up running around the hills East Peoria. I've had
three acres behind the house. Next door. Neighbor, Craig Garber was born
about five months before I was, And for about the first ten years of
my life, I was outside. Mom said go outside, and so playing
out in the woods and all that and just being active. You know,
we had a trampoline, so we're jumping until dark and you can't see each
other, and you know, mom calls in and my dad was on the
road a lot, so really just running around and being pretty hyper. You
know. Mom said I had to answer my pants, and so always doing
sports, always running around. You know. I went out for every sport
in high school, and if it was a team sport, some of them
I made, some of I didn't. Didn't make basketball, did football,
couldn't catch, so they put me on defense. Fastest guy on the team,
so I just knocked the ball down. Didn't make baseball. So I
went over out for track, and you know, just did all the things
that I like to do. Subjects that I liked, I did well.
In subjects that didn't make any sense, I didn't do so well. So
you know, I you know, by the time it came time to graduate
high school, I had this audacious plan. I'm going to go to you
know, go to college. I'm going to be in the nineteen eighty four
Olympics. And then I realized that being the fast white guy in Illinois doesn't
mean you're the fastest in the world. And I realized it not going to
be it. And besides that, my academic advisor setting me down and saying,
hey, you're doing really well in these classes, and you're not doing
really well in those classes. Do you see yourself being a metallurgical engineer in
a room with no windows? And I'm like no. So that I transferred,
and you know, I went to college and went through ROTC. Dad
said I should take a map reading course. And so it's about February of
nineteen eighty two and the professor Military science says, hey, we're going to
Airborne School. We're going to send people. And afterwards I raised my hand.
I go, I want to go to Airborne school. I'd learned my
sister went to Airborne school, my dad went to Airborne school. My brother
in law went to Airborne school. And he's like, oh, well,
you got to take this PT test. And you know, long story short,
I went to Airborne School. It was fine July and Fort Benning hotter
than bloody blue blazes. Yeah, you know. So I went to finished
up college and didn't know what I was going to do. I had a
Bachelor of Science and psychology and I did not want to listen to people wine
at me. So I went down to the recruiter and joined up. Wanted
to be a ninety eight golf a radio interceptor. Didn't really know what that
was. And that started it. So if you were an ROTC in college,
how do you make that switch? Why do you end up going and
listed? So ROTC kind of has that totem pole thing. So when I
was at Iowa State and then I transferred to Knox College, you go back
to the bottom of the totem pole and really was up for the rankings of
you know, to get an active duty commission, and they were talking about
reserve this and infantry, and I was like, I don't want to do
that. So they gave me my little discharge from the Army of ROTC.
And when I, you know, finished college, and then I went straight
and took that and went straight to the recruiter and said, hey, I
want to go in interesting And did you know you didn't know what nine eight
GOOLF was or a voice signal intercept? Like did the recruiter sell you on
that? Oh? No? So I did well on my GT score and
well on my ass FAB and I did well on the Defense Language after your
battery, and he said, well, you can be an interrogator, an
interceptor, and these other two things. And I didn't even know what the
other I don't get to remember what the other two things was. And I'm
like, well, I don't even know what the interrogator does, but it
sounds like only wartime and I don't want to do that, So I want
to be a radio interceptor. He's like, okay, you're the first one
this year and this is December. Yeah, so yeah, so I just
picked it by happenstance and went from there. And then did you uh did
you agree on your language at that point? Was that in bated into your
contract? Oh, it's funny put that point that out. I'm in basic
training and you know, when you're towards the end, they give your orders
and might say order, might say Korean. And I was the honor grad
at basic training, thank goodness. Colonel bray Boy comes up and he says,
you know, great on PT test. I scored on don't know,
three sixty five or something like that. And he goes, where are you
going. I go, well, I'm going to dl I. He's like
what language? I said, Well, I've got Korean. He goes,
well, what do you want? I go I want Russian. He goes
why and I said, I took two years in college. He looked sar
major and he said, sar majors. See what we can do. Jill
started telling me there're any chance in hell takes an Act of Congress, all
all the other lives. I tell you, Tuesday, not next Tuesday.
My language has changed to Russian. That's awesome, it was, yeah.
And so now you're off for a government funded vacation at d L d l
I, Monterey, California. We got. When we got there, they
had just opened what they called the Russian Village. Was on the other side,
brand new Barracks High school schedule, college workload being paid. It was
awesome. Yeah, because I had taken Russian in college. Yeah, the
first six months were easy. I got straight hundreds. Yeah. DLI is
everything that's great about school and nothing that's bad about school. There's no homework,
really, there's you know, it's you know, if you study in
your spare time, that's on you. But there's no homework. There are
no like research papers. But class is very interactive. It's very active,
so it keeps you engaged. Yeah. In fact, you're right, because
in the evenings I got bored and so Pacific Grove High School was just on
the other side of the fence, and I went over and talked to a
guy named Steve Salzanowski who was the varsity football coach, and asked him if
I could be an assistant. So I I was coaching receivers and defensive backs
in the fall, So yeah, it was it was a great time.
Yeah, And after you finish your language training, what's the next stop for
you? So then you go to San Angelo, Texas, middle of West
Texas, and that's where you do all the classified stuff, all the radio
traffic of what you're going to hear depending on what part of the world and
what the Russians are doing or the Soviets at the time, what they're doing,
whether it's artillery traffic. Because as a basic interceptor, first you wanted
to determine what the traffic is, armor, artillery, infantry forwarding, all
that other stuff, whether to do and admin stuff. Then as you get
better than you do the actual transcription. So that's what that school was for.
And it was I don't know, like four or five months. And
then from there, because I was going to Germany, we went to a
tactical course how to actually operate the tactical equipment, whether they were the man
packables of the vehicles up at Fort Devons. My first time at Fort Devons
and then we went over. Then I went over to Seas and I was
in want to wait them? I Betime, which was on the East German
border. How do they so the for people might not understand, like the
signal intercept goes from tactical or strategic where you're sitting in an air conditioned room
listening to intercepted traffic to tactical where you're actually out there with the troops,
you're on the ground. You is that a volunteer position because a lot of
people who go in for that now at the time. Well, and the
other thing, it's so much different now because of digital technology, so everything
is more remote now. So they just put up an antenna, just like
you have a cell tower. Well, a cell tower transmits and receive.
So that's basically what they do now. Almost nobody doesn't tactically accept in a
combat operation or a very specific mission that is tailored to right now at this
place, at that location. So back then, it's just what they had.
So we would go, you know, to the border, I mean
I lived seven kilometers from the border, you know, and then I'd go
to base and we'd get our equipment. Then we'd go set up Sometimes we
went to hard stands like well Back and everything else that was north of Fulda
or stuff like that. But I think the only place there was Augsburg,
Germany, and they were doing some of the remote stuff at that time,
and that was the big strategic thing. Did you get the listening to the
Rooskies plotting and planning on the other side of it was funny because you'd listened
to them and there they were more jacking around than we were. You know,
they were bored, or they were drunk, or they were doing whatever.
And up north they had what was called the Gotha training area. The
Soviets literally filled in in between two mountains to block the radio transmissions from their
training area so that we couldn't intercept it. It didn't work, so we
we just went over to here so we could still because everything's lying asite right,
so but you would hear them, you know, the same level that
we are jacking around. One time, we were at a hard stand and
we're doing intercept and it's New Year's and this guy's drunk. He starts singing
Happy Birthday in English because it's his birthday. Too far. I wish we
could have transmitted because we would have said it right back to happy Birthday.
But yeah, you just do stuff like that, you know, it's it's
not It would be rare that you caught something like their short third Shock Army
coming through. Even back in the eighties, we would have had some type
of satellite because you can't move one hundred and eighty tanks without something. Fine.
So yeah, and how long did you spend in night unit over in
Germany? So I got there eighty seven, eighty eight, and then that
was the end of my first enlist and I was planning on getting out.
I was married at the time, married my college sweetheart. We had a
boy, Zach was born in August, and I went to I said,
hey, I'm getting out, and they're like, well, you got to
talk to reed List Minincio. I'm like, okay, the only reason.
So I went out there and talked to him, and he goes, what
can I do to get you to stay in. I go, well,
I want to sixteen thousand dollars list bonus and I want to go to Key
West or Hawaii. He goes, okay, let me see what I can
do. That's Friday, and on Monday morning they said reen List Mininsio.
You're supposed to call him. He goes, you got three years in Key
West, you know, before a cell phone. So I get back on
the phone. I call my wife and I'm like, we got three years
in Key West. She's like, okay, yeah, that's not a hard
cell. It was not a hard cell. And so we moved to Key
West, Florida, and you know, it's ninety miles from Cuba, yep.
And you have the Lord Sigant Site and another training area over there,
and for some reason there was a Soviet Mechanized Infantry brigade teaching them mechanized infantry
tactics. Weird, Yeah, it's Cuba. And so that's all we did
twenty four Well, we didn't do it twenty four seven and we did two
eight. So sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, we did
military intercept. Air Force was on other time zones and stuff like that.
And I was in Key West and then the wall fell and they were pulling
all Russian linguists and I'm like, okay, this job's going to end,
right, And I put in a forty one eighty seven a request to go
to tenth group and they're like, you're crazy, you're leaving Key West,
but okay, and all those guys that stayed around ended up going to Fort
Drum. So you're specifically were you trying to get into Special Forces as an
mi I guy? Yeah? Yeah, So I'd heard about the Saude's,
I'd heard about the intercept, and you know, you get to go to
ranger school and you get to go do all the cool stuff and you're deploying
in small units and stuff like that, and that's what I wanted to do.
Yeah, because Key West was good. I mean it was four days
on, two days off, and like I say in the book, it
was good until it wasn't. When you can you know, I laughed at
my wife at the time, was like, you know, I never know
when you're gonna work. I'm like, are you kid me? Me?
I know when I'm gonna work three years from now, it's four two four
two four two. You know when you're gonna work. Yeah, and you
work four days, four swings, four days, four swings, four days,
four swings. So seven to fifteen hundred, fifteen to twenty three,
how were you do you remember how like sad A's came on your radar?
Was it because you were in Key West or were they either whispered about guys
in the ninety eight golf community, in the singing community. So I actually
has as a katoon startant. I had two guys go to selection, So
that was the first thing that kind of sparked sparked my head of Special Forces.
And they both came back and they weren't selected. Beave that won't you
later on we know they quit. But the scuba school was over there,
right and another friend mine who was another team startant, her husband was an
instructor over at the course and so they needed some extra bodies to do helic
casting and stuff like that. So I went and started talking to them,
and that's when I got the idea, Hey, you need to go do
tactical stuff. And I've always wanted to be in tenth group, you know,
up at Fort Devns and going over to Germany and stuff like that,
and so that's what I did. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because you
know, like a lot more people know about Green Beret or Special Forces than
they do about the Sauda units inside of them. Yeah, it you know,
And it's funny because the MI guys will say they're Special Operations Team Alpha
it's Support Operations Team ALPA. That's what the books. So, because you
got to remember, you're not selected to go there. You're just an mi
I guy, right, you weren't qualified, you didn't pass a selection or
anything else. You're just a sign there. So once you again get there,
you've got to show your medal. Right, And there were teams,
there were go teams, and there were no go teams, and you know,
so going to ranger school is one thing, you know, trying to
cause General Frank Tony was my second group commander, and he wanted the Saude's
to be scuba qualified because that's when Bosnia was starting to spin up. You
know, President Clinton and he's wanting to, you know, send us over
and like, okay, yeah, but we're going to infill by scuba probably,
so you got to get scuba qualified. So every six months we're doing
a physical and we're going through pre scuba and just getting our butt smoked.
Yeah. Finally he just sent us to the paddy course like I don't care,
we're going to send you in anyway. So that's where you start learning
about all that stuff. And you know, and actually when we're so nineteen
ninety two, when I signed into group, they handed your green beret because
that was the unit headgear. And within six months they were pulling General shack
now and that whole story. They were pulling the green berets if you weren't
you know, Q course qualified, right unless you deployed overseas and then you
had you know, we were like pulling up a room beret and then we're
pulling up a green beret. And I was like, okay, whatever,
it's just to happen whatever. But it's not just how would they like administrative
how would they work that because like you said that the Sauda guys, the
you know, these tactical signers, they didn't have to go through a selection,
but but in in the right setting, they could be called upon to
do very arduous missions. Correct, So would they try top And also like
ranger school is a big thing for them, like you're supposed to be ranger
qualified and all this stuff. It's slott. Yeah, So how would they
how would they manage those teams? Would they try to spread the wealth like
put like the qualified guys with the unqualified guys to make a week team stronger,
or would they make like the strong teams really strong and leave the weak
teams to like do their own thing. It depends on which battalion you were
in. I was in the third but two, and we had three strong
team leaders. Steve, Joe and I were team leaders and on the Saude's
and we were just strong. That's the way it was. Second time was
a little different. They actually had better linguists, but they were tactically unsound.
So it it just it was weird. You know, you would think
they would do that, they would get and they didn't push Ranger School as
much and they should have, and it just became an availability. And one
time somebody said, hey, do you want to Ranger School. I'm like
yeah. They're like, pack your bags are leaving tomorrow. I'm like no,
no, no, no, no, I'm not leaving tomorrow. You
know, to think about what if you've showed up to Ranger School with twelve
hours noticing, Yeah, it wouldn't be so good. So but yeah,
it you know, And we deployed quite a bit to Scotland. We did
an exercise with the sas third Ranger Battalion and we were with the Princess of
Wales Royal Regiment and we were infiltrators and they were trying to find it.
So, yeah, you learned a lot of stuff real fast. Yeah,
went through the British here school. I don't recommend it. And then how
did you guys manage it? Because like the Saudas, the signers have a
higher clearance than most of the team. Guys, do you have specialized gear
from the NSA specialized gear like when you're traveling, when you're working with these
teams, Like how do you manage that? Personally? To say hey,
like this is like this, this stuff is sort of off limits. I
know you're I know you're cooler than I am or whatever else, but this
stuff's off limits. So we would talk and we ran into that problem.
Even on a jrtc rotation. We jumped into Camp David, we did in
flight rigging and jumped in and I had talked with a team leader and said,
hey, this is what happens when we start doing the analysis. It
becomes sci and he goes, I don't have that. I got anybody on
your team. He goes, yeah, one of our echoes does. Why
he had it helped us out a lot. So then we were allowed to
try it, but then we had to transmit through an sci channel, otherwise
I would have to carry extra gear. I mean it's already bad enough.
We're carrying a Parody twelve, which is the size of that refrigerator. Now
I'm gonna have to carry my own PSC five and get my own crypto.
And luckily he had it. So you just work it out. You know,
you don't want to be standoffish, and you don't and you want them
to be integrated. And then all of a sudden you explain, Hey,
if you're going split team, there's three of us, right, so if
two guys are going with that team, I'm going with this team. It's
just me, right, doing twenty four hour ops. So we're in j
RTC, we're trying to intercept, and I'm intercepting until I fall asleep and
then I'm intercepting more. So you just had to work it out, and
that's that's how you build that rapport with them. And that's why when that
team eighty five got assigned to go to Bosnia and they did their decision matrix
and said we're taking them. Yeah, what was that like? When you
got the Bosnia? We never went? Oh really went to Brindisi, Italy.
That's a good men, didn't do anything because all we were gonna do
was, uh, they were gonna put him on a PR mission. Uh.
This is very early Brindisi is the airfield in Bari, isn't it.
Yeah, so it just that's beautiful. We were gonna you know, the
and at the very beginning, because remember this is ninety three, you know,
this is when, hey, we're going to be out by Christmas.
They didn't say which Christmas because we're still there, so it's got what's kind
of one of the running jokes. But yeah, we didn't do anything.
We didn't it thell. We didn't do anything, you know. And I
think the only true PR mission was the what's his name Grady mission? Yeah,
when Tomogrady got shot down? Yeah, back to one or whatever anywhere
whatever that one was throwing your literal seriou school that everything went wrong. So
yeah, but yeah, we actually never did anything, never did anything.
Operational law was in tenth group. Uh and then how did you find your
way over to fifth group? How did that come about? So we should
mention you went to OCS too. Yeah. So because the wall had fallen,
they weren't going to do I wanting to do any Russian more Russians.
They weren't going to I wasn't gonna get promoted, and they wouldn't let me
change languages because there was only two airborn you ranger of ninety eight golfs.
So I put an OCS packet. Actually, what was really good was Colonel
Philbert was my battalion commander. He was an o CS grad. The S
three was an o CS grad, and one of them, I detachment commander
from the other battalion was the OCS grad. And they were like, you
run it, and you run it through now because we're about to leave to
go somewhere. And so I did. In a ten day time, I
did my entire packet and walked it straight to Colonel Tony and I said,
will you sign this? And yeah. So then I went to I went
to Austter Candidate School, graduated in January of ninety four, went to the
basic course, and then went to Fort Campbell and did a full gamut there.
You know I have in the book. My first battalion commander was Colonel
Rodriguez, David M. Rodriguez, who ended up being with the Afrikaan commander
I think is one of his last jobs. Great, just great, commanders.
I had the whole time while I was there. And so when you
came out of OCS, I mean, w W was it? Did they
automat because you had been military military intelligence? Did they automatically branch you?
Am I? Or I was one of the lucky ones they did. There
were some guys out of OCS that were given artillery. It's called branch of
detailed because that reverse pyramid. You know, they need some second lieutenants,
but they don't need artillery captains, right, they need artillery lieutenants. So
no, I was given military intelligence. And when I got to Fort Campbell,
you know I was lucky. I was a little bit older. This
will be ninety three, so you know, I'm thirty, I've got my
senior wings, I got ranger tab and I'm a lieutenant walking into an infantry
battalion. So I got some credibility, right, and that helped a lot,
right, And you know, Chris the Battalion two fed me to the
Lions with John Lair the battalion three, and you know Carogue and they just
let me have it. But it was good. You know, it's like,
hey, no, no pad answers. I don't want to hear doctrine.
How long is it going to take to reduce this obstacle? How long
is it gonna take for the enemy to get there? How can I do
this? Where's you know, where's their weak points, their HPT, their
HVT and knowing all those acronyms and what they mean and then how to execute
them. So I, yeah, my success is based on my commanders.
And so you're doing a lot of mission planning, contingency planning, things like
that for the group. Yeah, So I went so and that was that's
actually in the second Baian, second Brigade of the hundred first. And then
I did a one year as am I Battalion or am I presuming Leader XO
for one j rtc rotation, and then I went to the one sixtieth.
I assessed with the one sixtieth somewhat like you know some of the other one
sixtieth guys al MAC and they talk about, you know, you go through
an assessment, you go through green platoon. Green platoon for an MI guy
is really easy, like you show up the work, but the assessment's pretty
rough for an MI guide because they're giving you a mission and planning and it's
all in classified because you're doing it from home, and then they're calling you
about every six hour, changing it about ninety two degrees. And so what
you were planning to do now you're having to change. Planning to do now
you're having to change. And I went in and did my briefing. I
made a three D model which later on said never they'd never seen anybody do
it because we were supposed to go into a compound and land and I had
to do all the you know, point of entries and everything else. And
yeah, the assessment, like it says in the book, Colonel len FRELLI
looks right at me and says, what the fuck do you think I want
a lieutenant for? So? Well, if you're looking for rank it,
yeah, but you're looking for experience, I'm at yeah, and uh yeah,
I made it and I stayed. I was the S two for twenty
six months. Wow. And we did Desert Thunder, Desert Fox. A
couple other deployments deployed down to Gabone for what used to be you know,
zaire Democratic Republic of Congo do a NEO that didn't happen. We got to
do some great courses and went to the seal. You know Intel course,
and a bunch of other things, and just kept learning more and more joint
stuff. I want to take just two seconds to tell the viewers out there
to please check out our Patreon. The link link is down the description and
for five dollars a month you get access to all these episodes ad free,
and we really appreciate at all of you who support the channel. I also
want to tell people about a article I just wrote about the green Light program.
This is the Special Forces program where they jumped in backpack nukes from the
nineteen sixties to the late nineteen eighties. And the article is titled Red Menace,
Black Ops, green Light and you can find it out there. Now,
go check it out. Let me know what you think of it.
It's a good title. Sean Naylor came up with that title. Yeah,
Yeah, it's a good title. Jumping in a nuke. Yeah, not
really sure i'd want to do that. Yeah. And next this coming Friday,
we're going to have one of the sources for that article, Bill Flavin,
who was on a green Light team. He led a green Light team
and he'll be on the show on Friday, so we've got to talk to
them about that. That's got to be just crazy. Yeah. I mean
I wonder how fast you'd have to run to get the minimum safe distance from
that, Right, that's the whole thing. Yeah, okay, so you're
not this time. You're at group as am I officer am my detachment?
Right. Yeah, So I went over and talked to Colonel Higgins and I
said, hey, you know, this is my chance to get in my
command, which is very hard to get and I'd really like to do it.
So were you a captain at this point in time? Okay, I've
been, so let's see. I got commissioned in ninety four. So yeah,
I made captain in ninety seven because I remember we were getting ready for
Desert Thunder and we're gonna go. We weren't gonna go, and I was
trying to get my dad down for the promotion. I remember talked to Colonville
Friendly and I'm like, let's just pin it on. He goes, we
don't do that. Promotions are for everyone else, not for you again,
great commander. So yeah, we ended up. So I sorry, transition
back to good to fifth Group. I'm a captain probably about three years am
my detachment got great Sauday, I actually have a tat long tab Saudes.
They let him do it for a while. They did Phase thirteen, didn't
do the MOS phase and then am I and s F didn't get along,
so they quit that. Oh so so they did so for a while they
could would they have to go through SFAs and then okay, they kind of
did their own kind of like a pre Ranger self unit. Once they sent
it, then you what did the phase one? The phase three? And
then that was it? Very interesting? Yeah, so that's let's see.
So we did am I detachment and we went over for Desert Fox and that's
where one of the incidents in the book, you know, the SF team
leaders talking about laying down the fifty cow and the entire team is going to
lay down in front of it. I was just like, you got to
be kidding me, and I kind of blurted it out and got pulled aside
and not really reprimanded. But gerald TONI was like, let's try to give
him some slack. Yeah, I go, that's nuts. He goes,
yeah. So we had to talk and then that's what he said. He
goes, you need to go to que course and I was like okay,
and my branch said no, but I hadn't been to the advance course yet.
So I went to selection in September of ninety nine, and December I
went to Fort Knox. So now you're in the pipeline. Yeah, and
you're rebranching also yeah. So yeah, because the SF doesn't have an officer
branch schools, so you're gonna go to one of the combat arms. Oh,
got infantry, armor or artillery? Okay, So in nineteen so two
thousand, I'm thirty seven. I am not going to the Infantry Officer Advanced
course because everybody said it was just ranger school all over again. You're doing
Matt Poncho's and running around. I'm like, no. So I went to
the Armor course, and I'm really glad I did because of logistics. Planning
for that helped me so much over the next five years. And yeah,
so I went to the events course at Fort Knox. You do cast cube
for a couple of weeks, and then went to Fort Bragdon. And when
did you graduate the Q course? So, because I was already language qualified,
we finished I think in May. I did seer school, took two
weeks leave, and I signed into group in July of two thousand and one
A funny story. So I signed in. They're like, hey, you're
in Bravo Company. Bravo Company's commanded and my Major Dave Neir. Major Dave
Nero was Captain Dave Nero when I was an MII detachment commander, so he's
now my company commander. Twice love the guy really, So yeah, I
mean, you get to fifth Group at the summer of two thousand and one,
having no idea what's coming. Where were you when nine to eleven happened?
So right up Gate four is the main gate to Fort Campbell, and
I'm at the cleaner's picking up my uniforms and I am driving into the gate
and the radio says a plane is hit. Like everybody else like sess nuh
yeah, some dumb pilot out there. Yeah, And so pulled in,
dropped my stuff off the team room, went over to the chow hall.
Everybody's sitting in there, and we saw the second plane hit like shit okay,
and sat around, what's gonna happen? What's gonna happen? Nobody really
knows, you know. It's Echelon's above nosebleeder talking what they're gonna do.
Base commanders actually General Cody, former one sixty regimental commander. Now he in
an eight sixty four pilot. He's now the division commander. First time they've
had an aviator and he's got apaches in the air loaded armed as nobody knows
what's going on, and they're like, go home, we'll let you know.
So the next day we came back. So, no, it's Wednesday.
Had you taken your team leader position? Yeah? Yeah, okay,
yeah, probably within the first day. So he came in, you know,
met everybody. Hey, great, you know a little bit of background.
There were eight of us, and yeah, they should just go home
next day. It took forever to get on post and then they said don't
come back, just stay home until Monday. And Saturday I got a call
saying, hey, you need to come into the group conference room. I'm
like, what happened to come in Monday? I'm tearing apart my deck and
everything else. But yeah, we'll come into the group conference room and they're
like, gentlemen, you are leading your teams into Afghanistan. And Major Nero
walks in and says, hey, you're now in five to five because your
warrant has elected to have knee surgery, and you're now below the number line.
So you and one of your weapons guys is going to five to five.
Three of your guys are going to five to three. They went into
Bamian and my team's starden and the Fox went to the B team. And
when you say below the number line, you're saying there's a There was a
minimum threshold for the team size, right, So they basically looked at the
team across the board and Colonel m'holland stated that all teams going in would be
at twelve. So if you were below eight and below you got parted out.
So went over to five to five. That put us at eleven,
and then we got an STS guy and then you know, so that put
us at twelve. So that's how the teams all got filled up. Nobody
had twelve. They always joke around if you see a twelve man team,
take a picture and it's still like that. So this is how you ended
up on triple nickel, correct, but you walked on there is still as
on a team leader position. Yeah, so five to five, I'm a
captain. You know, kind of a little bit of jocularity going on,
you know, brand new captain out of the Q course, except for I'd
been in nineteen years and I'm thirty nine years old. You know, I'm
older than the team startant. But you know, you train up, you
went through, We tried to figure out how to do you know, your
basic tactical drills, what's gonna happen. You start getting fed what the mission
was, and we started partnering it out just like you normally do. This
is started still at Fort Campbell. You got yeah, second, our battalion
is actually deployed to Jordan doing Early Victor, but it was only a couple.
It was the other two companies and the battalion staff. So the first
battalion staff is working with us, doesn't know us from Adam, and we're
trying to figure out what's going on. Nobody's been put into isolation like that
in decades. Yeah, so we just start planning and it was an open
planning at the beginning. We could go home, and then we got to
I don't know, three or four days prior to deploying, and then we
were locked down. What was that process? Like, I mean, because
you guys deployed to Uzbekistan, right correct, We land at K two and
they're just building as fast as they can, and they're like, go lay
down over there, and there was a pile of dirt over there, and
they're like when the sun comes up, we'll figure out what to do.
Just about sunrise, and somebody comes over yelling like what are you doing,
Like we were told to lay over here. They're like, no, that's
all the depleted uranium. You guys aren't supposed to be near it. That's
awesome part of the chaos. Yeah, that's my book. So you're the
whole team's over there now, like tell us walk us through like a little
bit of you guys like jocking up to go on this mission and the infiltration.
So you're just a sponge because you're pulling in every single time, you're
pulling in information because there's not a lot of information, you know, you're
getting fed from other agencies. They don't even know what the weather's gonna be.
We're getting sixty degrees, we're getting six degrees, we're getting snow hot.
So I'm either going in full snivel gear and gonna be a heat casually,
or I'm gonna have it packed and I'm gonna have it you know,
frostbite. Right, So we don't know what's going on. We don't know.
It's just it's fluid and you know. And I talked to Colonel Mulholland
last September about it. That man had the hardest job in the world because
he's got four stars telling him what he's doing wrong, he's got team leaders,
team starts going why do I not know anything right? You know?
And it was it was really good to talk to him about that, because
I I don't envy that man at all, and he is and he was
he was operating under pressure, under pressure, but also in a vacuum,
just like everybody else. And you know, it's like you're in ranger school
and you got your your your leadership role, your pel time. You're trying
to get it out as fast as possible, but you're head swimming and people
are feeding you stock. It's just it's time. Yeah. So yeah,
we were planning the best we could and then we're getting we're getting Hey,
you're going in civilian clothes, have me something clothes. Hey, you're going
in green BDUs, You're going in Acus, You're going in you know,
chocolate chips, You're going to You're like they're sending a guy down to Hu's
Beckett, you know, the Karshi Kanabad, and he's coming back with fubu
waar And I'm not joking, you know, I'm like, yeah, you
gotta be kid man. I mean, there's a picture I don't I don't
put it online because it's got other guys faces in it. But we looked
like the French resistance from World War Two, you know, we got chapeause
and I'm like, we're gonna die, right right? So how did how
did the infiltration finally take place? And like, what was your conception of
the of the mission by the time he deployed? So this was the first
time that I really realized the value of being the S two and the one
sixtieth because now I'm talking to the flight lead and he was a BMQ pilot
basic mission qualified when he had first came in when I was the S two,
So we had grown together and we had learned as I was learning about
the aircraft that aircraft don't have flares, chafts and pods. Pods are on
submarines. So I don't brief that anymore, you know. That was one
of my briefings when our JRTC as an S two they're like, that's a
submarine. I'm like, okay. So I'm learning all about the forty sevens
and the factors and it's capabilities and everything else. And he's briefing me and
I already know that, and so we're working on Okay, how am I
We're going to get in there. We've got to go across the Hindukush mountains.
Hindukush Mountains have to actually stop weather patterns. They're so tall, well,
forty seven can only go up so tall. You go above ten thousand
feet, you start losing oxygen and they only have enough oxygen for the crew
chief and the pilots. So now we're talking about going in and my team
isn't going to have on any oxygen and we're going to be up there for
a good forty five minutes with little to no oxygen. And so when we're
pushing up there, and I remember Joe telling me, he's like, I
don't think we're gonna make it. Do you want to be put down on
the mountain or do you want to be put down on this side of the
mountain. And I'm going through all my into briefings and remembering this is on
the north side of the Salon Pass. There was one tunnel that goes through
there that gets the bogroom and that comes up to Condus. Regards the one
that's up in the north, I think it's Condus, but still there was
a unit there. There was a Taliban you know, at the north side,
because they were they thought we were gonna have to go through the Slom
Pass. So I'm like, don't put us down there, And luckily it
didn't because that's exactly what I remember. But we could not punch through.
So we went back and was it the weather? That is why couldn't you
guys make it? Was there not enough like could they not get enough lift
or Whateverooks can go up to, you know, twenty thousand plus feet,
but the problem is if you the weather, the clouds, you can't see.
They were just starting out with a multimode radar. But you don't fly
when you can't see in a helicopter. It's not like you can punch up
to thirty five thousand feet and just go across. You're in a hellic out
so and these are the best pilots in the world, and so when they're
saying, hey, we can't do this, I'm trying to figure out how
we're going to do it. So I'm going back to my s two time
and I'm talking to him and I'm trying to work it out, and We're
starting to get pretty lightheaded because I'm not on on the oxygen. I'm like,
we need to go back. We just we cannot do this. And
so we did, and then they came down under the clouds and they had
an engagement with one of the mini guns and just high tailed it out of
there. And so it was about it was a couple of days later that
we finally were successfully to go in. That's why we'll always say we're arguably
the first team in because we actually went in, but we didn't land.
That's a fun jocularity between teams. So when you guys finally got on the
ground, I mean, what was like the mission statement that the group commander
gave to you guys, what were you You know, it's funny because it's
three quarters of a page that's it purpose key tasks and state the purposes to
defeat the Taliban and remove you know, okay from Afghanistan. The key tasks
are link up with the Northern Alliance, train them up. When the snow
melts, start an offensive, capture Cobble and state is Cobble is captured.
That's it, which we did very quickly. You guys did very quickly.
We didn't wait for it. We didn't even wait for it to snow.
We were so successful going in that nobody had the patience. As again talking
to Colonel Mulholland, the pressure from above was just too much. You gotta
go. Your teams are in. Why are they going to wait six months?
So you know, we're so we do. We link up and you
know, you got to do your bona fides and you know, and these
remember their tribes. We've learned a lot about the Afghans. You know,
they are tribal and they want to know you know, they they don't they
do the small talk. They drink tea and they figure out what you are
and why are you trustworthy and everything else. So that's what had to be
built, and then all the other ancillary stuff that motivated them to actually move
and get want to do it. So you guys get on the ground,
link up with the Northern Alliance and then who were you guys assigned to?
So Masud was the big guy, right and Fahim Khan was his security guy
didn't do so well. Musud was killed on the tenth Yeah, so that's
who we had to link up with. So we had to link up with
Fahim Khan and his generals and everything was in again layers, peeling back the
layers of security and the bona fides, I would say, because we linked
up with these guys and we linked up with this guy and we slowly moved
down the Hindu Kush mountains the mountain range until we got to the point where
we were was at the time, the Northern Alliance had the northern part of
Bagram Airbase the airfield, and the Taliban had the southern part, so really
the airfield was split in half. That was kind of the flat so to
speak, because the first time we went down, a couple of days later
we finally have gotten down to our safe house, the final safe house,
and we would get into Pagero's covered up in a blanket. We would go
down air base where the tower was and we would actually crawl up there and
start identifying where the Taliban was, and that's when we started the cast from
there and figuring out who is Taliban and other things. That went on and
realizing that they were were Arab Talibans and Afghan Talibans, which was a big
difference. Did they know at the time, were they planning on using Bogram
as what it eventually became, and did they want to minimize like battle damage
to it or the Americans? I don't, I don't know, Okay,
I mean I know because the flot was there, they weren't cratering it as
much as they did Cobble Airport. That level was not down to us.
But it was start calling casts, start figuring out where the Taliban is and
start calling casts. And we did every time we found groups and pockets,
and we just started lay laying waste. And so how long I mean,
how long were you out there at Bagram? I think by forty five days
later we had captured Gobble and that that was correct me if I'm wrong,
that was kind of the end point for your oda's mission, right when you
got to do we were done. And you know, other areas were faster,
other some areas were not. There were more squirmishes, and then as
time came down and more of the IPB, the intel preparation of the battlefield
was done more teams were going in because I think by the time we had
stopped populating the country, we have probably had forty five odas through Wow wow
significant. Really yeah, it was probably the largest in quite a while,
not ever, and we were postured for success. And how was I mean,
with that many odas or even the build up to that many odas over
that time, how are the logistics and support for you guys from the American
side, Just like an SF is supposed to be, you're going to have
an SFO be, you're gonna have aob's And everything comes down to log points,
log points, turned up, distribution points, distributions to teams. So
you guys didn't outrun yourhibbites because because you were advancing so quickly. No,
no, because it really it wasn't. You weren't advancing. You were just
pushing out. We had the nodes, so we had Bogram, Massari,
Sharif, Harat and Condahar, and then you just started pushing out. Interesting
and then you know the guys that went into Bamian, which was into the
mountains the other direction from Bogram, and then Condus and Gardez and all those
other Jalalabad and Jacoba Bad and all those other you just started populating out,
So yeah, it you just you've never outran it. But you also did
a lot of local procurement too, all your rice and your goats and you
know water. Almost all those places have some type of natural water source.
So they don't live there. You know, they don't have a phoenix,
right, there's no river there. They don't put people there. So you
know it it was pretty good. I mean, we we did it good.
I mean, what did that feel like when you guys got down.
Because there is that picture that of Triple Nickel that, at least in my
mind, it's fairly famous. If it's not famous to everyone watching of you
guys standing in front of the embassy, the American embassy in Kabol, it's
just another team picture. You know. There there were caretakers. I still
have some of the business cards at the end that the ambassador left. You
know, I still got a stationary. It's just kind of surreal, you
know it. There are certain areas the initial push scared the crap out of
the Taliban and they ran. There were fights. There were firefights, you
know, and there are some teams that got into hell of firefight. But
then there's some teams that just didn't you know, so the initial collapse was
a false success. Is it accurate to say that for your team, most
of the action was calling in casts and acting as a coordinator for the Northern
Alliance. Yeah, I mean they the guys did the fights going down,
but it wasn't it wasn't trench warfare. Sure, and you know, the
guys did great, all of them did. From the warrant the team started
and all that. You know, they did what they were supposed to do,
you know, but then idle minds in the city and it's not so
good. And how long were you guys down in a couple before they finally
said, like okay, Triple nickels out, like you've you've done enough,
you did your mission. Well, I got pulled back up to BOGRAM and
we're Major. Nero was the AOB and then started working with Task Force Bowie
when General Harrold came in, which was part of Anaconda, and then the
team went back to K two and then the first it's either the third or
the thirteenth of January. First group guy was killed. He was an eighteen
ECHOCAMMO sertant that was supporting another agency and he was talking about Chapman. Yeah,
yeah, yeah, he was killed by I wouldn't say it's an air
and bullet, but ambushed and was shot and instantly killed, and they needed
somebody to outrank him and escort his body back. And so I was told,
grab your stuff, you're going now. So we left Bogram, went
to K two. I had to shave, get a haircut, take a
shower, change clothes, and then we went to Onstool and there I met
his team startant and passed him on that way, and then I went back.
But I went to K two and I did land Dee confliction because we
had so many problems with ground verification, air and ground verification stuff like that.
That's what I now. Now it's getting so built up. I mean,
everyone wants to get in on the war, right. Well, okay,
so when I left Bogram Air Base there was one hundred and thirty five
people there. I think at its height there was fifteen thousand, twenty thousand.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so it's a little different. Yeah.
So getting back to the United States, I mean it sounds like you didn't
really have a whole lot of time to process what you had just been through
before you get sucked into the next adventure. We got back, everybody just
kind of went on leave. You know, you did your sensitive items accountability
all that. Everybody went on leave, and then all the people started coming
back. Major Nero came back and he said, hey, you know,
do you want to stay on five to five? Do you want to go
back to five one? And I wanted to go back to five one because
those were my original guys. Those were the team startant that I wanted to
work with, and we were going to get plussed ups. We got plused
up too, like eleven with new guys out of brag, out of the
Q course. Well, we got a little bit of leave and then we
started needing to do desert train up. So we packed up our humbies and
we went to El Paso, Texas to practice how to suck right right the
hide sights and everything else. And we really we knew vaguely what our missions
were, like, hey, you're going to do a reconnaissance, and you
know pretty much that's what everybody was going to do. Some former reconnaissance didn't
know how you were going to infiltrate, didn't know how you were going to
put eyes on target. It wasn't until October November that I actually got the
first inkling of our mission. So were they already took because Iraq was March
of two thousand and three, When did you first like get what are you
two thousand and two? Yeah? So are you prepping for Iraq? Or
do you think you're going back to Afghanistan? Now we know we're going to
Iraq? Okay, so you're already prepping for it. Okay, we are
prepping and figuring out stuff everything from you know, how to do vehicle self
recovery, the new vehicles they have just come out with, the GMVS,
which is the ambulance frame heftier hydraulic winch. You know, when it's empty,
it bounces around like a dune buggy and when it gets about ten thousand
pounds it is an awesome maneuver vehicle. So yeah, we know we're going
and we just don't know what and nobody knows what. And what's funny is
now coming back from Afghanistan all the new team leaders or guys that I went
through the Q course with because I didn't take you have to go to language
school. I went to Afghanistan. So now they're all talking about how they
lost you know, I missed out in the war, and I said,
you got it coming, yeah, and they did. So we prepped for
Iraq. Like I said, we all went out to Al Paso, did
all the desert train up, trying to figure out that self recovery, putting
in you know, logistics requests, and then just waiting for the At what
time did you guys receive you know, an oper order to conduct a strategic
reconnaissance mission. I think it was October November. I actually got that I
was going to do. My team was going to do a special reconnaissance in
the Carbalala Gap. And the reason why the third ID was going to either
have to go through that little narrow piece of land between the bar Ala Mill
Sea assault there's a lake and the eight Fields in the Euphrates River, or
they're gonna have to go all the way around. So they want somebody in
there to figure out what's in there, identify up to the last minute,
and they say it's gonna take third I D maximum of three days. So
you've got to get in there before the war starts because they're going to be
right there. Which if you studied desert storm, you knew that wasn't gonna
happen. And having gone to the Officer Advanced Course, knowing tanks and logistics,
you knew it wasn't gonna happen. I'll tell you all this stuff just
plays right into a story. It just just just out of curiosity before we
move on in Iraq, because you mentioned all these new captains showing up saying
we missed Afghanistan, like we missed the war, and you know, now
you're prepping for Iraq, but in your mind, like knowing what the key
tasks of the Afghan mission were and then you know, knowing how how fast
you guys got there, what had happened? Did you have like how long
did you expect us at that point in time to stay in Afghanistan when we're
in that kis it no idea? I mean I thought I had. I
had one vision that they were going to say, find a safe house.
You're going to be here for a couple of years until you build out till
you do what ended up being VSL Village Stability operation, right, building your
tribe, making sure everything sell safe, powers it being like yep, okay,
we're good. I was home by Memorial Day. Well, What I
mean though, is like, how like the war effort was very successful?
From you guys, did you expect the large conventional follow on? Did you
expect to be there for the next twenty years or did you expect that it
would be over shortly after you left? Well, the thing you find out,
and I'm sure you guys are saying, what what happens in your bubble
is all you know. And over time you start hearing more and more stories
and like why did this happen? Why did that? And one of the
greatest statements I've heard and I use is we weren't in Afghanistan for twenty years.
We were in Afghanistan one year at a time twenty times. Right,
Yeah, Because when I listen to stories of everybody, it is the same
thing. Every time. We don't hear the histories. We don't know what
it'sh We didn't put we didn't take that team and put them right back into
gardas every single time. We didn't just rotate two guys out at a time
keeping that team in our gard deak. So you're building that tribe's trust and
just keep it going. Nope, new team leader, new team, start,
new team, this new civil affairs team. You know it just yeah,
we know it wasn't the right way. It's interesting, so let's walk
us through the infiltration piece for oif so take it as you know again,
the advanced course is at Fort Knox. I'm figuring out how the tanks are
gonna go through? How am I? First of all? How am I
gonna get there? Right? And nobody can tell me? Am I going?
You know? Am I doing a C one thirty? I'm gonna do
AirLand and a dust landing? And then I remember back when I was in
the one sixty, the Air Force doesn't do that. They say that a
C five and a C seventeen can do dust landings, and see when thirties
they won't. So I'm like, okay, that's out. So am I
gonna go on a rat line? Am I gonna dress up like a bedolin?
I stopped? They said no beards, but I start growing my navy's
my Navy seal mustache. I mean, I'm like from the seventies. I'm
all the way down here. I'm not cutting my hair, and I'm getting
harassed by Sar Major and I go, Sar Major, do you know how
I'm getting infield? He's like, no, I go. I can cut
my hair, but I can't grow it right. My guys are going to
do the same thing because you don't know. So I don't know whether I'm
going to ratline. I don't know whether I'm going on camels, horses,
goats, or by foot. And so we're just prepping and I know that
here's where I'm gonna hide, and I want to go there about midnight.
So I'm going to go this far back and put my remain over day sight
and then do sequencing all the way back until I can infiltrate far enough away.
So I started planning that and it was funny. One of the one
of the guys I don't want to sink to, this guy was talking about
the software. It's called falcon View. It's open sources how Georgia Tech.
It is an unbelievable planning software. I planned my infiltration route while I was
on staff duty from a laptop I took from the S two shop that I
had purchased when I was the mid commander. And I am literally going through
that on a zach Sport, just going through trying to figure out all the
layers in how to do an infiltration and figuring out where the number, you
know, main lines of communication, staying away from the main lines of communication.
Where are the waddies, Where are the river beds? Where are the
sources of water that I've got to avoid? Where are the you know,
look at because there are there's a certain image that you can see where cattle
or some type of animal has probably walked for the last thousand years, not
ten thousand years. This is Mesopotamia. Your Garden of Eden's right over here,
you know, so you could see where these things walk. So you're
gonna have to avoid those. So I'm going through all that stuff. And
finally, so I don't know whether I'm taking Toyota Tacoma's in. You know,
we talked to Toyota and like, hey, if we take all the
doors or like, don't take all the doors off because you lose the integrity
of the cabin. You gotta keep at least two doors on. Because they
said, I'm like okay, And then you know, or Toyota high Loucks.
Am I getting fifty threes a water fifty three? I can't take any
of this stuff. If I canna take that stuff and I get a forty
seven I could put anything on there, you know, see one thirty,
I can put even more stuff on. So we are just going through all
the possibilities. And while we were in isolation in Kuwait, that's what we're
going through. And I remember being told like, Okay, hey, we
got the orders, you're going and I go up to the S three shop
and that's when General Granger whatever briefs about where he'd put an SF team.
Yeah, third id's gonna have to go right here, and he puts his
finger right exactly my reconsite, I'd put an SF team right here. He's
on CNN, CNN the night before I'm going in, Thank you very much.
Yeah, I'm like whatever. But yeah, So they're like, hey,
you're gonna take a C one thirty over to this point. You're gonna
link up with third time one sixtieth. Who's the commander, Bob Welch.
Bob Welch is a brother of another guy, another Welch, a great friend
of mine, the Estuary in arpetime when I was the too, And so
we're gonna grab the forty sevens. Then we're going down to our R to
refuel, and then we're gonna punch in and Uh, so yeah, we
land. I go talk to Colonel Welch and I've been to his wedding,
So again it starts clicking and and we start doing all the planning, and
I find the flight lead and we're trying to figure it out, you know,
and I got to do your what's called the helicopter factor. If you
need three, you play, you make four because something's gonna happen. It
did. We were so heavy, every single one of our humbies was fourteen
thousand pounds. Wow. And they had done some maneuver and broke a landing
gear, so they had the one of the teams had one of one of
my vehicles had to come off that beat off that helicopter and go on another
one. And we went down into our r to do the refueling. And
that's when we were you know that point in top Gun Maverick where those tea
lambs are going Hu. We were flying under that under the Tomahawk Cruiseman under
the Tomahawk. I mean, if I saw that movie, that would have
been exactly what I saw. I could see those under my nods wow.
And sitting on the tailgate of a forty seven like several hundred of them going
overhead. Yeah, that's fucking insane. It's amazing. Yeah, and and
it's actually one of the creuchies that I knew from before. The whole thing
was just you know, you're like, this is awesome sharing that moment.
Yeah. So just to lay out sort of like the the table of organization
and equipment a little bit, So twelve and ODA going behind enemy lines to
do this, and fifty miles behind enemy lines and you have what three is
it? Three gun trucks taking how many birds over the border? Three?
So? Uh three plus two DAPs okay, okay, And I don't know
if the little birds clear cleared the trenches first or they did, but you
heard a lot of fun. Yeah yeah, but yeah. So the DAPs
were leading and we flew in and by the way it worked out, we
were just going to do one remain over day sight and so they got us
up and they let us go. One of the DAPs said they saw enemy
four hundred meters this direction. And I never heard anything anymore. You did
it to me again, because they did that in Afghanistan. Oh you got
an enemy over here. Anyway, We went down to just like in Raidar
school, you conduct seals. They sit around, hear nothing, see nothing,
smell nothing. All right, let's go start them up and let's go.
And so we started moving over to the remain over day sight and everything
in the desert looks like the enemy. Yeah, contact three o'clock. Like,
okay, it's not contact unless they're shooting, right, you can say
the enemy. Let's just say the enemy. Just say let's not they contact
unless they're shooting. Because we were a pucker factor for the time. There
is because they don't know who you're going to run into, and there was
no way anybody was going to save us. Yeah. Did you guys have
any any air stacked at the time or were you you know, because everything
was going on at that time. You've got the border crossing way down south.
I know they're doing some attack runs. The tomahawks just hit. Yeah,
and that's always preparatory strike. So you got infiltrated the same night that
they were pushing across the BERM. I honestly don't remember, Yeah, but
I know it's the same night as as the shock and all. Yeah,
it must have been right right around there, right around a couple of days
before, right around so that first night you guys maneuver your vehicles, you
get to your first run site, we go to remain over day sight.
It is basically a depression and there's a picture in your book, right,
yeah, yeah, there's a depression. And if you walk out there,
the only thing you could see is if a guy was standing up out of
the turret, which was perfect. We're re main over day sight, and
I've got deja vu, just like Colonel o' connor, my Batian command at
the time, was a team waiter did an SR mission during desert storm,
okay, and they were the ones that had the Bedouins, And I popped
my head up, all right, Actually I don't. Shane, the one
of my bravos, says, we got people. Now, they're far enough
with they're about a half mile away. But they're also up wind, so
we're not down wind, so they're not they've got a dog, they're not
gonna smell us and everything else. So we're up wind, which was very
blessed, and we just I was just keep an eye out for him.
So we wait till it's dark again, and we start rolling up all the
Camo and we started to reduce seals again and we start them all up and
we take off for the gap and how about how long do you think that
it took that second night? Forever? Yeah, because in your book,
I mean you're worrying that the sun's coming up right well for the rate over
day side? Where were in the sun's coming up? Was that one?
But one of the one of the trucks got stuck and behind us are headlights.
Somebody is following us, whether they heard it, they saw the tire
marks or whatever, somebody has heard us. So I've got the rear gun,
you know, focused on them, and we're figuring out how to pull
them out. Remember I told you we have hydraulic winches. When the engine
overheats, the hydraulic winch shuts down. That wasn't after action review, right,
no hydraulic winches. So what we ended up doing was turning a truck
around using a hydraulic wrench from a working vehicle and pulled them out and then
they were able to pull and then we just kept on moving, you know,
grout into Parker factor and everything else. But yeah, hydraulic winch overheating
engine not good. It's tough for those desert devironments like Afghanistan and Iraq also
because you know, here in the States, it would be rare, like
we have roads everywhere, right, and people drive on those roads, where
in these other countries it's not uncommon for civilians to like drive across a non
road area or whatever else, like out in a rural area. So it's
very hard sometimes to identify, like if people are out there just doing a
river crossing because it's the quickest way between villages, you know, or if
it's a military element that's that's like following you or looking for you or whatever
else. But you have so as a former rest too, you always think
like the enemy, Yeah, where are they, where are they moving?
Who are your threats? And a lot of times it's just you've got bedo
wins everywhere. Yeah. So then you're looking for animal tracks, yeah,
water sources, shade the date, palm forest and stuff like that. So
you're trying. You can't avoid everything, right, but you can bypass,
right. You can't doggleg a lot of things, and that's what we did.
So it wasn't so one of the reasons it took you so long,
not just because the truck got stuffed, but because you're you're not just going
from A to B. You're making this. We are on the very secuitiest
route. Yeah, I mean I think it was fifty four points in the
E t rex. I put in wow, because I wanted to avoid all
of that stuff. You don't need any high ground, which is where they're
gonna be lazy and they're gonna sit up on right and whether they've got their
thia phones and it's just a bedo win. He's like, hey, I
want my one hundred DNR. I just saw a truck come by at one
am. You know, so you're avoiding all of that stuff, So tell
us about maneuvering the V into your L P O P Like it sounds like
you actually identified a pretty effective place again by luck. By luck. It
so a couple of funny things when you're when you're doing translations and having been
a former linguist. The gap we were told is heavily mind. Well,
when you're a defensive guy, that means they're putting land mines everywhere. What
we later find out it was heavily mind for gypsum. Okay, right,
great, right, and it's an old gypsum mind so now it's an artillery
impact area. So yeah, so I had seen the divits, I'd seen
the depressions and everything else. I'm like, Okay, that's probably a place
we're gonna play. We're gonna avoid this power plant, cement plant. Over
here. There's this road on the southern edge that in satellite imagery looks like
an oil trench. These guys at US analysts, I don't know. Oh,
they filled it with oil? What are you talking about? This isn't
This isn't nineteen ninety, this is two thousand. They're not filling this with
oil, right, It's just an absorb bo. We find out it was
an asphalt road. I'm like, how do you I mean, it looks
like a radio imagery. It looks like oil because that's what asphalt is made
of. But I'm like, how do you miss all the construction equipment that
it took to make this road. So anyway, we come across the road,
we get down and it's a great heide sight. I mean it is.
We got down in the river and we did a hard turn. Chris
found it and walked in and I mean it is probably ten to fifteen feet
taller than the vehicles, and we can come in and we can get all
three in a kind of a chicken foot pattern. We've got perfect camouflage.
We've got those camouflage, and we just start putting up We do our little
perimeter, you know, ranger ranger base operations, and you know, just
start putting up eyes on and try and watching the road that goes up the
south, watching the road that goes from east to west, and just looking.
Did you guys like dig spider holes or do hide sites? You didn't
have to where we were at. We we we started pushing out patrols at
night. The problem is we didn't want to get too separated because we're just
in the midle of and I and I had the same faith and enough get
or I racked that I had in Afghanistan that we weren't going to get casts
for thirty five to forty minutes. That's a long time to be shot,
right, and I don't I wasn't going through that again. And because all
the all the vehicles were in defilaid, we couldn't even use a vehicle to
help, right, you know, the win the walls were like this,
right, So yeah, it was on your belly, crawling up at night
and then just looking and then you know, after what day four is when
the SMaL hit just to Lynch Era. You know that big We've talked about
it here a few times. Yeah, yeah, we you know, we
were in full mask and everything else and just it we were Christmas dust cookies.
Yeah, we were covering the guns, just trying to survive. I've
got Oakley's with pits in them, yeah, from the pit from the sand.
And there were a few other like well maybe in retrospect they're funny.
There's some problems with the FBCB two. So yeah, the Blue Force tracker.
So because we're in the death Laide and the takeoff angle just go to
the end. The takeoff angle is like at nine degrees or ten degrees.
So that first night we wait, you know, we're sending in our ANGUS
report. We come back up, they're like, hey, we've been trying
to call you is like, dude, we're right here. They're like,
we thought you were dead because nobody can see a Blue Force tracker. So
we had to dismount one and stick it up there because again we were so
low. And from then we were getting calls from that attack helicopter regiment that
came through British tornadoes and everybody else saying hey, what are you doing down
there? Or Ktack is talking to everybody. We said Blue Force tracker.
We thought it was something weird, you know, anybody was up here and
I was talking And that's also when third I D was slowed due to the
dust storm. That's what I got word afterwards that President Bush and Rumsfeld kept
asking They're like, hey, how's that team, and Sentcom is like,
the only good thing that was happening was there was an s F team out
in the middle of nowhere and it's still blinking. It's scary that these that
these air units they were passing by you and saying that they didn't know anybody
was up there because it's just from that Blue Force tracker. But the thing
is they don't have Blue Force and Stinky had his I f F, but
he has to be transmit when it's on. It were to turn it on
because those things don't have batteries for ten days and our three day mission ended
up being nine and a half days. And then the other uh, you
know, maybe humorous only in retrospect is the batteries and the vehicles dying.
So yeah, that so, because you're so far from in front of everybody
and diesel engines are not quiet. We didn't run them. We also weren't
run We were only running one radio and it was a man pack. But
there's a trickle drain on your hum bees and they were dead. When it
time time to come, it was like click click and you know that,
you know that sound car click click click click. I'm like, okay,
what are we gonna do? And for some reason, when I left the
house of Fort Campbell, I grabbed a spool of wire and we started doing
everything in parallel and syria of all the vehicles together. Daisy chained them together,
Easy chained together and started that one and then moved it over the second
one, started that one, moved over the third one. Because you don't
have jumper cables, you have slave cables. There's another aar comment, you
can't jump something like that if you don't have jumper cables. Yeah. So,
yeah, you were out there flapping. That's why the Immaculate mission is
what it's called in John Gresham's book Beyond Helen Back, so it's in there.
It's like that I don't know the five, six or seven greatest s
F missions, And that's why they say he goes. If it wasn't for
that, you had the greatest mission ever. I go, it was still
a good mission, right, Yeah, we screwed up on the radios,
but it was still a good mission. But you were still able to self
recover though, like you didn't like you didn't have to blow the vehicles in
place and hump it out because you couldn't get we were going to do that.
Yeah, the next couple of days we went from bad to worse.
Yeah, So and then tell us about you know when third ID final does
push up to your location, how your mission starts to change. So you
know you have to do a passage of lines somehow, And I knew that
I wasn't going to go with all these young privates driving these fifty four ton
tanks coming forward and got gunners and everything else, I am not popping my
head out going we're here, So we're gonna do a passage of lines by
bypass, we're gonna stay underground. Well, we're gonna move from where we're
at farther south. We're going to stay underground, and then once the lead
element gets passed, they're gonna stop, and then we're going to do in
ISLID laser in the and rope them in. So we did that. We
got there early, ended up going through a minefield, which we didn't realize.
Real mindfield. Yeah, yeah, a real minefield. In fact,
Chris the Fox actually walked us through it. Yeah. And so we got
there early. All the engines were cold and they couldn't see us on thermals.
I go, because we're definitely, I said, just look for the
islid and they saw it, and then they moved and brought up a scout
section and we briefed the lead company commander, then the lead battalion commander,
the lead brigade commander right now all over this where we had identified the minefields
that we saw, and I told him, I go, this is what
we've seen. There may be others. Just because I'm not writing it doesn't
mean because I'm not putting that on myself. I'm not gonna say, hey,
you know you said there were no minefields. No, I said,
I didn't see one. So they went through pretty successful. They actually were
able to plow those minefields through, and they went through the dam and you
know the way to Bagdad. Did they have dozer like construction dozers. They
had dozers, but it was really for talk. Stuff they had with the
tanks. They had the the mind clearing plows and rollers and chains and I
mean all the stuff you've ever seen in conventional They had all that stuff.
But the dozers were mainly just to dig burns around talks. How were you
guys able to identify the minefields? What were the tell tell signatures? On
the way in, we just drove the luck of God is what that was.
And on the way out you just saw them. Now, the hasty
ones. So what would they just did hasty? I mean you saw foreign
military minds is what. I will just leave it at that. All those
all those countries that signed them, we're not going to use minds, or
they traded them for oil. They were all over the place and literally just
sat there on roads, some semi buried in the dirt, tickle sticks up
top, all over the place. Rarely did we see any except on our
x fiel that actually buried. And then after you got reintegrated back in with
American forces, you're no longer behind enemy lines. It sounded like there's a
lot of frustration on your part. It's like it's like, what's my next
mission? What am I supposed to be doing. So yeah, it I
mean, we're not even in a fog of war. We're just we're back
into chaos. That's why, that's why I had to put this in the
book. You know, Linda Robinson wrote the book Masters of Kings. I'm
just a disciple of chaos. It's just crazy. Yeah, we were.
So we'd been around Carbala for so long, and third I D had basically
did a blocking position, and then we found out the hundred and first was
to do a relief in place. But the brigade commander Third I D has
no idea what's going on. So I'm calling and you know, fifth groups
like hey, go talk to the hundred first. I'm like, well,
you know, you want to look up the CEO I or anything the phone
book, and I can't find anybody. So literally we bounce around the next
three days trying to find him, and nobody knows or nobody's gonna tell us,
you know, when the brigade talk and then the division tack, and
then the division talk, which is like four circus tents, you know,
and you know, I got colonels going, well who are you? I'm
like, well, I'm the team leader. I've been here for two weeks,
you know, I'm just trying to help, and we couldn't figure it
out. And then went back up and when I was talking to the brigade
commander, that's when the hundred and first did their assault inside. And then
that was the Battle of Karbala. And is I'm trying to recall from the
book, it sounded like you guys ended up inside one of the cities,
right. So yeah, after the clearing the surrender of all the people,
the fighters in Carbala, we actually went into the city and that was when
they said, okay, you need to basically start up the city, figure
out who the government is, start them up, figure out who the mayor
is. Excuse me, vetom, figure out get it standing up, because
you're not leaving until they can stand on their own. So we went in
saw this one area, double walled compound, ended up being Carbala University.
Pulled in there. They were waving us down, and we went in and
talked to them and we're figuring out what while they were waving us because they
were getting looted. People were coming in breaking stuff, stealing computers and they're
like, will you stay here, So you know, Alex Team Sart and
I we were talking about it and it's like, hey, it's a double
walled compound. We just got to figure out how to defend it because we've
still got to do green bray stuff, you know. And the Bravos did
great setting it up. Got a couple of the local families to live.
There were huts in each of the Cardinal direction corners. So the payment for
them was, hey, we'll give you enough money for food. You tell
us what's going on, and you fire your gun. If anybody comes over
the wall, don't shoot them, just fire the gun and then we'll come
run. And then we started working with the school and then the conventional forces
as they came through, trying because you know, eleven s F guys can
either defend themselves or they can do operations. You can't do both, right,
So that's when as teams were going, units were coming through. We
had eighty second, we had the Marines, we had you know, brigades
and batons were coming through. In exchange for you know, getting them chicken
dinners or having a place for them to sleep in a protected area, they
would pull security for us. So we did that for probably the next three
months, Wow, standing up figuring, you know, vetting, you know,
because again at the beginning, you had the DA had somebody who should
be in charge of uh Carbala and the State Department had an idea we should
be in charge of Carbama and the Department of Defense. And I'm like,
okay, how about the locals? Right, So that's when we start vetting
and you know, side usef and so a little bit of Lawrence of Arabia
here. It was crazy. And how were there multiple like families uh vying
for influence? Like how are you figuring? How are you navigating the social
situation to set up the next Carballer government? You know the way they do
your security clearance? You pick your friends, right then they go talk to
your friends and who is his friends? You don't go talk to them,
You talked to the third the third ring. Right, that's the way you
do it. That's the way we would start doing it. And like,
hey, do you know this guy? No, I don't know him.
Well he says he's the mayor, he's not the mayor or. I don't
know who the mayor was. There's some people that just didn't know, right,
you know. And then you know you had restaurant owners and this,
and people had agendas and like that, and you just had to still,
you know, you had to filter through it and figure out I mean,
and what we kept found with side you sef was he was basically I think
it was like the assistant mayor. Nobody knows what happened to the mayor,
but everybody liked him. And then you know, the police chief, well
they didn't like the police chief. Well everybody doesn't know where he went either,
but this guy should be the police chief. And then we then we
would go ask other people. Then we'd ask how you do said for like,
okay, we think this is police chief, Like, well I don't
like him, would he be a good police chief? And he's like yes,
okay, okay, then he's a police chief. I don't care if
you like him. We're not doing this game again, you know, And
like I did in Afghanistan, it's like it's like yeah, it's like uh,
you know, high school student government or something like that. Everybody's your
friend and then if he's not your friend, then he's you know, a
Baptist party, Like no, just stop. You know, it's like modern
day swat you know, swatting is what people are doing. I don't like
Jack, We're gonna swat his house and like, oh my god, there's
a lady screaming she's gonna die. You know, No, that's what they
were doing. We're doing it all the time. So yeah, for the
next ninety days, were you just trying to figure out and let them stand
their own government up? And you know, And I got a hold of
Major Nero or Major Loanan actually this is now Major Loanan, the new company
commander. What was our exit criteria? Well he was in Afghanistan. He's
like, I don't know what you're talking about. Well, Major Niro again,
my company commander twice is now the Battalions three. So I'm like,
hey, what's the exit criteria? Right? He goes, you need to
do an area assessment and with all the hierarchy, who's in charge, where
they are pictures of everybody and everything else. And I go done deal as
a civil affairs team had just arrived from nineteenth Group and so they were doing
it and I said, okay, I get to leave when we've done all
this stuff. So I have about seven megabytes and at the time that's a
lot of information. He goes, I got five. I go, you
get to seven and we'll trade and I can leave. How long are you
here? He goes, I'm here for twelve months. I go, okay,
I had all the hierarchy, he had all the area assessment stuff.
We started sending it back and it was just shutting down the PSC five and
some major neros like I trust you come on back, and we were balls
in the walls leaving while Fourth ID was coming up Pipeline Road because remember they
had come through Turkey, were denied, so they had come all the way
around. But uh yeah, it just you know, just buy the sea
of your pants. You're standing stuff up, just by the book and then
heading back home and then heading back home. And then so when I went
back home, that was my twenty sixth month as an ODA team leader,
which is a lot of Team two combat tours, which is pretty lucky.
So they made me the battalion S four for about six months had a battalion
budget of five hundred thousand dollars and I spent one point two million because it
was g Watt funding and they didn't say no. And that that's when I
started campaigning because I want a Delta company. And when I was in tenth
group as a support you know, support guy. You're under Delta Company,
and I wanted that position. And it was a little controversial for a long
taber to take the support company, right, not as not as team leader,
or I shouldn't say not as an eighteen series, not for fifth group.
It always been. In fact, the first Sardan had always been a
long time really because there aren't many first positions for an eighteen series. Yeah,
okay, so I campaigned pretty hard and you know, very thankful.
Colonel Connor said, yeah, so I got to take that, and I
was supposed to. He said you need to pick your first Sarden, you
know, And I was talking a bunch of eighteen series and I'm like,
you know, and this was the controversial part of it. I got it
backwards. Rocky Sorder was an A ninety eight. Him and I were roommates
in Bannock in nineteen ninety. He was a ninety eight golf Arabic. He's
a fat redneck from Utah and he's fluent in Arabic fluent later on to go
work for other agencies, making big Bucks fluent. He was also a former
eleven Charlie Mortarman and I knew him. And what better first started to have
in a support company than a support guy and Perry Bear group. Sar Major
called me up and he goes, got a question about your first Sarten.
I go, okay, he goes, that's normally an eighteen series. I
go, I got it, Sar Major, we're going to war and he's
a fluent Arabic speaker and he's a former eighteen Charlie, and I need these
guys to know to trust him. He goes, okay, didn't bad.
And I and we trained them up and put them through nine to mili M
four two four, nine to forty fifty cow because they're the ones that ran
the convoys, right, you know, and you know the previous battalion had
a problem and they had an actual discharge and they took the guns away from
the soldiers for the support guys in combat. Wow. I don't know if
you can even legally do that. I don't know. So they were were
they running con were they running convoys with no without weapons? Now they gave
them the weapons, okay, yeah, so they went to what they do
weapons. But see they never did life fire test fires. They didn't have
straight SOPs they had a couple of things and I'm just like, no,
you. So I had my support team leader was a former Marine came in
as now a logistics guy, so he's a support platoon leader. And I
had a guy as an eighteen echo was in between teams, and I said,
you guys are the conboy commanders. You're the NCO. You're the officer
every convoy that goes out, you go out. Anybody that comes on your
conboy, you're the conmot commander. I don't care whether it's me. I'm
now a major. I don't care where it's the colonel. I don't care
if the general officer. You're the convoy commander. Like Sarah can't do that'
Like no, you have to. You know the SOPs, you know the
calls, you know the combat, you know what everybody's gonna do. You
know who to call, you know the call signs, you know the frequencies.
You're gonna do it. Every single time. You will do a pre
brief, you will do a life fire weapons check, and you'll do an
AAR and you'll recover the vehicles getting ready to do a convoy for the next
day. Every single time. And I still have the logs. In fact
that we've used the logs because a couple guys later on we're running the Combat
Action badge. But yeah, I still have the logs, every single one
of them. How many convoys did they run during that deployment? They did
seventy three, Wow, fifty four contacts doing fifty four context. That's incredible.
That's crazy running all the logistics to different Fifth Group teams around Iraq,
not just Fifth Group down in the Green Zone. Two. Oh yeah,
we you know, I remember a couple of them because when I went,
I was a fifty cal gutner Major Smith the battalion XO fifty cal gutner when
he went, because that was the most casually producing weapon. But it's also
a lot of the support guys didn't get to that level, right, you
know, I saw an eighteen Bravo a weapon sardant have a misfire on fifty
cal at the enemy because he didn't double charge it. You know, you
got a double charge, he didn't a chunk, so like no, so
yeah, that's probably the most senior ranking gunner in all of the convents.
But like I remember one of them cause we were going, uh April Uprising
two thousand and four. Sorry, Major Stack had not gotten killed yet.
We were going to Taji No, not Taji Ramadi, and Fallujah. We
had putting the team on the other side four to two, and the enemy
had basically cut off their power and they're like, oh, we need power,
Like okay, So we got two forty kW generators. Put'em on
a semi, put their water, their food, and everything else in that
semi, and we're going loaded for bear. So we put that. By
this time, we have double armed most of the hum vs. The picture
on the banner that is a kevlar seat because we started putting kevlar seats in
the humbies. That is actually a kevlar seat mounted on a pod. And
that is a two forty golf on the front. And I'm in back.
So I've got a turret with a fifty col gunner and i got a two
forty. We've taken one inch plywood and draped kevlar blankets, so I've got
some protection in the front and I've got my seat in the back, and
we're going to Fallujah. And both directions were in firefights, Mad Max,
Yeah, just because they are, you know, just like Jay was talking
about they were back from the windows shooting. You could they were actually the
second the second buildings. Yeah, and you know, a'm small beast small
yeah, yeah, yeah. It's it's when they're doing stuff like that,
it's so hard to identify first off, where the fires come from, and
then and then to engage them back because you don't Well, it's funny because
when we pulled up there, the Marines had the highway blocked because it's a
it's an elevated highway around the east and the north side. So you're at
the second floor level. They're like, hey, nobody's going, you know,
and Lieutenant Shilling is like, ay, sir, they're not letting us
go. I go send them back to me. How you doing, I'm
major running and we're going, sure, why are you not the conboy commander
long story the tennis, Shilling is and we're going, okay, And we
did and you know, unloaded it, got them all their stuff and made
it back and it was like driving NASCAR because that semi was going as fast
as it could and we had a tire on the back of the lead hum
V so he would just bumping. It's like, keep going, keep going.
We had two insides and one back, one in front, two insides
unning back just to protect it, just running and gunning. Yeah. It
sounds like some post apocalyptic Yeah it is. It's mad Max. Yeah,
but the thing and I and I at it and a smile about it.
And I've got the pictures and I still talk to the guys as much as
I can. It all worked out, that's the thing. Yeah, Like
I said before, you know, before the podcast, I'm the luckiest commander
ever to go through Special Forces because I have never issued a pr part.
Yeah, yeah, to you were in the thick of it three times at
least. Yeah. I shot more of the enemy by a direct fire weapon
as a major than I did as a captain on a Special Forces team.
Yeah. Those I mean, I think to give perspective for the people who
may not know, convoys were really the most dangerous sitting ducks, you know,
because you Yeah, the thing was, you know, strat Com Strategic
Command put out a great plotter chart. So it's got twenty four hours in
it, and then it's got all the all the contacts and what type of
contacts and everything else. And when you're going down to Route Tampa and there
are I ed every single morning between seven thirty and eight o'clock. Guess what,
don't go there between seven thirty and eight o'clock. Let everybody else and
I feel sorry for him. Let everybody else absorb all the IEDs. Don't
have to be me, you know. I remember Sar Major asking, He's
like, how can you guys aren't believing? The first thing in the morning,
I go Sar Maia and I told him. He goes okay. But
the other thing was, you get stuck some place at night, stop and
you stay there. You always prepare for overnights because we had we had an
incident. We had a I don't remember what it was. We had a
up at the battalion. We were at the Rod Winnie Palace complex palace on
the hill southwest of Buyout Btyne. Had a bunch of all the company commanders
up and Sar Majors and they were going back down the hill and they got
ambush and that's when Sar Major Stack was killed, you know, ambushed and
in a firefight for their life because with nighttime and just you know that AOB
team put up a hell of a fight. You know. They asked us
to QRF for him by the time we got organized, we were ready,
but you know, the Marines came in and rescued them and towed them in,
and you know, I was just like just happenstance. So tell us
about, you know, coming home and kind of getting into retirement, because
you've already had your your whole listed career OCS, so you were a fairly
a fairly salty major seasoned, well seasoned, while I was actually by the
end, I was older than my battalion commander. But you know, it
was what it was, so I started looking at it. What else was
left? You know, battalions three, battalion command six years away. My
wife at the time and I grew up in the same house until we went
to college. You know, she lived over here. You know, I
was in the same house. I walked to grade school, I walked to
middle school. I walked and I came back to the same house for eighteen
years. My son, when he was fifteen, had moved seven times,
and now they're in high school. I think my oldest was a sophomore.
My daughter was gonna be a freshman. My youngest was like nine, and
that just wasn't fair because I and I talked to my branch manager, actually
Chris Connor, my former battalion commander, and we were trying to work it.
You can go to eleven Worth for three years, but then you're gonna
have to move. Okay. Then my daughter's gonna have to change high schools.
We can, you know, take you to brag and you can do
this long. Okay. Everybody's gonna have to move during high school and that's
gonna be hard. And I didn't want to do it, so I put
in my packet and I retired. I told Colonel Naylor that I was going
to retire, and he said, will you stay on and be the rear
detachment botanic commander while I'm gone? I go, of course, you know.
So that's what I did, you know, And I supported the unit
from the rear and took care of the beans and bullets and getting new guys
in and then receiving back casualties and you know, doing all that, and
then when they came back, I just saluted and went on coached my son
for the next two years and baseball and I had a great time. Yeah.
So was it at all a difficult transition for you or did you feel
as though you had done what you set out to do, and you were
fine with moving into a mine was delayed problems. I got a divorce afterwards,
which is you know, like about fifty percent of green berets for many
reasons. But I had to now figure out how to manage two households.
So again you start going into processes. So I went overseas and took a
job of contracting two thousand and nine, so it's still towards the end of
gy and where you're making pretty nice money. Did that for a year,
and my daughter was a senior in high school and said, you need to
come home. Didn't want the delay and everything else. And I called the
kids every morning on Skype. I sat outside the USO with my iPod Touch.
Didn't have the iPhones yet, so I'm literally getting on Skype and I
can talk to them. So I would talk to them. I got up
about four thirty in the morning and talked to them, and then went and
worked out and then brand sources and everything else out. Then it worked out
again. But I did that every day for a year. You know,
I think I talked to my son, who was six at the time,
more then than I do now. And I'm overseas. But yeah, and
then then I came back. And then that's where I had to figure out
the transition because then I'm a contractor. I'm working at so Common and figuring
out purpose. And I loved it. I did it for ten years,
almost eleven years, because I got to work with the green suitters, you
know, with the SF guys and with the seals and all that replicating soft
and that helped a lot in the transition because I didn't lose touch. But
I wasn't one of them, you know, so you know, we had
we were good times, and so yeah, the transition was more delayed from
me, you know, and it wasn't so much because I was at so
calm. I still had that touch. Guys that go straight back and don't
have any touch. That's that's hard. And I've talked to guys, you
know, it's like, look, you got to connect somehow, whether you
do Team Rubicon or somebody like that, just do it, you know,
give a quick plug. Do you know Team Rubicon, I've heard of them.
So disaster response to disaster recovery. You sign up, it's free,
you deploy. They pay for everything, whether it's a hurricane or a Tornado.
You can deploy for four days, you can deploy for up to two
weeks. Be careful because as a former SF guy, they're gonna make you
the OPSO, whether it's your first deployment or not. I became the assistant
OPSO on my second on my second day, you know. But it's fun
because you're back with the guys. But that's a way to connect. It's
just a quick plug for them. But it's a great thing because they cover
everything. But you have to stay connected otherwise you're like Jay was saying,
idle hands. Yeah, you don't need idle hands, idle minds, because
it's gonna get it's gonna get crazy. And so I picked up doing Ironman
Triathlons Extreme Triathlons. I did a twenty nine zero twenty nine, which is
a high the level of everest, you know, at Mount Stratton, seventeen
times up a mountain and it rained. It was forty degrees. You know.
Challenge your brains now, right, you know. So that's that's what
I do. You know, this year, I'm going to back off a
little bit. I think I'm only gonna do one iron Man, but I'm
challenge my girlfriend or daughter we're gonna do a fifteen k and then we're doing
Climb for Lungs, Climb for Life. You know, she's a former lung
cancer survivor and you know, non smoker, and so was like, okay,
hey, listen to that. Do things that challenge your brain, do
things that challenge your body, just do something, you know, And how
did the idea of writing a book come to mind? It's my mom's fault.
So my mom passed away in twenty eighteen. But you know, when
I came back from Afghanistan and then Iraq and showed her some of the award
write ups and stuff like that, she was like, you need to write
a book. I mean, yeah, yeah, I know, to write
a book. And like, yeah, I just I didn't think it was
important. I'm still not sure how important it is. But because that's something
my mom wanted me to do, I finally decided, Hey, all right,
I'm gonna write a book. So a friend of mine that I went
to college was actually a fraternity buddy. We were talking and he's like,
hop, you're right, I go dude, I don't know anything about it.
So we talked about it and he kind of just you know, helped
me massage it because you know, some of the paragraphs or chapters are five
pages long, some are twenty two. He goes, just do them by
subject. Don't try to make twenty two page chapters all the way through because
nobody will understand it. So we did it, and you know Amazon's got
the KDP publishing and it's such a great way to put it out there.
You know, sold a couple hundred copies given away a bunch, did something
for a vets group up in Fredericksburg. You know, there's a wonderful lady
that does her version of Salvation Army and I wish I knew the name of
it. I'll have to send it to you later. But she does that
and all the money goes towards local veterans. They her and a couple other
people. They've paid for a house, somebody's mortgage every year, in a
car for somebody every year. Wow. So you know somebody's selling used clothes
that can do that. That's amazing. So we did. I did something.
You know, great friend of mine, Mike Bosco, he is one
of my n c os when I was in the one sixtieth went on to
be the j two over at sock Pack and you know, he wanted to
do it, so we did that thing for him. And so I just
keep doing stuff like that. And like I said the book, it's really
not cathartic or anything. It just it just is because for me, like
I said, I had a great career. You know, I don't have
you know, you have your lulls and your disappointments, but you know,
all in all, it's a great time. And definitely, like you know
one, it's a reflesh of your compid and too it's also just right place,
right time, like you just like nailed it, you know. Yeah.
Do we have a questions for Dan? I believe we have one.
Uh. Actually it's from uh Corman, uh greeting, Uh, thank you
Gorman. Greetings from FOURD Assembly, Chicago. So a hard, hard work,
ethic, humility in the face of one's ego, and humility with one
success. How can we instill these in each other and ourselves going going back
to work? So yeah, he wants to ask how how to instill those?
Well, the thing is you everybody has been taught. You know.
One of the things that when I went through o CS was I had paid
attention to PLDC and then b NOC and OCS. I may Distinguished Military grad
And it wasn't because I studied hard. It's because I had studied when I
went through PLDC, and I studied when I went through BANCH. The Army
has taught you what you should be doing. You have your troop leading procedures.
You know what a great example was when we were in isolation get ready
for Afghanistan. Everybody was floundering for a format, like, what are you
talking about? Right, there's no format that's what you're about to do?
You have no of course there is. You did it in the Q course.
It was ODA zero ninety five or something like that. That's the format.
I had printed out twenty copies of that ODA format for Robin Sage and
was hanging it out and that was our briefing form. And it worked.
Yeah, use what you have. There's no reason to reinvent the wheelright,
you have what you have, You have all the tools, five paragraph operation
work, you go through ranger school, right, that's not silly stuff,
right, you know, use it. I mean when you think about how
many people have made careers out of taking the MDMP or you know, ranger
school, hamdbook or whatever and translate in into civilian to speaking going to corporations.
There's a reason that works. It is solid structure. Yeah, and
that's what always cracks me up. You know it again going back to krolmhlland
no one has done what he has done in probably fifty years. And he
gave me three quarters of a page of paper purpose, key tasks and end
state. Right now you get sixty five pages of crap. Right, you
don't need it. But what you got was very clear, It got the
point across and it was it was all you really needed. That's all you
need. Yeah. We have one other very important question from Alexander Runyon.
Who is your favorite daughter and why Alexandra say Alexandra, Okay, I only
have one. I can't belie she's on there. Okay, but you know
what, you know, it's fun with alex People ask me if my kids
joined the army and no. When Osama bin Laden was killed, she was
the first one to tell me because he made me leave home. Right,
So it affects your kids, yeah, for sure. But I will say
I'm also one of the luckiest dads on earth because all three of my kids
are our college graduates and doing professional work, which is unbelievable. What do
we got for? Uh, all right, we got thanks, Alex,
give me one second shown ass any tricky CESTAR missions you could talk about.
Also, do eighteen Bravos get taught gunsmithing slash improvised firearms like eighteen Charlie's do
improvised explosives. So eighteen Bravos, yes, but it's also a lot of
their own desire to go deeper into it. Yeah, I don't think in
the Bravo course, at least when I went through, they certainly weren't teaching
like improvised weapons like how to make zip guns or say anything like that.
No, you can, you know again, it's it's kind of like when
they you can make your own forty five out of spare parts except for the
lower receiver. Yeah, well you're not supposed to the now. The ce
SAR not really when I was, yes too with the one sixtieth. So
there's a difference between CESAR and pr comment. Search and rescue is what the
conventional units do. The jelly greens, even though they do in flight refueling,
they're not allowed to go past the green zone, you know, they're
not allowed to go where there are going to be SERF Stare missiles. Even
though they have the AC doesn't really make a lot of sense because they're pretty
much like the DAPs except they're not loaded, or the Lima models, the
Kilo models. I'm sorry, but you know, when you have to figure
out how you're gonna do it. You know the great story of O'Grady,
it's in Beyond Helen Back and when they talk about how the Marines went and
did it, because though Grady did, he ran at the Marines with a
gun in his hand. You know, you're supposed to turn your back,
you're supposed to do stuff. So you know some of the things actually that
are not classified, And I'll tell you about one. The one sixtieth went
in the Libya and stole a Hind helicopter. The Russians were doing it.
It fell, it did a hard landing. They left it there and we
went in and stole it literally slow loaded out underneath the Chinook pictures are awesome.
I think they're still classified, but I know it's not anymore. But
yeah, so that would be actually the most the best one that I would
talk about. Told you about a former dealt the guy then became a one
sixty pilot. You know, he did the rescue of Mewse. You know,
that's for him to tell or books or whatever. But you know,
there's a lot of stuff out there, but any secretive stuff not really.
Yeah, and then the what was Oh, yeah, we've talked about Cesar.
Okay, what else do he One more question from Isaac. I saw
a bit of the film bread Winner about a girl living in Afghanistan during the
reign of the Taliband before nine to eleven, life was brutal for everyone,
and especially girls and women. So what is life like for them now compared
to before the invasion and during the US involvement and after they left. Oh,
that's a roller coaster. And honestly is it's a roller coaster because it
got really a little too free and then a little too hard, then a
little too free, and it's all based on where they live. You know.
One of the most touching things to me was probably the second day we're
coming down through the Hindu cush and a little girl about the age of my
daughter at the time, Little jellies on little dress, on flowing blonde hair,
chewing bubblegum in a dirt road, just waving people going by, you
know, so it's all ware. You know, the the Taliban, you
know, it's like a sexy, sexy, a sexist white male. In
the fifties, when we were telling women they can't run marathons because they're uterus
and fall out, I'm sorry, what you know, just let's let's bring
it into reality, you know, stuff like that. You just it.
Yeah, so when people talk about they're like, it's all based on where
you live. In Afghanistan and one of the crazy things with the teleban,
you know, they had their vice and virtue police, and a lot of
them were Arabs who didn't speak the local languages. And so I remember an
Afghan and telling me a story about when he was walking down the street with
his mom right and holding her hand, and the vice virtue police came out
and started beating both of them because they were unmarried, holding and they were
holding hands in public, and he's like, it's my mom. But they
were still like but they were Arabic, so they didn't understand what he was
saying and they were just beating them. So I put this out in the
message, and I was told never to say it again. But I'm not
in the army anymore. The Afghans don't like the Arabs, no, not
at all. They're tribal. Yeah, and there are peaceful people, but
they're tribal. We keep trying to make it like the first whatever we are,
right, first world country, whatever we're supposed to be. Leave it
alone. Yeah, it's it's not one time zone. I mean, for
god's sake, it's Zulu plus four and a half, right, right,
really yeah, it's like half an hour. Yes, really, well,
it's not Zulu plus four and a half. It's it should be like I
don't know, probably three or four different time zone. Yeah, but we
do it for our own sake, you know, And and it should be.
I mean, Herad is more Persian than it is Afghan, so let
them figure it out. Yeah. Yeah, it's not going to become a
Jeffersonian democracy exactly, and it shouldn't be exactly. You know. I always
laughed when we were going in there, like we should bomb it into the
stone age like it already is. Yet there are places that don't have running
walk Yeah. There were houses that have one room and had a hole in
it, and that's when you did your stuff and Oh, by the way,
that box full of dirt right there, that's your toilet paper, you
know. As one of the first things of telling me said guys like dude,
you can't take your baby wipes and use them and put them down there
because it gives us away. So either put it in your bag or use
the dirt, and then our poop doesn't smell like their poop. And you
want to get into that stuff. So people can find the book on Amazon
on Amazon. I'm working on the audio book I I got. I wouldn't
say diverted. I had to take a break, but again, I'll get
it done by one March because my daughter said, so I'll get it on
audio book. But yeah, do reach out. Go to Dan Runyon dot
com. Email me. I've already had two guys former Green Bereaves out of
fifth Group, their civilian ROTC instructors. I'm gonna take a hundred books up
top of them, hand those out. I'll be you know, pay for
my plane ticket. I'll do anything. Yeah, you know, I'm not
doing it for money. I literally did it because my mom ask me to.
I also, in addition to the book, I wanted to mention this
really fine bottle of whiskey that you brought us. It's it's sent me,
right, is that the or that's just what's the special? I think Heritage
Distiller re see it on Instagrams where I saw it, Yeah, and I
bought it back in October. It's how it's your proof and it's moving forward
to a very five proof. Yeah, that's definitely how it's. Yeah,
and they're talking about coming out with other versions. I think they might have
coming out with the tenth Mountain Division. So if you legs out of out
of New York want to get your own whiskey, But by all means,
uh, any final thoughts, anything that you know you really want to get
out there that I didn't asked about or we didn't cover. No, I
would say for a lot of people, and you kind of touched on it
with Jay. We don't need another nonprofit, we don't need another veterans organization.
Find one out there and join it. You know, decades ago it
is either American Legion or a VFW. And now we've got catch a lift.
Unbroken Spirit organization out of Asheville, North Carolina. No Barriers, USA,
Irreverent Warriors. I mean, there are so many out there. Somebody
will pay for you to do something somewhere in the world. Type it in.
There's a guy out of Fredericksburg that wants to start doing gardens for veterans.
Give you all the supplies you want to garden. There's a program out
there that teaches veterans how to do be keeping. Hey, more parts you.
But I mean that stuff out there and the money's out there, and
it's just like, you know, there's wounded warriors, there's there's all the
things. We don't need another nonprofit. Just figure out how to help whatever.
Because I said, I really enjoyed doing Team Rubicon. It was awesome.
It helped me a lot. I didn't want to be the APSO,
but it's like, sure, why not, you know, no barriers USA.
I was organizing and doing heights for hikes for disabled veterans out in Fort
Collins, Red Feather Lakes area. Unbroken Spirit Organization. Peter Champagne and his
wife Marlene have got one out of Asheville. Look them up Unbroken Spirit dot
org. They pay for everything and they're doing it right. All of them
now have this three phase program because the worst thing to do is go do
something with somebody and then go home, empty, dark apartment. So that's
where their phase three comes up. Still keeps you engaged? How do you?
How do you continue on and be an active participant in your community and
they hold you to it, you know, and so find them google it,
internet searching, whatever the word term is. But yeah, no,
I I appreciate all this, and yeah I'll tap that in with you guys,
and no, I appreciate all of it. Yeah, thank you,
Dan, thanks for coming in and doing this in studio. You know,
I think I think I want to say that I found you and or I
found your book maybe on LinkedIn that might have been might have been LinkedIn.
I was very appreciative the green Bery Foundation put it on there. I somehow,
And we were talking earlier about algorithms and hashtags and what puts you out
there. Yeah, when I posted I did the book, I got like
seven thousand views. That's fantastic. That's cool man, and and so yeah,
maybe that's how it is. But yeah, you can find me on
LinkedIn. I had my own business for a while, so you type my
name and it comes up way too much for my comfort. Cool, So
people should go check out the book Disciple of Chaos. It's on Amazon.
You'd find it right now. There's a link down in the description. Thank
you again, Dan. Yeah, and we will see all you guys on
Friday with Bill Flavin. So take care out there.