Welcome to Stories of Special Forces Operators Podcast. Listen to some of the bravest
and toughest people on the planet share their stories. Sit back and enjoy.
Welcome Back. We have a great guest today, Dan Shilling, and we're
gonna be talking about his career in special Ops as well as his book Alone
at Dawn. It's about Medal of Honor recipient John Chapman and the untold story
of the world's deadly at Special Operations Force. I know you're wondering who is
Dan Shilling. Well. Dan Shillings a thirty year Special Operations in Combat Control
vetterment. Dan Shillis had numerous combat and clandestine deployments around the world, including
the operation popularly known as Blackhawk Down, where he was credited with saving the
lives of a ranger and seal under fire. I will talk a little bit
about that later on in the show. He later founded and then served as
the first commander of two Special Operation squadrons. He's an adrenaline enthusiast. He
holds the Giinness World Record for most base jumps in twenty four hours and as
a mountain speed wing pilots. That's right, folks, he keeps himself busy
then and is also a motivational speaker. It consults internationally on security manager.
He's got another great book called Awareness that you highly recommend. But before we
get started, you know what to do. Make sure to share, subscribe,
hit that I like button. You know we like it. And before
we get started, let me give you a little insight into the book.
Just kind of got to get your appetite wet. Here in the pre dawn
hours of March fourth, two thousand and two, just below the ten four
hundred and sixty nine foot peak of a mountain in eastern Afghanistan, a fierce
battle raged out numbered by al Qaeda fighters, Air Force combat Controller John Chapman
and a handful of Navy seals struggled to take the summit in a desperate bid
to find a lost's teammate. Chatman, leaving the charge, was greatly wounded
in the initial assault. Believing he was dead. To see a leader ordered
to retreat, Chapman regained consciousness alone with the enemy closing in on three sides.
I'll leave it there as we continue to talk about it. Of course,
we're only going to touch the tip of the iceberg of the book let's
not waste any more time. Welcome to the show, mister Dan Shillane.
Welcome, sir Carlos. Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to
talk with you and reach your audience. Thank you very much again, and
I know I've mentioned it before on our other podcast, Spycraft. Thank you
very much for your service. You know, that's one of the first things
I wanted to start off before we get to your book Alone a Don which
is a great read. It's got some great reviews. People we've interviewed as
well. Pete Blaber another great one, Delta Force. Tell us a little
bit about it. Yeah, nice guy too. Tell us a little bit
about what got you motivated to become a special ops. Well, it always
comes back to for many guys, it comes back to a girl. So
the girl I was dating at the time reached into my chest and very graciously
grabbed my heart, ripped it out and crushed it. And I was looking
for something to do, and I had, you know, all my uncles,
my father, my mother were all in World War Two. So I
grew up in this generation of you know, watching World War two movies.
You know, Lee Marvin and John Wayne doesn't matter who. But and I
thought, man, I'm looking for something different. And I bumped into an
Army recruiter who told me, we will pay you to jump out of airplanes.
And it had never occurred to me in my life. Adrenaline fueled as
I am, and it never occurred to me at that point in my life
to jump out of an airplane. I went, I'm in sign me up.
So I started as an Army grunt paratrooper and it was great. I
loved it, humping a rock in a sixty. And it was a meritocracy,
you know, the military. The great thing about the military is it's
a leveler. Doesn't matter where you came from demographically, you know what your
advantages were as in childhood, None of that matters. It's what you put
into this thing that is the US military. And from there I just found
my way serendipitously into combat control, which I had never heard of either,
which is one of the reasons I wrote alone at don Is. No one
knows about these guys. And I found my way there, found a home
man, and then I just never looked back. I loved being part of
that really special community and part of the joint community, and the opportunity to
really push yourself against the world's best and measure yourself against these other people.
It was a great opportunity. And you know what, my career isn't really
a chart that you can plot. It's more like a warshock blot because I
just went here and there, and I was in the army, that is
in the Air Force, is in the army, that isn't the Air Force.
And you know, for me, I just went where I thought things
would be interesting, and I kind of lived my life that way. But
I'll tell you what I was. I was very fortunate to have found my
way into the communities that I did and did. You worked after the special
operations career, you worked with three later agencies as well, if I'm correct.
Yeah, I've done so my last assignment in the military last without getting
in anything really sensitive or classified. You know, there's a lot of collaboration,
especially in the in the in the war in Afghanistan and some of the
other places that I've worked with. The intelligence community, So the ICE,
which is seventeen organizations, there's a lot of there's a lot of people with
a lot of specializations. So yeah, I spent a bunch of time with
the CIA, spent a lot of time in N S A and S S
A. You know, N G I A all the a's, FBI,
C T. You get to, you get to you get to see these
other communities again. And that opened up some doors and uh and opened up
my eyes to some different worlds that you wouldn't normally see, even in white
special ops. You know, there's a big difference between white ops and black
ops. And it's fascinating and so for me, I enjoyed that. But
when I retired, I I I wasn't interested in going to work for one
of those agencies because I'd rather be speed flying, writing books and hanging out
with my wife and I all the time. That's what I do. Well,
that's awesome, Yeah, I think Actually, I remember you were on
our Situational Awareness podcast. That's the one you were on. Yeah, that's
right. Because the book he wrote, Folks, is called The Power of
Awareness and Other Secrets from the World's Foremost Spies, Detectives and Special Operators and
how to Stay safe and Save your Life. And it's a great book.
Highly recommend that. We're going to talk a little bit more about. He's
got an upcoming course and as well, so we'll talk more about that towards
the end of the show. I'm going to shift gears a little bit.
Actually before that would make a comment. It's kind of funny. I always
when I have people on special operations or military I always think it's something like
Rambo that motivated them. And I was surprised how many people actually were motivated
by Rambo or John Wayne in the Green Bereat movie. Did that ever have
any influence at all? Or now? No, it wasn't movies in fact.
And you know, I again, I sort of joined the military in
a lark because I just wanted to try something new in life. But what
it really does is it's a portal, right, and it allows you to
get into these things that you then realize have more value than the perception of
popular media. And in my case, and I think this is common for
a lot of men and women who get into these communities. Man, I
really can I do this? You know? Can? I Am I capable
of these things that these other people that I see doing and I find interesting?
I mean I got paid to skydive, scuba dive, blow stuff up,
throw motorcycles out of airplanes. I mean you know, it's it's really
fun but miserable stuff at the same time. And to be able to do
that, I think for me it was I wanted to be the best in
the world at what I did, and I was very fortunate to be able
to do that and be able to say that now. It's all those things
have to come with I think some perspective and context and what I look at
now. I was just talking with one of our operators. I also was
going to call my a young operator. He's been in for seventeen years.
But you know, there's so much more capable than I was twenty or thirty
years ago. The men that we produce now are much more capable than the
generation that I was part of eighties nineties, the war. I mean I
retired till twenty sixteen, and we were more capable, I think in a
lot of ways, from training and the resources and the techniques, you know,
tactics and procedures than the Vietnam generation that raised me. Not that we're
better than those people or these people are better than us, but we can
do more. And it's an interesting thing to watch in evolution warfare, that's
fascinating. I have spoken to some individuals and special opp communities. And that's
one of the things they mentioned that there is a difference. Obviously much more
technically savvy now, right of course. Yeah, but also the character of
the individual has been changed a little bit, and not in a sense of
good bad character, but in the sense of handling adversity and grit. You
know, when I've interviewed mc V sogs, it's remarkable. These guys were
twenty years old, and I'm listening to their stories and I'm thinking, really,
you went through all that at twenty that's unbelievable. And yeah, it's
a very different world. Yeah, that's what you know. And that I
think what you're touching on too, Carlos is in special ops you tend to
get more mature men women. I don't mean like they're more mature people.
They have matured in their evolution. They have more time on planet, more
time in the service, and so and then they have a lot of longevity
inside those communities. And so these are pretty pretty wise people, you know.
And I mean I think back to black Hawk Down, you know,
Gothic Serpent, myself, the Delta operators. Most of these people were like
late twenties at the at the earliest or they're in their thirties. The rangers
we had with us, the average age was nineteen. Man, that's a
there's a big disparity between being nineteen in Mogadishu, Somali in October of nineteen
ninety three and being thirty in that same space and having you know, I
think had been in for like eight or nine years or something at that point.
But having you know, and I've been working with Delta Force and still
Team six, and you know, like you're with these people and you're learning
from them. You're the best in your own community, in the Air Force
Special Ops community, but you that that brings a lot of salt into that
those gunfights and yeah, and so you know, I think it's it's interesting.
So those guys from from back in Vietnam, I think, by and
large, were much younger people when you if you did it, if you
could map that, you'd find that they're much younger than the guys who what
we were rolling around with in the Horn of Africa or the Arabian and Peninsula,
or Afghanistan and Iraq. You know, throughout the war years that we've
had the last two decades, our guys tend to be older. I mean
I was like fifty years old. I'm still going to do it. That's
the interesting things. I know. We've been fortunate and blessed enough to interview
several people who went through that battle, just like yourself. By the way,
boat folks, Dan Shilling, that's s C H I L L I
n G the book. He also wrote a book called The Battle of Moga
d Shu, The First Hand Accounts from the Men of Task Force Ranger.
It's another great read too. That's the interesting things. I've interviewed Brad Thomas,
you might know him. I've interviewed Kenny Thomas. I don't think it's
Kenny. He's a musician now too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, my
apologies, Kenny. So it's Kenny Thomas. And then we have Tom Saturley.
We've interviewed him and Kyle Lamb. Kyle's Kyle's Kyle's got a guy with
a lot of standing in a lot of communities. He's a pretty remarkable individual.
Well, all those guys are remarkable. He had a lot of salt
back then, I think when he was in the Battle of Moga Dhu.
But some of the other ones, when they're just like your story telling me.
Some of these guys have never seen combat yet, even though they were
in special ops, and then they get thrown in there. And it was
supposed to be a really simple mission, if I remember correctly, to a
certain dega, it was a complex. It was a complex in execution in
that it had like anything that we do now, there's you know, there's
there's two hundred guys rolling out on these on these assaults or these these you
know, capture missions, but there's probably like fifteen to twenty really key people
because who are responsible for something that has to happen, and so you know,
it's quite sophisticated. And back then you got to realize we didn't have
ISR the same way we just got those helicopters. We had this I think
it was Westpact Company, and we had a ball mounted on a on a
huge five thirty I think, And you know, we didn't have the kind
of stuff we do now. But it was a remarkable task force for its
time. It was it was really amazingly capable. I always like to point
out that, you know, that single gunfight was two hundred guys against thousands
and thousands and thousands of people and I challenge any other country in the world
to put two hundred guys in that position and not only have one guy walk
out alive, which I don't think would happen. We prosecuted the mission and
executed it successfully. The mission that day was one hundred percent successful. We
would have to get these guys. We got cost US eighteen Americans, cost
us them always one thousand and fifteen hundred people. We lost some helicopters,
but the fact is we prosecuted the mission. And you know what, US
Special Operations can do anything that they set their mind to. You know,
you made the point that because I think Kenny was saying, how about how
different it would have been if it would have had some of their equipment with
them, the night vision and things of that nature. And I think I
saw I had. I never rolled without mine. Oh that's right. Yeah,
that's interesting. It's a fascinating thing. Now, what was your story,
because you mentioned some of it in the book, and of course we
don't want to give everything away, but what did you do? Tell us
a little bit about your experience in Loga Dshue. How was it for you?
Well, uh, you know, I was a combat controllers to the
two four. So I've been working over at Delta Force when it first came
up earlier in the spring, and then the mission sort of morphed a little
bit in forced composition. The focus of the mission stayed the same at least
in concept, but which was to go and stabilize some things and capture this
warlord and dismantle the Somali National Alliance, which was kind of a militia for
Muhammad add and the Habber Ghetter clan. So all that's so much geopolitics,
some of that tactics, some of that battlefield reality in that environment in a
city of a million people. So for me, I ended up being assigned
to the Rangers. I came off the Delta part of the mission because I
had already rotated out, but I had been one of the original planners for
the whole deployment. So my boss, my chief, sent me, He's
like, go back over to Delta, get yourself a job. I'm like,
okay, I can do that. Because it had passed on to Bray
and another guy named Dave Schnorr, who were combat controllers, and that's who
was with the Delta guys on the assault. So I ended up being part
of the Ranger Convoy Force and worked for the Ranger Battalion commander. And you
know, as a common controller, I'm there to interface between air components and
various ground components and you know, the great capability. This is sort of
getting into the topic of alone a don but in combat control in general is
combat controllers are this self organizing battlefield connectivity that doesn't exist anywhere else. We
understand the airplan, we understand the ground plan. We're the guys who can
provide the effects on the ground from the air, and we know how to
coordinate things and we just naturally do this and even people when they don't.
You don't have us on the mission, your mission is is is in many
ways degraded if it's if it's a joint mission, and you know, inexperienced
commanders can can fall victim to that. But guys who were control a lot,
whether or as operators or commanders, do not like to leave, you
know, the front gate without them. And so that was my job in
Somalia. But in the execution of the gunfight, I didn't pack a lot
of ammunition back then, and because if things go really bad, I'm gonna
be on the radio. That was my reasoning. And man, you know,
on that day, in a lot of ways, I was just another
guy. I was. I was doing my comic control job, communicating with
people and talking about this and that. But I ended up shooting a lot
of people too, man, and I ran out of ammunition, and that
was an unfortunate lesson learned in my In my case was that I just have
to add more weight to my body. And I'm already as a combat controller,
You're already carrying more weight than anybody else on the battlefield. It's all
radios, it's all batteries. Can't run out of battery, you know,
and so and having all this other stuff, whether it's beacons, all the
other things that go along with that. Especially back then, you know,
the other guys were rolling around with h gear and body armor and a line
belt and AMMO. I had all that too, and I had like seventy
five pounds of rock on my back. So when I do for controls with
the Rangers, man, they're rolling around with just water and AMMO, and
I'm like, I'm humping. I'm humping a lot of more weight. And
you just have to be able to perform as well. As those guys that
you're with, and it's really daunting to be a combat controller. Man.
I'll tell you. That's part of the reason I wrote the book. And
were you I guess you all sounds like you were surprised when things turned as
they did and all of a sudden you had to engage in combat. Do
you remember what you thought, like, Oh crap, what am I into
now? Or well, yeah, sort of. I think you vacillate.
You're focused on you know. The great thing about training is it allows you
to focus on what you're supposed to be doing this, no matter with the
conditions, so they could be it could be a moderate gunfight or in this
case is like the most extreme gunfight I was ever in. You're focusing on
what you have to do and that's what you've been trained to do, and
you know and you even have the aptitude for it. That's part of how
we select people. But in the same time, simultaneously, and I can't
speak for everybody, but I think it's pretty common. You're still going through
the physiological and the emotional experience. It's happening, it's real, it's existential.
You could die in any moment, and sometimes that pops into your head.
So there were times like everybody in my vehicle got shot basically, and
so you know, in my opinion, I got hit in the body,
eye, i got hit in the foot, and it's like, you know,
and people are dying around me, guys I knew, and who are
amazing operators. I'm like, man, that guy just got shot and just
dropped and he's an amazing delta operator. I'm just waiting for my turn.
And so you then vacillate between focusing on things and then you know, the
emotional experience starts to happen. And in my case, it was between resignation
like well, I'm probably gonna get a shot. I die here, and
I'm fucking pissed off and I'm going to shoot all you people that are a
threat to me. It's in a range of emotions and it's a that's part
of what the reality of those types of experiences are is You're still a human
at the end of the day, you know. So it varied, you
know, because gun an eighth and hour gunfight isn't a sustained laying down of
you know, cruiserve weapon fire. It has it has peaks and lulls,
you know, and in those lulls, you're either talking to people, or
you're thinking about you need to do next, or thoughts creep into your mind.
All these things are happening at once, and so it's it's quite a
life transformative experience to be in a gunfight. Thank you for sharing that.
And you know what's interesting as I speak to individuals who've been in gun battles,
such as yourself, for officers of the law, there's a thing called
time dilation, which I'm sure you're aware of. Oh yeah, I experienced
it. But the question for you is that's such a different battle because gun
battles tend to last minutes usually. Yeah, right, yours was a little
faster than what the population population thinks. The civilian doesn't realize that people don't
just want to hang out having a gunfight for the hell of it. They
happen pretty fast, you know, and then you're either trying to overrun the
other guy or you're trying to get away from the gunfight. You don't just
want to hang out and shoot at each other for the hell of it.
That's the thing. I guess My question to you is, I see I
understand the concept of time dilation. It's similar to flow. Mikhael chim Chick
my eye used to talk about flow in sports. Anytime I get in these
kind of stressful situations where a body has to focus, we go into those
flow state and time dilations seems to be similar. I really have to pay
attention of everything around me and slow things down to process it. But did
you feel that and then disappear because you're in a gun battle a lot of
times in Miss Long? I think it might just I think it just be
my part of the heightened response of the amazing thing that is the human body.
The other thing that happened to me besides time, Billy that was odd,
and it's related to that, was selective hearing, you know. I
mean back then, I didn't wear a headset. I like the handset because
a handset for me was a very simple thing. If my five pen didn't
work, I could swap out another one. I'm not trying to is it
this comcorde? Is it my headset? Is that concord? And I can
hand my handset to somebody else. So as a guy, I tended to
use handsets, So but I would have I threw ear pro in just regular
foam earplugs in for gunfight, and every time we got in a gunfight,
I'd immediately take him out, which was you know, why he bothered to
put him in. It didn't make any sense, but you know, it's
who knows you do things. But I would have these conversations with the fifty
gunner on my hummer was a guy named Mike pringbll Ranger. It's a great
guy. He was just a dead eye with the M two. And in
the middle of this gunfight, RPG's are going off all around us, We're
laying out volumes of fire. And the weird thing for me was I kept
talking to him and you'd think I'd be shouting or he'd be shouting, and
like it was this very calm, deliberate but easy to hear conversation amongst all
the din of the firefight. And I remember reflecting on the very next day,
I'm like, God, that was really weird that. You know,
normally a fifty cali's he's laying down rounds and I'm I'm shooting at people.
Everyone's shooting at people, and people are shooting at us and stuff blowing up,
and you can just have this normal conversation in normal tones of voice.
And that was that was more weird than time dilation because I've experienced that in
training before too, when we did underwaters, which they don't do anymore because
we killed too many people. You start to brown out. You're still conscious,
but you're oxygen deprived enough that your vision goes first, so you get
tunnel vision, and then eventually you brown out, which means I can't see.
I'm effectively blind, but I'm still consciously thinking. And that would go
into some time dilation for me, because I experienced that in the pool when
I was going through you know, a Key West as a combat especially forces
combat diver, but more so at the combat control end DOC course where we
definitely punished our guys a lot in the pool. So it was, you
know, it was just another one of those experiences. And I think a
lot of people have that the car accident can do that to you too.
That's very true. That's fascinating. Look for a dialogue component of it all.
That's fascinating stuff amazing the human body. As you mentioned a minute ago.
Again, folks, we're talking to Dan Shilling. The book is alone
at Daunce. We're going to be switching gears over there, because you've been
talking about being a combat controller, and you decided to write a book about
a Special Ops combat controller, and this time you switch gears from yourself to
somebody else. Why did you choose John Chaplin? Well, John's story came
to me. I mean, I didn't know John Well. He was a
new guy at the at the twenty four Special Tactics Squad when I was on
my way out the first time, and I was going to Combat Control School
to be an instructor, and I was just going to go to college,
so I was going to school at night. So you know, we all
knew in our community about John's experience and what had happened on the mountain,
and it was pretty clear to me. And then when I retired, i'd
seen the video footage which was classified for a long time, of what happened
mountain. We all did. And this is early on in the war when
Predator drone footage was really coming into its own. But and we had the
gunship footage as well from the AC Went thirty gunship. But I retired in
twenty sixteen, and I'm writing novels and I'm living on I'm living it out
to a ski resort and i ski one hundred days a year and I'm hanging
out with my wife because we get to now finally, and a friend of
mine brought it to me and said, listen, you know John's sister wants
to write has been trying to write this book, and you should talk about
it. So I got on the phone. It turned out to be my
co author, and we talked about it. I said, I'm not really
interested in writing this book because I'm I'm not looking for conflict. There there's
a lot of controversy around some of the things that happened with John on the
mountain, and I'm really in a peaceful place. I'm a Buddhist. Actually
most people don't know that, but I became a Buddhist when I worked in
Thailand for several years. And you know, I didn't want to write the
book, and ultimately I felt like I had to. So the rest is
history. I spent two and a half years working on this book seven days
a week, doing my own investigation and what happened, but it wasn't just
John's story. So John Chapman is the first Medal of Honor recipient for the
Air Force in half a century since Vietnam the Air Force's only medal of honor,
so it's a very powerful story. Obviously, at the time, John
didn't have the Medal of Honor. I remember the publisher asked me, what
are you gonna do if he doesn't receive the medal, because it was sort
of in the process, and there were people in the Navy actively trying to
thwart John's medal of honor, which is pretty dishonorable. But that's a small
subset. So John's medal was not guaranteed, and I said, doesn't matter
whether he gets the medal or not. In my sense as a historian,
I'm here to write his story, and the story is the story, whether
anybody recognizes him as a hero or not. But I felt that that was
only half the book, and this is why I decided to write it.
Combat Control CCT, as most people know, it is the other half of
this story. And I felt the two married and no one really knew who
Combat Control was, and my purpose in writing this book was to share that
with the American public. To go listen. The deadliest individual to ever walk
a battlefield in the history of human warfare is an Air Force guy and he's
a combat controller because that one guy can kill more people on a battlefield using
his expertise than anyone in the history of warfare. And I always start with
this story about Calvin Markham. Calvin retired as the chief Silver Star recipient.
He was in Afghanistan and in fact, he was one of the guys who
went over with five ninety five. So he's the first American to cross the
border with a Special Forces ODA in America's response to nine to eleven. And
in his first twenty six days in combat, he killed more people than any
seal in the history of seals. And you know what, it was his
first deployment, first combat ever, and he had eleven deployments. So you
know, it's like, who are these guys and how is it that they
can do this? And that's the purpose of Alone at Donlin. And I'm
really I'm really pleased with the reception that the book has gotten. It you
know, made the New York Times bestseller list, which is a great thing
as an author, and it allows you as an author to get out to
more people. But it still sells every month. People are buying that book,
and I'm I'm really proud of that now I'm not in I didn't put
myself in my own book. It's a history of combat control in a real
sense, but there's a lot of things in there that involved me. But
I felt as the now, as an author and no longer in the military,
it was important that I could could present this as, Hey, this
is not about me. This is about these guys, and it's about this
one amazing individual who was one of them, and that's John and combat Control.
What stood out for you the most about John in regards to his character
in that character, but to what he did that day, Well, what
he did that day is a subset of who he really was. That's how
I would first answer that question, because he was a very resilient, intellectually
curious, and empathetic individual, and that's very common to comic controllers. Comic
controllers tend to be the best ones, are very intellectually curious people. And
you know, he wasn't. He was a very resilient person, and he
persevered during this gunfight until he ultimately got shot through the heart. It expired,
and he wasn't he was He was courageous because he was a resilient person.
He wasn't resilient because he was courageous. I think that's the way I
felt to that out. He was this resilient individual and he just was not
going to give up, and he felt he had these responsibilities. I can't
say what he truly felt or thought, but I can say what he decided
to do. I can say what actions he took, and those are indicative
of what he was thinking about. And he was very clear that after this
left him for dead and he's alone on this mountain and he's fighting against a
lot of people, including hand to hand combat. His physiological damage and I
have his autopsy. I've got all of pathology sixteen gunshot, shrapnel and laceration
womens man. Nine of those were gunshot womens and he was still functioning.
And that's an amazing testament to an individual who says I'm not going to give
up, but he's on his own. Then comes this rescue helicopter to come
and pick up the seals. No one knows John's on top of the mountain
and they're coming in to retrieve the surviving seals because they left another dead guy
behind too. There's a couple of guys left on the mountain there's John and
a guy named Neil Roberts. But John Chapman makes this decision to say,
I'm not gonna let this helicopter get shot down, which would have been the
third helicopter shot down on this mountain, and he climbs out of this bunker
and just takes the fight to the enemy while he's in the process of dying
because he was bleeding out, man, and he was in severe shock,
blood loss, and he did that. Man, What an amazing selfless thing
to do. It's a if you watch the video. I've got a YouTube
channel video which covers John Chapman. You can go to dan Selink Books you'll
find it, or just google the First Medal of Honor on YouTube and it'll
populate. Twenty million people have seen this video. It's John's footage of him
actually doing this, and it's it's an emotionally, very impactful video. And
I'm really pleased that I got that. I had the opportunity to be the
person to share that with the world the way that I did, both in
the book and the video. And then hopefully next year we'll start filming one
hundred and thirty million dollars film about John's life and his events on the mount.
That's amazing. Again, folks, the book is called Alone at Dawn?
Did John. I know a lot of Special Operations and other soldiers as
well, that when they do here bravery or brave deeds such as that,
when the sacrificed their life, they always think it's as a team effort.
They don't want to receive it on honor because they think it's not about me,
it's about the team. Yeah, John, universally, Yeah, John
felt that way. I'm sure he did. In fact, this is when
I said to Laurie, my co author, which was John's sister, because
she really wanted to write a biography about her brother. And I said,
let me tell you something, your brother would not want a book about himself.
He'd want a book about his community. So that's what the book we're
going to write. And that's the book that I ended up writing, was,
you know, all John's community, the guys who knew him, who
they were, and John's story at the same time. And I can't speak
for John, but I am sure he would be uncomfortable with the recognition that
he has has now garnered his wife, who is the most wonderful person Baalery.
I love her to death. We're really good friends, and she's she's
just a remarkable lady. She found love again, got remarried, and then
lost a second husband, so she's been widowed twice. And she's just one
of these people who can deal with life. I mean, she talks about
John. You can see the impact all these years later. He's been gone
for twenty years now, and he had He was such a genuine and as
I said, empathetic person. He had this great capacity for empathy, like
to defend the defenseless, you know, if you were getting picked on in
high school. Even though he was a jock and he was a state champion
competitive diver, he just wouldn't abide by people picking on other people. And
it's a testament to who he was. And I'm really glad I got to
be as biographer. I consider it one of the great honors of my entire
professional careers. I got to be the person who chronicled John and these guys
that no one ever heard of. Let me give you one quick stat this
is really interesting about Comick. So the most decorated wing in the United States
Air Force has zero pilots in it. It's the twenty four Special Operations Wing.
It's the most highly decorated wing in the Air Force, and combat controllers,
which comprise point one percent of the US Air Force, point one percent.
In America's longest running war ever, we're over fifty percent of its Silver
Stars, seventy plus percent of its Air Force Crosses, and its only medal
of honor, and that came from point one percent of the US Air Force.
And that is it's amazing. Really, yeah, that is amazing.
And now you were a combat controller, I guess referred as were you only
a combat controller in Shoo? Did you continue the job at other places as
well? No, I was in the first Go War over there with doing
the scud Hutt thing, and I've been down to Central America in the eighties.
I was in, you know, working in Southeast Asia doing stuff with
the Ties, and you do there was border problems with drugs and Burma and
Mayan mar you know, and you get in the Golden Triangle. So I've
been around there and then and then we went to Haiti and did some other
things that were still remain classified. And then I actually got out of the
military completely and I started own business. I went to graduate school, and
I ended up in the Army SF as a guard guy in the nineteenth Group,
and that's where I got my commission, and I ran the HALO program
for the nineteenth I was kind of their subject matter expert for HALO because if
you know anything else about me, I like parachutes man, and so I
did that, and then I ended up going back into the Air Force and
then started I became sort of a serial entrepreneur. I created a couple of
squadrons, one from scratch and became the first commander there, and then I
became the commander of another, the first commander of another unit. So I
found my way back into Air Force combat control and special tactics, and that's
where I spent the rest of my career. And so it was a good
it's a good career as a combat controller. Independent on Mogabi shoe for now,
because I know that that seems to be one of the anomalies in your
life for most people. What other areas did you find either interesting challenging as
a combat controller. So here's here's something that people may not realize a lot
of your listeners will find this fascinating combat control training pipeline is the longest,
most expensive, most intellectually demanding, and as physically demanding pipeline in the world.
It is harder to become a combat controller it is to become say a
Steel or Green Beret. It's not I'm not trying to like those guys aren't
hard. It's not hard to do those things, like very few people can
do those things. But ours is longer, harder, and in more intellectually
demanding, because what we ask of these guys when you go out in a
battlefield as a combat controller. Back to Calvin Marketm. There's a gunfight raging
hand to hand combat at the to the tower in Kandahar, and he's calling
in air strikes and if he screws and he's talking about it with his Special
Forces ODA team leaders, like, if I screw up this strike, we're
all dead. The guy's like, if you don't make the strike, we're
all dying in any way. And Calvin is calling in air strikes without a
GPS, you know, fidelity using Soviet era maps. This is this is
the Fall of two thousand and one. Man like, this is have responsibility
one hundred responsibility for whether everybody on the battlefield around you lives or dies everyone,
both the enemy and the friend friendly forces. That's a lot of responsibility
and it's a lot of complexity he has to understand. He has to know
all the call signs, the frequencies involved, the airspace involved, plus what's
happening on the battlefield, plus what the effects are of that munition off of
that particular aircraft, which may be French or British or American. It is
an immense amount of information that you have to do. And one of the
things that separates a combat controller from everybody else on the battlefield isn't isn't battlefield
prowess a gunfight, because a gunfight, for most people is a two dimensional
experience. I think left and right, and I think near and far.
And if you and I are in a gunfight, Carlos, and I'm gonna
shoot you, I'm thinking in two dimensions, and I'm going to kinetically reach
from my gun to you by a bullet, And that's how I think and
experience it. Combat controllers do not experience battlefields that way. They experience them
not in two dimensions, but in four because they're also thinking high and low,
the airspace and everything that's happening around it to include what's happening in that
two dimensional battlespace on the surface of the planet is in his mind. And
time is a very important fourth component because in a gunfight, if you're a
Green Beret and I'm a kind of controller and the gunfight's taking place, as
we've already discussed, it takes place as long as it takes. Could be
eight seconds, be eight minutes, could be eighteen hours if you're in Mogadishi,
right, But it just takes as long as it takes. To that
combat controller, it's a critical thing he has to think about all the time.
When is my airplane going to get here? How many planes do I
have? What's their playtime? How long can they stay? You know?
When do I have to be able to replace these airplanes? When do I
have to replace what's happening on the battlefield with some more information. It's this
four dimensional experience, and the course of writing alone at Don is when I
had this epiphany when I realized, holy shit, I don't even think like
the other guys I've been in gunfights with, whether it's Delta Force or Rangers
people I've been in gunfights with. I'm like, my experience is somewhat different
than theirs, and that's part of what these guys do, and that's really
remarkable. But the other answer to your question about what distinguishes a combat controller
from other special operations forces is this humanitarian component. When a country like Haiti
collapses in twenty ten or in twenty twenty one, you don't call for seals,
that's not who we need. But when the global community decides to make
an international response to relieve the suffering in a country like eighty in twenty ten,
the first guys that arrived there on as the first of the first responders,
were combat controllers. So a guy named Tony Travis was the team leader
for the world's response to the Haitian collapse in twenty ten. He arrived there
with a handful of other combat controllers, ONEATV and a folding card table,
and in twenty eight minutes he established the re established the international airport at porta
Prince, and started bringing in aircraft and relief supplies. And what's amazing is
he exceeded the maximum capacity of that airfield how many planes could actually be on
it, helicopters and planes, by fourteen hundred percent, not one hundred and
forty fourteen hundred percent. Wow. He ran this operation for two weeks,
never had an incident, planes from all over the world, different languages,
all this other stuff. And you know, man, that's what's great.
We kill the bad guys more effectively than anyone else, and we rescue the
good guys, and it's a very satisfying thing. So, for instance,
Hurricane Katrina, redot and Ike here in the United States, so much of
those rescue efforts, not the relief, but the rescuing of people were done
by combat controllers. What could be better than helping Americans in crisis, man,
Most guys in special lifts don't get to do that. You just go
down range and do stuff for other people. So combat controllers have done that
all around the world. Fukajima twenty eleven, Bonda Ace the Indonesian tsunami on
Boxing Day two thousand and four. My comic controllers are leading the way.
I mean. For Japan during their nuclear accident, US Air Force combat controllers
reopened the airport for the country of Japan to help them with their crisis.
And so for Tony's efforts. In twenty ten, he was the first enlisted
member of the US military to ever be recognized by Time magazine as one of
its hundred most Influential People of the Year. This is why I wanted to
write this book. Americans need to know about these guys. The first guy
to jump onto a south pole was a combat controller and he did that because
they needed to get equipment in and they kept screwing it all up and they
were destroying equipment, and they're like, hey, we need to put somebody
in there. Can't land an airplane anymore because it's winter, and we're going
to send this guy down there who went by himself. He can tell us
it's the sixties because they just did this by himself. And the guy named
Patton, Sergeant Patten jumped under the south pole, not to do some I'm
the first guy to jump in the south pole, but it's like, hey,
you have to go down there and do this thing. And at the
time, it's like, I wonder if this parachute's going to open and function
in these conditions, because if it's not, I'm going to hit the south
pull at one hundred and twenty miles from now. Oh. It's just these
are some really amazing people with stories and if you know, if you're listening
to this, you should pick up the book or listen to a load at
Don because it's going to change your perspective on what special ops can be.
Not because Steals and green Berets and Rangers don't do amazing things and are loaded
with all these heroes. It's that these guys are so unique, even within
that community of unique individuals. That's fatulous stuff. Again, folks, book
is Alone and Don by Dan showing SDHI double l I n G. You
can get it on Amazon. It's available also on audiobook and Kindle, hardcover
and paperback. Damn, we got a few minutes to go. A couple
more questions to ask you, and I want to get to your program as
well and awareness and that's coming up hopefully in the future. But I guess
a couple of questions that popped up in my head. I'm trying to keep
this as fluid as possible, but I'm having a hard time trying to keep
it. But that may not happen. Curiosity enthralls me in this question I've
asked several times before. The other individuals. They kind of not similar trajectories
as jurors in your life because you have a lot of different areas that you
went, but when you did the intel world as well, and you coordinated
with those three letter agencies, being a combat controller going into war Mogadishu in
battle and then hitting the intel world, was it different for you? Did
you say, Wow, Okay, now I see what these guys are looking
at, because it's different what I'm looking at, or vice versa, anything
kind of any epiphany there, because we know sometimes they butt heads, right,
they haven't been here where the boots on the ground, and then the
other way around. You know, they don't know what we know. You
got this kind of rivalry sometimes that happens. But did you see anything that
it opened your eyes against a different way? It opened my eyes a lot
because you start to see you realize that man, I worked for Jaysock,
which is the world's blackest and most specialized and capable special operations community, and
you tend to think like, yeah, this is the way the world looks,
this is the way the world works. And you go over and stay
work with the NSA or the CIA, which are two different entities. And
let's say throw the FBI into this mix, because now I'm working with FBI
counter terrorism and you see that other people have different views of the world,
even the world that you're staring at, and it's a common goal we all
have to say, combat terrorism and counter terrorism. But what they can and
can't do, what they think they should and shouldn't do, are very different
things in yours. You know, the responsibility of the CIA is to inform
the government and the President of the United States about the state of the world.
That's their job. You know, they brief the president every day.
It doesn't matter who the president is. This is their job. Politics come
and go, administrations come and go. The CIA remains and its responsibility stays
the same. And this say, this is the same things. So my
wife was an NSA cyber warfare operative. She's way smarter than I am,
which is a I highly recommend marrying that way, by the way, But
you know, her view of the world. We talk about stuff at home
and our little family skiff, you know, the back porch and I'm having
a cigar and we're talking about things. This is very different than mine because
her responsibility in NSA is is to gather intelligence that helps shape the CIA or
the or my own Jaysack community. Because NSA is a military organization, and
then there's the FBI's responsibility when it comes to counter terrorism. Was what does
it touch here? US citizens or in the United States. Those people all
have very different views of the world and or how we go about these things.
And it allowed and it forces you, or in my case, it
affords you the opportunity because I found it very fascinating to look through somebody else's
eyes. And that's what storytellers do. And I think of myself now as
a storyteller because I write books, make movies either about my own books or
other things I find interesting. And to look through other people's eyes is a
very valuable thing to do because it allows you to become more tolerant and accepting
about the world around you. And I think those are often overlooked aspects of
life and this current hyper polarized world that we live in. That's another story.
And I don't talk politics, man, I don't do politics, but
but you know, those are valuable things to look. To look through somebody
else's eyes, even your enemy's eyes, is a really important thing to do.
Pete Blaber, who you mentioned earlier, who was Delta Force, you
know, leader, and he's a friend of mine. I have a lot
of respect for Pete. Pete was one of Pete's great attributes was he would
look through the lens of the other side pretty well. And even in special
ops, I think a lot of officers and leaders and even senior operators don't
do that. The enemy the enemy, and I just got to go crush
them, man. You can crush them better if you understand how they see
the world and how they see you. Yeah, he's extremely insightful, extremely
insightful man. When we did the interview again, folks, Dan Shilling three
books, I highly recommend we're gonna start getting ready tottack one of them,
but alone and Dawn is when we're talking about a lot today. We also
talked a little bit about another book, Bottle Battle of Mogadishu, the first
hand accounts from the men of Task Force Ranger. And we're going to start
heading towards the direction of the power of awareness. But I'm going to set
it up and bring back my little chain here of questions. We had a
little king for a second, but I think I'll bring it back. Tom
Beck controller very important, very powerful individual. That makes me think you're a
target now? Is that true? Are other enemies looking at going that's the
first we can knock that guy out, we really improve our chances in winning
this battle. Or am I far off on that? It depends on the
sophistication of the enemy. Goes back to what we're just talking about. Do
they really know who's coming after them? If they really understood you have special
operations and how it integrates, then yeah, they might know who that guy
is and the value of knocking that guy out. But in a general sense,
I don't think that's what happens when you've on a battlefield. I think
a lot of a lot of enemy combatants we have fought, you know,
to our advantage, we're not sophisticated people in their understanding of your capability and
your force composition. Now that's different in Ukraine and some other places that we're
going to be going because that the war we had in the past twenty years
is over. That was a special ops war. The next wars are not
going to be that way. So you know, I don't know that you
I don't know. I don't know how to answer that to the extent of
how often combat controllers might be targeted by the enemy, But but you know,
it was that it was. It was in the course of being a
combat controller and special Tactics officer where I worked around the world and I,
you know, it's not just special ops that you think of things like I'm
working in Bangladesh. I spent several years working in out of Banglade in Thailand
and Vietnam some too, and you're doing port security stuff, and I got
involved in things like community policing and DACA Bangladesh. That's not you wouldn't naturally
go, oh, yeah, You're going to go to Bangladesh and start working
with universities and police institutions as a special ops guy, and then engage with
the ambassador, you know, and pitch him on, hey, I think
I've got this idea ambassador. That's very different stuff. And what I learned
in the course of all this is, man, you start traveling the world,
and it's not about being a special ops man or woman. It's about
what is it? How do you move about that world? How do you
absorb that world? And from a personal safety standpoint, which is what I
became very passionate and I'm very passionate about now, is how do you not
be a victim of a crime? And what I really landed on when I
wrote The Power of Awareness. The book is it's not a self defense book.
I'm not talking about kropmagog, concealed carry, or best tactics for employing
a firearm in a threatening situation. Those are all tools to fix a problem.
My toilet breaks, I need a wrench to fix it. If I'm
being confronted with a bad guy and I got to pull out my gun,
that gun is a tool to fix the problem, which is the bad guy.
I can't get away from my approach as a Buddhist philosophically and as a
personal safety expert or a guy with a lot of experiences, don't give in
that situation. And that really comes back to being situationally aware. What does
that mean to a civilian? That's a very different term than to professionals who
have spent years being trained to be situationally aware. So how can I help
the typical citizen of the world be situationally aware? And the other thing for
me that was foundational to personal safety was how to get people to reconnect and
listen to their intuition. Because everyone has intuition. Where people get in trouble
is they override or ignore their intuition. I know not to let serial killer
Ted Bundy into my apartment complex. Don't do that. But oh I don't
want to be silly. I don't want to be rude. Okay, come
on, in mister X. People override their intuition, and that's the foundation
of my book. And what I did with the book was take those two
foundations, essay and intuition, and then help people understand how to determine if
they have a problem, how to make a plan, and when they have
a plan, how to take action, not to fight the bad guy,
but to avoid the bad guy altogether, or to evade the bad guy,
or to escape before you need that Kravmagod tool. And so for me,
I spent a lot of time on that book thinking about how to convey that
information both the professionals and the amateur. And at the end of the day,
as we were talking about, was before we started the podcast, I
spent all summer filming and converting my book into an online course. Because most
people don't read books, damn it. I like books because I'm a geek.
My backdrop, I got books everywhere in my office. But you know,
everybody is and dies on a phone and so if I wanted to reach
many, many people and help young college freshmen, females to seventy year old
male executives be safe, I realized I had to convert my book into it
an app, and so I converted my book into screenplay. I've written several
screenplays and I filmed it this summer, and it's got exercises and there's review
questions, and I think it's a really easy way for people to come to
a better understanding on how to be safe as they go from across the street
across the world. And I've really enjoyed that. It's a really cool way
to spend your days helping people not be victims of crime. It's fascinating because
I know I've been getting back months ago into the world of martial arts in
jiu jitsu and wa tie and whatnot, and I've interviewed a lot of black
belts now and MMA fighters, and one of the resonating things I've been hearing
goes along with what you just said, and what they keep telling me is
I'm not training to learn how to fight, I'm training how to keep out
of fights. And it was a fascinating way to look at it. He
goes. Everybody tells me, the black belts, the professors, they keep
telling me. One of the things I've learned over the years when I got
my black belt was how to avoid fights. It's not about how to defend
yourself, even though you have the skill set if you needed to. But
it's really we don't get into it. We know we can take the person
out. We're just going to move away. It's not worth it. And
it was a fascinating look at martial arts because a lot of people think have
the mentality of oh they're learning how to fight and hurt people. In reality,
n now they know they don't have to and they get away. That's
because it gives them confidence. But I still think a lot of what those
people are talking about isn't what I'm talking about. They're talking about de escalation.
Oh try and get away from the fight, do you know, because
it's still in the com it's still within the relative sphere of special of martial
arts, because that's what they's that's their discipline, that's what they spend all
their time. I'm on is the martial art. Yes they want to de
escalate, Yes they want to extract themselves from the situation. But in the
course of that they're not talking of they don't really delve into situational awareness and
intuition. And for me, it's six rules in my book. The third
rule is do I have a problem? It's a question, and you have
to ask yourself do I have a problem. And there's only one or two
answers. It's either yes or it's no. There's no in between. It's
binary either or and or. If you don't know, the means yes,
I have a problem. So you know, that's what you have to start
teaching people, is that person could be a problem. If I think they're
a problem, I have to make a plan, and the plan should always
be first and foremost, how do I get away from the problem. I
always tell people my favorite, my favorite special operations plan of all time run
Away, run Away, because you know Mighty Python and the Holy Grail Man,
they nailed it that. It's a brilliant film on personal safety, run
Away Man, because distance equals safety. And that's where it's thematically consistent with
I think you're talking about from these martial arts folks, But I'm not a
martial arts guy and I don't carry a weapon. You're talking one step before
that, then before they get into that de escalation, don't even get to
that point either. That's right for me. It's about if you're situationally aware
and you're in tune with and heeding your intuition, you're going to see that
problem coming because you're not walking down the street looking at your phone. You
know, you're not run going down the street with earbuds in and looking at
your phone. Man, if you're if you're eliminating your two greatest distant senses,
vision and hearing. If you're eliminating those, you're making yourself a target.
And it doesn't matter who you are, you're more likely to be targeted
because criminals are really adept at picking out good targets. You know why.
It's their interest to pick the easy target. So if you're not paying attention,
my ability to run up and grab the phone out of your hand,
or steal your purse, or whack you on the back of the head and
drag you away so I have possession of your body is much easier. And
so for me, my whole book's purpose is it's really different from the martial
arts or the firearms safety communities. We're all related we're all have a common
goal. I'm not here to compete with those people. I'm here to provide
information to people long before they are doing martial arts. I do advocate for
martial arts, and if you want to carry a gun, I advocate for
competent shooting instruction. You know, go to gunside academy or a lot there's
a lot of great I'm not here to champion them, but you know,
anywhere you go there's a lot of great that Rob Latham. There's a lot
of people out there who teach shooting. And I don't even know who's the
cool kid in town for martial arts or shooting now, but go get that
training. But my point is to walk the world. You don't actually have
to have that training. You don't have to carry a gun, you don't
have to carry a martial art. Those are good things to know, but
they're hard. They take a long time and a lot of discipline. What
I'm teaching doesn't take a lot of time. What it takes is learn to
think a little bit differently, learn to know when not to look at your
phone. Everyone's gonna look at their phone. Everyone's going to do text and
drive shit. I do it who does not text while they drive. Every
American texts and drives at the same time. I'm just here to say,
don't do that. When you walk out of an international airport and you're waiting
to catch the Metro in London or the two, you know, like,
that's not the time to look at your phone, man, It's your time
to look around. And so that's the purpose of the book, and I
spend all summer filming it, and I'm really excited about this. I really
want people to find this. If you go to Dan Sling books dot com,
it's front and foremost because it's my current book, and I hope people
go there buy my book or not. Honestly, it's not really about that.
It's that you can look at these principles and start thinking about safety differently.
And my whole goal in life is to help people not be victims of
crime. It's a way of making up for having killed people, which is
something that's philosophically has always bothered me. Some guys are been bothered by that.
The only regret in my career is that I had to kill people.
Everybody beats to a different dron, no doubt about that again, folks,
Dan Shilling SCCHI, Double l I n G. The Power of Awareness and
other Secrets from the world's foremost Spies, detectives and Special Operators, and How
to Stay Safe and Save Your Lives. The book we just talked about.
The other two books, I highly recommend The Battle of Mugadishu, first hand
Accounts from the men of Task Force Ranger, and Alone at Dawn, which
we also covered today. We covered three books. Kind of hard to do,
but we did it. Alone at Dawn it's the Medal of Honor recipient
John Chapman's story, The Untold Story of the World's Deadly a Special Operations for
us, Dan. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to be
with us today. Carlos. It's always a pleasure, man. I appreciate
what you're doing, and I appreciate the message you're trying to get out.
And I think what you do in this podcast and Special Ops is really good
for Americans. So I hope it's circulating and it's been a pleasure. Thanks
again, that means a lot. I appreciate it. I think, like
you said earlier, these stories have to be told and people need to know
about them. I think Rambo did it did something but not what he wanted
it to do. I still highlight the last ten minutes of that movie because
I thought that was probably the best mix of the movie, when he felt
and broke down and people got to see that these guys are humans as well.
Yeah, folks, go to Dan Shilling dot com. You can learn
more about his books there as well. Thank you everybody for listening. You
know what to do, Share, subscribe, hit that like button, Go
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