Speaker 1: Special Operations, Colbert SPI and I.
Speaker 2: The Team House with your host Jack Murphy and David Park.
Speaker 3: Hey, everybody, welcome to Team House episode three hundred and
Speaker 3: sixty four. I'm Dave Park. Joining us tonight is Lee Deckleman.
Speaker 3: Lee is a former ranger, former SF plankholder at Triple Canopy.
Speaker 3: Has done a lot of great things, a lot of
Speaker 3: wild things, a general man about town, international man of mystery,
Speaker 3: as it were.
Speaker 4: Thanks for joining us tonight, Lee.
Speaker 1: NICs, Dave.
Speaker 5: I appreciate you having me.
Speaker 1: I'm grateful anytime I can unpack my life story and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, among.
Speaker 3: My trod it it is a hell of a story too.
Speaker 3: Lee wrote a book about his life, I mean, going
Speaker 3: all the way back. Actually your birthday is only one
Speaker 3: day after mine.
Speaker 4: Uh so yeah, oh yeah. But uh the name of
Speaker 4: the book is Internal Volume.
Speaker 3: And as we get more into your story, you can
Speaker 3: tell us where Internal Volume comes from, because it's really
Speaker 3: it's not just a story about your life, but it's
Speaker 3: a story about uh I don't want to say your dysfunction,
Speaker 3: but but your trauma and not just you know, trauma
Speaker 3: from war or trauma from combat, trauma from security or whatever,
Speaker 3: but just the trauma is a childhood like your childhood
Speaker 3: was not was not a pleasant one, and sort of
Speaker 3: how that manifested throughout your life and things like that.
Speaker 4: You also founded B Yoga Strong, and right B Yoga
Speaker 4: Strong is.
Speaker 1: The name of your right. Well that five years ago
Speaker 1: when I founded B Yoga Strong. COVID hit right after that,
Speaker 1: and so I've struggled to kind of hold on to
Speaker 1: the foundation and and grow that. And so where that's
Speaker 1: at right now is is kind of on pause. But
Speaker 1: that was outside of just getting healthy and getting my
Speaker 1: own internal volume to a real low and good place.
Speaker 1: You know, the only other purpose I had was wanting
Speaker 1: to provide free yoga to my community, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: as a form of free therapy seven days a week
Speaker 1: where people would have a soft place for free to
Speaker 1: land at the end of a hard day. Yea.
Speaker 5: And so that that's the goal.
Speaker 1: You know. We'll probably get into it a little bit
Speaker 1: later when I can explain how that's kind of shifted.
Speaker 3: Sure, absolutely, So let's start from the beginning. Uh, we
Speaker 3: like to ask everybody, what is your origin story? What
Speaker 3: made you the man you are today?
Speaker 1: Well, I started out in life below average, so not
Speaker 1: even average when I was born. I was two and
Speaker 1: a half months premature, and I was cross eyed, and
Speaker 1: I spent months in an incubator in the ICU before
Speaker 1: I went to foster home. At about age six, my parents,
Speaker 1: my birth parents, came back and got me and along
Speaker 1: with my other sisters who were also in foster care,
Speaker 1: and we moved from Baltimore, Maryland, to Tennessee. A couple
Speaker 1: of years after that, and just a couple of days
Speaker 1: after getting to Tennessee, at age nine, you know, my
Speaker 1: father died, so I was on another planet. We were
Speaker 1: Jewish in Middle Tennessee in the nineteen seventies. I was
Speaker 1: nine years old, had just come from foster home. I
Speaker 1: really hadn't even got assimilated with my new family properly,
Speaker 1: and my dad was gone. So that was a really
Speaker 1: that was the first trauma. I remember. That was a
Speaker 1: real tough spot, and my mother was homicidal and suicidal,
Speaker 1: and so it was a very dysfunctional situation. After that,
Speaker 1: it got worse instead of better once we moved here
Speaker 1: and football. My father was really good at football. And
Speaker 1: I didn't know my father, but I knew he was
Speaker 1: a World War two veteran and he was really good
Speaker 1: at football, and so I wanted to be really good
Speaker 1: at football. The only problem was is I was the
Speaker 1: smallest kid in my grade every year, and I talked
Speaker 1: funny because I was from up North and you know,
Speaker 1: a little Jewish boy, and everybody was Christian.
Speaker 5: So I did feel like I was on another planet.
Speaker 1: And that led to really focusing on football, and that's
Speaker 1: really kind of what saved me. And when football was
Speaker 1: over and I didn't have the size or the grades
Speaker 1: to go to college, that was a real low spot
Speaker 1: in my life. Right after I graduated high school, and
Speaker 1: so I decided to join the army. I never wanted
Speaker 1: to be in the military. I didn't like discipline, you know.
Speaker 1: I was kind of a wild eyed Southern boy, a rebel,
Speaker 1: you know, in my nature, and so I didn't want
Speaker 1: to go in the military, but I did. And since
Speaker 1: I was going to go in, I decided, well, I'm
Speaker 1: not going to just go in. I want to do
Speaker 1: something special. Because when you grow up as a traumatized
Speaker 1: kid with nothing and you feel like you're nothing, you
Speaker 1: have to become something, right, So that's your ego, like
Speaker 1: you have to attach yourself to something. I have to
Speaker 1: be something and so being a ranger was important. That
Speaker 1: was my life mission.
Speaker 3: So, you know, you talk a little bit about the
Speaker 3: trauma of childhood, and you go into a lot of
Speaker 3: depth in the book, but I'd like to kind of
Speaker 3: rewind a little bit because when your parents came, you
Speaker 3: were with your foster parents for seven years correct.
Speaker 1: Well, for the first year there was a lot of transitions,
Speaker 1: so about six years.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, and the first year you were one year old,
Speaker 3: so right, right, so yeah, so you weren't really keeping
Speaker 3: a die or anything. But you know, if you don't
Speaker 3: mind me talking a little bit about what's in the book,
Speaker 3: because I do want people to understand sort of like
Speaker 3: the depth of the trauma and where it started and
Speaker 3: then you know, because it gets you know, it ends
Speaker 3: up with yoga. But your mother was on volume and
Speaker 3: a number of other things or whatever when you were born,
Speaker 3: which is why your premature. She went into a deep
Speaker 3: depression and you were made wards of the state. You
Speaker 3: never like, you never really lived with your parents. Your
Speaker 3: foster parents were your parents. And you know, you said
Speaker 3: that your parents came at your biological parents came and
Speaker 3: got you. But you in the book, you talk about
Speaker 3: how they came and got you. And it wasn't just
Speaker 3: traumatizing for you, it's traumatizing for your for your foster parents.
Speaker 1: That's right. My my foster mother was crushed. A rose
Speaker 1: was crushed. That's all I really remember labing was she
Speaker 1: was crushed.
Speaker 3: Because they just showed up, right, they just showed up
Speaker 3: and said, here we are, come on kids, And that
Speaker 3: would show this woman who had been raising you for
Speaker 3: six years as.
Speaker 4: Her children, just wanted you to walk out the door.
Speaker 1: That's right. And the unfortunate part is is, you know,
Speaker 1: they tried to find me my whole life and get
Speaker 1: back in touch with me because my parents cut off
Speaker 1: any kind of They never spoke of them, never mentioned
Speaker 1: their name. And so it was through social media that
Speaker 1: my older foster and brother from that family finally found me.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't that long ago. It was around twenty thirteen.
Speaker 1: I was working at Facebook at the time, and they
Speaker 1: contacted me, and you know, it was kind of magical
Speaker 1: to be able to talk to them and fill some
Speaker 1: some voids, fill some gaps and get some ques, you know.
Speaker 1: Uh and and so I ultimately went and took my
Speaker 1: son and went and met them, and uh so that
Speaker 1: that was nice, but it Rose had already died, so
Speaker 1: I didn't get an opportunity to see her as an adult.
Speaker 1: And you know, if anything makes me sad about that,
Speaker 1: it's it's that.
Speaker 4: So, you know, you.
Speaker 3: Feel a drift. You get out of high school, you
Speaker 3: join the army. What was that like for you?
Speaker 4: You know, joining the army you didn't want to be disciplined.
Speaker 4: You're kind of a wild one. And now you know,
Speaker 4: you don't just join the army, but you go to rip,
Speaker 4: you know, you do all this stuff and then you
Speaker 4: go to battalion. What was that that that like for you?
Speaker 1: Well, as much as I didn't like discipline, I hated
Speaker 1: being a nobody. I hated just being empty, you know,
Speaker 1: and so I had to feel that. So it's kind
Speaker 1: of like you do things you normally wouldn't do when
Speaker 1: you want something bad enough. And so I was willing
Speaker 1: to do and put up with whatever they put me through.
Speaker 5: I would have done practically anything.
Speaker 1: And so the hardest part for me about becoming a
Speaker 1: ranger and getting into regiment was just getting there. You know,
Speaker 1: the problems are how problematic that can be when you
Speaker 1: sign up for the army thinking that you're going to
Speaker 1: range a regiment and you find out that you're just
Speaker 1: going to an infantry unit, and you don't realize that
Speaker 1: until you're in basic training. And so that fight to
Speaker 1: finally get into regiment against the army in the original contract.
Speaker 5: Uh, you know that that was the hardest part.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, as your book kind of lays out fairly, well,
Speaker 3: you're a bit of a scrapper and you're you're not
Speaker 3: crazy about authority or people abusing their authority or speaking
Speaker 3: to you, you know, in disrespectful ways.
Speaker 4: How did that mesh with you know, being young Cherry Lee?
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So when
Speaker 1: I was growing up in the seventies in the South,
Speaker 1: you get fist fight.
Speaker 5: Like that was that was just normal behavior.
Speaker 1: Like the teachers would would just go out on the
Speaker 1: playground and they would gather and talk and you'd sort
Speaker 1: out whatever you needed to do. So being violent, being monstrous,
Speaker 1: of behaving like a sociopath wasn't unacceptable. And so getting
Speaker 1: into the military, especially into range regiment, you're almost it's
Speaker 1: almost an advantage to be a sociopath or to have
Speaker 1: be on that spectrum to the comart to be able
Speaker 1: to compartmentalize in that sense. And the difference between a
Speaker 1: good ranger and a bad ranger, or a good seal
Speaker 1: or a bad seal is are you wearing a white hat?
Speaker 1: Are you wearing a black hat? Because we're almost all
Speaker 1: on this on the spectrum of being sociopaths. So and
Speaker 1: every now and then you meet a psychopath, he's like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like, wow, that guy has ice going
Speaker 1: through his veins.
Speaker 5: Like I don't want to ever cross him.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that was it was a dream come true
Speaker 1: and it was you know, the eighteen Delta course. Graduating
Speaker 1: an eighteen delta course was definitely a highlight of my
Speaker 1: military career. But my time in Ranger Battalion and my
Speaker 1: squad in Ranger Battalion Bravo Company, third between Second Squad,
Speaker 1: you know, out of my military career, that's my most
Speaker 1: beautiful memory. Yeah, you know, I cherished that. And so
Speaker 1: it's kind of tough watching some of these g Watt
Speaker 1: Special Ops guys kind of make us look like idiots
Speaker 1: with Lion and making up these stories. You know, the
Speaker 1: best way to go about telling your war stories is
Speaker 1: leave a few things out and that way you make
Speaker 1: sure you're not you're not gonna get in trouble or
Speaker 1: or or be called out for exaggerating too much. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So you did your time in Ranger Battalion. Are there
Speaker 3: any highlights that you want to cover when while you're there?
Speaker 1: Well, I've I've got a pretty funny story I had
Speaker 1: to do with my son being born while I was
Speaker 1: in Rage Battai. But other than that, no, it was
Speaker 1: it was peacetime. Yeah, so being a Ranger Battalion peacetime
Speaker 1: was hard. It was just straining, you know. When I
Speaker 1: finally went to combat, it was like, Okay, it's only
Speaker 1: hard when it's hard. It's not just hard on purpose.
Speaker 1: You know, people aren't trying to make combat hard. Your
Speaker 1: leadership isn't trying to make it harder on you. You know.
Speaker 1: So combat was a break for me. I thought peacetime
Speaker 1: Ranger Battalion was the hardest thing I had ever done. Yeah.
Speaker 4: So you, uh, do you want to tell the story
Speaker 4: about your son?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So when I was in when I was in
Speaker 1: the battalion, I had my second child, and Josh and
Speaker 1: he actually ended up going to Bravo Company, First Range
Speaker 1: Battalion after you graduated high school, but he was born
Speaker 1: there and the way that happened. You know, Uh, well
Speaker 1: it's not it's it's kind of a long story. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we might want to it's in the book, but
Speaker 1: it's kind.
Speaker 5: Of a long story.
Speaker 3: So all right, buy the book. Oh where can people
Speaker 3: find your book?
Speaker 4: Is it on Amazon?
Speaker 1: It's on Amazon? Ok. Just if you put internal volume
Speaker 1: or put my name in you'll see that beautiful art
Speaker 1: on the front covering. And that's the logo for the foundation,
Speaker 1: which again it's on pause and not doing anything with
Speaker 1: it currently. But I have been teaching over the last
Speaker 1: five years for free.
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Speaker 3: So you leave Ranger Battalion and you leave the Army,
Speaker 3: right you ets, and you joined.
Speaker 1: No No the So the first time I was in
Speaker 1: the Army, I went to ranger school as an infantryman.
Speaker 4: Oh okay, I couldn't.
Speaker 1: Get into regiment. I had to get out and then
Speaker 1: go back in. Okay, So get right to ultimately being
Speaker 1: range of battalions Okay, through Desert Storm after twentieth Special
Speaker 1: Forces Group.
Speaker 4: Okay, that's right, because you went to Desert Storm with
Speaker 4: a conventional.
Speaker 1: Unit, right, with a National Guard unit. Yeah, a disaster.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that's right. So then you.
Speaker 3: Because you got out a couple of times, so you right,
Speaker 3: So you go to range battalions.
Speaker 1: I did. I did. I went in in eighty five
Speaker 1: and ats and eighty eight. I got activated for Desert
Speaker 1: Storm in ninety to ninety one, and then I when
Speaker 1: I got back from there, I joined the twentiesth Special
Speaker 1: Forces Guard Unit and then in ninety five went back
Speaker 1: on active duty to first Range of Attack until I
Speaker 1: was medically retired.
Speaker 4: Hey, I got a.
Speaker 6: Question, because we never really have too many a ton
Speaker 6: of people that I asked that talk about Desert Storm.
Speaker 4: What was that trip like for you?
Speaker 1: For my unit and for my experience, it should have
Speaker 1: just been, you know, considered a training exercise. You know,
Speaker 1: we really weren't. My my unit didn't have a purpose there.
Speaker 1: And so when you're in a situation like that and
Speaker 1: you don't have really a functional purpose, you're not really
Speaker 1: participating in the war.
Speaker 5: They have to make up something for you to do.
Speaker 1: And so that's kind of what our unit, that's the
Speaker 1: space our unit landed in. And so I think the
Speaker 1: what I got out of Desert Storm was what the
Speaker 1: news says about war can be one hundred percent opposite
Speaker 1: of what's really going on at the time.
Speaker 5: I think that's the.
Speaker 1: First time I ever realized that because of what CNN
Speaker 1: was putting out versus what I was seeing with my
Speaker 1: own eyes. And the other thing I think I got
Speaker 1: out of Desert Storm was, you know, you just get
Speaker 1: that first combat deployment out under your belt. You know,
Speaker 1: it's it's a little unless you don't have a center
Speaker 1: in your brain that gets scared, you know, the migula,
Speaker 1: unless you don't have one like some of those cliff climbers.
Speaker 1: It's a little nerve wracking trying to keep it together.
Speaker 1: And you know, your first time going into a war
Speaker 1: where it's just an unknown, it's a complete unknown, and
Speaker 1: so getting that out of the way really helped.
Speaker 4: So, uh, you you come back from Desert Storm, you
Speaker 4: you go to Ranger Battalion because you didn't do the
Speaker 4: Q course while you were in twentieth.
Speaker 1: Group, Right, that's right, I just dis selection.
Speaker 3: Okay, so you go to one seventy five.
Speaker 4: That's right, okay, sorry about that. And then at the
Speaker 4: end of that time, do you get out again or
Speaker 4: do you go? Do you roll right into essef from
Speaker 4: there I leave?
Speaker 1: I was gonna. I became I was impa first bat
Speaker 1: and became a team leader, and I wanted to stay
Speaker 1: and become a squad leader because you know, I kind
Speaker 1: of wanted to go to the unit. And my patuito
Speaker 1: sergeant at the time was a real dick. And I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna call him out on here, but uh, everything
Speaker 1: else about my batoon and everything else about battalion I loved,
Speaker 1: except this guy. And so I just decided to put
Speaker 1: in a forty one eighty seven to transfer to the
Speaker 1: Q course. Since I had already been to selection and
Speaker 1: I had already been selected, it was just time to move.
Speaker 4: On, okay.
Speaker 3: So so you don't get out, you you roll into
Speaker 3: the Q course.
Speaker 4: That's right, okay? And how is that for you?
Speaker 1: It was the best it was. I spent almost fifteen
Speaker 1: years total in the military. It was the best two
Speaker 1: years of my military career.
Speaker 4: Yeah, San Antonio, is that good?
Speaker 1: No? No? I was the first class at brag Oh really,
Speaker 1: I was the first class where it was all at
Speaker 1: brag You had to pass the National Register Paramedic course,
Speaker 1: so sock them became this beast of a medical course.
Speaker 5: To get through and so it was very challenging.
Speaker 1: But if if something's done right, you know, being challenged
Speaker 1: is a good thing. You know, a certain type of
Speaker 1: stress is a good thing, you know, in the right environment.
Speaker 1: So great instructors, very professional operation. Everything that was done
Speaker 1: there was you know, respectable, honorable.
Speaker 5: There was you know, there was a there was a.
Speaker 1: High standard, you know, the opposite of anything that Tim
Speaker 1: Kennedy has been putting out there. You know, the Ranger Regiment,
Speaker 1: the Green Brace community, you know those are really special places.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you fin the Q course like top Medic
Speaker 4: right out of the eighteen delta course.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well it was there was eighteen teams. So out
Speaker 1: of my class, I think there were no fourteen teams,
Speaker 1: fourteen or eighteen teams, but it was Seals Green Berets.
Speaker 1: That was back when the PJS still went there, the
Speaker 1: Independent corpsman. So everybody, everybody went to the short course
Speaker 1: of long course there and so out of my class,
Speaker 1: everybody was divided up and it was a twenty six
Speaker 1: mile land that course, and every couple of miles or
Speaker 1: kilometers there would be a medical scenario, you know, and
Speaker 1: it was a pass or fail, and the fail added
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes to your time of pass. You just continue
Speaker 1: to move, and it's kind of like the Tordy France.
Speaker 1: The first group to finish with the lowest time or
Speaker 1: the shortest amount of time wins. And so I was
Speaker 1: with the team that that won. It was four. It
Speaker 1: was four rangers. So it was two guys from third
Speaker 1: Ranger Brittalion, myself, and then a stud of a ranger.
Speaker 1: I can't think of his name right now, but he
Speaker 1: was in Best Ranger competition. He placed in Best Ranger competition,
Speaker 1: but I can't think of his name right now. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so we won the Best medic competition. I don't think
Speaker 1: they did it. I don't think they do it anymore logistically.
Speaker 1: I think it was real hard, and I think a
Speaker 1: lot of students didn't like it, Like the Seals did
Speaker 1: not like it. I'm pretty sure the pj's didn't like
Speaker 1: it either. The pj's just had their own way of
Speaker 1: doing things, so I think that's why they ultimately came
Speaker 1: up with their own eighteen Delta course.
Speaker 3: And so out of the eighteen delta course, what group
Speaker 3: did you get assigned to?
Speaker 1: Third Group? Okay, I wanted I wanted Seventh Group because
Speaker 1: it was peacetime as Seventh Group was the only guys
Speaker 1: going down range with magazines and their guns. Yea, and
Speaker 1: so that's that's what I wanted to do. You know,
Speaker 1: I didn't mind j Setz or anything like that, but
Speaker 1: I wanted to go shoot back people.
Speaker 4: Sure.
Speaker 1: I wanted to be that guy.
Speaker 4: Sure. And the Seventh Group was getting on you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: With their second families down in Panama.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, they could do They could do a Netflix
Speaker 1: series about Seventh Group during that time, last about ten years.
Speaker 4: So you go to Third Group focused on Africa. How
Speaker 4: was that for you?
Speaker 1: It was a disappointment. So, you know, I can be
Speaker 1: a purist sometimes, or I can be you know, on
Speaker 1: my high horse sometimes, or you know, I went through
Speaker 1: a lot to get there, and I had.
Speaker 5: A high expectation.
Speaker 1: And so when I went to Swaziland, Africa for the
Speaker 1: first time, I wanted to cure everybody. And you know,
Speaker 1: if there was somebody in the village that was having
Speaker 1: complications with a delivery or whatever, it was, and that
Speaker 1: was the scenario that happened that I'm that I'm was
Speaker 1: first upset about. You know, I want to be able
Speaker 1: to go and and and at least help and you know,
Speaker 1: not being able to do that, you know, having.
Speaker 5: Those kind of restrictions.
Speaker 1: You know. Uh, I just didn't understand it. It didn't
Speaker 1: make sense to me to have the type of restrictions.
Speaker 1: Just like in wartime sometimes the roe is geared towards
Speaker 1: favoring the enemy. And I don't care about the political
Speaker 1: or or what the narrative is. You know, the guys
Speaker 1: on the ground know and what's right and what's wrong,
Speaker 1: and so uh yeah, anyways, I get getting inside.
Speaker 3: It's interesting because you're not even complaining that you guys
Speaker 3: would get a creative MRIs while tenth group was eating
Speaker 3: foy grid and brought worst. You're you were just more
Speaker 3: taken back by the fact you couldn't do your job.
Speaker 7: Oh yes, yes, no, I I thought the ship with
Speaker 7: the sugar was part of the beauty of being you know,
Speaker 7: an elite operator, was you know, being able to take
Speaker 7: the ship with the sugar.
Speaker 1: I was fine with that, not you know, being lied
Speaker 1: to or being manipulated or ultimately being bullied, uh, which
Speaker 1: would happen sometimes in your career. Yeah. I I the
Speaker 1: the the part of me that wanted to be successful
Speaker 1: in the military couldn't control the part of.
Speaker 5: Me that you know, wasn't going to put up with that, right,
Speaker 5: And so you know.
Speaker 1: I'm not the best example. If you read my book,
Speaker 1: I give some good advice, but I'm not the best
Speaker 1: example of how to be a great soldier.
Speaker 3: Well, advice comes from learning, and you've done a lot
Speaker 3: of learning.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So what was it like? So what timeframe? What
Speaker 3: years are we talking about right now?
Speaker 1: For which job?
Speaker 4: For SF? While you're in third group?
Speaker 1: Okay? Okay, So I joined twentieth group in ninety one
Speaker 1: or ninety two. I went on active duty in ninety five.
Speaker 1: I went to the Q course in ninety six, and
Speaker 1: so I got medically retired in two thousand.
Speaker 4: Okay, So so about four years bouncing around Africa?
Speaker 3: What what was the what was your mission? What was
Speaker 3: the situation like? Because you talk about these restrictions, what
Speaker 3: were the concerns at the time?
Speaker 1: Well, we had before you know, how s F guys are.
Speaker 1: I mean, we went over there and everybody around us,
Speaker 1: you know, was in love with us. You know, we
Speaker 1: we went over there won the parts and minds of people,
Speaker 1: and not through just pure manipulation, but through just actually caring,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean, you know, if you're gonna be
Speaker 1: a great arreat, you should actually care about helping people
Speaker 1: because that's part of what your you know, job is,
Speaker 1: and so it's not just killing people. It might be
Speaker 1: healing them and just helping them might be the mission.
Speaker 1: So well, what specific I forgot that.
Speaker 3: That's okay, I'm just saying for for you, because we
Speaker 3: don't hear about the GYT as much anymore, or we
Speaker 3: don't hear about the time prior to the GE as
Speaker 3: much anymore. So in Africa at the time, you know,
Speaker 3: isis wasn't a concern like what what was your mission
Speaker 3: in Africa?
Speaker 5: Training?
Speaker 1: Training? Training? Yeah, training, you know, you you might do
Speaker 1: medical support, but it was usually a training mission or
Speaker 1: adjacet mission, and there was just a lot of downtime
Speaker 1: for the medics to do medical stuff, you know. I
Speaker 1: mean I had one person in Swaziland bring their grandfather
Speaker 1: in a wheelbarrow like eight miles through the mountains in
Speaker 1: Swaziland to be seen, and you know, he had polio,
Speaker 1: so there was nothing I could do. But that was
Speaker 1: the environment I was in. And I wanted to be
Speaker 1: a doctor, you know. That was a phase of my
Speaker 1: life where I wouldn't it wasn't important to run around
Speaker 1: to shoot people like. I wanted to heal people like.
Speaker 1: I really loved being a medic. And usually when I
Speaker 1: love something, i'm really good at it. So and then
Speaker 1: I kind of lost my love for it over time,
Speaker 1: and and and just moved on.
Speaker 4: Was that burnout or was it due to bureaucracy just
Speaker 4: the army doing the army thing?
Speaker 1: It mainly the medical field with the paperwork. That would
Speaker 1: be the biggest thing. Is the paperwork in the medical
Speaker 1: field has gotten so bad. If paperwork or school worker
Speaker 1: sitting still and writing and thinking like that and behaving
Speaker 1: like that, if that stresses you out because you're too
Speaker 1: much like a chimpanzee like I am, then then it
Speaker 1: wasn't attractive anymore. If I could go treat people and
Speaker 1: not have to do the paperwork, I would stand on
Speaker 1: my feet and treat people from daylight till dark. So
Speaker 1: that was that was the main thing. The other thing
Speaker 1: was to trauma is over time, when I became a
Speaker 1: nine to one one paramedic. I didn't realize how traumatized
Speaker 1: I was. I didn't realize that I was walking around
Speaker 1: with an internal volume that was so high that I
Speaker 1: was constantly stressed out. My blood pressure was constantly up.
Speaker 1: And uh so I started seeing you know, murder suicide
Speaker 1: stuff and veterans coming home and you know, dying, and
Speaker 1: and uh I just didn't want to see anymore. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Now, are you talking about when you were after you
Speaker 4: were out or when you were right?
Speaker 1: Right? This was? This was after Ramadi. So this was
Speaker 1: after killing a bunch of folks, surviving a bunch of attacks,
Speaker 1: feeling like Superman, coming back home and realizing that you're nothing.
Speaker 5: Okay, yeah, so.
Speaker 3: You got medically just charged in two thousand. Now I
Speaker 3: don't want to go the story of your medical condition.
Speaker 6: Is.
Speaker 3: People have to buy the book, people have to read
Speaker 3: it like it is. I had to take it in
Speaker 3: chunks because I could feel everything.
Speaker 4: It's amazing, it's amazing.
Speaker 1: Do you want me to give a sample?
Speaker 3: You can give a teaser, but I really no, No,
Speaker 3: that's right, that's right.
Speaker 1: We talked about that earlier. Yeah. Yeah, well we'll wait.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, Oh, it's just it's just what you're going
Speaker 3: to talk about in the.
Speaker 1: Case you did, but if you wanted to just just
Speaker 1: mention it. I was medically retired from the Army because
Speaker 1: they did a surgery on my bladder and went sideways
Speaker 1: and they had to go back in and do an
Speaker 1: emergency surgery right after the initial surgery, and when they
Speaker 1: did that, they ripped open the head of my penis,
Speaker 1: and multiple surgeries came after that.
Speaker 5: I was discharged with incontinence.
Speaker 1: And you know, I was still in my thirties and
Speaker 1: a Green beret and when all that was going on,
Speaker 1: so and it led to a divorce with my wife
Speaker 1: and kids, and so it was the worst, most traumatic
Speaker 1: time in my life. And it's a story that you know,
Speaker 1: I've never heard anybody else tell from that aspect of
Speaker 1: having trauma to your penis. Short of that guy that
Speaker 1: had his penis cut off by his wife or girlfriend.
Speaker 1: Find me down the road and throughout the window. He's
Speaker 1: got me beat. But he's the only guy I know
Speaker 1: of that's got me beat.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I guess he made a recovery because
Speaker 3: didn't he.
Speaker 4: Go on to do porn or a porn after that?
Speaker 1: Well, you know, with today's technology, they could put a
Speaker 1: big old black penis on you, you know, and you
Speaker 1: could being porn and and uh and have a and
Speaker 1: and and have a make a lot of money doing that.
Speaker 1: I'm sure.
Speaker 4: Everybody's got a path. So yeah, and and and.
Speaker 3: What you just described is the perfect kind of teaser
Speaker 3: for it. But you go into some some detail that,
Speaker 3: like I said, I could feel it.
Speaker 4: But anyway, so.
Speaker 3: You leave, Uh, you leave in two thousand and two
Speaker 3: thousand and one.
Speaker 4: What did you do between between that and nine to eleven?
Speaker 1: Oh? Okay, So I got medically retired in May of
Speaker 1: two thousand. The next day I went to work as
Speaker 1: a paramedic in Rutherford County in Middle Tennessee in Murphysboro, Tennessee.
Speaker 5: The next day I went to work.
Speaker 1: I was of the generation in the mindset that if
Speaker 1: you didn't have a job, you were worthless, you were
Speaker 1: sorry as hell.
Speaker 4: So, you know, when.
Speaker 1: I realized I was getting put out of the military,
Speaker 1: the only certification I had was being a nationally registered paramedic.
Speaker 1: Everything else that I had done in the military wouldn't
Speaker 1: get me a job doing anything. So you know, you
Speaker 1: can't even get a job as a call anymore being
Speaker 1: a Green Beret or a arranger unless you have a
Speaker 1: college degree. So I just did I just I just
Speaker 1: went with it. And so the next day I was
Speaker 1: working as a nine to one one paramedic and I
Speaker 1: did that for the next two years until ultimately I
Speaker 1: went to become a Federal Air Marshal because of nine
Speaker 1: to eleven.
Speaker 4: And I do I want to say that we are
Speaker 4: skipping a lot of personal stories and anecdotes and everything,
Speaker 4: because while you were a paramedic at the station, was
Speaker 4: the I believe second ass kicking you delivered that is
Speaker 4: detailed in this book.
Speaker 1: In that year.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I used to in that year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think most people from our community either were
Speaker 1: like myself, or you know, their best friend was like
Speaker 1: me or something. You know, we're not too far away
Speaker 1: from being that or whatever. And so, you know, I
Speaker 1: grew up fighting. I didn't like being bullied, and so
Speaker 1: I had just got put out of the military. The
Speaker 1: trauma from that surgery, the trauma from my divorce. My
Speaker 1: best friend was having an affair with my wife. I
Speaker 1: let that go and the divorce was going fine, and
Speaker 1: as soon as I started seeing this hot female cop,
Speaker 1: my ex wife started causing drama, and my ex best
Speaker 1: friend started causing drama. So it's very detailed in the book,
Speaker 1: but I just told him, I said, well, let's just
Speaker 1: meet and settle it. So my best friend in my
Speaker 1: life had become my nemesis and I put him in
Speaker 1: the er. And so maybe six months after that, my
Speaker 1: hand had healed up pretty good. You know, being a paramedic,
Speaker 1: short of being an air marshal, being a paramedic was
Speaker 1: the best job I had for getting dates that would
Speaker 1: be appropriate web putting it. And so I was getting
Speaker 1: all the dates I wanted. And this one nurse that
Speaker 1: I had contacted, one of the other paramedics was seeing
Speaker 1: her and so he had a problem with it, and
Speaker 1: she was cool.
Speaker 3: I was like, I was like, I'm sorry, No, you
Speaker 3: said you contacted her, but she gave you her number
Speaker 3: and told you told you she was single.
Speaker 1: That's right, Yeah, that's an important part. Yeah. So so anyways,
Speaker 1: she was just one of three or four nurses or
Speaker 1: paramedics I was messing around with at the time, and
Speaker 1: he was engaged to somebody and seeing people on the side,
Speaker 1: and so when that conflicted, you know, he called me
Speaker 1: up and addressed it and I actually liked the guy
Speaker 1: like I liked him, and he was just being a
Speaker 1: real jerk to me, just talking down to me. And
Speaker 1: so within a minute or so, I just got mad.
Speaker 1: And once, once, once a fighting age mail crosses me,
Speaker 1: all I want to do is kill them, right, So
Speaker 1: I just become a chimpanzee, a sociopath, and so all
Speaker 1: I wanted to do was after that, So there was
Speaker 1: no rush. I was like, Okay, all right, that's how
Speaker 1: you feel about it. That's your woman. I need to
Speaker 1: stay away. I get it. So about two weeks later,
Speaker 1: I bump into him as shift changeover and I tell
Speaker 1: him to meet me out in the garage and we
Speaker 1: sorted it out.
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Speaker 2: Hey guys, I want to tell all of you today
Speaker 2: about a new newsletter that launching that encompasses both the
Speaker 2: Teamhouse podcast the eyes On podcast and The high Side
Speaker 2: News outlet, which I run with Sean Naylor. The newsletter
Speaker 2: is gonna be once a week. It's gonna come into
Speaker 2: your inbox and you're gonna get the most current podcasts
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Speaker 2: current on the high Side. So it's another way for
Speaker 2: us to get the information out to you as social
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Speaker 2: what you're gonna get. So this is a once a
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Speaker 1: The link.
Speaker 2: The link will also be down the description if you're
Speaker 2: looking for it there.
Speaker 3: And that's Teamhouse Podcast, dot Kit, k I t Kilo India,
Speaker 3: Tango dot com. Backslash joint.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yes, so from there, from being a paramedic.
Speaker 3: And that's it's in the book. Guys, get the book.
Speaker 3: It's entertaining it sol you'll love it. So nine to
Speaker 3: eleven happens. There's that big surge for air marshals. And
Speaker 3: initially before they started lowering the standards, they had incredibly
Speaker 3: high standards, right and in a lot of former soft
Speaker 3: guys were going into it. It was kind of a
Speaker 3: network and uh, and so you went through all this training.
Speaker 3: They have very precise shooting standards. Because you're an air marshal,
Speaker 3: apparently you also meet a lot of women on the job.
Speaker 3: And what happened with you is what happened with a
Speaker 3: lot of the guys, which I think is one of
Speaker 3: the reasons why the standards lowered. Was triple cannot be
Speaker 3: starts up. It's kind of word of mouth. It's all
Speaker 3: like tier one, Tier two, tier three. Guy, it's all
Speaker 3: soft guys initially, that's that's all they're taking. The pay
Speaker 3: is what six hundred twelve a day? Like the pay
Speaker 3: is outrageous, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, So you're you're you're exactly right.
Speaker 5: I mean, the two things that I think.
Speaker 1: Removed all the good people are most of the good
Speaker 1: people from that program or pushed them out. Was when
Speaker 1: the Secret Service took over and kind of changed the
Speaker 1: way they ran that department. A lot of people were like,
Speaker 1: I'm not you know, we're not doing this. This isn't
Speaker 1: what we signed on for. And I was part of
Speaker 1: that group, and so there were so many opportunities, you know,
Speaker 1: because they recruited so high for the Air Marshal program.
Speaker 5: The standards were so high that a.
Speaker 1: Lot of people that became Air marshals qualified in that
Speaker 1: initial push in two thousand and three, two thousand and
Speaker 1: four to Iraq in Afghanistan is contrast, which you know,
Speaker 1: met that standard. So it was an easy.
Speaker 3: Transition because Triple Canopy people may not know this, but
Speaker 3: Triple Canopy was known as the the soft like Triple
Speaker 3: Canopy was the elite security company and they had a
Speaker 3: very very rigorous qualification course.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I don't you know. This is the part
Speaker 1: of my career that I think, you know, is more
Speaker 1: interesting to me. So but I was there from the
Speaker 1: beginning and I know all the key players very well.
Speaker 1: And my last deployment with Triple Canopy I started in
Speaker 1: February of four and my last deployment with Triple Canopy
Speaker 1: was in twenty twelve. So I saw the beginning and
Speaker 1: the ending of Triple Canopy and the company that I
Speaker 1: started with. There's nothing I've done in my lifetime that
Speaker 1: compares to that organization. It was amazing, I mean absolutely amazing.
Speaker 1: I was a very average guy that was very grateful
Speaker 1: to be there twelve. You know, in twenty twelve when
Speaker 1: I went back, it was the most budget, bullshit company
Speaker 1: I had ever deployed with. Yeah, you know, so it
Speaker 1: was a shell of itself. And so what happens is
Speaker 1: is they what Triple Canopy did in the beginning was
Speaker 1: they said, we're going to have the best men, the
Speaker 1: best pay, and the best equipment. And for the first
Speaker 1: seven months they did that. The next seven months they
Speaker 1: lost sight of that. Fourteen months into it, they started
Speaker 1: changing and each year over time, they got further and
Speaker 1: further away from what they initially started as. And because
Speaker 1: in the beginning they cared about the guys on the ground.
Speaker 1: When you have a corporate office that's full of operators
Speaker 1: that knows that they're there to support the guys with
Speaker 1: body armor on, it's different than because I worked in
Speaker 1: corporate with the ODT later on, the corporate security culture
Speaker 1: thinks to corporation is the important part, and the guys
Speaker 1: on the ground need to listen up and do what
Speaker 1: they're told. And it's the complete opposite. If you want
Speaker 1: to operate the right way, if you want it to
Speaker 1: be non toxic, healthy, if you want everything to be
Speaker 1: on the right frequency, Triple Canopy did it right for
Speaker 1: the first seven months. And now I'm not saying Blackwater
Speaker 1: because I worked several years with Blackwater, and Blackwater and
Speaker 1: Eric Prince was a great company to work for, but
Speaker 1: they still weren't Triple Canopy in the beginning. Nobody did
Speaker 1: what they did right well.
Speaker 3: And you know when you just think of I guess
Speaker 3: the economics of the You know, you have all the
Speaker 3: g watch starts, and you have all these soft guys
Speaker 3: that are within three to five years of getting out
Speaker 3: right maybe you know, staying up on their skills whatever else. Well,
Speaker 3: that pool dries up eventually. And not only that, but
Speaker 3: where Triple Canopy can pay guys eight nine hundred dollars
Speaker 3: a day because they're they're giving like the cream of
Speaker 3: the crop there pitches, well, it's allsoft like these guys,
Speaker 3: they're all professionals, you know, they all know what they're doing.
Speaker 3: But then you have companies like cust Battles and these
Speaker 3: other like shit, I haven't heard that name a long time, right,
Speaker 3: you have these other shit show.
Speaker 4: First off, you need more and more people and you
Speaker 4: need the faster.
Speaker 3: The second thing is you have all these other companies
Speaker 3: coming in and going, well, you know, they say they're
Speaker 3: going to do it for you know, twenty two hundred
Speaker 3: dollars per manday. We can do it for you know,
Speaker 3: twelve hundred per manday, and we can get those same
Speaker 3: guys they can't, But nobody ever checks that afterwards.
Speaker 1: You're absolutely correct. It becomes what they call lean management
Speaker 1: style from a corporate aspect, it's just about the margins
Speaker 1: of profit and it literally becomes just a business model.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and like.
Speaker 1: EODT, like whoever thought it would be a good idea
Speaker 1: to take South Africans, white South Africans and put them
Speaker 1: in charge of black Ugandans. But that's what they did,
Speaker 1: and other companies followed. Because you were once paying an expat,
Speaker 1: whether it be you know somebody from America or you
Speaker 1: know a qualified person from Britain or wherever else. But
Speaker 1: you were once paying that person. Let's just say you're
Speaker 1: paying them five hundred dollars at the low end to
Speaker 1: do the security at the front gate or whatever. You know,
Speaker 1: shit worked that nobody to do. That needs to be done,
Speaker 1: and it needs to be done by somebody that cares
Speaker 1: just enough to stay awake and do their job. And
Speaker 1: so when you can pay you Gandan's five or six
Speaker 1: hundred dollars a month to do the same job, and
Speaker 1: they'll actually take more pride in it because it's so
Speaker 1: much more money than they can make. It's an opportunity
Speaker 1: worth leaving you Ganda to be away from their family,
Speaker 1: to be in harm's way. It makes that big of
Speaker 1: a difference. But yet they're being managed by South Africans.
Speaker 1: So I was actually involved in I don't know if
Speaker 1: you remember, but in a Baghdad there was a South
Speaker 1: African that was killed by a Ugandan and then the
Speaker 1: Ugandan killed himself at one of the bases. And I
Speaker 1: did the investigation on that, and it was it was,
Speaker 1: it was that whole concept of just racism. You know,
Speaker 1: they just harass those guys so much, and all those
Speaker 1: guys wanted to do was pull security, make money for
Speaker 1: the family, go home right right, and and so you
Speaker 1: know they would do things like have them up all
Speaker 1: night running from one guard shack to the other. Five
Speaker 1: minutes later, you know, run again. So they would just
Speaker 1: run them okay, so they couldn't fall asleep. You know,
Speaker 1: just just real brutal kind of things. So again I
Speaker 1: can get off track on that and get into a
Speaker 1: whole different chapter of life. So it was pretty awful.
Speaker 1: After two thousand and four, two thousand and five, In
Speaker 1: two thousand and six, I went to work for the
Speaker 1: for Uses with the ATA program. And that was other
Speaker 1: than being part of Team Miami and Ramadi Iraq with
Speaker 1: Triple Canopy, you know, an original member of that team.
Speaker 1: This was the next best job I'd ever had, working
Speaker 1: with that anti terrorist Assistance program. It was wonderful. But
Speaker 1: after that I started bouncing to sock. I went to
Speaker 1: EOD Corporate. I went to Blackwater. You know, I've been
Speaker 1: with Tiger Swan with Olive Group, and I may be
Speaker 1: missing a few unfortunately I can't remember all of them.
Speaker 1: But but but most of it was ship, most of
Speaker 1: them ship Blackwater. When Eric was there, they had it right,
Speaker 1: They did some cowboys stuff. But I'm not you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna judge how savage people are gonna be
Speaker 1: in a scenario because I know the scenarios I had
Speaker 1: to be in. The what I criticized people and what
Speaker 1: I can't stand and what I'm against is people lying
Speaker 1: about what they did or didn't do, especially to profit
Speaker 1: from it. So I don't have a problem people that
Speaker 1: trained all their life to go kill folks and they
Speaker 1: go over there to kill folks, because that's what we
Speaker 1: sent people to do, and we should support that a
Speaker 1: little bit more than what we did.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about your time, because you know, you talk
Speaker 3: about being in combat, and for anybody who thinks that
Speaker 3: you weren't in combat because you were working for Triple Canopy,
Speaker 3: let's talk about your time. And you know t Miami
Speaker 3: Ramadi at that time. How many how many ambushes or
Speaker 3: contacts would you say you were in during that like
Speaker 3: three or four year period.
Speaker 1: Okay, So in two thousand and four in Ramadi and
Speaker 1: not just in Remady, but we were the team assigned
Speaker 1: to Ramady. We were attacked over twenty times. And when
Speaker 1: I say attacked, it involved an RPG a machine gun.
Speaker 1: We were attacked. It wasn't like somebody walked across the
Speaker 1: street with AK forty seven and looked at us hard.
Speaker 1: You know, we were attacked over twenty times, and uh
Speaker 1: so our principal was attacked even before the team got
Speaker 1: there in Ramadi and the limo was his limo was
Speaker 1: down hard and there was a DC reporter in the
Speaker 1: vehicle as well. And it was after that event, I
Speaker 1: think that was January or February oh four. And I
Speaker 1: don't know that a news reporter after that ever went
Speaker 1: to Ramadi. They would go to Fallujah, they would go
Speaker 1: to Camp Fallujah, but I don't know of one single
Speaker 1: reporter or anything that after Remadi. I mean, nobody wanted
Speaker 1: to go to Ramadi.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, in the book, you tell a funny story about uh,
Speaker 3: your principal, the ambassador ray Would. It needed to be
Speaker 3: a lot of the meetings that Mattis needed to be
Speaker 3: at and that he was. I don't want to say
Speaker 3: he was your canary in the coal mine because basically,
Speaker 3: you guys wanted to get out. Hey, you wanted to
Speaker 3: get out ahead of.
Speaker 1: Him, right, Yeah, it's a funny story. Now, but you know,
Speaker 1: when when you start realizing that every time you go
Speaker 1: to a meeting that jennerifal General Madis is at, he
Speaker 1: gets attacked going or coming back from every time. And
Speaker 1: so when you realize that pattern, you know, operating at
Speaker 1: tier one level, you have the freedom of going, we're
Speaker 1: gonna change tactics. You know, when you're in the conventional
Speaker 1: military and they say the convoy speed is going to
Speaker 1: be forty five to fifty miles an hour, or you
Speaker 1: can't come in and say, hey, dude, we're doing one
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty today. We're gonna have a kilometer in
Speaker 1: between us. You make contact, I'll be rolling up far
Speaker 1: enough back where I can dismount take the attention off,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. We started doing things different
Speaker 1: and it worked.
Speaker 3: But with Mattis, you guys started like leap making sure
Speaker 3: that you always left before his convoy did.
Speaker 1: That's right, that was our That was our primary launch
Speaker 1: indicator was we had to leave Camp Ramady, we had
Speaker 1: to leave the government center, we had to leave Camp Fallujah,
Speaker 1: wherever it was we were meeting. We had to leave
Speaker 1: before General Mattis because he stopped and fought. So in protection,
Speaker 1: you're taught to run right, to go against your instinct. Well,
Speaker 1: for some people it's their instinct to run. But you know,
Speaker 1: when you're attacked, you're supposed to fight back. You're supposed
Speaker 1: to be trained to that level that your instinct is
Speaker 1: to fight back. And uh, General Maddis, I don't know
Speaker 1: if he'll ever write a book, but you know, tell
Speaker 1: me another two star general that you know of that
Speaker 1: every time he got attacked, which was regularly, they stopped
Speaker 1: in fault and he was right there with his marines
Speaker 1: doing that. So and and I've got a story of
Speaker 1: General Kelly also. You know, we took him down the
Speaker 1: hill and he told a story about uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the first guy he killed over there from his hum
Speaker 1: V And so you know, these are general officers that
Speaker 1: are getting out there with their men and participating in
Speaker 1: the war. And so I have nothing but respect for
Speaker 1: General Maddie. But yes, we got attacked a lot, but
Speaker 1: he got attacked every time he left the base.
Speaker 5: As far as I can remember.
Speaker 3: What was that because you know you had been arranging battalion,
Speaker 3: you had been an sf all sort of in a
Speaker 3: peace time. I'm military. What was that first contact like
Speaker 3: for you?
Speaker 1: The first contact I was in, it went great at first,
Speaker 1: so when when we got ambushed, we had the principal
Speaker 1: with us. I was in the follow vehicle and I
Speaker 1: saw four gunmen out my out my window and so
Speaker 1: and we were going pretty slow, and so the call came,
Speaker 1: you know, RPG gunners, reverse out, reverse out, and so
Speaker 1: one guy the videos online of this attack, but it's
Speaker 1: from one vehicle, so you're only hearing him on the
Speaker 1: radio in his vehicle because it's being recorded by the camera.
Speaker 1: There's five know, there's five vehicles totaling five different versions
Speaker 1: of what's going on. But unlike with Tim Kennedy, everybody
Speaker 1: basically tells the same story just from their perspective.
Speaker 3: How many how many grenades did you guys throw that day?
Speaker 3: I want to know how many grenades you threw personally?
Speaker 1: Well, I had there was only three or four, No,
Speaker 1: just kidding. I had one grenade and it was strapped
Speaker 1: you know, to my to my kit and uh, but
Speaker 1: I never used that in battle.
Speaker 4: Amateur hour, amateur but I was.
Speaker 1: I was literally taking the slack. Now, we're an armored vehicle,
Speaker 1: so if you're going to crack the door, you better
Speaker 1: know what you're doing because you don't want to unbutton
Speaker 1: your armor. Unless you really need to, and you thought
Speaker 1: that through. And I had them dead to right and
Speaker 1: we were starting to turn around, and I literally have
Speaker 1: the perfect scenario if you're right handed cracking the back
Speaker 1: door on the left side, looking back at three gunmen
Speaker 1: on a porch and one in the yard, and they're
Speaker 1: both you know, kind of at the they're all at
Speaker 1: the low ready, So I kind of had them deads right.
Speaker 1: So I'm taking the slack out and then he hit
Speaker 1: the gas and that slung me And so now I'm
Speaker 1: sliding across the seat and the BMW in the leather
Speaker 1: seat to get to the other windows so I can
Speaker 1: keep an eye to the so I can still see
Speaker 1: them because now we're turning around, and that's when the
Speaker 1: RPG hit the road and shattered my window and flattened
Speaker 1: all the tires.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so I mean, I assume you guys had
Speaker 4: run flats.
Speaker 3: You didn't need to do a recovery, You didn't have
Speaker 3: to do a recovery or anything like that.
Speaker 1: You could like that we would have been dead. Yeah, Dave,
Speaker 1: that out of all the scenarios I've been in, and
Speaker 1: from a protection standpoint, I've been in a lot of
Speaker 1: scenarios from a protection standpoint of how to play these
Speaker 1: things out. And if if any of our vehicles that
Speaker 1: day would have stopped rolling, everybody in that vehicle would
Speaker 1: have been in trouble. Yeah, it would have been in trouble.
Speaker 1: They had us on both sides of the road. It
Speaker 1: was a it was a major ambush that they were
Speaker 1: setting up, and uh, it just looked like we caught
Speaker 1: them off guard. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So you know you talk about internal volume, and you
Speaker 3: had mentioned it a couple of times like before this, uh,
Speaker 3: before this, since an interview, before this time of your life.
Speaker 3: Can you tell us what the the the internal volume
Speaker 3: meant for you?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So if you, I guess the best way to
Speaker 1: explain this if you you go sit in a room
Speaker 1: where it's quiet, turn your phone off, turn the TV.
Speaker 1: It's just quiet. There's nothing that's sit there for fifteen minutes. Now,
Speaker 1: if that seems like torture, your internal volume is probably high.
Speaker 1: You're probably gritting your teeth. You're probably well, what animal
Speaker 1: in nature can't just sit and be calm and relax
Speaker 1: and the quiet? So if you can't do that, which
Speaker 1: I couldn't, that's an example of you know, you're so
Speaker 1: We've got all these lies and excuses and these biases
Speaker 1: we tell ourselves to justify our behavior. Our self taught
Speaker 1: can justify almost anything we wanted to. And so what
Speaker 1: I realized was my internal volume. It wasn't whether I
Speaker 1: had a new car, It wasn't whether I had a
Speaker 1: great job, It wasn't whether I had the beautiful, hottest girlfriend.
Speaker 1: What made me happy was how I felt on the
Speaker 1: inside that internal volume, and when it was low, those
Speaker 1: were the best times in my life. And it was like, so,
Speaker 1: how do you have a low internal It's like, oh,
Speaker 1: you have to be mindful. What does that mean? Well,
Speaker 1: so then you start down that road. And so I
Speaker 1: took the path of mindfulness by walking the Appalachian Trail.
Speaker 1: And that was when I woke up to what to
Speaker 1: actually recognize that what's going on inside me is my life.
Speaker 1: What everybody else thinks and what everything else is going
Speaker 1: on is something totally different. This experience. Whether you believe
Speaker 1: in the Bible, whether you believe were a computer program
Speaker 1: like the Matrix, no matter what you believe, you know,
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, how you feel about
Speaker 1: this experience. You know how you feel in your container.
Speaker 1: You know we all look a little different, some fat,
Speaker 1: some tall, some gifted, some not. Whatever. It's a temporary
Speaker 1: container made up of bacteria, fungus, all kinds of stuff
Speaker 1: from the universe that we're in right now, traveling through
Speaker 1: this experience, and how you feel is what mattered. And
Speaker 1: I discovered that on the Appalachian Trail, walking that spending
Speaker 1: that four months by myself, you know, I found.
Speaker 5: Organically how to just be present.
Speaker 1: Like I got to a point, Dave where I couldn't
Speaker 1: think about the future or the past. Now, imagine going
Speaker 1: to sleep and not thinking about what happened today. Imagine
Speaker 1: going to sleep and not thinking about your childhood. Imagine
Speaker 1: waking up and not worried about work, Like I got
Speaker 1: to a state of nirvana naturally by just being in
Speaker 1: the woods. And if you look historically at mythology and
Speaker 1: all teachings from the East, people go out into the forest,
Speaker 1: They go out into the woods, they go out into
Speaker 1: the desert, they go and spend time alone as something happens.
Speaker 1: And that's something that happens is real, and it's a detox.
Speaker 1: So your ego is toxic, and the bigger your ego,
Speaker 1: the more toxic. And so I want to mention this.
Speaker 1: What I love about your podcast, Dave, you and Jack
Speaker 1: is you guys are the real deal. But you guys
Speaker 1: don't have an ego. Like your platform, your mannerisms, your attitudes,
Speaker 1: the way you guys do things. It isn't from this
Speaker 1: egotistical place. And I dig that. So killing the ego
Speaker 1: is what my life is about now. And the hard
Speaker 1: thing with killing your ego is it's the most painful
Speaker 1: thing you'll ever do, because to kill your ego means
Speaker 1: I'm not a green brain anymore. I'm not a ranger.
Speaker 1: I'm not some badass fistfighter from back in the day.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm just an organism in this universe.
Speaker 5: And how I feel is what matters.
Speaker 1: How I the energy I put out, the frequency I operate,
Speaker 1: how I interact with animals and humans, all that matters.
Speaker 1: And so it's a it's a paradigm shift. It's a
Speaker 1: complete awakening where you just search for truth. There's no
Speaker 1: more manipulation, there's no more room for lives like it's
Speaker 1: the truth and and that's all you want.
Speaker 3: So it's it's very interesting, and I you know, look
Speaker 3: forward to when we like get into sort of that
Speaker 3: that journey of self discovery. But one of the reasons
Speaker 3: I asked you about internal volume is because I think that,
Speaker 3: you know, there are a lot of like ideas or
Speaker 3: terms around it, but I like the idea of internal volume.
Speaker 4: And I think that.
Speaker 3: For a lot of guys in the soft community, or
Speaker 3: a lot of people.
Speaker 4: Not guys but girls, a lot of people who.
Speaker 3: Join the military or high performing types of jobs, that
Speaker 3: they have that drive and they have that internal volume,
Speaker 3: and they're always kind of like seeking right. And I
Speaker 3: think one of the things that many of us loved
Speaker 3: about war was that finally the external volume massed the
Speaker 3: internal volume, and finally, right, finally, we're finally the world
Speaker 3: has come up to our standard and it's not screaming
Speaker 3: anymore because now there's equilibrium. And I think that so
Speaker 3: many people when they finally find that and then they
Speaker 3: lose it, it's worse than not having found it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like that. I think I'm glad you kept
Speaker 1: talking about this because what I failed to connect with
Speaker 1: the militaries we're familiar with inflate and deflate. You got
Speaker 1: to be able to inflate deflate be a tier two god,
Speaker 1: especially at operate a tier one level. You got to
Speaker 1: be able to inflate and deflate well. And so what
Speaker 1: does that mean? So internal volume, think about a volume
Speaker 1: nog set on zero or set on ten. When you
Speaker 1: set that on zero, just peace, just calm, just stillness.
Speaker 1: And that's what we really want. We all, deep down
Speaker 1: want to feel safe. We want to feel value, you know, worth.
Speaker 1: We want to be calm, you know, like you feel
Speaker 1: when you're romantic or having a nice meal. That parasympathetic
Speaker 1: part of your brain. We don't want to live in
Speaker 1: that chimpanzee part of our brain, that sympathetic response, that
Speaker 1: fight flight, you know, freeze, fawn, you know high, you know,
Speaker 1: we don't want to live in that. So learning how
Speaker 1: to inflate and deflate properly is something we learn well.
Speaker 1: And since they promote a monstrous side of us. So
Speaker 1: when you have that rage, that internal volume, that unpacked
Speaker 1: trauma from your childhood, you know, all this stuff that
Speaker 1: you're suppressing so that you can be successful, because if
Speaker 1: you couldn't suppress that, you be in prison, right right.
Speaker 1: The guys that can suppress it become cops and military guys.
Speaker 1: The guys that can't suppress it become criminals, you know.
Speaker 1: And so Yeah. When you think about that knowledge, you know,
Speaker 1: it's like, Okay, I'm at it. I'm flying into the objective.
Speaker 1: If I'm mindful, I'm at a two. I'm focused on
Speaker 1: my breathing. I know my job.
Speaker 5: When I step off, I'm going left.
Speaker 1: I need to make sure I don't do this next
Speaker 1: phase we're gonna be here. I need to make sure
Speaker 1: I don't do that. You know, you're calm, you're thinking
Speaker 1: it in, you're ready, You're ready for anything. You're ready
Speaker 1: to flow and go right. But when that guy comes
Speaker 1: through that door, you know you need to go from
Speaker 1: A two to eight. You don't need to go to ten.
Speaker 1: You don't need to freak out, but you need to
Speaker 1: get on it right, and then you need to come
Speaker 1: back down, go back to your breathe and go. So
Speaker 1: that's a mindful approach to being an operator in combat.
Speaker 1: And so I think when you get the green light
Speaker 1: to be monstrous, that monster and everybody has it. And
Speaker 1: Carl Jung, you know, talks a great deal about the shadow,
Speaker 1: you know, the monstrous. Jordan Peterson talks about you know,
Speaker 1: the monster or like us monster killers. You know, when
Speaker 1: you get the green light to do what you've been
Speaker 1: trained to do and the freedom to do it. It's intoxic, Katie.
Speaker 1: It was the highlight of my life. That there's absurbing
Speaker 1: in Ramadi with triple canopy was the highlight of my life.
Speaker 1: If I would have died there or died when I've
Speaker 1: got home, I would have lived a complete life. So
Speaker 1: everything I'm doing now is is extra is a cherry
Speaker 1: on top. Okay, like you said, once you come home
Speaker 1: and you don't have that, it's tough. And it was.
Speaker 5: Man.
Speaker 1: You know, I spent a couple of years homeless. You know,
Speaker 1: it hasn't been a hugs and singing sweet songs. You know,
Speaker 1: it's been tough.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So let's talk about that then, because you know,
Speaker 4: you you spend that time in Ramadi, and then then
Speaker 4: you do more of the chase set, right, you do
Speaker 4: more of the training, the supervision, the corporate stuff, and
Speaker 4: you know, and I think one of the things that
Speaker 4: you said hits on.
Speaker 3: Why a lot of veterans have a hard time dealing
Speaker 3: with the trauma and not just trauma from war, but
Speaker 3: trauma that's been carried forward and then just sort of
Speaker 3: like condensed in war, is that.
Speaker 4: It was the highlight of your life. And it's hard
Speaker 4: to find anything.
Speaker 3: And so, you know, guys and girls come home from
Speaker 3: that experience and it was the highlight. And now they
Speaker 3: have to deal with paying bills, they have to deal
Speaker 3: with you know, taxes, they have to deal with like
Speaker 3: social etiquette, all this other stuff.
Speaker 4: And I think.
Speaker 3: A lot of them, for a lot of you know,
Speaker 3: like it all gets lumped under post traumatic stress. But
Speaker 3: I think for a lot of the misych, I think
Speaker 3: for a lot of it'sch I did what I wanted
Speaker 3: to do, Like what do I got now another thirty
Speaker 3: forty years?
Speaker 4: Like what am I going to do for thirty or
Speaker 4: forty years?
Speaker 1: Right, that's a great point. I think it's all under
Speaker 1: the umbrella of PTSD. I agree with you when people
Speaker 1: talk about it, but like you're saying, there's there's lots
Speaker 1: of subcategories that fall under that. And yeah, I can
Speaker 1: tell you from experience that part of the reason why
Speaker 1: veterans are blowing their brains out in the VA park
Speaker 1: a lot is because the way they're treated at the VA.
Speaker 1: I can tell you that when you come home from
Speaker 1: killing folks and almost being killed several times, and everybody
Speaker 1: on your team makes it home and you're so grateful
Speaker 1: that that's your story that everybody on your team came
Speaker 1: home after all that, and you struggle to get medical
Speaker 1: care and dental care and and and end up not
Speaker 1: getting those things. But then illegal people, like it's being
Speaker 1: promoted on television like half of America or a third
Speaker 1: of America's supports illegal people in this country getting full
Speaker 1: medical benefits and combat veterans aren't. You know, if you're
Speaker 1: not one hundred percent disabled, you don't have dental care
Speaker 1: in the VA. And so unless you have a job
Speaker 1: that provides dental care after that, which you know, there's
Speaker 1: problems there. So from a mental health standpoint, when you're
Speaker 1: looking at okay, I'm getting older and getting old is
Speaker 1: not for sistis like it's tough getting old and not
Speaker 1: being able to do what you used to do when
Speaker 1: your mental you know, your mental health is challenged as
Speaker 1: you get old, and so it's a lot tougher. When
Speaker 1: you turn on the news and you see Americans fighting
Speaker 1: politicians fighting for illegals and you've been left out there
Speaker 1: basically to rot. It makes you question everything.
Speaker 3: So during this this high part of the g R,
Speaker 3: not just you know, not just your time in Ramadi.
Speaker 3: But when security is still like a very thriving industry, right,
Speaker 3: there's still they're still throwing money at it. The pay
Speaker 3: for the individuals have gone down, uh the equipment's gone down,
Speaker 3: but the contracts are bigger, right, And you're you know,
Speaker 3: finding your way through this.
Speaker 4: What are you thinking?
Speaker 3: Are you looking for a career, are you looking for satisfaction?
Speaker 4: Are you looking for a rush?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 4: What are you doing?
Speaker 1: Well? When when I was with Triple canop you know four,
Speaker 1: I thought I was going to spend the rest of
Speaker 1: my life with them, and then just you know, Blackwater
Speaker 1: won the contract and they offered me like three hundred
Speaker 1: dollars less to do the same job in Ramadi, and
Speaker 1: I was like, no, this was a new team. I
Speaker 1: knew how dangerous. I'm like, oh, I'm good and so
Speaker 1: I you know, that's the only reason why I turned it.
Speaker 1: And uh so when I left there and went to
Speaker 1: useless ATA program, I was like, I'm going to spend
Speaker 1: the rest of my life doing this job. I mean
Speaker 1: I loved it and it was sustainable, like, it wasn't dangerous.
Speaker 1: It had everything that that you would want, except you know,
Speaker 1: not being shot at or blown up like I was
Speaker 1: a remodie, which I enjoyed, but long term, you.
Speaker 4: Know, that's not sure.
Speaker 1: You don't want to keep doing that long term. So
Speaker 1: it was a great you know, I did what I
Speaker 1: wanted to do. I proved to myself that I was
Speaker 1: a man. You know, that's what we want to do, right,
Speaker 1: We want to prove we want to be somebody. You know,
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, if you really slow
Speaker 1: down and look in the mirror, deepen up, there's still
Speaker 1: a little boy in there, you know. And so if
Speaker 1: if if you don't bring that little boy with you
Speaker 1: along the way, he's still in there somewhere, curled up
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, that traumatized little boy. So you know,
Speaker 1: all that came to fruition. Everything culminated in my life.
Speaker 1: And so it was like being a professional football player
Speaker 1: and winning the Super Bowl, Like I know what it
Speaker 1: feels like now to be that person. It's the same
Speaker 1: internal feeling to be at the top of your game
Speaker 1: and the top organization in the most dangerous little city
Speaker 1: in the world, doing what you do at the highest level. Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: and then to walk away from that and have another
Speaker 1: opportunity was great. So after but I'm getting sidetracked. My
Speaker 1: ex wife sent me an email and said if I
Speaker 1: didn't come home, what had happened? And she had got
Speaker 1: pregnant with her my ex best friend, and they we're
Speaker 1: going to get married, and so now everything changed. So
Speaker 1: the deal I made with her for child support, my deployment, rotation,
Speaker 1: everything was perfect, everybody was happy. And then she got
Speaker 1: pregnant and decide to get married and everything changed, and
Speaker 1: so I had to resign from that position, come home
Speaker 1: and be a full time parent so that I wouldn't
Speaker 1: lose custody in my children. And so I left that job,
Speaker 1: probably the best job I could have ever had, because
Speaker 1: I didn't want to give up custody in my children.
Speaker 1: And I know a lot of guys with our background
Speaker 1: would have kept working, but I just, you know, at
Speaker 1: that time, my kids meant everything to me.
Speaker 4: Sure, can you tell us a little bit about the job,
Speaker 4: because you know a lot of people may not be
Speaker 4: familiar with USTUS or ATA.
Speaker 1: Or oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's nine week deployments
Speaker 1: for the bomb teams or the instant countermeasure teams. So
Speaker 1: what we would do was we'd go into a place
Speaker 1: like Indonesia or India a place where friends of our country,
Speaker 1: and this program had been around at the time for
Speaker 1: twenty something years and it's just kind of a a
Speaker 1: report builder with nations, a nation builder. So we would
Speaker 1: go over and teach the Indonesian Special Operations Bomb Unit
Speaker 1: how to build and how to disrupt IDs of all
Speaker 1: different origins. And then after they learned how to disrupt
Speaker 1: those IDs, we would teach them post blast scene analysis,
Speaker 1: you know, how to come in. So like when we
Speaker 1: were in Indonesia, Bali had the second attack and I
Speaker 1: was actually in Kudah and Bali had the time of
Speaker 1: that attack, and so for that team to go in
Speaker 1: there after the Rajah restaurant was blown up, you know,
Speaker 1: they would go in and look for evidence of bomb
Speaker 1: parts and things of that nature. So we would teach them,
Speaker 1: uh those basic things and then just go to another country.
Speaker 1: So you would set up, get your equipments set up
Speaker 1: for a week, and then you teach them for eight
Speaker 1: weeks straight and five hundred and it was great money,
Speaker 1: great work, environment, great mission. And I could have done
Speaker 1: that until retirement. But again, you know, life takes you
Speaker 1: where it takes you, and you got to meet life
Speaker 1: where it takes you and That's something I've definitely learned now.
Speaker 1: So I really fought it at the time. If it
Speaker 1: was to happen again, I wouldn't have. I would have
Speaker 1: just you know, went along with it and not got
Speaker 1: so upset and tried to you know, work from that
Speaker 1: from a more mindful place. But I just I just said, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'll just resign and go home and just sit at
Speaker 1: home to Spider because now that I'm home, I don't
Speaker 1: have to pay two thousand dollars a month child support.
Speaker 1: So she just cut her nose off to spite her face,
Speaker 1: and so did I.
Speaker 3: So so you come back to the States, and what's
Speaker 3: the job market like for you? Here's what what is
Speaker 3: the future for Lee when he looks at it if.
Speaker 1: I don't deploy, see it. I was. I was in demand,
Speaker 1: you know, I've just come out of remody for fourteen months.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of things going on in Israel
Speaker 1: and other places. There was a lot of opportunities that
Speaker 1: I turned down because I couldn't deploy anymore. I mean
Speaker 1: really really good Abichi the agency stuff a lot of stuff,
Speaker 1: and uh, I just couldn't do it. So Luckily, when
Speaker 1: I was in twentieth Group. A buddy of mine, John Nettles,
Speaker 1: was working with Alan Braslan. Alan owned teas in West Memphis,
Speaker 1: which became Olive Group and then all of sold it
Speaker 1: back to to Alan.
Speaker 5: But uh, where.
Speaker 1: Was I going with that?
Speaker 4: Like like your your future? Like right?
Speaker 1: So, so because of my relationship with John, because John
Speaker 1: knew we're over in Iraq at the same time doing
Speaker 1: different things. He knew I had been at Ramadi and
Speaker 1: Fallujah shooting folks while doing protection work. So they got
Speaker 1: a contract to teach pre deployment training for the Seal
Speaker 1: teams in West Memphis, and so they contacted me to
Speaker 1: be the lead instructor for all their pre deployment PSD work,
Speaker 1: their protection work, high threat protection work. So I put
Speaker 1: together a live fire eight eight day live fire course
Speaker 1: from scratch specifically for the Seals. And if it weren't
Speaker 1: for that, I wouldn't have been connected to the community
Speaker 1: at all anymore. And so I was working part time
Speaker 1: as a paramedic again. Luckily I left there on good
Speaker 1: terms and they welcomed me back part time, and so
Speaker 1: I was teaching part time, doing paramedic part time, and
Speaker 1: I did that for a couple few years until things
Speaker 1: had changed enough to where she allowed me to start
Speaker 1: deploying again.
Speaker 3: And you know, it's interesting because you met men like
Speaker 3: high Threat PSD, uh, like personal Security Detail.
Speaker 4: That's that was something new that came out of that you.
Speaker 3: That came out as you want, right, you can't go
Speaker 3: to Executive International or whatever whatever those schools are and
Speaker 3: learn how to be a bodyguard in that kind of
Speaker 3: environment like you have. You almost have to have a
Speaker 3: military background in order to do that job.
Speaker 5: You have to have a soft background.
Speaker 1: I think I'll go a step further and say you
Speaker 1: have to have a soft farm. High threat PSD is
Speaker 1: a thinking man's game. Doing PSD in a combat zone
Speaker 1: is a Tier one mission. And so you were one
Speaker 1: hundred percent correct prior to g Watt. I know, maybe
Speaker 1: maybe dev Group did some stuff like that, but you know,
Speaker 1: Delta was the only guys really doing uh PSD, you know,
Speaker 1: like they did Schwartz Costs Detail. So mad Max that
Speaker 1: ran the first two selection classes for Triple Canopy. So
Speaker 1: if you were in the first class or the second
Speaker 1: class in the original Triple Canopy in the beginning and
Speaker 1: O four, you had to pass mad Max's standards and
Speaker 1: they were very high. They were Delta standards and they're
Speaker 1: no joke. Anybody went through there or tell you they
Speaker 1: were Delta standards. They couldn't get enough people through the pipeline,
Speaker 1: so they removed mad Max and put him in another
Speaker 1: capacity so they could get larger classes through because the
Speaker 1: contract group, and that would be the second that would
Speaker 1: Then that's when you start looking at the second seven
Speaker 1: months of triple canopy in the beginning. And that's when
Speaker 1: you start talking about things you talked about too, you know,
Speaker 1: start getting a different level of guy in four or
Speaker 1: from four to five, from five toh six, you start
Speaker 1: the pay gets less higher level guys go do different things.
Speaker 1: Lesser qualified guys replace those guys, and by the end
Speaker 1: in Afghanistan and Iraq, you had guys that didn't have
Speaker 1: soft backgrounds, some guys that just had law enforcement doing
Speaker 1: jobs that once were only held by soft guys. And
Speaker 1: there's a reason. Now I'm not saying, let me let
Speaker 1: me caveat this. My experience in Remady the two four
Speaker 1: Marines and two five marines that infantry did more than
Speaker 1: the special ops and what we did ever did so
Speaker 1: these infantry guys that we send a war to place
Speaker 1: like Flush and Ramadi that fight day and night every
Speaker 1: day in their deployment, saw a lot more and did
Speaker 1: a lot more than anybody like me ever did. So
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to say that, I just want to
Speaker 1: make sure I make that distinguished. But for these skill sets,
Speaker 1: these tier one type jobs, you know, you need to
Speaker 1: have a soft background because you need to be able
Speaker 1: to lead a team or be the bottom man on
Speaker 1: the team. You need to be able to do you know,
Speaker 1: you need to be able to inflate and deflate to
Speaker 1: the full spectrum of whatever might happen. Because like when
Speaker 1: we were protecting Ambassador Stu Jones going to Hillo, going
Speaker 1: to Baghdad, going to Flujah, going to downtown Ramody, going
Speaker 1: crossing the border into Jordan, we didn't have military support.
Speaker 1: We were five vehicles, fifteen men with one principal, roaming
Speaker 1: all of Iraq, you know, and a lot of times
Speaker 1: we got shot. I got shot at four different times
Speaker 1: by friendly fire. And somebody from I was on a
Speaker 1: podcast once and I said this wrong. Somebody from Cornell.
Speaker 1: I said Stanford, but it was Cornell. Somebody from Cornell
Speaker 1: that was doing their doctorate or whatever on fraticide contacted
Speaker 1: me because they had heard that I had four different
Speaker 1: incidents where I had been shot at by friendly fire
Speaker 1: and they so they wanted to talk to me about that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it was. It was four during that time,
Speaker 1: really was. It was a it was a crazy time.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, a friend.
Speaker 1: Oh, I gotta point this out. I gotta point this
Speaker 1: out because I don't want to forget it. It's in
Speaker 1: my book and it's driven me crazy. The Devil Overramady
Speaker 1: sniper was not Chris Kyle. Okay, in two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: the devil Vermady sniper was killing marines and army men
Speaker 1: and contractors left and right. And the Devil of Vermadi
Speaker 1: was Juba and Uh. He ultimately killed one of the
Speaker 1: replacements Bama that replaced me when Blackwater took out replaced us.
Speaker 1: He ultimately killed him about two weeks later. But Chris
Speaker 1: Kyle was not the Devil of Ramadi. That was a
Speaker 1: sniper that was killing Americans, not an American that was
Speaker 1: killing bad guys. That was a bad guy that was
Speaker 1: killing Americans. Was the devil of Ramadi.
Speaker 4: Thank you for clarifying that. So sorry, I lost my
Speaker 4: train of thought. Okay, So you start to work fill
Speaker 4: Olive group, or you get in with that, you get
Speaker 4: him with Tiger Swan with some of that sexy pipeline infiltration,
Speaker 4: yeah or well yeah, uh so I was.
Speaker 1: I was living like John Jay Rambo, you know, I
Speaker 1: was homeless, working for cash, you know, on construction jobs
Speaker 1: or whatever else.
Speaker 5: You know, that's where some of us, did you know,
Speaker 5: end up.
Speaker 1: And so uh a guy from Blackwater reached out to
Speaker 1: me and said, you know, there was this apple protest
Speaker 1: at Standing Rock and they were paying like five hundred
Speaker 1: dollars a day to pull security. And I was like, heck, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: I was. I was in bad shape, you know. And
Speaker 1: uh so that was a chance for me to try
Speaker 1: to get straightened out financially and and.
Speaker 5: Get my feet back under me.
Speaker 1: And I went to work there and in a few months.
Speaker 1: So if I go somewhere and I like it it's
Speaker 1: something that want to it usually goes well. And when
Speaker 1: I go somewhere I don't usually does it. So I
Speaker 1: went there and it went well, And the next thing
Speaker 1: I know, I'm the deputy project matter manager for Tiger
Speaker 1: Swan running the entire state of Iowa where the pipeline
Speaker 1: ran through, where the valve sites run through and during
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, there were two females that were leading this
Speaker 1: band of domestic terrorists who were doing millions of dollars
Speaker 1: of damage on the valve sites with the pipeline, the
Speaker 1: control centers, and putting holes in the actual pipes. So
Speaker 1: the FBI finally closed in on them and they finally
Speaker 1: arrested them, and that job just went away. So, you know,
Speaker 1: I had been promoted up to a deputy project manager JP,
Speaker 1: who I worked for, who was the program manager. Like
Speaker 1: I was like, okay, Like this is gonna work work out,
Speaker 1: Like I'll stay with these guys. This is another Delta
Speaker 1: operated company like Triple Canopy. Like I'm doing well. I've
Speaker 1: been in well. They like my leadership style and I'm happy,
Speaker 1: and I really was. My mental health was great. And
Speaker 1: so people like us. If we're in a position where
Speaker 1: we feel good about ourselves, we release good hormones, we thrive,
Speaker 1: we lose our belly fat, you know, we get off
Speaker 1: of our ass. We we you know, and and when
Speaker 1: we don't, when we're in a job where we don't
Speaker 1: feel like we're high enough, or we're in a job
Speaker 1: we don't want to do and we have to do
Speaker 1: or whatever. You know, we we have a lot of
Speaker 1: negative energy and negative self talk, and we can lie
Speaker 1: to ourselves and ignore that, but it can make us,
Speaker 1: you know, not a good version of ourselves. And that's
Speaker 1: where a diction and separating from our suffering, that's where
Speaker 1: all that stuff plays in. And that's where yoga and mindfulness,
Speaker 1: you know, that's where I was able to wake up
Speaker 1: to just how monstrous I am and just how much
Speaker 1: in denial I was about all that.
Speaker 3: So after Tiger swanp like that goes away, was Facebook
Speaker 3: next for you?
Speaker 1: No? Facebook was before that. Facebook went away because of
Speaker 1: two reasons. And I'm gonna say the first reason because
Speaker 1: I don't want to sound like I'm making any excuses.
Speaker 1: They politely asked me to leave. But the secondary reason for.
Speaker 5: That is is DEI.
Speaker 1: So Facebook was operating by DEI before there was d I.
Speaker 1: They just didn't know it, but I did, you know,
Speaker 1: So they didn't want They wanted guys like me and
Speaker 1: guys like Steve that I won't mention his last name
Speaker 1: because I don't.
Speaker 5: Know if he would like that, but Steve.
Speaker 1: From up in Washington State, came down from Paul Allen
Speaker 1: and Bill Gates's detail to work at Facebook, and I
Speaker 1: came there at the same time, and I worked the
Speaker 1: day shift and he worked a night shift. And our
Speaker 1: job was developed facebooks how to operate as a protection
Speaker 1: to detail, and they didn't want to We we helped
Speaker 1: get them to kind of a basic level, but they
Speaker 1: didn't want to really do things right. And after two
Speaker 1: thousand and four with Triple Canopy, I was going to
Speaker 1: do things right or I was going to bitch about
Speaker 1: it and leave. You know, I couldn't not do things
Speaker 1: right anymore.
Speaker 5: I couldn't. I could not do it.
Speaker 1: So I made things kind of hard for some people there,
Speaker 1: and they were frustrated with me, and and they you know,
Speaker 1: they they asked me to lead, and so.
Speaker 5: You know, that was part of that not being a
Speaker 5: good place.
Speaker 1: If I would have went to Facebook and they would
Speaker 1: have said, the way you are is exactly what we're
Speaker 1: looking for, which is what tigers Wan did, which is
Speaker 1: what Trimple Canopy did, which is what Blackwater did. If
Speaker 1: I would have got that reception, I'd still be at Facebook.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: A lot of times, you know those those companies, you know, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Adelson.
Speaker 3: Adelson is his name right out in Vegas, Like, you know,
Speaker 3: they they want the soft guys, but they want more
Speaker 3: of a cop mentality.
Speaker 1: Well, yes, yes, in a way like McDonald's details. Some
Speaker 1: of those details are very cop secret service kind of oriented.
Speaker 4: Right, So you're all.
Speaker 1: Right, but but I don't mind saying this, and I
Speaker 1: know what I say, your channel doesn't represent. But what
Speaker 1: Facebook wanted was gays and lesbians and blacks and whites
Speaker 1: and Korean. They wanted their protection detail to look like Facebook,
Speaker 1: and that's what they did. So there was there was
Speaker 1: lots of unqualified people that I vetted coming into the
Speaker 1: team that were voted in that we're not qualified. They
Speaker 1: weren't qualified to be on a local a little local garden,
Speaker 1: you know, like a Verizon cell phone story, you know,
Speaker 1: much less, you know, protecting billionaire CEOs and CEOs of
Speaker 1: corporations that have the intellectual properties of Facebook in his brain.
Speaker 1: You know, you're protecting that and so, and not to
Speaker 1: mention the embarrassment, like who wants to be on a
Speaker 1: protect in detail. And the only thing guys remember is
Speaker 1: you're the guy that let that happen to Huckerbird, Like
Speaker 1: I remember that everybody in the world remembers that, you know,
Speaker 1: so you don't want to be working with idiots. And
Speaker 1: uh so my standard was high and it still is.
Speaker 1: So if I'm gonna do something, I'm gonna do it right.
Speaker 1: If not, you know, just do it without me, I'll
Speaker 1: go do something else. But uh yeah, they wanted and
Speaker 1: they did. They There was one black guy that was
Speaker 1: gay with one female that was a lesbian openly. They
Speaker 1: were all young, and it was just chaos. People didn't
Speaker 1: you know, you would drive the client to San Francisco
Speaker 1: with no backup vehicle. So we literally had Sheryl Sandberg,
Speaker 1: the COO, self made billionaire, herself on the side of
Speaker 1: the interstate, broke down with the shift leader because the
Speaker 1: shift leader came from seat for service and didn't even
Speaker 1: have the wherewithal to have a backup vehicle. But I've
Speaker 1: been screaming that stuff, you know, having ghost vehicles, doing.
Speaker 4: Things right right.
Speaker 1: You know, the money was there, let's do it right.
Speaker 1: But it's kind of like the government, like people just
Speaker 1: want to just get along. Everybody be happy and if
Speaker 1: something terrible happens, just point fingers and then fix it.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, let's be proactive, yeah, you know, and
Speaker 1: and you know.
Speaker 3: And I think that like a lot of people misinterpret
Speaker 3: like the idea of it doesn't matter if somebody, if
Speaker 3: a guy's a black, gay guy, or a woman is
Speaker 3: an open if they know how to do the job.
Speaker 3: The problem is is when you start hiring because of
Speaker 3: who they are instead of what they know and what
Speaker 3: they can do.
Speaker 1: Let me clarify that because I know that could be
Speaker 1: sensitive to people. You're exactly right, That's what I meant.
Speaker 1: You know, I grew up a poor little Jewish boy
Speaker 1: in Tennessee. Like I don't have some kind of racism
Speaker 1: towards you know, anybody. I've I've been bullying and had
Speaker 1: my own experiences in my own life and my own problems.
Speaker 1: I'm about being qualified. So yeah, every everybody on the
Speaker 1: team could have been gay here or lesbian if they
Speaker 1: were qualified, if they if they had the qualification that
Speaker 1: these people didn't. And so the motivation, just like with
Speaker 1: d I, the whole problem with d I is do
Speaker 1: you and here's what I asked people. You're in a
Speaker 1: bad car accident and you look up and there's a paramedic.
Speaker 1: Do you want a paramedic that is highly trained or
Speaker 1: do you want a paramedic that is hired because of
Speaker 1: the way they look and their ideology. Now, if you
Speaker 1: ask anybody this in a life or death situation, what
Speaker 1: do they want? If you're on an airplane and it's
Speaker 1: getting hijacked? Do you want somebody like me that's gonna
Speaker 1: stand up with a pistol and do whatever I gotta
Speaker 1: do to get between you and the threat and get busy?
Speaker 1: Or do you want somebody that just looks and believes
Speaker 1: in a certain audeology in that position? Because I went
Speaker 1: through the Federal Law Enforcement Academy with a black female.
Speaker 1: Now I've worked with black females that can outdo me
Speaker 1: in a lot of things. But this black female couldn't
Speaker 1: get out of a first class seat, that's how big
Speaker 1: she was. She couldn't pass the basic shooting standards that
Speaker 1: were drapped to the FBI standards from the initial it
Speaker 1: was the TPC, the tactical pistol course reduced out to
Speaker 1: the whatever the Federal standards pistol for. So it's a
Speaker 1: much lower standard that she couldn't pass it. So, but
Speaker 1: guess what she graduated. So people can think whatever they
Speaker 1: want to, But when you're on an air when it's
Speaker 1: a job a fireman has to carry you out of
Speaker 1: a burning building. You got to ask yourself. You got
Speaker 1: to stop all this fighting and ask yourself, what would
Speaker 1: you want Who would you hire to do those jobs?
Speaker 1: Do you want them to meet a standard or you
Speaker 1: do you just want them to look a certain way?
Speaker 1: And so, you know, I grew up with common sense
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna hold on to that. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So face so Facebook is four tiger Swane So Facebook,
Speaker 3: and then uh and then the yacht detail, right the
Speaker 3: or the uh that?
Speaker 1: Man? I you know, we could do a podcast, but
Speaker 1: just one these like there's so many things when you
Speaker 1: mentioned them, I'm so glad you read the book, you know,
Speaker 1: because there's so much in there.
Speaker 3: That you get one once again, I want to say.
Speaker 3: It is highly entertaining, like your personality shines through.
Speaker 4: It's it's it's an enjoyable read.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, the so the yacht thing was out of desperation, uh,
Speaker 1: and and it turned into the Facebook thing. So to
Speaker 1: go to the yacht thing, we have to back up
Speaker 1: before the Facebook thing. But let me tell you, doing
Speaker 1: yacht security and protection is shit work, man, It's shit work.
Speaker 1: If you have to live with the crew, just watch
Speaker 1: a couple of episodes of Below Deck. It's it's a
Speaker 1: it's a tough life. It's for somebody like us to
Speaker 1: go spend a couple of months on a yacht. But
Speaker 1: I got to work with several billionaires in my life
Speaker 1: in that capacity. I got to see them with their
Speaker 1: you know, literally with their you know, their shirts to
Speaker 1: offer their you know, drunk, with their guard down, and
Speaker 1: you know, I got to see personal sides of them.
Speaker 1: You know, you get to hear them in the backseat
Speaker 1: talking business with other people. You know, you're just privy
Speaker 1: to things that I won't obviously share those type of things,
Speaker 1: but it's really it's really interesting. You know, I got
Speaker 1: to meet the father of the DVD, uh Liber Farb.
Speaker 1: He was the father of d B D and he
Speaker 1: spent about a month on the yacht, and you know,
Speaker 1: he's good friends with Kevin Coster and he just had
Speaker 1: you know, you get to hear all these amazing stories
Speaker 1: from these people and exposed to different things, and then
Speaker 1: you get to see that, you know, billionaires can be miserable.
Speaker 1: You know, there were some people that I work with
Speaker 1: and I won't point out who because I worked with several,
Speaker 1: but there were. Some of them, like Cheryl Samdberg is
Speaker 1: one of the probably the best human beings I've ever
Speaker 1: met in my life. I've also met some of the
Speaker 1: worst in that group. So being a billionaire doesn't mean
Speaker 1: you're happy. There is no correlation between being a good
Speaker 1: person and being happy. There's no correlation with those things.
Speaker 1: Putting these people on pedestals like we do is ridiculous,
Speaker 1: Like when you get to see them who they really are.
Speaker 1: Most of them you wouldn't hire to mow your yard.
Speaker 1: Most of them I wouldn't hire to babysit my children,
Speaker 1: like you know. So yeah, it helped me wake up
Speaker 1: to a lot of things.
Speaker 3: So so the yacht facebook Tiger Swan, and then Tiger
Speaker 3: Swan goes away.
Speaker 4: So what's next?
Speaker 1: So I take I work overseas a couple gigs during
Speaker 1: the hurricane disaster. Nothing noteworthy there, just typical arm security,
Speaker 1: shit work, twelve hour shifts, seven days a week, good pay,
Speaker 1: ship work, shit leadership. You know, good pay, and you're
Speaker 1: working with good guys, guys you've worked with before.
Speaker 5: So just just another gig, no big deal.
Speaker 1: You learn what not to do usually on those type
Speaker 1: of gigs, and that led to I'm not doing this
Speaker 1: no more. I'm gonna There's an air force base in
Speaker 1: my hometown, Arnold Air Force Base, Tellahoma, Tennessee's my hometown.
Speaker 1: It's mainly civilians to work there. They work on you know,
Speaker 1: rockets and weapons systems and things like that out there.
Speaker 5: So it's mainly civilians.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to get a security job out there.
Speaker 1: They pay twenty something dollars an hour. It's easy work.
Speaker 1: There's never been a threat there. It's my hometown. It's
Speaker 1: no big deal, right, I'll just do that. They have
Speaker 1: good medical insurance, and so I did that, and about
Speaker 1: a year and a half into it, it turned out
Speaker 1: it was shit work. Terrible word the one of the worst.
Speaker 5: Jobs I've ever had.
Speaker 1: And from a security standpoint, the leadership and the tactics
Speaker 1: and the mindset was the worst I had ever had
Speaker 1: up until that point. And it was a military base,
Speaker 1: an air force base. So what are you gonna do.
Speaker 1: I just show up and get your paycheck. And it's
Speaker 1: a joke. It's a joke. And so about a year
Speaker 1: and a half into it, I hurt my shoulder from
Speaker 1: an incident in Iraq and then an incident in Africa,
Speaker 1: and then I heard it again during this job, and
Speaker 1: so I took leave. And as soon as I took leave,
Speaker 1: Workman's callum they started trying to fire me. Well, when
Speaker 1: you're trying to fire me, are you trying to do
Speaker 1: anything to me? And you don't have a good reason,
Speaker 1: You're gonna bring out my monster and I'm gonna feel
Speaker 1: like I'm getting bullied. And when I feel like I'm
Speaker 1: getting bullied, I don't care who you are, I don't
Speaker 1: care what it is. I'm going to fight back. And
Speaker 1: so I got a lawyer and I fought back, and
Speaker 1: they decided that they didn't want to.
Speaker 5: Fire me anymore.
Speaker 1: And the day I was supposed to report back to work,
Speaker 1: I resigned because I was going to resign all along
Speaker 1: after that because of that ordeal. It went on for
Speaker 1: a few months. I was going to resign all along
Speaker 1: after that, and I got contacted about protecting the president
Speaker 1: of Haiti in twenty nineteen, and so I jumped on
Speaker 1: that and that that's the last job I ever took,
Speaker 1: except for becoming a yoga teacher. So twenty nineteen, the
Speaker 1: deployment to Haiti, it turned out to be the worst
Speaker 1: deployment of my life, and I resigned.
Speaker 4: Yeah, what what was so bad about it was that
Speaker 4: the leadership.
Speaker 1: Later, So the mission was real. Like President jovan l
Speaker 1: got assassinated like a year later, so the mission was real.
Speaker 1: The threat was real. I knew it was real. I
Speaker 1: was brought down there as the senior not the not
Speaker 1: the senior leader, but the senior expert on protection. I
Speaker 1: was the person that dealt with the president and his wife.
Speaker 1: I was the only person, including on our detail and
Speaker 1: including on his detail. I was the only person that
Speaker 1: was allowed to be with the president with an weapon.
Speaker 1: So that was my role. I was the a I see,
Speaker 1: the agent in charge, but I wasn't overall in charge.
Speaker 1: I couldn't make the ultimate decisions. And so we were
Speaker 1: doing some cowboys shit when all we really needed to
Speaker 1: be doing was keeping an eye on him and his wife.
Speaker 1: And we were doing everything but that. And it was
Speaker 1: some of that cowboy stuff.
Speaker 5: It was some of the stuff that you know.
Speaker 1: Blackwater it got accused of in the early days.
Speaker 5: It was some of the stuff that.
Speaker 1: Custer Battles was accused of back in the early days.
Speaker 1: Just some cowboy stuff. And this was a mature group
Speaker 1: of men down there doing this mission. We had the
Speaker 1: right people, we just didn't have the right mindset, the
Speaker 1: right leadership, and we were focused on the wrong part
Speaker 1: of the story. And I'm glad that I resigned and
Speaker 1: left there because one of the guys that was on
Speaker 1: my team I fired because of how bad he was.
Speaker 1: And he and another guy that I had worked with
Speaker 1: a couple months later killed a couple in Nashville for
Speaker 1: money and they're doing life in prison and Tennessee right
Speaker 1: now to two marines, one Force Marine and one what's
Speaker 1: the other organization, MARSAC one WARSOK and one for uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've worked with both of them, and so that was
Speaker 1: the kind of people some of the stuff that yeah,
Speaker 1: And I was just like, no, I'm I'm leaving on
Speaker 1: my terms. I'm resigning. I'm going home. You guys can
Speaker 1: have this if that's how you're going to operate. And
Speaker 1: so so I'm glad I.
Speaker 3: Did so through all this and through you know, all
Speaker 3: these years, you have this internal volume, you have this
Speaker 3: trauma that that.
Speaker 4: You haven't dealt with. I don't even know if you've
Speaker 4: recognized it.
Speaker 3: What what started you on this path first to walk
Speaker 3: the appalation trail and then what took you to yoga, of.
Speaker 1: All things, I was gonna kill my boss. I'm glad
Speaker 1: you brought that out. I left that out, I think,
Speaker 1: I don't think I brought that up. So when I
Speaker 1: walked to Appalachian Trail, I felt healed. When I got
Speaker 1: back off the Appalachian Trail, I slowly became me again.
Speaker 1: The busy world, the noise, distress, it all worked its
Speaker 1: way back in, and I had forgotten how to be,
Speaker 1: to just be. I had detoxed, and now I had
Speaker 1: got back on the.
Speaker 5: Hairine, so to speak.
Speaker 1: Sure, And so the other pivotal point was, as I
Speaker 1: had had it. I was finally done. I was done
Speaker 1: with the stress, the hot blood pressure. I was done
Speaker 1: with being told what to do. I was, you know,
Speaker 1: by stupid people. I was done with all you know.
Speaker 1: I was done with all this stuff. Now I'm not
Speaker 1: saying I was right about anything. I'm just answering your question.
Speaker 1: I felt like I was just completely done. And when
Speaker 1: my boss, who was a little retired Air Force officer,
Speaker 1: when he tried to fire me for using innerpro language
Speaker 1: at work. That's what they were trying to fire me
Speaker 1: for a bunch of security guys and cops at an
Speaker 1: Air Force base and he's trying to fire me for
Speaker 1: inappropriate lightage. So of course when I got my horse anyways,
Speaker 1: So but when he called me in the office and
Speaker 1: told me he was gonna, you know, fire me, And
Speaker 1: when I left there, I was so upset that I
Speaker 1: decided I was gonna wait for him to get off work.
Speaker 1: I was gonna follow him home and kill him. And
Speaker 1: that's what I was gonna do. Well, and I didn't
Speaker 1: have another They wasn't There wasn't another thought on my mind.
Speaker 4: And you know, we didn't you know, we didn't cover
Speaker 4: this to send the book.
Speaker 3: But when we talked about those two fights you had
Speaker 3: in that one year, the first fight almost ended that
Speaker 3: way too. The guy was saved by families showing up
Speaker 3: in the park.
Speaker 1: That was the first time in my life. So that
Speaker 1: was after being a green Bereat, but before Ramadi the
Speaker 1: Triple Canopy. It was in between there. That was the
Speaker 1: first time. That wasn't the first time in my life
Speaker 1: i'd chase somebody with a gun or something like that,
Speaker 1: but that was the first time in my life where
Speaker 1: I knew I gave myself the green light to kill somebody.
Speaker 1: When you get when you're somebody like us that have
Speaker 1: all these skill sets, all these abilities, all these experiences,
Speaker 1: but you obviously keep those things and check. When you
Speaker 1: give yourself the green light to do whatever the fuck
Speaker 1: you want, it's liberating. It's liberating. And when you feel
Speaker 1: like it's just because it's a really bad person that
Speaker 1: was trying to do something bad to you, it's just
Speaker 1: it's like, just because the rest of society won't fight
Speaker 1: back and and teach you a lesson, I will. So
Speaker 1: when I hear about a coworker goes to work and
Speaker 1: kill somebody, or like when that guy killed that insurance
Speaker 1: god in New York, I don't go, oh my God,
Speaker 1: go catch this guy or whatever. I go. I wonder
Speaker 1: what the story is because I bet half the time
Speaker 1: the person getting what they god might have had it coming.
Speaker 1: That's how you know, That's how I look at those things.
Speaker 1: So I was in a scenario where I was gonna
Speaker 1: be that god ex everything goes and kills his boss,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna be the bad guy. You know, his
Speaker 1: story are My story is not gonna be the narrative.
Speaker 1: His story is gonna be the narrative. He's gonna be
Speaker 1: the government. He's gonna be the media in this scenario,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna be on the ship end of the stick.
Speaker 5: And that's you know, that's how those things work.
Speaker 4: So you were show this was your planneror this was
Speaker 4: your thought and what changed.
Speaker 1: So in twenty fourteen, when I worked at Facebook, the
Speaker 1: guys that came down from Washington State, from Bill Gates's
Speaker 1: detail and Paul Allen's detail, they were used to smoking
Speaker 1: and doing marijuan because it was legal and the corporations
Speaker 1: don't have a policy against it. So Facebook was the
Speaker 1: same way. So it's legal in California to do weed
Speaker 1: if you have a medical marijuatera card, and it's legal
Speaker 1: to do weed if you work at Facebook. I mean
Speaker 1: they the campus at Facebook. Each section has its own bar,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean, it's a very liberal kind of
Speaker 1: it's interesting, it's fascinating kind of the dynamics out there.
Speaker 1: But back to back to the point. I got back
Speaker 1: to my camper. I was living in a camper at
Speaker 1: the time, and I got back to the camper and
Speaker 1: I had been doing Oshtonga yoga. It's a type of yoga.
Speaker 1: I won't get into it because it's not important. But
Speaker 1: I was doing an oshtonga practice. It takes about ninety minutes.
Speaker 1: So I thought, okay, if I do yoga, I usually
Speaker 1: feel better after yoga. If I do yoga, maybe i'll
Speaker 1: feel better. Because my internal volume was out of ten, right,
Speaker 1: like I was gonna kill him, and I wasn't just
Speaker 1: gonna kill him. I was gonna hurt him, and then
Speaker 1: I was gonna kill him. I was as upset everything
Speaker 1: in my life that had ever pissed me off, any
Speaker 1: everything in my life that I wanted to do or
Speaker 1: say to get back at somebody, he was going to
Speaker 1: get it. And I knew it. You yeah, I'd do it.
Speaker 1: And since I had, You know, once you kill a
Speaker 1: few people in a few different scenarios, you realize how
Speaker 1: easy it is. That's not the hard part. Killing people
Speaker 1: is not hard. It's giving yourself to greenlight to do it.
Speaker 4: And so that's the hard part.
Speaker 1: And yeah, well that's that's where the conundrum came in.
Speaker 1: So I did ninety minutes of yoga and I still
Speaker 1: wanted to kill him, and I started thinking, okay, if
Speaker 1: I go kill him. At that time, there was about
Speaker 1: three people or four people I.
Speaker 5: Wanted to kill honestly, that had done me wrong in
Speaker 5: my life.
Speaker 1: And you know, if they made it legal, I'd go
Speaker 1: kill those people and sleep like a baby. So I
Speaker 1: started thinking, do I go kill those people? If so,
Speaker 1: in what order? So my mind starts getting really busy.
Speaker 1: And the only thing that ever worked for me was weed.
Speaker 1: And so I called up a friend of mine and
Speaker 1: I got some weed, and I smoked a bush of weed,
Speaker 1: and I got really high, and I did some more yoga,
Speaker 1: and I felt like giving people hugs. I didn't. I
Speaker 1: didn't want to hurt him, but I didn't want to
Speaker 1: go back to that job. I didn't know what to do.
Speaker 1: I thought, you know, maybe I should commit myself. You know,
Speaker 1: I need help, like I noticed in that moment, like
Speaker 1: I got to do something, Like you got to do something, dude?
Speaker 4: Is this is this?
Speaker 3: So I decided I want to ask you real quick
Speaker 3: before you move on, is this the first time?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 3: Because you know, a lot of spiritual development, uh happens
Speaker 3: after or potentially a lot of the spiritual development happens after.
Speaker 3: I don't I don't want to call it a nervous breakdown,
Speaker 3: but after people like after the ego is destroyed, right,
Speaker 3: once when the ego blows up, it gives us some
Speaker 3: clarity for a little while, or it can, it doesn't always.
Speaker 3: But was this the first time that you had I mean,
Speaker 3: I know you'd been angry before, you know, you you
Speaker 3: jacked up those guys in the fire, stuff like that,
Speaker 3: But is this the first time that it got to
Speaker 3: that point to where it was just like like a
Speaker 3: bubble bursting for you.
Speaker 1: No, I had been that mad before, but it was
Speaker 1: before I killed people. So going and killing them wasn't, like,
Speaker 1: you know, in your multiple choices, it just wasn't a choice.
Speaker 3: But what I mean is this the first was this
Speaker 3: go ahead, go ahead?
Speaker 1: But what you said is a very very valuable point
Speaker 1: for everybody when you have an ego death. This is
Speaker 1: the hardest, darkest thing. And that's where I'm at now.
Speaker 1: So that was the beginning. So that was the beginning,
Speaker 1: the segue into enlighten the enlightenment, the awakening, the higher consciousness.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of ways of talking about it, the darkness,
Speaker 1: embracing the darkness, becoming one, becoming the real you, you know,
Speaker 1: because most of us don't want to admit, you know,
Speaker 1: I'll say something funny, simple, but it can be profound.
Speaker 1: Like most people don't want to admit they masturbate, right,
Speaker 1: so the lie about it, Well, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: things that people don't want to admit that to lie about.
Speaker 1: But once you wake up, only the truth can work,
Speaker 1: you know. And so when you kill your ego and
Speaker 1: you only operate with truth, there's no facade. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to be this fake person. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: go try that act. I'm not going to try to
Speaker 1: make this person happy. Like when you elimit all those
Speaker 1: you know, it's a game changer. But when you kill
Speaker 1: your ego and I'm in the process of doing that,
Speaker 1: the depression or what feels like depression is that stuff
Speaker 1: that you have to go through. And when you end
Speaker 1: up on the other side of an ego dead, you're free.
Speaker 1: You don't live in this material world in love. You
Speaker 1: don't respond to the news and the ups and downs
Speaker 1: and all this nonsense in this fake world it's been created.
Speaker 1: You're grounded in your body, which means you're not in
Speaker 1: the future of the past in your mind. So when
Speaker 1: people say, what do you mean grounded in your body?
Speaker 1: Of course I'm in your body. It's like, no, you
Speaker 1: spend ninety five percent of your conscious day unconscious and
Speaker 1: better in the subconscious. So are in the unconscious mind?
Speaker 1: You know, there's about five percent of the time the
Speaker 1: average person is in their body. And what I mean
Speaker 1: is grounded and right now, right now, this podcast is
Speaker 1: forcing me to be grounded and right now and pay
Speaker 1: attention to you. But how many times during the day
Speaker 1: are we thinking about something else? Driving down the road,
Speaker 1: thinking about the future, past, laying in bed thinking about it.
Speaker 1: You're not in your body. Once you're grounded in your body.
Speaker 1: That's mindfulness, your present. And people read all these books
Speaker 1: and do all these things. It's like, that's all you
Speaker 1: have to do. You don't have to read anything. Just
Speaker 1: start being present, stop being distracted, stop being you know.
Speaker 1: And so that's my still on that you had already
Speaker 1: been doing yoga up to this point.
Speaker 4: Was yoga just initially?
Speaker 3: Was it just you know, away for an older guy
Speaker 3: with a beat up body to kind of stay in sheep?
Speaker 1: That's a great question that we didn't talk about. So
Speaker 1: when I finished the Appalachian Trail in twenty fifteen, a
Speaker 1: friend of mine bought me the book. And every veteran
Speaker 1: should read this book. Everybody with childhood trauma should read
Speaker 1: this book or listen to it. The Body Keeps the
Speaker 1: Score by Bessel Vandercoke. I read that book, started reading
Speaker 1: that book in twenty fifteen, and I started crying and
Speaker 1: I wasn't ready. And so in twenty nineteen, I was
Speaker 1: ready to read it. And when I read in that book,
Speaker 1: Bessel Vandercoke or some of his colleagues or people in
Speaker 1: that realm did a study in twenty fourteen with traumatized
Speaker 1: sexually assaulted, abused, rate incest women, a large group of that.
Speaker 1: They did an extensive study in twenty fourteen, and they
Speaker 1: found out that yoga does more to help trauma than
Speaker 1: any medication on the market. And so I'm a very logical,
Speaker 1: critical thinking type person in this phase of my life,
Speaker 1: and so it was like, oh, okay, well I need
Speaker 1: something to do. I need a passion of purpose in life.
Speaker 1: Sheryl Sandberg's foundation lean In is this beautiful thing. She's
Speaker 1: this beautiful person. Well, I want to be a beautiful thing.
Speaker 1: I want to do beautiful things. So I'm going to
Speaker 1: have this foundation and I'm going to teach yoga for free.
Speaker 1: And it started out great at first, and COVID hit
Speaker 1: and COVID, which I truly believe then and now, was
Speaker 1: a false flag attack. COVID crushed people that were doing
Speaker 1: things like me, hairdressers, people that owned gyms MMA, so
Speaker 1: you know, it crushed people that were doing things like that.
Speaker 1: So I was trying to give back something free to
Speaker 1: the community. I was teaching six times or two times
Speaker 1: a day, six times a week at the American Legion,
Speaker 1: and so that's where I got that idea. It was
Speaker 1: from that book. Somebody that could speak our language, that
Speaker 1: had dealt with veterans for forty something years. He invented
Speaker 1: the term PTSD. So we're better to learn about what
Speaker 1: that means. Where does that come from?
Speaker 5: What's that about?
Speaker 1: And so you want to talk about why we act
Speaker 1: the way we do or why people act the way
Speaker 1: we do. It's like if I'm present and you say something,
Speaker 1: there's a gap between what you say and how I respond.
Speaker 1: If I'm not present that door right now start screaming boom,
Speaker 1: I'm not present anymore. That ninety five percent, that chim
Speaker 1: panze part of my brain is now in charge. And
Speaker 1: now I turn and I rapped to the door. And
Speaker 1: if it's trouble. I'm ready to meet it. I'm ready
Speaker 1: to inflate to ten just like that. Well, you can't
Speaker 1: operate in the civilized society like that. So that's what
Speaker 1: we're dealing with. That's what we're dealing with. It's that simple.
Speaker 1: It's a part of our brain that operates how we
Speaker 1: behave and if we're not mindful and stay in that
Speaker 1: other part of our brain, the part I'm in right now,
Speaker 1: that's when those things are gonna happen. And so practicing
Speaker 1: through neuropress through neuroplasticity, and through time. What is neuroplasticity.
Speaker 1: It's the same thing Ivan Pavlo did with his dogs.
Speaker 1: He would ring a bell, they'd salivate and then he
Speaker 1: feed them. It's conditioning people. That's what they do. The
Speaker 1: human You know, we were conditioned to act a certain
Speaker 1: way during COVID, right, you know. It's a conditioning. So
Speaker 1: you can condition yourself to do good things as well
Speaker 1: as bad things. So what you do and what you
Speaker 1: think about on a daily basis will change you through neuroplasticity.
Speaker 1: And the younger you are, the easier and faster that
Speaker 1: change will happen. But you still can be my age
Speaker 1: and change. Do I think at fifty nine years old,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm gonna be as you know, have zero
Speaker 1: violence inside of me and be this totally different person. Know,
Speaker 1: I'm always going to be me. I just need to
Speaker 1: be mindful. And that's the purpose of my book, you know,
Speaker 1: where a monster and mindfulness become one. You know, that's
Speaker 1: the subtitle of the story of mine book.
Speaker 4: So when you have this moment, you're like, something has
Speaker 4: to change, and you'd already been practicing yoga, so you
Speaker 4: are already aware that, Like obviously you knew that you
Speaker 4: had trauma in your past, but it's coming, it's bubbling
Speaker 4: up and becoming you're more aware of it.
Speaker 3: How has your practice of yoga? How has anything else
Speaker 3: that you've been doing?
Speaker 4: How has that.
Speaker 1: All right?
Speaker 4: I should say, has that have you? Have you worked
Speaker 4: through some of that?
Speaker 3: Has have you purged or cleansed or or even you know,
Speaker 3: made friends with with with your past or with that trauma?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I've been at
Speaker 1: this five years and then the last year I would
Speaker 1: say it's been the biggest breakthrough. I'd say in the
Speaker 1: last year two years, but more the last year I
Speaker 1: would say I'm really feeling the effects of the ego debt.
Speaker 1: You know, I practiced meditating. You know, I have animals
Speaker 1: and a hobby farm, and you know I don't focus on,
Speaker 1: you know, doing great things anymore, you know, getting attention anymore,
Speaker 1: and you know earlier, you know, especially last year. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like I'm a minimalist. I got on social media
Speaker 1: to try to promote my book because if the book
Speaker 1: does good, I can have the money for a free
Speaker 1: yoga studio and pay instructors to give yoga for free.
Speaker 5: You know, it'll all come to fruition.
Speaker 1: But what I found out was chasing that was wanting something,
Speaker 1: and that's my ego, you know, And you start going, well,
Speaker 1: hold on, it's like no, Like, if you really want
Speaker 1: to get down to it, if you really want to
Speaker 1: do this right, That's what it's about about, just being
Speaker 1: just being right here, just being calm, being mindful, not
Speaker 1: letting everything else affect you. And I'm not there yet,
Speaker 1: Like I still deal with anxiety and depression and I
Speaker 1: have really bad days sometimes. But what I'm doing right now,
Speaker 1: I'm at the part of the ego death. If you
Speaker 1: look into what Carl Jung or a lot of the
Speaker 1: experts talk about the ego death, you know, and it
Speaker 1: was great that you understand that, and we're talking to that,
Speaker 1: but you know, when you get to that, there's an
Speaker 1: anti social isolation, quiet stillness aspect of that that can
Speaker 1: make you not want to be around humans. And so
Speaker 1: I kind of realized that in my quest I was
Speaker 1: being a little hypocritical. I was talking about being, you know,
Speaker 1: killing my e go and I'm out here trying to
Speaker 1: get on podcasts and trying to promote my book and
Speaker 1: I'm on social media and whatever. It's like.
Speaker 5: I'm lying to myself.
Speaker 1: So that's where you have to back up and with
Speaker 1: those biases and that self talk and that justification and go,
Speaker 1: hey man, you know, if I if my book's supposed
Speaker 1: to do well, it's just gonna do well. I wrote it.
Speaker 1: And that's karma. And karma's not punishment. Karma is what
Speaker 1: you do. And so if you do great things, great
Speaker 1: things are gonna happen in your life. You reap what
Speaker 1: you sew. It is a cause and effects. It's a
Speaker 1: real thing, and I believe in it one percent. I
Speaker 1: think when I die, everything that I did to somebody else,
Speaker 1: I'm going to experience, and that's karma. I'm gonna experience
Speaker 1: myself what I did to people. Everybody I killed in Iraq,
Speaker 1: I'm an experience and what it was like to get
Speaker 1: killed by me. Every girl that I ever lied to,
Speaker 1: or cheated on or hurt you or monstrous towards, I'm
Speaker 1: going to experience what I did to them, you know.
Speaker 1: And that's what hell is to me. You know, That's
Speaker 1: that's how I look at things, and so you know
Speaker 1: when I look at Carmen, now, it's serious. And I
Speaker 1: want to make sure that whatever I'm putting out and
Speaker 1: whatever I experience with animals or humans or other living
Speaker 1: things is as beautiful and kind and as loving as
Speaker 1: I'm capable of. But there's no guarantees. I'm still me,
Speaker 1: and if I'm not mindful and things get crazy enough,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna act like a an alpha team
Speaker 1: leader and ranger battalion or a you know, a shooter
Speaker 1: in Iraq.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you so much. Leave for for sharing well,
Speaker 4: first off, for writing this book.
Speaker 3: It's it's amazing. And also for coming on and sharing
Speaker 3: your story with us. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Have it's my it's my pleasure. You know, out of
Speaker 1: the there's some great podcast out there with UH and
Speaker 1: within the special ops community, but you know, within that realm.
Speaker 1: You know, you guys have been my favorite for a while.
Speaker 1: I just like your style, like the way you guys
Speaker 1: do business, very respectful. Uh. There there's no ego, even
Speaker 1: though you guys could. You guys have incredible backgrounds, and
Speaker 1: what you're both doing right now is still doing great things.
Speaker 1: So you know, I appreciate you know, I'm nobody, you know,
Speaker 1: to be somebody in our community, you gotta do something
Speaker 1: that gets in the news and do something for valor.
Speaker 1: And so I'm just grateful that I could unpack that
Speaker 1: I could have an honor an opportunity to say that
Speaker 1: you can be a below average person and then find
Speaker 1: a way to catch up to the group and spend
Speaker 1: the rest of your life just surrounding yourself with good
Speaker 1: people and try to work above average even if you
Speaker 1: started out below average. You know, you can manifest whatever
Speaker 1: you want, but you got to start paying attention to
Speaker 1: your internal narrative. If you're talking negative and talking shit
Speaker 1: but acting nice to people, you're full of shit. You're
Speaker 1: two different fucking people. You know. The outside's got to
Speaker 1: match the inside, and if it doesn't, you need to
Speaker 1: look in the mirror until it does.
Speaker 4: It's so true Internal Volume. Find it on Amazon.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Uh, you guys, it's a hell over read. I'll just
Speaker 3: say that it is. It is quite exciting. Is there
Speaker 3: anything that we missed? Anything that I failed to talk
Speaker 3: about or ask you about that you.
Speaker 1: Uh, we were probably We've probably gone a long time,
Speaker 1: so I don't want to drag it out. I just
Speaker 1: want to say a shout out to Joe Price. I
Speaker 1: hope that we can get justice one day for job
Speaker 1: Price and John Chapman and folks like that. I hope
Speaker 1: we can clean up the special ops community a little better,
Speaker 1: like with what you guys are doing with Tim Kennedy.
Speaker 1: You know, guys like me really appreciate that. It's really
Speaker 1: triggering for things like that to happen in our community.
Speaker 1: So seeing people pleasing that up quickly and holding a standard,
Speaker 1: it makes me proud again that I was a green
Speaker 1: brat and that I was a ranger. So I really
Speaker 1: appreciate that. And I just want to say that if
Speaker 1: anybody you know, I just finally got one hundred percent
Speaker 1: VA after twenty something years of fighting. I got a
Speaker 1: great guy at anybody wants to reach out at Lee
Speaker 1: Decleman at gmail dot com, I'll hook you up with
Speaker 1: a great god. He got me and my sister one
Speaker 1: hundred percent, you know, in about a year a year
Speaker 1: and a half. And so I know, I got a
Speaker 1: lot of guys are fighting to just get the basic
Speaker 1: care and if you need help, please reach out and
Speaker 1: tunnels to towers, that's where I give my money. They're
Speaker 1: doing great things for homeless veterans, and so I just
Speaker 1: want to shout out to them. You know, anything we
Speaker 1: can do is veterans to help veterans, lift them up,
Speaker 1: and the veterans that have been lifted up by lies,
Speaker 1: let's bring them back down and let's bring that harmonious
Speaker 1: balance back to our community.
Speaker 5: And that that would be a great thing to see
Speaker 5: happened for my die.
Speaker 4: It would be amazing.
Speaker 1: Uh D.
Speaker 4: Do we have any questions?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 4: Okay, where can people? Are you on social media? Or no?
Speaker 1: No? If somebody wants to reach out to me about anything,
Speaker 1: I'm living small. You know, I'm not going to be
Speaker 1: a public even if this book does real good.
Speaker 5: You know, I just want to kind of do my thing.
Speaker 1: But if I can help anybody or anybody has any
Speaker 1: questions or you know, Lee Decklman D E C K
Speaker 1: E L M A n at gmail dot com, you know.
Speaker 5: How to help anybody in any way I can.
Speaker 1: But you know, my book's about a traumatic life that
Speaker 1: has a little bit of war in it.
Speaker 5: It's not a war story.
Speaker 4: Oh, it's a worst story. Like the whole book is
Speaker 4: a worst story.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, in a way there may not. There may not.
Speaker 4: It may not be an Iraq or Afghanistan vate. It's
Speaker 4: a war story.
Speaker 1: And well, the last thing I want to say is
Speaker 1: I'm no hero. I've never done anything heroic. But everything
Speaker 1: in that book is true.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think you know, you know a lot
Speaker 3: of our viewers are history bossed, or they like the
Speaker 3: military or you know, the intelligence community or special operations community.
Speaker 4: If you know, this.
Speaker 3: Is a book honestly, because it's not just about the military.
Speaker 3: It's a book that like everybody can relate to in
Speaker 3: one way or another. You know, it's it's your story.
Speaker 3: So you know, I really hope people do pick this
Speaker 3: up and read it. We're going to go now, uh,
Speaker 3: we are going to do a uh team house after
Speaker 3: dark Uh, for our patron subscribers after this.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 4: So if you're a patron subscriber and you want some
Speaker 4: spicy tales, uh, that's where.
Speaker 3: You'll find them. So thank you everybody. We really appreciate it. Lee,
Speaker 3: thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much, Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Hey, guys, I want to tell all of you today
Speaker 2: about a new newsletter that we're launching that encompasses both
Speaker 2: the team House Podcast, eyes On Podcast, and the high
Speaker 2: Side News outlet, which I run with Sean Naylor. The
Speaker 2: newsletter is gonna be once a week. It's gonna come
Speaker 2: into your inbox and you're gonna get the most current
Speaker 2: podcasts on eyes On and the Teamhouse and whatever's topical
Speaker 2: or current on the high Side. So it's another way
Speaker 2: for us to get the information out to you as
Speaker 2: social media algorithms are pretty iffy and you never really
Speaker 2: know what you're gonna get. So this is a once
Speaker 2: a week email. It'll slide into your inbox and it
Speaker 2: will have you know the greatest hits of that week.
Speaker 4: It's really good checking it out.
Speaker 2: The website for it is Teamhouse Podcast dot kit dot com,
Speaker 2: slash Join Teamhouse Podcast, dot Kit dot com slash Join.
Speaker 2: You go there and you enter into your email list,
Speaker 2: or you enter your email into the little thing on
Speaker 2: the website and you're good to go. And that'll be it.
Speaker 2: So we really appreciate your support and hope you'll consider
Speaker 2: signing up.
Speaker 1: Where's the link.
Speaker 2: The link will also be down the description if you're
Speaker 2: looking for it
Speaker 3: There, and that's Teamhouse Podcast, dot kit k I t
Speaker 3: Kilo India, Tango dot com, backslash joint