Speaker 1: The Team House with your hosts Jack Murphy and David bark.
Speaker 2: Hey.
Speaker 3: Guys, welcome to episode one hundred and sixty five of
Speaker 3: The Team House. We're here tonight with Nicholas Moore. He
Speaker 3: is the author of Run to the Sound of Guns.
Speaker 3: He served in second Ranger Battalion from the ranks of
Speaker 3: private to platoon sergeant over one thousand missions and thirteen
Speaker 3: combat deployments, where he was wounded. He was involved in
Speaker 3: some very significant operations, from Jessica Lynch to Extortion one seven,
Speaker 3: to Operation Red Wings the Recovery, to numerous other things
Speaker 3: that we'll get into tonight. So, Nicholas, thank you for
Speaker 3: joining us.
Speaker 4: Oh, thanks for having me.
Speaker 3: Absolutely dude, really appreciate you taking some of your Friday
Speaker 3: to speak with us.
Speaker 4: Oh, no worries.
Speaker 3: So let's start off, man, start, We'll start start at
Speaker 3: the beginning, the beginning of the story. If you could
Speaker 3: tell us a little bit about, uh, sort of where
Speaker 3: you grew up and why you.
Speaker 5: Ended up in the military and why and Ranger Battalion.
Speaker 4: So I grew up in Newton, Kansas and you know,
Speaker 4: just trying to figure out, you know, what to do,
Speaker 4: and I thought, you know, college sucks. But if I
Speaker 4: joined the Army and I want to go to school,
Speaker 4: and you know, I serve that I can don't have
Speaker 4: to take a student loan and I can go and
Speaker 4: it's all good. And you know, some of us do
Speaker 4: it and end up going to school, and some of
Speaker 4: us don't and we just end up staying in the military.
Speaker 4: But the whole thing was, you know, I had a recruiter,
Speaker 4: you know that just based on the lifestyle that we had,
Speaker 4: you know, playing sports and being active and out outdoor activities,
Speaker 4: hunting fish and all that stuff. He goes, Man, you
Speaker 4: guys love the Army, but you'll never be happy if
Speaker 4: you don't pursue the Ranger Regiment. And so you know
Speaker 4: that was kind of well what's that? And you know,
Speaker 4: so you do a little bit of research and you're like, okay,
Speaker 4: well that's definitely what I want to do.
Speaker 2: And so you know, you.
Speaker 4: Go and do it. And you know this the old
Speaker 4: mantra that goes with it. You know, as you continue
Speaker 4: to be in the Ranger Regiment, what have you done
Speaker 4: for the rage of Regiment today? So you know, there's
Speaker 4: always that little aspect, you know, as your career progresses
Speaker 4: through you know, it's always trying to better you know,
Speaker 4: against the organization as a whole.
Speaker 1: Yeah, did you do was any of your family in
Speaker 1: the military. Was it something that you had been exposed
Speaker 1: to earlier than that, or like or is it just
Speaker 1: kind of it seemed pragmatic at the time.
Speaker 4: No, my grandfather's both both my grandfathers served in World
Speaker 4: War Two, and then you know, we've had, you know,
Speaker 4: family members in the military, but mostly it's always been
Speaker 4: in the Navy, and I had an aunt who served
Speaker 4: in the Air Force back in the late seventies, I think,
Speaker 4: and you know, but nobody really in the army except
Speaker 4: for my grandfather's brothers. You know, they were in the
Speaker 4: Army in World War Two. But you know, we're basically
Speaker 4: a Navy family. And then me and my brother decided
Speaker 4: we were both going to join the army and be rangers,
Speaker 4: and you know, so it was fun. Uh, you know
Speaker 4: at that part of it. My grandpa didn't talk to
Speaker 4: me for like three weeks because he was mad we
Speaker 4: didn't join the Navy.
Speaker 3: Okay, so you and your brother, did you like have
Speaker 3: the same like entry date into the Army?
Speaker 5: I mean, was it that close?
Speaker 4: Yeah, we're we're identical twins. So we were at school
Speaker 4: and went through uh, basic training, everyone school, RIP, and
Speaker 4: then got stationed together. So we did it all together
Speaker 4: all the way until I think four five, and then
Speaker 4: he went down to his wife, got restationed to Martin
Speaker 4: Army at Fort Benning and so he went down to
Speaker 4: be a RIP instructor and and that's kind of where
Speaker 4: our careers split apart. I stayed at second and then
Speaker 4: he moved down to third for a while and then
Speaker 4: you know, when it is some time in the big
Speaker 4: Army and finished his career as an ROTC instructor at
Speaker 4: the University of Kansas.
Speaker 3: So what at that time, just to hit it up
Speaker 3: a little bit, going through basic training airborne school, what
Speaker 3: was the RIP experience like? But that was nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 3: pre pre nine to eleven, before the war kicked off.
Speaker 3: What was it like going through RIP during that timeframe?
Speaker 4: Uh, you know, it's a I don't know if it's
Speaker 4: better or worse because I think about it and it's like, God,
Speaker 4: would I want to sit and do that for eight weeks?
Speaker 4: You know? It was Yeah, the whole RASK thing, It's
Speaker 4: like wow, No, but it was I had I had
Speaker 4: a lot of fun. There was really a lot of
Speaker 4: my ranger experiences that I didn't like. You know, some
Speaker 4: of them good, some of them bad. But they're all
Speaker 4: memories and you know, just just kind of fun. You know.
Speaker 4: It's always that that mental challenge through some of the things,
Speaker 4: you know, can I make it to the end? And
Speaker 4: you know when you do, you're you're a better human
Speaker 4: for it, and you're a better ranger all the way around.
Speaker 4: And you have, you know, a starting point to learn
Speaker 4: what suck is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you get out of RIP and you go
Speaker 1: to the best company in the best battalion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, BC two seven five right.
Speaker 4: Yep, BKO two something went to first platoon. My brother
Speaker 4: went to third, and so that was always fun. I
Speaker 4: mean it was always, you know, all the way up
Speaker 4: until we both got our tabs. You know, it was
Speaker 4: just you know, who's got the better twin And they
Speaker 4: were always you know, putting us, pitting us against each other,
Speaker 4: and so it's you know, it's nothing changed from school
Speaker 4: or you know, sports, and so it's just you know.
Speaker 3: So two seven five is something something different between two
Speaker 3: seven five and three seven five, And I believe one
Speaker 3: seven five is you guys all have platoon names and through.
Speaker 4: Something every platoon.
Speaker 3: But yeah, and three seven five. I think my platoon
Speaker 3: was the only one that had a name. But I'd
Speaker 3: like to hear what your platoon name was and how
Speaker 3: it got that name.
Speaker 4: Well, One Bravo it was. Eventually it became the Sea
Speaker 4: Bass and it was just, uh, you know, it was
Speaker 4: at the same right they tagged it right at you know,
Speaker 4: the Afghanistan was just cranking off and Austin Powers had
Speaker 4: just come out, and it was, you know, our pl
Speaker 4: was calling us a bunch of mutant Sea Bass, and
Speaker 4: so it just kind of stuck. And so that was that,
Speaker 4: and then you know, I was in One Bravo till
Speaker 4: I till in the middle of three, and then it
Speaker 4: went over to three Charlie, and uh stayed there till eight.
Speaker 1: So you you actually were in ranger school during nine
Speaker 1: to eleven, right, Yeah, so how did that?
Speaker 6: Yeah, you know, it's on one of those things, you
Speaker 6: know sometimes you you're like, now, this can't really be happening,
Speaker 6: and we just thought it was some kind of weird,
Speaker 6: you know, false motivational thing that.
Speaker 4: Our eyes were doing. We weren't you know, nobody was
Speaker 4: really sure if it was something that everybody was you know,
Speaker 4: accustomed to in every class that you know, oh, you
Speaker 4: got to hurry up because you know, the army, the
Speaker 4: country's throwing the war and all this stuff. But what
Speaker 4: kind of struck at home was you know, when they
Speaker 4: came out and they asked people if they had family
Speaker 4: that worked as world trade centers, and you know, you
Speaker 4: kind of get the weird look like why are you
Speaker 4: asking that? And then you know, forty five minutes or
Speaker 4: so later, you know, a does anybody have parents that
Speaker 4: work a Pentagon? And you know, everybody's like, why would
Speaker 4: I raise my hand out? Want to get singled out
Speaker 4: for something? And you know then they're kind of like, hey, no,
Speaker 4: this is you know, serious, and they realized that we
Speaker 4: weren't believing them, and so they kind of called a
Speaker 4: couple of guys to go forward and just kind of
Speaker 4: see the news feed on the on a TV and
Speaker 4: for about five minutes and then kind of came back
Speaker 4: and say, hey, they're not lying, it's this is real.
Speaker 4: And so we have one guy who raised his hand
Speaker 4: and say, yeah, my dad works at the Pentagon, and
Speaker 4: you know, they said, well you need to call him.
Speaker 4: And so that really messed with him. It was a
Speaker 4: kid out of three some five and luckily his dad
Speaker 4: was out of the office. I think he was at
Speaker 4: Fort Lee, Virginia that day, Bud. He you know, when
Speaker 4: he came back to work on the twelfth, he didn't
Speaker 4: have an office. Holy shit. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then how much so how far into ranger school
Speaker 1: were you and how much longer did you have to go?
Speaker 2: And how did that affect Ranger School?
Speaker 4: Well, you know, you we're basically day.
Speaker 2: Two, okay, oh wow wow.
Speaker 4: So you know, we've just done the pet test in
Speaker 4: that morning, we just finished the five mile run and
Speaker 4: so it it was it was interesting because you always
Speaker 4: hear the stories of guys, you know, you got to
Speaker 4: get you know, seventy percent of your patrols you gotta pass. Well,
Speaker 4: I mean, at that point they were you know, the
Speaker 4: ris knew the writing on the wall. And then so
Speaker 4: the whole point was to get the guys back to
Speaker 4: the units as fast as possible. So you pass one
Speaker 4: patrol and you never got another one.
Speaker 7: Yeah, So you know, and then it it became guys
Speaker 7: that failed patrols.
Speaker 4: You know, it was putting the right guys in positions
Speaker 4: to help them get the next patrol to pass so
Speaker 4: that they could go on to the next phace, so
Speaker 4: that guys aren't stuck, you know, playing the how many
Speaker 4: months can I be in Ranger school games and graduate
Speaker 4: and then get back to your units because we got
Speaker 4: to go do.
Speaker 2: Business, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Did you have any of those guys in when you
Speaker 1: were when you were doing a jack where they just
Speaker 1: assigned like for four bat guys to them and just say,
Speaker 1: he's going to pass this patrol, so you basically don't
Speaker 1: let him make any decisions.
Speaker 3: I probably was that guy going through his life as
Speaker 3: an E two had been in battalion for like two months.
Speaker 5: I think I was that guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no, but where where they basically give you
Speaker 1: the reins and say get this guy through this patrol?
Speaker 4: Right? You know it's not the pick on people, but
Speaker 4: it's usually the young lieutenants that they're just still trying
Speaker 4: to get their feet underneath them as you know what
Speaker 4: it's like to be a leader, and and you know
Speaker 4: we've got you know, guys from the Ranger regimen been
Speaker 4: there twelve eighteen months. You know some guys that got hurt,
Speaker 4: you know, maybe twenty four months of experience, and they
Speaker 4: kind of understand the game, so you know, let's just
Speaker 4: turn them loose.
Speaker 1: And yeah, so you were you were in ranger school
Speaker 1: when the first actions, when when Afghanstian kicked off, right
Speaker 1: like they Yeah, we.
Speaker 4: Were, Yeah, we were just finishing up mountains when when
Speaker 4: everything kicked off and we were getting graded patrols and
Speaker 4: who was going to go to Florida And it just
Speaker 4: happened to be the night that three seventy five jumped
Speaker 4: on Rhino and the Riyes wheeled the TV cart out
Speaker 4: and say, hey, check this out, and all the guys
Speaker 4: from three seventy five are crying, and then guys from
Speaker 4: first and second are laughing, and the guys from third
Speaker 4: are like why you you know why you laugh and
Speaker 4: it's not funny. We're not a part of this. And
Speaker 4: it's like, well, guess what, Ourpatalians haven't gone yet. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Were you worried that that it was going to be
Speaker 1: like another war, Yeah, it was going to be like
Speaker 1: Desert Storm.
Speaker 2: It was going to be over before you are out
Speaker 2: of ranger School.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there was a lot of us that were, you know,
Speaker 4: it's going to be the traditional like Grenade of Panama
Speaker 4: Desert Storm, where it's going to be over as fast
Speaker 4: as it started, and uh, you know you're going to
Speaker 4: miss it all. And but you know, when you when
Speaker 4: you start thinking about the amount of time that it
Speaker 4: was going to take to put everything over there, you know,
Speaker 4: and get it in place, it was just a matter
Speaker 4: of you know, when when's it going to be our
Speaker 4: turn and is there going to be anything left because
Speaker 4: the regiment's going to rotate everybody through at least once.
Speaker 1: And right, right, So you graduate ranger school and how
Speaker 1: how was your reception when you got back to second
Speaker 1: bat What was going on at the time.
Speaker 4: Oh, everybody to have just gotten back from the Yakama,
Speaker 4: So it's kind of the I got back like twenty
Speaker 4: four hours before the battalion rolled back in from doing
Speaker 4: you know, all the big fun stuff over in Yakama,
Speaker 4: and you know, it was just kind of figuring out,
Speaker 4: you know, how the rotation was going to work, because
Speaker 4: you know, one seven five was just gearing up to go,
Speaker 4: and so we were trying to figure out what our
Speaker 4: training schedule was going to be and what was going
Speaker 4: to look like and then when was our window going
Speaker 4: to come to to go and was there still going
Speaker 4: to be anything to do? When we got there. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you know, and then twenty years later it's still going on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, So what when did you get the word
Speaker 3: that you guys were heading over and like what what
Speaker 3: was it like jocking up for that deployment, getting ready
Speaker 3: to go out the door?
Speaker 4: We got kind of got the word that we were
Speaker 4: still going to get to go as probably uh in
Speaker 4: late November December. You know, one seven five is going
Speaker 4: to go, and then it's gonna be our turn to go,
Speaker 4: and you know it might be the only deployment that
Speaker 4: we get in Afghanistan, but you know, it's as it
Speaker 4: stands right now. You know, we saw to go do
Speaker 4: rudder wing Bilats and and all the training that you
Speaker 4: know was normally you know, gearing up for for all
Speaker 4: that stuff, and so you know we did and then
Speaker 4: uh Vico Bco led the push for Second Italian because
Speaker 4: at that time it was uh, basically you know, there
Speaker 4: was only the need for like basically one company. We
Speaker 4: were still sitting you know, split between Canaharn Vogram and
Speaker 4: that was about it. And then you know, everybody realized
Speaker 4: that this was gonna be the long fight, and so
Speaker 4: then we started uh kind of pushing out and doing
Speaker 4: the expansion for the American footprint and setting up bases
Speaker 4: and and all that stuff, and that's kind of what
Speaker 4: we ended up doing our first deployment. And then after
Speaker 4: we'd been there for oh, I don't know, maybe a
Speaker 4: month or so, they rolled in with the rest of
Speaker 4: the battalions. So AKO and SICCO came in and kind
Speaker 4: of helped expand the footprint and all the fun What
Speaker 4: was you know, like post taku Gar, post taku Gar
Speaker 4: and you know, Operations Anaconda. There really was nothing going
Speaker 4: on in Afghanistan. You know, it was basically you know,
Speaker 4: when you look at what was going on, you know,
Speaker 4: you hear about one seventy five and Roberts Ridge and
Speaker 4: then three seven fives jumping on Rhino and doing all
Speaker 4: that stuff. You know, we're going over there thinking, you know,
Speaker 4: it's gonna be game on. It's spring summer, and everybody's
Speaker 4: gonna be fighting. And that was, you know, complete opposite.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: Let's they were just as much as we were trying
Speaker 4: to feel out, you know, what was going on with
Speaker 4: the Talban. You know, they're kind of sitting back on
Speaker 4: the border and just watching, you know, how we're doing business.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that first deployment was like pretty relatively quiet
Speaker 3: at the time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean we did one There was one operation
Speaker 4: and where you know, they got it. The platoon got
Speaker 4: in a gunfight. I was on a fifth kel, so
Speaker 4: I didn't get to be you know, on the ground
Speaker 4: for that one. But it was one engagement, last five
Speaker 4: seconds and that was it. Yeah, that's the deployment was
Speaker 4: just setting up bases and driving around Afghanistan and homebies.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you mentioned I forgot you mentioned in your
Speaker 1: book that you actually had a guide, a tourist guide,
Speaker 1: and a ranger who had been a Russian in Afghanistan.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there was a kid in the well, not a kid,
Speaker 4: but you know, there was a guy in theirpleteen and
Speaker 4: that it was I believe he was Ukrainian, but you know,
Speaker 4: it was part of the Soviet block at the time.
Speaker 4: And he was like eighteen nineteen and got conscripted into
Speaker 4: the Red Army, and you know, he spent a year
Speaker 4: in Afghanistan in like eighty eight, eighty nine when they
Speaker 4: were shutting it down. But it was really cool because
Speaker 4: you know, at the time, you know, he could tell
Speaker 4: you what everything was on Bogger and you know, all
Speaker 4: the remnants of what was left. So that was I
Speaker 4: mean for a history lesson, that was kind of cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's pretty surreal.
Speaker 1: So so that was sort of your your first trip.
Speaker 1: It was just you know, setting the footprint. There wasn't
Speaker 1: a lot of activity. What happened then after that you
Speaker 1: went back and reset and what was your kind of
Speaker 1: time between the deployments looking like at this point?
Speaker 4: Uh, you know, so we we went back to reset
Speaker 4: and that was kind of when everybody was thinking that,
Speaker 4: you know, this is basically a wrap up and you know,
Speaker 4: we're we're not going to be involved in this anymore.
Speaker 4: But you know, all the Italian's got at least one
Speaker 4: deployment and you know three seven five came back over
Speaker 4: and ripped us. And you know, so when it came time,
Speaker 4: you know, throughout the year that it was we were
Speaker 4: going to at least go one more time, it was
Speaker 4: you know, Iraq was ramping up, and so it was like, okay,
Speaker 4: well who's going to go to Afghanistan? And so Charlie
Speaker 4: Cookmanty got picked to go to Afghanistan. And the whole
Speaker 4: preface was for them to go was to shut down
Speaker 4: the special ops. You know, flipprint over there, and then
Speaker 4: kind of if things did crank off in Iraq, then
Speaker 4: they were going to join us over in Iraq. And
Speaker 4: you know, they ended up staying for six months. You know,
Speaker 4: they did their three month deployment plus the Iraq and
Speaker 4: you know and stuff, so they got stuck in Afghanistan
Speaker 4: for six months. So let's just say Manning retention to
Speaker 4: Charlie Company was terrible after everybody got home.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, So then you guys were working up toward
Speaker 1: towards the invasion of Iraq, right, which was that that
Speaker 1: was in March of two thousand and three. So were
Speaker 1: you guys part of that initial invasion or did you
Speaker 1: get through shortly after it?
Speaker 4: We? Uh, the battalion was infilling, you know, shortly before
Speaker 4: everything cranked off. But we didn't actually put wheels down,
Speaker 4: you know, over there until the night that it officially
Speaker 4: cranked off, because we got I had a bird we
Speaker 4: are bird broke in Germany?
Speaker 2: What what?
Speaker 4: What? You know? It's always kind of one of those
Speaker 4: those fun things, are you know, uh, riding in on
Speaker 4: the C seventeen, you got your gas masks strapped to
Speaker 4: your hip and you're wearing your mop suit.
Speaker 1: Right, right, So can you tell us a little bit
Speaker 1: about what a mop suit is for the people who
Speaker 1: might not be familiar with it.
Speaker 4: It's a chemical suit that you have to wear and
Speaker 4: you know, it's a charcoal line suit and it's for
Speaker 4: gas and biological weapons and stuff. It's gonna help keep
Speaker 4: it off your skin. And they're terrible to wear.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: They they're like hot in the They're hot in the
Speaker 4: daylight and cold at night.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, they trap.
Speaker 1: They're basically like sweats, like the plastic suits that you
Speaker 1: used to wear for wrestling or whatever.
Speaker 2: Like they're not comfortable at all.
Speaker 4: Uh no.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So when you guys, because your bird got hung
Speaker 1: up in Germany when you landed for the invasion, did
Speaker 1: you guys go to Saudi or did you go did
Speaker 1: you go someplace elf Sport?
Speaker 4: Since you was we landed in Saudi?
Speaker 8: Okay, Yeah, so you know, every everywhere where the special
Speaker 8: office footprint was during desert storm was the same place
Speaker 8: that we went to, and you know, basically basically unloaded
Speaker 8: and then just got everything set and I think within
Speaker 8: a couple of days we were running cross border offs
Speaker 8: out in the West.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so then what was that like for you, Like
Speaker 1: moving into you know, from Saudi into Iraq and what
Speaker 1: kind of vehicles were you guys in and what were they?
Speaker 4: Just you know, we're running the light the soft skinned
Speaker 4: you know, humby gun trucks. We'd skin the roofs off
Speaker 4: and taken the windows out, which was stupid because we
Speaker 4: caught one of the sandstorms right after it happened, and
Speaker 4: I know Therple team got caught out in it in
Speaker 4: the trucks and the windshields and they're trying to hold
Speaker 4: m R boxes up over their face to keep rocks
Speaker 4: from blowing in, and you know, nobody could see anything.
Speaker 4: So they're stuck sitting out there in it anduntil the
Speaker 4: sun comes up and then they can at least try
Speaker 4: and attempt to get back. And so it was interesting.
Speaker 4: You know, we had five fifty cord from all the
Speaker 4: tents to the latrines and to the chow hall, so
Speaker 4: the guys could follow the string and and you know
Speaker 4: walk around in the brown out.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, those sandstorms were something else out there.
Speaker 1: And then, uh so how long was your trip to
Speaker 1: Iraq and like where was did anything particularly notable happen
Speaker 1: during during your tour there?
Speaker 2: Not?
Speaker 4: Not at the first part of it, you know, until
Speaker 4: everything came down for for us to do the Jessica
Speaker 4: Lynch rescue. And we've just rolled in off like a
Speaker 4: twenty four hour off to go tie in with three
Speaker 4: seven five and help them come back from H one
Speaker 4: when they where they jumped in and then bring their
Speaker 4: vehicle convoys back. So we drove out tying with them
Speaker 4: and then brought this like five mile long convoy back
Speaker 4: across the border. And then you rolling in dog tired,
Speaker 4: and the commander comes out of his tent and he's like, hey,
Speaker 4: pack your stuff. We're leaving in three hours and we're
Speaker 4: gonna go do this. And I was like, oh, that's funny.
Speaker 9: And seriously, folks, yeah, I was stupid eat for what
Speaker 9: do I know that the commander is not just you know,
Speaker 9: not being a jerk and trying to get guys to
Speaker 9: have some kind of false motivation because you know, you know,
Speaker 9: get in dog tired and throw down on the cot
Speaker 9: and start cleaning your rifle and Squeadlier comes back in
Speaker 9: he's like, no, pack your stuff because we're.
Speaker 4: Out of here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And were you guys aware of Jessica Lynch, of
Speaker 1: that whole situation at the time or was the mission.
Speaker 4: No, I mean no, we hadn't really gotten any I
Speaker 4: mean we kind of got like a little brief of it.
Speaker 4: But the kind of the the shit, you know, kind
Speaker 4: of the the awe of the whole thing was like,
Speaker 4: how in the heck does a maintenance company get ahead
Speaker 4: of the front line?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, it's like the.
Speaker 4: Unfathomable, you know, how does this happen? It's you know,
Speaker 4: we start kind of spitballing this whole thing, and you start,
Speaker 4: you know, talking to some of the maintenance units that
Speaker 4: are out there, and they just you know, at the time,
Speaker 4: they weren't equipped with night vision at the time. They're
Speaker 4: still driving you know, blackout lights and the way that
Speaker 4: you know that everybody has since World War Two. It's
Speaker 4: just slow moving and trying to navigate. And you know,
Speaker 4: only the combat arms units have night vision because that's
Speaker 4: the priority, right, So you know, it was just kind
Speaker 4: of like how does this even happen?
Speaker 2: Yeah? And so what was what was the mission?
Speaker 1: As it was brief to you guys, what was your
Speaker 1: role and what was your overall effort?
Speaker 4: We were gonna set in as far as Bravo Companies
Speaker 4: part of it, we were gonna infill on Marine Corps
Speaker 4: forty six is on the west side of nazarea kind
Speaker 4: of in this flat looked like a kind of a
Speaker 4: trash pit area on the west side of town. And
Speaker 4: then we were just gonna run in a few blocks
Speaker 4: off the desert and established blocking positions around the hospital
Speaker 4: while one five a company from one seven to five
Speaker 4: was gonna skirt all the way around on the east
Speaker 4: and then come in from the north and then bringing
Speaker 4: the you know, the big guns on the trucks and
Speaker 4: just basically you know, lock it all down until we
Speaker 4: had gotten her out and gotten confirmation and recovery of
Speaker 4: everybody else that was off those trucks. And uh, I
Speaker 4: was we were only on the ground for like three
Speaker 4: and a half hours and it was all done. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I mean by the time the seals came in on
Speaker 4: the hospital and did the whole uh you know, recovery
Speaker 4: of her, we had just basically put the blocking positions
Speaker 4: on the ground. We hadn't even gotten the established yet.
Speaker 4: As far as how fast that that whole thing happened,
Speaker 4: it was a matter of just moments. Yeah, And because no,
Speaker 4: but it was fun, you know, it was fun to
Speaker 4: be a part of it. And you know, I guess
Speaker 4: we were saying earlier this is you know, there's all
Speaker 4: these things. It's just another day at the office until
Speaker 4: you get later in life and then you start talking
Speaker 4: to people about it and then it's like wow, uh,
Speaker 4: you know, it's kind of a historic, you know, event
Speaker 4: that we've got to be a part of, you know,
Speaker 4: the first successful pow rescue and over forty years. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then what happened in terms of recovering the bodies
Speaker 1: were you were you guys part of that?
Speaker 4: Uh No? That was Once in five? Would you know
Speaker 4: they're guys on the trucks that they recovered them and
Speaker 4: then they ground X filled them out on their on
Speaker 4: the humbies and so we just stab, you know, maintained
Speaker 4: blocking positions and stuff until you know that they were
Speaker 4: done and they had X filled the trucks and then
Speaker 4: we pushed out for uh xfil on the forty six's
Speaker 4: and you know, got back on the on the air
Speaker 4: base there in nazarea, and you know, high fives and
Speaker 4: handshakes and it was all good and you know, go
Speaker 4: find your friends and Once in five and see how
Speaker 4: the everything went on their aspect of it when they
Speaker 4: rolled back in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and how I mean, I can't imagine.
Speaker 10: That that that that was well, of course it wasn't pleasant,
Speaker 10: but it was it was pretty harrowing for them because
Speaker 10: those those bodies were in show shallow graves, right, yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it was you know, they they said it
Speaker 4: wasn't it It wasn't pretty.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, And I could only imagine you know, yeah,
Speaker 7: you know, later seeing some of the things that I've seen,
Speaker 7: you know, later on it's just, you know, it's not fun.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So was there anything else that happened, Uh during that
Speaker 1: trip to Iraq?
Speaker 4: That was we did you know, Operation Reindeer, which was
Speaker 4: then you know, the true you know, the true rangeer mission,
Speaker 4: smash everything, kill everyone, you know, destroy it all and
Speaker 4: then you know, come out high five and in handshaken.
Speaker 4: At the end. We had our first wounded an action
Speaker 4: on that on that deployment team leader from second second
Speaker 4: Squad Uh got hit with an RPG and and lost
Speaker 4: his lower left leg. So, you know, other than that,
Speaker 4: it was it was a you know, it was a
Speaker 4: it was a great traditional you know, typical ranger training op.
Speaker 4: You know, do you remember everything?
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but do you remember any many of the
Speaker 1: details of Operation Reindeer in terms of like who you
Speaker 1: were after and sort of what how it was going
Speaker 1: to go down.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So what what it came came down to was
Speaker 4: that there was a second collection that had you know,
Speaker 4: large sized force was kind of out training in the
Speaker 4: in the desert kind of northwest Afghani or Iraq, and
Speaker 4: it was just basically, you know, it was like eighty
Speaker 4: to one hundred and twenty is what Intel was was
Speaker 4: putting on that it was. And you know, you could
Speaker 4: tell they were holding formations and they were doing training
Speaker 4: and things like that, and so it was you know,
Speaker 4: who could hit this first? And you know at this
Speaker 4: is at the big command level and this is you know,
Speaker 4: what's been filtered down through the company commander at the
Speaker 4: time was that it was in the hundred first sale
Speaker 4: or area of operation and they were going to take
Speaker 4: like a week to plant it out. And that what
Speaker 4: didn't make you know, the powers that be happy, and
Speaker 4: so it kind of came to the special opsite and
Speaker 4: you know, we just said, well we can hit it
Speaker 4: tomorrow and so we you know, just work through our
Speaker 4: normal off cycle and planned it out, rehearsed it, and
Speaker 4: you know it basically other than Matt getting hurt. You know,
Speaker 4: it worked, you know, the same way it doesn't training,
Speaker 4: but even to that part, you know, we trained, you
Speaker 4: know casually play and all that stuff. So it just
Speaker 4: sucked that, you know, it actually happened.
Speaker 5: So I mean, that was a pretty sizable force on
Speaker 5: that target.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it was the I don't the exact count.
Speaker 4: I don't remember exactly the number, but you know it
Speaker 4: was over eighty. So first and second came in on helos,
Speaker 4: and third had launched basically about ten hours before the half.
Speaker 4: The helo package launched, and they drove up on trucks.
Speaker 4: They were going to do the backside blocking and set
Speaker 4: up the fark for the little birds and all the stuff,
Speaker 4: and so then they you know, after we x filled
Speaker 4: the half, then they stayed and kind of did the BDA,
Speaker 4: the battle damage assessment afterwards. It gave a rough count
Speaker 4: and you know, handed the objective over to the hundred
Speaker 4: first when they came into take control of it, and
Speaker 4: so it was kind of interesting when they came back,
Speaker 4: you know, kind of get the picture of, you know,
Speaker 4: what it looked like in the daylight.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, uh so after that then it was back home.
Speaker 2: You become a team leader or.
Speaker 4: Were you move over to Charlie Company and took took
Speaker 4: a fire team over to Charlie Company. And then we
Speaker 4: did the Winter Surgeon three to Afghanistan. Were walking around
Speaker 4: in the mountains for six weeks. We always call it
Speaker 4: Mount Fay's Research for.
Speaker 2: Those of us that are there, And can you tell
Speaker 2: us about that?
Speaker 1: What was uh? Was it similar to your first apployment
Speaker 1: to Afghanistan or was it completely different?
Speaker 4: It was different because we were up in the Conar
Speaker 4: and in the Petch River valley.
Speaker 5: This is the big surge, Wesley Morgan writes about, isn't that?
Speaker 4: Yeah? I believe so, yeah, yeah, So we were, you know,
Speaker 4: kind of expanding the footprint and just kind of getting
Speaker 4: into the mountains to kind of chase down some of
Speaker 4: the rat lines that people were, you know, Taliban fighters
Speaker 4: were using to come in and just kind of deny
Speaker 4: the access through the mountains in the winter and show
Speaker 4: that everybody that hey, we're not afraid to come up
Speaker 4: here and we're not afraid to hang out for weeks
Speaker 4: on end and and and do our thing, which was
Speaker 4: it was fun. I mean, you know, like I wrote
Speaker 4: in my books, you know, so a lot of the people,
Speaker 4: you know, in villages at like ten thousand feet, you know,
Speaker 4: they're still thinking that the Russians are in there. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and so you know, just to see the disconnect in
Speaker 4: that country at you know, at that you know, at
Speaker 4: that primitive point, was like, uh no, they haven't been
Speaker 4: here for like ten winters. Now at least.
Speaker 3: What was it like operating at that altitude and such like,
Speaker 3: I mean, that's some of the most difficult terrain in
Speaker 3: the world.
Speaker 4: It was definitely taxing, if you will. Some of the guys,
Speaker 4: you know, they've never been at altitude like that. Some
Speaker 4: of the guys you know out of Florida and Geordia
Speaker 4: and you know, never you know, being on the Mount
Speaker 4: Yona and Ranger Schools probably some of the highest elevation
Speaker 4: that they've ever been on. And so you get guys
Speaker 4: up there, you know, ten thousand feet or above, and
Speaker 4: guys are coming with altitude sickness and they're just not
Speaker 4: being able to adjust as easily as some And you know,
Speaker 4: Manning is still low and Charlie Company at the time
Speaker 4: because it's just coming off the Iraq thing. Guys are like,
Speaker 4: now I'm out of here. We got hosed over and
Speaker 4: so we're we're in there with five man squads, so
Speaker 4: we're still carrying all the gear for nine and so,
Speaker 4: you know, the only nice thing is we went in
Speaker 4: with no body armor. We were just carrying chess racks
Speaker 4: and rocks sacks. But the rock secks were still weighing
Speaker 4: in about eighty eighty to ninety pounds, depending on you
Speaker 4: know what is in there.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, that land will break you too. That's not
Speaker 2: easy terrain to move over.
Speaker 4: No, you know, there we did. We did hire on
Speaker 4: some pack mules, which is kind of interesting for a while,
Speaker 4: and that was a lot of it was just to
Speaker 4: go to the resupply points to be able to bring
Speaker 4: bring back the supplies that we needed instead of doing
Speaker 4: the Ranger School ruck dump and then walking down and
Speaker 4: loading up and then carrying it all back up. It's like, well,
Speaker 4: let's just hire some people with mules and we'll pack
Speaker 4: mule this stuff up there and all we have to
Speaker 4: do is just walk.
Speaker 1: So did you guys just hire like the mules or
Speaker 1: did you actually have people because you have to know
Speaker 1: what you're doing with the mule, right, Yeah.
Speaker 4: No, we we hired the locals at the time, and
Speaker 4: it's like, hey, you know, here's however much in you
Speaker 4: know Pakistani ruppes that makes them happy, Like they're justified
Speaker 4: to waste a day, you know, renting their mules to
Speaker 4: us and walking them up the mountain. Yeah, and then
Speaker 4: bringing the cases of m R E s and whatnot.
Speaker 1: And uh, one of the stories, Oh, I was just
Speaker 1: gonna say one of the stories you told during that time,
Speaker 1: because you you guys were on the h VT, the
Speaker 1: High Value Target, the Time Sunset Target, and uh, can
Speaker 1: you tell us about when you went out with the
Speaker 1: Seal team.
Speaker 4: Oh, so we had just coming out of the out
Speaker 4: of the pest. We've been in there for three weeks
Speaker 4: and it was like supposed to have like a seventy
Speaker 4: two hour rest and refit back of the block room.
Speaker 4: So we all get back, you know, off the off
Speaker 4: the birds, and you know it's kind of standing around
Speaker 4: in line for showers, and this HBT comes down and
Speaker 4: they said, hey, the team's gonna Seal Team is going
Speaker 4: to go out and hit this and we've got to
Speaker 4: go out and do blocking positions, So get it all
Speaker 4: back on and and load up. And so you know,
Speaker 4: I didn't get a shower and uh so we roll
Speaker 4: in there and we hit this this draw off the
Speaker 4: uh off the conar and uh, you know, seals are
Speaker 4: hit the wrong side of the valley because intel's just
Speaker 4: not very good in Afghanistan at this point. It's just
Speaker 4: you know, it's human so it's there's a huge margin
Speaker 4: of error in it. And they didn't want to walk
Speaker 4: across the valley and go up, so they just called
Speaker 4: a helo to come pick them up from one side
Speaker 4: and carry him to the other because they didn't want
Speaker 4: to walk it. Yea in a nutshell, I guess that's
Speaker 4: the nice way to put it short.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, So was there anything else on that? And
Speaker 1: for those of you who don't know, I'm not really
Speaker 1: drinking them on, Madge, I had surgery, so if I'm
Speaker 1: a little like faded, but uh it was Was there
Speaker 1: anything else on that on that particular trip that because
Speaker 1: you mentioned that that was up to that point like
Speaker 1: sort one of the best sort of all around sort
Speaker 1: of I guess military experiences you had, just in terms
Speaker 1: of the type of job you guys were doing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, it was kind of the for those
Speaker 4: of us later on that you know that were that
Speaker 4: were still in uh, in the regiment or the battalion.
Speaker 4: You know that that kind of became the baseline for
Speaker 4: the word suck. It was like everything else if it did,
Speaker 4: you'll meet that threshold of just pain and misery. It
Speaker 4: it wasn't that bad, right, because that was that was
Speaker 4: just brutal. I mean, you know, got knees and ankles,
Speaker 4: and you know, guys are quitting and it's like, oh, well, awesome,
Speaker 4: you can quit all you want. You ain't coming off
Speaker 4: the mountain. They're not sending a helicopter for you.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, where are you gonna go?
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, you're a private They're not gonna send a
Speaker 4: helicopter come get you. Great, awesome, we'll deal with you know,
Speaker 4: you quitting later.
Speaker 1: And those are also the type of operations that you
Speaker 1: hold over the new guys had when they weren't on it.
Speaker 2: You like, you know, they start play, You're like, ah,
Speaker 2: you weren't there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but then you made yourself feel like a dinosaur later.
Speaker 1: On, right, Right, So then so you guys are on
Speaker 1: this hop in schedule because that was in two thousand,
Speaker 1: like late two thousand and three, and then the spring
Speaker 1: you're right back in Iraq again.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we did the winters. The end of three, we
Speaker 4: were back in Afghanistan and then we were kind of
Speaker 4: doing the Spring Surge as we refer to it, in
Speaker 4: four and it was just a short, little forty five
Speaker 4: day to kind of reinforce the Special Ops footprint so
Speaker 4: we could move some units around, you know, shift guys
Speaker 4: and not have a loss in combat abilities. Yeah. So
Speaker 4: so that was that was definitely interesting because that was
Speaker 4: like the the introduction, if you will, to IEDs. You know,
Speaker 4: at that point, you know, it was starting to get
Speaker 4: armored vehicles and it's like, why are we driving around
Speaker 4: with this? You know, what's the what's the big deal?
Speaker 4: You know, they're like popcan size explosives and you know,
Speaker 4: like within a year, you know, we're they're planting you know,
Speaker 4: two thousand pounds of hme E under the roadbeds and
Speaker 4: blowing tanks apart.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, well and not just that, but you talk
Speaker 1: about your story with the tanks, the Abrams tanks, right, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we had that trip. We were going from by
Speaker 4: app from the airport into town into the green zone
Speaker 4: to link up to do an op and you know
Speaker 4: we're running blacked out and you know, we got the
Speaker 4: city lights shining in our face, so you can't really
Speaker 4: see anything other than about twenty yards in front of you,
Speaker 4: but you know, the highways along straight run and so
Speaker 4: you know, put it down and just go. And there
Speaker 4: was a tank that had been sitting in the median
Speaker 4: and they traversed the cannon to look at something with
Speaker 4: thermal off the cannon and they brought the barrel across
Speaker 4: that a zero plane and it was right at the
Speaker 4: same time. But we came in with the truck and
Speaker 4: almost killed the gunner out of my truck. You know,
Speaker 4: he was in a medically induced coma for about forty
Speaker 4: five days and his face was broken in about thirteen places,
Speaker 4: turning mark nineteen on the front on the lead truck
Speaker 4: into Basically the receiver was a banana and the barrel
Speaker 4: broke in three places. The strike plate we never found,
Speaker 4: and you know, it basically almost totaled the truck. It
Speaker 4: took us two days to get the turp, you know,
Speaker 4: reconfigured with stripped parts off other vehicles and put it
Speaker 4: back together.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's, it's and it's weird sometimes too in combat.
Speaker 1: How it does you know in a war zone? How
Speaker 1: how it's some of the most random events that right,
Speaker 1: you know, you know, blue on blue isn't always just
Speaker 1: friendly fire. Sometimes it's just these incredibly random events like that.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: And it was just one of those things. They didn't
Speaker 4: see us because they were busy looking at something and
Speaker 4: we couldn't see them with the lights and just the
Speaker 4: you know, the the we're all running, you know, the
Speaker 4: monocular PVS fourteen's, and you know, it's like, well, hey,
Speaker 4: we're good, we're on this. We own this section of
Speaker 4: highway between town and the airport and there's nothing going
Speaker 4: on out here ever, and so you know, we don't
Speaker 4: really need to, you know, watch out for for other forces.
Speaker 4: But you know, there's a tank sitting in the media
Speaker 4: and right right it happened to be the you know,
Speaker 4: I've just had chosen to drive in the left lane
Speaker 4: as the lead truck, you know, and we hit it
Speaker 4: didn't damage the tank, I mean, we scratched the paint
Speaker 4: a little bit, but the damage to the barrel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so that was a fairly on eventful trip
Speaker 1: for you guys, right.
Speaker 4: Uh, Yeah, that one, that one was. Yeah, as as
Speaker 4: far as any any operations that saw you know, any
Speaker 4: contact in it. You know, there there wasn't really a
Speaker 4: lot going on at that point.
Speaker 2: Uh. And then your next trip was Mosul.
Speaker 4: Yes, well, no, Afghanistan. We went to Afghanistan. That's five.
Speaker 4: That was Marcus la Trail.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, sorry about that, so can you yeah, so
Speaker 1: can you tell us about that?
Speaker 2: Then?
Speaker 4: Uh, Marcus the Treill you know, it's Afghanistan. Targeting was
Speaker 4: you know, still in its infancy. Is still a lot
Speaker 4: of human based at that point in time in Afghanistan,
Speaker 4: so they're really wasn't a great targeting platform to go on.
Speaker 4: As you know, we looked for you know, legacy targets
Speaker 4: and plant out some of that stuff. And as far
Speaker 4: as what the rangers were doing a lot of it.
Speaker 4: We were just on ts TS time Sensitive Target for
Speaker 4: one platoon and then the other was on CSAR Combat
Speaker 4: Search and Rescue was a STEO basic standard Ranger tasking
Speaker 4: at that point in time, and we had just rotated
Speaker 4: off of the CSAR tasking onto the Time Sensitive Target tasking.
Speaker 4: So we had just finished all the stand ups for
Speaker 4: you know, running through timelines and checks on all that stuff,
Speaker 4: and got the word that you know, uh, Marcus Traill's
Speaker 4: team was was going to go out and do this
Speaker 4: Operation Red Wings. And you know, as rangers always do
Speaker 4: you know, we get enough information to have a conversation
Speaker 4: about it at chow hall table, and so we started
Speaker 4: talking with some of the Rekie guys and you know there,
Speaker 4: you know, they're briefing us because they've been following this
Speaker 4: a lot closer than like a rifle balteon has that
Speaker 4: wasn't kind of in our uh in our wheelhouse as
Speaker 4: far as targets we were looking at, but stuff that
Speaker 4: Reki had been looking at in areas to do to
Speaker 4: do some of their stuff, and they were like, wedn't
Speaker 4: do it this way, not four guys, No, we'd take
Speaker 4: a whole recon section, you know, twelve guys and then
Speaker 4: but we wouldn't do it without a rifle teon and support,
Speaker 4: you know, even if it was a you know, five
Speaker 4: k standoff between the two, because they can fight to
Speaker 4: us and we can fight to them, and it's a
Speaker 4: bigger footprint on the ground. Yeah, do we run the
Speaker 4: risk of spoiling the target, yes, But you know, on
Speaker 4: the other side of it, you know, we as rangers,
Speaker 4: you know, we're always going to bring everything in the
Speaker 4: kitchen sink to bear on an objective to turn the
Speaker 4: you know, the odds in our favor. And you know,
Speaker 4: did they do anything wrong in the way they did it? No,
Speaker 4: they made judgment calls along the way. And you know
Speaker 4: we can armchair quarterback this right. You know, here's years
Speaker 4: later and say, well I wouldn't have done that, and
Speaker 4: I wouldn't have done this, but you know, they did
Speaker 4: what they do and right, so you know that led
Speaker 4: us into you know, you know, then losing calms and
Speaker 4: them getting in the fight and you know, as the
Speaker 4: as the movie portrays it out, and you know, and
Speaker 4: then we got to go in and do the combat
Speaker 4: search and rescue on the Turbine three three crash site
Speaker 4: and then figure out what the question mark.
Speaker 3: Is what was going on on your base with your platoon?
Speaker 3: I mean, are you getting worried that this team is compromised?
Speaker 3: There are guys who are m I A, we might
Speaker 3: have to go look for them. Then you find out
Speaker 3: a bird went down? I mean, can you take us
Speaker 3: through a little bit of that.
Speaker 4: So so that morning, so June twenty eight, that morning,
Speaker 4: you know, we we got up and we just did
Speaker 4: what rangers do you know, We got up to pt
Speaker 4: went ate breakfast. Going on with our training cycle, we
Speaker 4: were going to go out to East River Range, which
Speaker 4: is just outside of Bograam, the little town of Bogram.
Speaker 4: So we left the base, got outside there. We're gonna
Speaker 4: go do some shooting drills and just you know, have
Speaker 4: a good session on the range and we get out
Speaker 4: and start throwing the target stands off the trucks and
Speaker 4: that's about the time that you know, we we find
Speaker 4: out that the bird's been shot down, and you know,
Speaker 4: it was hey, don't don't worry about what you've thrown
Speaker 4: off the trucks, get back on the trucks. You know,
Speaker 4: we got to get back and there was a lot
Speaker 4: of guys who are like, what are we doing? And
Speaker 4: you know, we didn't have any of the answers at
Speaker 4: the leadership level of what was going on. We just
Speaker 4: knew that, you know, we had to be back for
Speaker 4: something that was gonna gonna get breathed, you know, to us.
Speaker 4: And as the situation was developing, and and so then
Speaker 4: as we were rolling back in, you know, we find
Speaker 4: out that the aircraft has been shot down, that team's
Speaker 4: in the fight, and you know, we're just stand by
Speaker 4: at that point. So I wouldn't really kind of understand
Speaker 4: the whole situation for you know, probably another six years
Speaker 4: as I progressed through through leadership. But you know, as
Speaker 4: I tell people, it's, you know, it's as a young guy,
Speaker 4: you know, it's not that we're not going to get
Speaker 4: in there and we're not going to be a part
Speaker 4: of this and we're not gonna but we're going to
Speaker 4: turn the tables so that way when we do recommit
Speaker 4: forces into this area, we've got so many assets to
Speaker 4: bear on the objective that nobody would be in their
Speaker 4: right mind to want to play. So, you know, it
Speaker 4: was probably you know, about ten hours or so after
Speaker 4: the initial shootdown that you know, that night as we're
Speaker 4: getting ready to launch and you'll finally got the green
Speaker 4: light that we're going to go, and we load up
Speaker 4: everybody that's going to fit on the aircraft at altitude
Speaker 4: and launch and then we hit the mountain weather on
Speaker 4: that night and have to divert infill and go sit
Speaker 4: at jawl about for a day and then wait to
Speaker 4: get infilled the next night.
Speaker 1: What what was your understanding at that time of the
Speaker 1: situation on the ground.
Speaker 4: So the understanding was that the forty seven had been
Speaker 4: shot down. There was no movement on that, you know.
Speaker 4: Is SR feeds were terrible at the time. I you know,
Speaker 4: I don't even understand how people could understand, you know,
Speaker 4: what they're seeing on that screen. It was such a
Speaker 4: bad quality feed even then, you know. And so we
Speaker 4: knew that the aircraft has been shot down. We're going
Speaker 4: in to do combat search and rescue on the crash.
Speaker 4: You know, Murphy's team was still a question mark as
Speaker 4: to what's going on because there had been no radio
Speaker 4: comes with them since Murphy's SAP phone call. So the
Speaker 4: priority tasking was to recover the crash because we knew
Speaker 4: where it was, and then after that it would just
Speaker 4: be to figure it out, if you will.
Speaker 3: So we we we interviewed Tony Brooks on the show before.
Speaker 5: Was he in your platoon?
Speaker 4: Tony was in one, Charlie, so he was the other
Speaker 4: half of the element that went up. So it was, uh,
Speaker 4: theurplatoon led the way because we weren't on the CSAR,
Speaker 4: so we didn't have all the recovery and crash axes
Speaker 4: and all this stuff to do that. So we we
Speaker 4: kind of plowed the way, if you will, and we
Speaker 4: were there to kind of take the brunt of any
Speaker 4: contact that was going to be made, because we were
Speaker 4: just there to add security to to what they were
Speaker 4: going to come in and do. As far as recovery,
Speaker 4: that was you know, one Charlie's tasking at the time.
Speaker 4: So that was that was where Tony was and.
Speaker 5: Okay, cool, you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, it's cool to get like some different perspectives
Speaker 3: on it. So then what was your platoon you know,
Speaker 3: I mean you just explained what your platoon's role was,
Speaker 3: but then walk us through infil and getting on the ground.
Speaker 4: So infil we infilled somewhere about probably about eight thousand
Speaker 4: feet and you know, it was what we could get to
Speaker 4: with the package size that we had on the aircraft.
Speaker 4: And so there we knew there wasn't a way to
Speaker 4: land anywhere up there, so we knew it was going
Speaker 4: to be a rope and it was going to be
Speaker 4: at least and minimum of forty footer and it ended
Speaker 4: up forty and then as it broke drifts, you know,
Speaker 4: it kind of goes forty to sixty to you know,
Speaker 4: as it works out. And then when one Charlie came in,
Speaker 4: I know, their rope started at sixty and it ended
Speaker 4: somewhere around eighty.
Speaker 3: Tony said, they just roped down into fog with like
Speaker 3: no idea of where the bottom was.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it was. Well, I mean the fuck came
Speaker 4: in after we were already on the ground. I know
Speaker 4: what he's talking about, because you know, it is just
Speaker 4: the way the weather was working, and you know, it's
Speaker 4: just it was. It was, you know, one of those
Speaker 4: points where I never really you know, after a private
Speaker 4: I never roped with with leather gloves, you know, fast rope,
Speaker 4: you know, the working work gloves anymore. I always did
Speaker 4: it in no max shooting glo Hamburger helpers.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I never tried like trying to take those gloves off,
Speaker 4: and always felt like my hands got so much hotter.
Speaker 4: And you know, I had a teen starts said hey,
Speaker 4: just just rope in your shooting gloves because you don't
Speaker 4: have to grip. The rope is tight. He this paces
Speaker 4: the heat just as well, and he said, just try
Speaker 4: it on the fast repe tower. So I did, and
Speaker 4: that's that's a forty foot rope, and you know, it
Speaker 4: wasn't terrible. And then I was watching guys carrying two
Speaker 4: forties and stuff roping in and they've got the big
Speaker 4: thick gloves on and they're squeezing extra tight just to
Speaker 4: have a feeling on the rope, right, And so then
Speaker 4: they're burning in and you know, and their hands are
Speaker 4: getting so hot that you know, they're blistering at you know,
Speaker 4: still ten or fifteen feet above ground, and they're just
Speaker 4: letting go. They're like, I'll just deal with it when
Speaker 4: to hit the ground. And you know when once Charlie
Speaker 4: came in, you know, they had the same problem, and
Speaker 4: guys were falling off and then they were just ending
Speaker 4: up in the big pile. And I know their rto
Speaker 4: had had his arm broken because he got stepped on.
Speaker 4: Yeah that's and so you know he got guys that
Speaker 4: need to get meted back, but you ain't getting meta backed.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So what was it like for your platoon roping in
Speaker 5: and getting on the ground.
Speaker 4: Uh, it wasn't. We didn't have any contact or anything.
Speaker 4: And it was it was quiet, you know. And then
Speaker 4: when you when the brown out cleared and all the
Speaker 4: you know, the wash of everything, and you know, you
Speaker 4: kind of look up the mountain, you know, you you
Speaker 4: could see the crash because it's still on fire, it's
Speaker 4: still burning and it's just kind of one of those
Speaker 4: ominous moments, if you will, just kind of you know,
Speaker 4: the gravity of what you're doing has finally set in
Speaker 4: because you're seeing it with your own eyes and not
Speaker 4: on a TV screen. And then you know, it just
Speaker 4: becomes the all night walk up hill through the nettles
Speaker 4: and you know the Scotch Burn or not the Scotch Burn,
Speaker 4: but you know the pines and all the groundcover that's
Speaker 4: up there in the mountains, and it's just.
Speaker 2: Were you guys.
Speaker 1: Was there any intelligence that there were enemies on the
Speaker 1: objective or around the objective?
Speaker 4: We had, you know, any eyes around the area, but
Speaker 4: it wasn't anything like on on the objective. There wasn't
Speaker 4: any movement on there, you know, throughout the day or
Speaker 4: or anything. And there wasn't there wasn't any you know,
Speaker 4: people coming and going from it. I think, you know,
Speaker 4: looking back at it now, is they realized what they
Speaker 4: had done and what was about to happen, and so
Speaker 4: they were just kind of got a little bit of
Speaker 4: standoff and they really were it was to observe how
Speaker 4: we were going to take care of it. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: so you know, as the the that day turned into
Speaker 4: you know, a week to two weeks. You know, at night,
Speaker 4: you know, you see little fires on the mountain and
Speaker 4: you know, get eyes on it, especially can and then
Speaker 4: ac one thirties dropping, you know, one O five's on it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So what was that first movement that first night?
Speaker 2: What was the movement like for you guys? How long
Speaker 2: did it take?
Speaker 4: It took all night. We didn't get to the top
Speaker 4: until about an hour before you know, sunrise, and then
Speaker 4: were sitting there on it and the kind of listening
Speaker 4: to one Charlie, you know, suck their way up the
Speaker 4: mountain and then one Bravo was still about halfway up
Speaker 4: the mountain because they had driven in from Jelalabad the
Speaker 4: night or the morning that it happened. They drove up
Speaker 4: the ninety k in their trucks and then they started
Speaker 4: walking from the base of the mountain up and they
Speaker 4: didn't make it until the next day. And you know,
Speaker 4: only about half the guys that started to climb up
Speaker 4: the mountain made it up and the rest of them
Speaker 4: had to go back down and get picked up by
Speaker 4: the trucks. And you know cause they just either heat, heat,
Speaker 4: exhaustion or you know, twisted ankles and whatnot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and so what did that what was the
Speaker 1: next like week to what how what did that set
Speaker 1: in motion for you guys in particular?
Speaker 4: So what a said of motion for us was, you know,
Speaker 4: the priority tasking was to accountability and recovery of all
Speaker 4: you know, members of that aircraft crew and then the
Speaker 4: QRF team that was on there. So that totaled sixteen.
Speaker 4: And so we got those numbers, you know, kind of
Speaker 4: early afternoon and there was a small clearing on top
Speaker 4: of the mountain. You could put a small helicopter like
Speaker 4: little bird on it, but it was you know CDs
Speaker 4: drops for demolitions and you know, basically had to create
Speaker 4: an HLZ to be able to get everybody off that
Speaker 4: mountain that you know, the remains for those guys. And
Speaker 4: so it was kind of a was a good distraction,
Speaker 4: if you will, to do timber charges and clear that
Speaker 4: space to be able to make enough room to bring
Speaker 4: you know, helicopter in. And and so we just finished
Speaker 4: our regimental breachers course and uh so all that old stuff,
Speaker 4: you know that that timber stuff was still fresh in
Speaker 4: everybody's mind. So it was, uh, you know, we're all
Speaker 4: sitting there trying to do the math and the first
Speaker 4: starting to like use the peed method. Yeah, so we're
Speaker 4: sending tree stumps and everything up, you know, like Roman candles.
Speaker 4: It was, you know, just packing as much explosives in
Speaker 4: these little burrow holes in or knees and launch it.
Speaker 4: And so that that was fun. We cleared that and
Speaker 4: then we got to tasking for you know, what would
Speaker 4: turn out to be, go down the mountain and find Marcus,
Speaker 4: and so that that started the fun of the mountain.
Speaker 4: Weather moved in that night and dumped on us, and
Speaker 4: we're trying to walk down hill and you know, the
Speaker 4: trails a little stream bed at the time, and so
Speaker 4: guys are slipping and falling and guys are trying to
Speaker 4: not fall off the rid and then we end up,
Speaker 4: uh just for safety reasons, you know, we end up
Speaker 4: spending the last few hours kind of under pine trees
Speaker 4: waiting for the sun to come up so that we
Speaker 4: don't lose anybody.
Speaker 5: How many guys did you have left in your platoon
Speaker 5: at this point?
Speaker 4: We had split the four so we had two squads
Speaker 4: in the p LS package. So you know, the PT
Speaker 4: leader R. T. O f O were with us, and
Speaker 4: then the pat servant had his you know, uh, one
Speaker 4: squad two machine guns, you know, on still on the
Speaker 4: top and okay, on the on the top of the mountain,
Speaker 4: and we knew what we were. Yeah, they were still
Speaker 4: up there with with one Charlie and and reinforcing them,
Speaker 4: and we're just kind of the the maneuver element, if
Speaker 4: you will, going down and trying to confirm or deny
Speaker 4: what this push to talk signal was that that we
Speaker 4: were getting being triangulated down into this. I I always
Speaker 4: forget the name of the village, so I can't even
Speaker 4: remember it.
Speaker 3: So you guys have you guys had to kind of
Speaker 3: like hide hide out, not hide out, but you know,
Speaker 3: take cover under the pine trees until dawn and then
Speaker 3: continue to move down to where this you know, ostensibly
Speaker 3: there was a sigate hit that you had to go investigate.
Speaker 4: Right and so that was basically confirmed deny. You know,
Speaker 4: was it enemy recovered American equipment or was it actually
Speaker 4: in fact, you know, Murphy's team or you know what
Speaker 4: what the question mark was still for that and that
Speaker 4: was kind of where we were at from the tasking.
Speaker 4: You know, the crash had been accounted for us and
Speaker 4: now we're just trying to figure out, you know, the
Speaker 4: fate of you know, this Foreman seal team and so
Speaker 4: you'll finally push down in there.
Speaker 1: Was it consistent signal that you guys were going off
Speaker 1: of or was it just like a single a couple
Speaker 1: of hits and they're like okay around this general area.
Speaker 4: No, it was. It wasn't like a consistent but you
Speaker 4: know it's like somebody just ken the can the push
Speaker 4: to talk you know, intermittently enough to get a you know,
Speaker 4: an orbital transmission to triangulate, uh, you know where it was.
Speaker 4: And so it was kind of confirmed or deny what
Speaker 4: that was. And so you know, there was an s
Speaker 4: F team that was walking up that we tied in
Speaker 4: with and uh then pushed back down into this this
Speaker 4: little village. And then you know, as we're doing the
Speaker 4: rangers smashed through all the doors and clearing the village.
Speaker 4: You know, here comes Marcus, you know, from up from
Speaker 4: where they had him hidden and kind of stashed, and
Speaker 4: so you know, confirm that and then start you know,
Speaker 4: doing the.
Speaker 3: So so they actually brought Marcus out to meet you guys.
Speaker 4: Right, and they knew why we were there, and they
Speaker 4: knew what you were lying for, and so it was
Speaker 4: to you know hand him over and then do the
Speaker 4: you know, the kind of the whole s F thing
Speaker 4: where they do the you know, let's drink some tea
Speaker 4: and talk and you know, what.
Speaker 3: Was that moment like, what was that moment like when
Speaker 3: you first got face to face with Marcus and confirmed
Speaker 3: this guy's alive? And what what was your your perception
Speaker 3: of all that?
Speaker 4: I don't know the big question. You know that we
Speaker 4: you know, the first thing that we asked was once
Speaker 4: you know, we went through the whole challenge and kind
Speaker 4: of confirmed that it is him, you know, through the
Speaker 4: whole you know, M I, P O, W, M I
Speaker 4: A cards, you know, we all fill out, and going
Speaker 4: through that, it was you know, dude, where's everybody else?
Speaker 4: You know, and then you know it's like they're dead.
Speaker 4: Well okay, great, not great, but you know it's like, okay,
Speaker 4: but where they're on the mountain, that's it. You know,
Speaker 4: it's kind of that you can't give me anything more.
Speaker 4: The CITYO has just started kind of a frustration thing,
Speaker 4: and I get it. You know, he's been you know,
Speaker 4: that wasn't it probably wouldn't have been fun come down
Speaker 4: that mountain the way he says he came down that mountain.
Speaker 4: But you know, I I would like to hope to
Speaker 4: think that, you know, my friends were dead on that mountain.
Speaker 4: I can at least remember some kind of terrain feature
Speaker 4: that I could at least tell somebody that they're you know,
Speaker 4: they're up here in this area.
Speaker 3: And so what was the next step after that initial
Speaker 3: you had that initial questioning of Marcus, Uh, what what
Speaker 3: happened next?
Speaker 4: So then what happened next was, you know, we just
Speaker 4: kind of secured the little village that we were at
Speaker 4: and uh, you know, confirmed that it was him passed up,
Speaker 4: you know, oversap that you know, we had him, and
Speaker 4: then we were in control of him. And then we
Speaker 4: just had to sit and wait for nightfall to come
Speaker 4: so that we could bring in the middle of Backburg
Speaker 4: and get him out. And then it just started, you know,
Speaker 4: days and days and days of sweeping and searching this mountain.
Speaker 5: Side for the rest of the team.
Speaker 4: For the the rest of the team.
Speaker 3: I mean, did you guys eventually find the remains of
Speaker 3: those three other guys.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we expilled Marcus in the next day. You know,
Speaker 4: we were sweeping the lower portion of this of this
Speaker 4: spur and the other half of our paton was coming
Speaker 4: from the top of the ridge down we were just
Speaker 4: kind of meeting in the middle. And so after we
Speaker 4: had met in the middle and you know, kind of
Speaker 4: traded information and they got a break, you know, they
Speaker 4: started to climb back up for the night, and we
Speaker 4: turned around and started coming back down to finish our suite.
Speaker 4: They stumbled on on two of the remains just by
Speaker 4: half instance, somebody lost their footing and slipped into a
Speaker 4: little wash and ended up, you know, face first with
Speaker 4: with two of them oh Man, and so well, the
Speaker 4: rough part was that they still had to go like
Speaker 4: eight meters vertically with you know, to two sets of remains,
Speaker 4: and all we have is the old school poncho method
Speaker 4: to carry him up, right, because you couldn't do it
Speaker 4: with a litter. So it was wrapping them up in
Speaker 4: the poncho and kind of getting them up as best
Speaker 4: as possible, and you know, then they have to carry
Speaker 4: it traverse them across the ridge back over to the
Speaker 4: the HLZ and you know, then that was the hard
Speaker 4: part is after that, now we're just looking for one person, right,
Speaker 4: and you know, we ended up searching for oh Man, well,
Speaker 4: probably another ten days before we got ripped out when
Speaker 4: three seventy five came in. Yeah, and you know, at
Speaker 4: that point, you know, we're fourteen days, twelve or twelve
Speaker 4: days into this whole thing, and it's guys are just gassed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I remember Tony saying that, I mean the weather,
Speaker 1: you guys weren't getting enough water, that it was just
Speaker 1: it was just non stop for you guys.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was you know, from sun up to sundown,
Speaker 4: you know, and then you got to you know, we're
Speaker 4: pulling security and small elements and so you're not getting
Speaker 4: much sleep, and guys are getting sick with you know,
Speaker 4: dehydration stuff or guys are getting you know, you know
Speaker 4: what happens, and you you get a bad MR and
Speaker 4: then you got a little bit of food poisoning or whatever,
Speaker 4: and work doesn't stop. You just got to keep going.
Speaker 4: You know, you've got a little bit of food poisoning
Speaker 4: from an MR that may have spoiled and you ate
Speaker 4: it anyway. And yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, so you guys get ripped out before you
Speaker 1: find the uh, the final body.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then but well we got ripped out and
Speaker 4: then so I want to say it was probably eight
Speaker 4: hours later, you know that three s five had had
Speaker 4: found the uh, the last one, and so uh you
Speaker 4: was we were happy that. We're upset that, you know,
Speaker 4: we didn't end up finding him, you know, because somebody
Speaker 4: else had to come in, but you know, we're glad
Speaker 4: it was over with right right.
Speaker 3: Well you said the you mentioned earlier on that you
Speaker 3: know there were things that you pieced together years after uh,
Speaker 3: the event because at the time, you know, you're a
Speaker 3: you're a sergeant, You're you know, reacting on the ground
Speaker 3: as things unfold in front of you, doing the best
Speaker 3: you can. I just want to ask you real quick,
Speaker 3: you know, what's your perception of what what happened out
Speaker 3: there today versus what it was when you were actually
Speaker 3: there as a younger man. I mean, is there anything
Speaker 3: you've learned, anything that kind of like opened up your
Speaker 3: scope or offered a wider context that was surprising to you,
Speaker 3: or that kind of that you look at this event
Speaker 3: much differently today than you did at the time.
Speaker 4: I think it just what you know, it comes to
Speaker 4: mind is you know, the the amount of that goes
Speaker 4: into this type of situation. It's one of those things
Speaker 4: that we never trained for. When you know, nobody ever
Speaker 4: goes into a training scenario that we're gonna have aircraft
Speaker 4: shot down, and we're gonna do this, and we're gonna
Speaker 4: do that, and then all this kind of stuff and
Speaker 4: so it's like the worst of everything, you know, as
Speaker 4: far as the circumstances, and it's trying to understand all
Speaker 4: the pieces, you know, the wizard behind the curtain, if
Speaker 4: you will, of what's going on. And you know, it's
Speaker 4: all the questions that we asked after we got back.
Speaker 4: You know, why did it take so long for us
Speaker 4: to launch? You know, what were the circumstances? And you know,
Speaker 4: it's it's when this type of situation happens, it is
Speaker 4: everything stops in in theater, uh, you know, and then
Speaker 4: it's it's all assets shift focus, and it's trying to
Speaker 4: put everything in place so that way, you know, like
Speaker 4: I said, you know, when we do commit the force,
Speaker 4: it is you know, with all the odds can be
Speaker 4: stacked in our favor as best as possible. And so,
Speaker 4: you know, not not to jump forward too far, but
Speaker 4: you know, it's kind of one of those things that
Speaker 4: always stuck in my head. And then when the Extortion
Speaker 4: one seven shoot down happened, you know, we're on the
Speaker 4: ground and so then it's I can explain, you know,
Speaker 4: because I'm the old fart at this time. You know,
Speaker 4: it's kind of explains. The voice on the fly is like, hey, look,
Speaker 4: you know, this is what's happening behind the scene. You know,
Speaker 4: we're here in the middle of it right now, but
Speaker 4: this is what's going on on the backside. And so
Speaker 4: it's not that you know, we're not going to get
Speaker 4: things that we need, but there are steps and things
Speaker 4: that have to that have to happen. And so it
Speaker 4: was one of those that was the big learning lesson
Speaker 4: for me was you know, what are what are all
Speaker 4: these steps on the backside of of this type of scenario.
Speaker 3: It's uh, it's we talked about on last Friday's episode.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's it's amazing the effort that the US
Speaker 3: military will go through to recover our soldiers, uh, even
Speaker 3: if it's only to recover their remains, that will go
Speaker 3: through incredible lengths to u to repatriate every American troop.
Speaker 5: It's just incredible, right right.
Speaker 4: You know that was you know, the war Fighter series
Speaker 4: on History Channel. We did a segment with with this
Speaker 4: Marcus Latreil Red Wings recovery and you know something that
Speaker 4: he said, you know, it's you know, when they get
Speaker 4: in trouble, you know, they it's it's not expected. But
Speaker 4: you know when they say that the Rangers are coming in,
Speaker 4: you know, it's they're coming in with everything, you know,
Speaker 4: because you know, we're bringing everybody that we can, and
Speaker 4: we're bringing all the toys and all the stuff, and
Speaker 4: you know, we're bringing a big footprint.
Speaker 2: And yeah, it.
Speaker 1: I mean, and you know, even though it was it
Speaker 1: was challenging for all the Rangers involved.
Speaker 2: I mean.
Speaker 1: We I mean, I'm grateful and I think you know,
Speaker 1: obviously the families are, like everybody's grateful that those seals
Speaker 1: did come home, you know, that they were found, because
Speaker 1: that would also be a horrible, you know thing for
Speaker 1: a family to go. Are they just out there missing?
Speaker 1: You know, are they still alive being held somewhere like.
Speaker 3: To this day, I mean, dpaa. I mean, we deal
Speaker 3: with it with our Vietnam veterans. You know, there's like
Speaker 3: one hundred and fifty Special Forces soldiers alone. I believe
Speaker 3: we're missing somewhere on layouts in Cambodia, And I mean
Speaker 3: that's just terrible.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So after did it Aside from that, you guys
Speaker 1: ripped out.
Speaker 2: So you left Afghanistan at that point, correct.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was our last off. You know, we were
Speaker 4: out of there. It was just a couple of days
Speaker 4: long enough to you know, download the ammunition, pack everything up,
Speaker 4: throwing the palette and get on aircraft. We were we
Speaker 4: were out.
Speaker 1: And then you turned around and then you were in
Speaker 1: Mosoul in two thousand and six, and uh, I thought
Speaker 1: you're Yeah, I thought that your uh, your chapter name,
Speaker 1: Fast and Less Furious was funny. Can you can you
Speaker 1: tell us why why you called your chapter that?
Speaker 4: Uh, it was just a I'm not really sure anymore.
Speaker 4: It was just kind of a play on words with
Speaker 4: you know, I you know, things are speeding up in Afghanistan,
Speaker 4: but you know, or in Iraq, but you know, not
Speaker 4: necessarily are we having more fun? If you will, there's
Speaker 4: not you know, we're smashing targets and taking guys in,
Speaker 4: but we're not really getting in the fight. Yeah, gun
Speaker 4: fights really going on.
Speaker 1: And part of that the way what I got from
Speaker 1: this chapter and the way you explain it, the reason
Speaker 1: you weren't getting in a in as many gun fights
Speaker 1: is because you guys had really nailed down how to
Speaker 1: do these hits and that ninety eight percent of these
Speaker 1: hits we're debt. We're done silently where the bad guys
Speaker 1: never even knew you were there until.
Speaker 4: Exactly you know, it was one of these. You know,
Speaker 4: so we've just come out of Afghanistan, we've been dealing
Speaker 4: with this, and you know, the other battalions are you know,
Speaker 4: kind of setting this new trend, if you will, this
Speaker 4: new ttp for this what we're calling silent entry. And
Speaker 4: you know it's not the traditional ranger below the front door, open,
Speaker 4: go in, smash everything. It's you know, how can we
Speaker 4: come in as sneaky and quiet as absolutely possible. And
Speaker 4: you know, basically we're waking people up out of a
Speaker 4: dead sleep to take these targets. And so you know,
Speaker 4: at first you're like, oh, this is such a big letdown,
Speaker 4: But then as you start going on and it it
Speaker 4: really becomes this thing that we're all kind of driving
Speaker 4: for is you know, mission success is now not how
Speaker 4: much can we smash, but how how successfully can we
Speaker 4: get in repeatedly silently without firing any of these shots.
Speaker 4: Because now we're getting all of this intel from all
Speaker 4: these people through interrogations and all this stuff. And so
Speaker 4: you know, when you shift your mindset kind of away
Speaker 4: from the traditional you know what we'd like to call
Speaker 4: the ranger smash, and now we're kind of playing on
Speaker 4: the same TTPs and and kind of lines that you know,
Speaker 4: Team six guys are playing on a Delta Forces playing
Speaker 4: in and they've been having success for you know years,
Speaker 4: and you know all kinds of settings around the world
Speaker 4: that they're employed in. You know, we can as a
Speaker 4: Ranger regiment, we can employ these types of you know,
Speaker 4: operational guidelines that we're going to go do this and
Speaker 4: we're going to do it as quietly and mission success
Speaker 4: is now based on the amount of people that we
Speaker 4: can not kill on target, but we can drag off target, right,
Speaker 4: you know, and then it really becomes the driving force.
Speaker 4: You know, mission success is now can we do it?
Speaker 4: And how many times can we do it? And then
Speaker 4: you know it's kind of not necessarily mission failure. But
Speaker 4: you know, if shots are have to be you know
Speaker 4: fired in, right, you know, what do we do wrong
Speaker 4: that that got us into that gunfight? Because it's really impressive,
Speaker 4: you know, as a leader when you can bring like
Speaker 4: thirteen plus guys into a target building and roll up
Speaker 4: fourteen or fifteen dudes without anybody knowing that you're even
Speaker 4: in the room, right, And so you know, that was
Speaker 4: you know, and then when we started going into two
Speaker 4: other techniques later on, you know, was like, but we're
Speaker 4: so good at this, why are we switching to doing
Speaker 4: this this other thing? And you know, I never really
Speaker 4: liked what we call prefer you know, later on it
Speaker 4: would be the call out. And I understand the you know,
Speaker 4: as a leader of the thought behind it is that
Speaker 4: it's less risk of force because we're now telling the enemy.
Speaker 4: And you know, for those of people who don't understand,
Speaker 4: it's kind of like what you know a swat team
Speaker 4: will do, or you know, the FBI does, you know,
Speaker 4: when they surround a house or a compound or whatever
Speaker 4: and then they're getting on loud speakers and they're telling
Speaker 4: people to come out and surrender and and all that.
Speaker 4: But you know, it's never the fun way to do.
Speaker 4: It's kind of you know, if you will, it's boring.
Speaker 3: Right, right, You walk us through like one of those
Speaker 3: ops that really like stands out in your mind where
Speaker 3: you know, you just kind of like pride open the
Speaker 3: front door, and rangers and night vision just kind of
Speaker 3: swept through and.
Speaker 4: Well, there was uh mostli we we had one op
Speaker 4: and I mean we had been in probably four or
Speaker 4: five houses down the block trying to get the right house.
Speaker 4: And when we finally did get the right house, you know,
Speaker 4: we popped the front door open, all nice and quiet,
Speaker 4: and I mean there was no there was no reverberation
Speaker 4: off the metal door or anything. We had you know,
Speaker 4: pressure and counter pressure working, and you know we ended
Speaker 4: up you know, sliding in all nice and and quiet.
Speaker 4: And then you know, I had a whole squad of guys,
Speaker 4: you know, pulling security on dudes. And then it was
Speaker 4: you know, we had the first floor, you know, secure
Speaker 4: as as far as you know, guys are. We've got
Speaker 4: guns on the right amount of people, and you know,
Speaker 4: we've got a whole other squad is sneaking in to
Speaker 4: take care of you know, what needs to be going
Speaker 4: on upstairs, and everybody's all super quiet, and you know
Speaker 4: we're basically we take the whole house down all in
Speaker 4: one shot, and we end up with like sixteen detainees
Speaker 4: and you know, the whole target's done in forty five minutes.
Speaker 4: We got everybody's tagging bag. We've done all the sight
Speaker 4: exploitation and you know, and then we're we're onto the
Speaker 4: next objective. Yeah. So it's amazing when, you know, when
Speaker 4: when you can look back at that and and be like, wow,
Speaker 4: I was a part of that, and you know that
Speaker 4: that worked out great and and you know when you
Speaker 4: can explain you know that that is you know, mission
Speaker 4: success because you know, intel drives the targeting, and when
Speaker 4: you don't kill the intelligence, then you get more targets
Speaker 4: and you get to go have more fun. And you know,
Speaker 4: when you could explain that to the younger guys who
Speaker 4: are you know, nineteen twenty and just kind of chomping
Speaker 4: at the bit, and it's like, no, hey, to relax, relax,
Speaker 4: We're being smooth, We're being quiet. You know, we started,
Speaker 4: you know, climbing walls and and you know, then then
Speaker 4: it would became the whole you know, can we do
Speaker 4: a top down? You know, can we come in from
Speaker 4: one building or can we ladder up the side of
Speaker 4: the building. And you know, not only can we come
Speaker 4: in from the ground floor, but can we send in
Speaker 4: the salt force in from the top floor and still
Speaker 4: do it all silent? You know, it just becomes a
Speaker 4: whole other side of you know, this developing persona that
Speaker 4: we're creating in the Ranger Regiments. Not just are we
Speaker 4: the ability to go smash things, but we can be
Speaker 4: as precision as anybody else, but do it with twice
Speaker 4: as many people.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: I want to take just one second here to give
Speaker 3: a little advertisement actually for our own podcast. We have
Speaker 3: a Patreon site and there's a link down the description.
Speaker 3: If you guys check it out, and if you join,
Speaker 3: you will get ad free episodes. You get all these
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Speaker 3: that's all I wanted to throw out there.
Speaker 2: Tonight.
Speaker 1: You get deep thoughts by Jack and Dave sitting in
Speaker 1: our smoking pajamas and uh, you know, talking about the
Speaker 1: way of the world, plus a lot of great bonus content.
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 2: But so then after Missoul, you guys did Ramadi, which
Speaker 2: is a lot more of the same. But now you
Speaker 2: guys are operating on boats.
Speaker 4: Uh yeah, we're on the on the sweat boats, on
Speaker 4: the sockars, no ship yep. So that you know it
Speaker 4: was it was different. It was totally fun. I mean,
Speaker 4: you know, because at the time, you got to remember
Speaker 4: Ramadi and Flujah, they're still on the you know, it's
Speaker 4: still a wild West out there. You know, the Marines
Speaker 4: are still having it out all day long every day,
Speaker 4: and we're trying to you know, kind of squeeze in
Speaker 4: the seams and do what we're doing. And uh, you know,
Speaker 4: we had a company commander at the time. He was
Speaker 4: notorious for you know, any holiday. It was a day
Speaker 4: that you know, he had been blown up and so
Speaker 4: he didn't really like to drive anymore. And so he's like,
Speaker 4: the only holiday I've never been blown up on is Halloween.
Speaker 4: And so we took the ground of salt force out
Speaker 4: and strikers and uh hit a target driving back and uh,
Speaker 4: his truck gets popped, and you know, it's what we
Speaker 4: call a catastrophic vehicle kills. So it's a striker, but
Speaker 4: it had a whole penetration and it was enough to
Speaker 4: penetrate the bottom of the floor and then what came
Speaker 4: through stuck in the back of the seat on the driver.
Speaker 4: But nobody, nobody was hurt. And you know, the testament
Speaker 4: to the striker as a vehicle platform that we were using,
Speaker 4: it blew all the circuit breakers in the vehicle and
Speaker 4: all the driver had to do was just reach around,
Speaker 4: push the breakers in and start back up. And it
Speaker 4: drove all the way back to the gate and then
Speaker 4: it gave up the ghosts, you know, the all the
Speaker 4: steering linkage and the front broke apart and it was
Speaker 4: plugging the uh the ECP there at the at the
Speaker 4: gate onto Ramadi. And so that was kind of funny
Speaker 4: because we had to move the the t barriers out
Speaker 4: of the way to open it up so we could
Speaker 4: get the record in there to hook onto it, because
Speaker 4: there wasn't a way to pull it through the chicanes
Speaker 4: with with that with all those barricades in place, so
Speaker 4: we had to you know, it was probably a three
Speaker 4: hour process to get that truck through the gate. You know,
Speaker 4: we got all the marine convoys and the army convoys
Speaker 4: and body they're all backed up sitting outside waiting for
Speaker 4: us to move our piece of junk. And so after that,
Speaker 4: you know, the team six guys were like, hey, we've
Speaker 4: got you know, the boats are down you know at
Speaker 4: the little off site you know, on the on the river,
Speaker 4: and you know we could start employing those and so
Speaker 4: we started doing you know, boats in, helicopters out, or
Speaker 4: helicopters in and boats out, and that's pretty cool kind
Speaker 4: of and riding the rivers. And it was definitely really
Speaker 4: cool because we could get way closer to target on
Speaker 4: the boats than you could with you know, helicopters without
Speaker 4: the noise signature. And it just you know, opened up
Speaker 4: a whole nother avenue of a technique that we hadn't
Speaker 4: really you know, been utilizing. And it was Yeah, I
Speaker 4: just I'm the only thing I wish that it was
Speaker 4: it had been in the summertime instead of in the winter.
Speaker 3: I've never been to Ramadi before, so I'm actually looking
Speaker 3: up on the map. So the Euphrates kind of runs
Speaker 3: right through the center of the city and there's a
Speaker 3: few like outlets, one of one of which it looks
Speaker 3: like it runs right into like the city center.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: That's pretty that's pretty cool, man. So you were you
Speaker 3: said we were able to get closer to target using
Speaker 3: the boats.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we could get within you know, a k of
Speaker 4: the target building or you know, depending sometimes it was
Speaker 4: within you know, four or five hundred meters of the target.
Speaker 4: And so you know, you have a last you know,
Speaker 4: the LCC is you know basically at the boat drop
Speaker 4: off point on the beach and then you know, move
Speaker 4: the target and take the target down, and you know,
Speaker 4: then moved to Xville and you know, just short helicopter
Speaker 4: ride back onto the base and so it was uh,
Speaker 4: you know, it was definitely fun because we were the
Speaker 4: one of the first to actually implement it and so, uh,
Speaker 4: you know, we kind of got to be on the
Speaker 4: on the front side of that. As far as what
Speaker 4: the rangers were doing with you know, boat boat ops.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now did you guys did you guys have those?
Speaker 1: I mean, I know that boat ops was always supposed
Speaker 1: to be a ranger thing, but it really we only
Speaker 1: at least like in the nineties, we only use for training. Like,
Speaker 1: did you guys have those in theater? Did you acquire them?
Speaker 1: Did somebody else have them and you borrow them? How
Speaker 1: did that all start?
Speaker 4: Well, it was the They were the quick boats, so
Speaker 4: the teams brought them and so the Swick teams are
Speaker 4: the guys they were manning all the boats, and so
Speaker 4: they're the sofcars that the you know, the nine hundred
Speaker 4: horsepower twin jet drive uh, you know, forty foot assault
Speaker 4: boats and so you know, they've got a whole there's
Speaker 4: a whole crew, these navy guys that drive the boats,
Speaker 4: gun the boats. All we did was just get a ride.
Speaker 5: And that's pretty cool.
Speaker 3: I never even knew the rangers did that. That's interesting.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was. It was definitely fun. You know, in
Speaker 4: the in the boats of you know, everybody's like, well,
Speaker 4: I wouldn't want to do that. Well, it's a fully
Speaker 4: armored boat. You know, it's nine hundred horse power. They'll
Speaker 4: do fifty miles.
Speaker 3: An hour on the water and safer than drive places.
Speaker 5: It's safer than driving down a road that's packedfull.
Speaker 1: I yeah, unless they're like deploying yeah, mines or something
Speaker 1: mine dog men.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: Well, there had been there was a time, you know,
Speaker 4: early on where the enemy had been trying to figure
Speaker 4: out how to id the river and they could figure
Speaker 4: out how to do it, and there wasn't any success.
Speaker 4: Whether they had tried hanging them from the bridges, but
Speaker 4: you know you can see that, and then they tried
Speaker 4: to plant them in the river banks, but it wasn't
Speaker 4: anything that was going to cause any kind of lethality
Speaker 4: to the boats. So they just basically gave it up
Speaker 4: as like, well, if they're going to use them, then
Speaker 4: there's something that we can do about it until they
Speaker 4: come on target.
Speaker 2: So I know that. So we have like more Missoul
Speaker 2: in Afghanistan.
Speaker 1: I don't want to leave too much out, but I
Speaker 1: also really want to get to I want to talk
Speaker 1: about twenty eleven.
Speaker 2: Okay, I want to make sure we talk about that.
Speaker 2: Am I missing anything? All space? Yeah?
Speaker 1: So can we talk about about your injury, about how
Speaker 1: all that came about?
Speaker 4: Yeah? So do you want to skip the extortions? Oh?
Speaker 1: No, No, let's talk about the extortion. Yeah, let's talk
Speaker 1: about extortion on first. Yeah, sorry about that.
Speaker 4: No, that's okay, we can. So this was kind of
Speaker 4: the the twenty eleven deployment was it was the last
Speaker 4: of the surge, the Special Ops surge into you know,
Speaker 4: Petreus's surge into Afghanistan and and kind of increasing that force. So, uh,
Speaker 4: BICO was the last company and second Arrange battalion to
Speaker 4: surge whether stay late or or go early. And so
Speaker 4: we had just finished the the KPEX at Fort Bragg,
Speaker 4: which is the big you know, the Special Ops dog
Speaker 4: and pony show for Congressman and uh you know, the
Speaker 4: President and all that stuff, which was fine because it
Speaker 4: gave us, you know, an extra week of training with
Speaker 4: you know one sixtieth and some you know, platoon time
Speaker 4: if you will, to run around of work through fine tunes,
Speaker 4: some TTPs and some s ops and break some of
Speaker 4: the new guys a little bit tighter online with you know,
Speaker 4: how we're gonna accomplish these these tasks when we're getting overseas.
Speaker 4: So you know, we got task to go to Bob
Speaker 4: Shank and be passed with Team six, uh under their command,
Speaker 4: and so h we went over and and did that,
Speaker 4: and uh, you know, we had a pretty good working
Speaker 4: relationship with with the Gold Squadron for for that uh
Speaker 4: early part of that deployment. And then the uh, you know,
Speaker 4: night of August six rolls around and so objective Left
Speaker 4: to Grow comes up on the table as a you know,
Speaker 4: it's a a target that had been tracked and chased
Speaker 4: and kind of lost but never could get a lot
Speaker 4: of fidelity to to it because he's a pretty dynamic
Speaker 4: target meeting. He's constantly on the move and and you know,
Speaker 4: hard to nail down to one location. But he had
Speaker 4: rolled into the Tangy Valley on this you know, this
Speaker 4: day and singing. It had kind of pinned him into
Speaker 4: a certain location inside the the valley and in a
Speaker 4: little cluster of buildings, and it was enough that it
Speaker 4: was probably about seventy percent fidelity on the on the
Speaker 4: objective targeting that it was. It was still solid, and
Speaker 4: we had just come off a few days of weather
Speaker 4: and uh, we're looking at maybe some more days of
Speaker 4: weather on the back end of this. So it was
Speaker 4: we had this little like two day window of good
Speaker 4: weather to do an op and I was kind of
Speaker 4: you know, looked at the at my peel and you know,
Speaker 4: we went to chow and we were sitting there having
Speaker 4: the conversation. I'm like, look, I'm willing to take a
Speaker 4: swing at seventy percent, you know for this target. You know, uh,
Speaker 4: you know we're gonna be stuck sitting for weather for
Speaker 4: a few days. And I don't you know, we've already
Speaker 4: been stuck sitting and Rangers doesn't do well sitting sitting
Speaker 4: around with with whether if we don't have anything to do.
Speaker 4: So you know, I was like, I'm willing to take
Speaker 4: a swing at seventy you know, we're going into the
Speaker 4: Tangy Valley. So it's basically a guaranteed gunfight, and you know,
Speaker 4: what do you think And he's like, yeah, I'm willing
Speaker 4: to take a swing on seventy percent. So we went
Speaker 4: back and pitched it that will take a swing at
Speaker 4: it and if nothing else, you know, we'll let him
Speaker 4: know that we're chasing him and kind of break his
Speaker 4: pattern of life. And usually when we can do that
Speaker 4: and break the pattern of life on people, that's when
Speaker 4: they start making mistakes and it becomes easier to you know, launch,
Speaker 4: launch a follow on operation because he's not sure what
Speaker 4: he needs to do. And so, you know, we drew
Speaker 4: up the plan and got approval and then brief the plan,
Speaker 4: pitched the plan to the boys and you know, one
Speaker 4: of the only times I've ever told the boys we
Speaker 4: actually it was the only time I ever told him.
Speaker 4: I was like, you know, this is the Tangy Valley
Speaker 4: and it's not an if we're going to get into
Speaker 4: a gunfight. It is a one we are walking into
Speaker 4: a gunfight on this night. And there's a reason why
Speaker 4: we only go into this value on the no illumination cycle,
Speaker 4: and that's because they're going to shoot at anything, helicopters, aircraft, people,
Speaker 4: So you know, switch it on, put it on straight,
Speaker 4: and you know we're going to get it on tonight.
Speaker 4: And so we had an uneventful you know infield when
Speaker 4: no rounds taken because we had flown in extortion one
Speaker 4: six and one seven had been our infield aircraft. And
Speaker 4: so then they flew back cycle through and Gold Squadron
Speaker 4: was on QRF for for us or any follow on
Speaker 4: objectives that came up from what we were doing. And
Speaker 4: so infield, got the guys, got the boys on the ground, uh,
Speaker 4: you know, started moving to the objective, got word that
Speaker 4: you know, there was eight to ten and we fighters
Speaker 4: moving off the objective, and so we uh pulled the formation,
Speaker 4: got clearance for fires with the Apache gun ships and
Speaker 4: and lit into them with the Apatche gunships two gun
Speaker 4: runs per aircraft and and then push the target uneventful
Speaker 4: after that, and then cleared through the the contact and
Speaker 4: had stirred up a bunch of you know stuff in
Speaker 4: the valley, and so you know, I was it's just
Speaker 4: you know, guys in their rebel rousing, trying to get
Speaker 4: guys to come out and you know, gather a force
Speaker 4: to come and fight. And so we're clearing through our
Speaker 4: target and uh, you know, it's it's looking good for
Speaker 4: what's being seen on is R because they're seeing a
Speaker 4: bigger picture than what I've seen within you know, a
Speaker 4: thousand meters circle of my objective. And so the the
Speaker 4: call came from the from the jock to my petun
Speaker 4: leader and myself was like, hey, are you guys gonna
Speaker 4: go You know, you're gonna go push farther into the
Speaker 4: back and you know, taking on this contact. And at
Speaker 4: the time, you know, we're working a pretty good objective
Speaker 4: and we were actually kind of thought we had what
Speaker 4: we were looking for on the objective as far as
Speaker 4: who we went into the the valley to get and
Speaker 4: we said, no, you know, we think we're working at
Speaker 4: and we have what we want. They said, you know,
Speaker 4: do you care if you know gold squadron comes in
Speaker 4: and you know it starts there on movement to contact
Speaker 4: on the rest of this objective and you know, about
Speaker 4: five k to the west of you. And I said, well,
Speaker 4: that's plenty of deconfliction of space for small arms fire.
Speaker 4: So if they want to come in, you know, and
Speaker 4: that's what they want to do, good on them. You know,
Speaker 4: it's had been a pre briefed h discussion between malteltoone
Speaker 4: leader myself, Jonas.
Speaker 11: And Lou the master chief and the commander for the
Speaker 11: Gold Squadron, that hey, look, if it does ever happen
Speaker 11: that it's a single objective, but we end up bringing
Speaker 11: in the other al, you know, we'll link up and
Speaker 11: then we'll just kind of work Xville, you know as it.
Speaker 4: Plays out, and if we have cycle aircraft and a
Speaker 4: cycle aircraft and you know, we'll just get it done
Speaker 4: and it's like okay, great, awesome. So we knew how
Speaker 4: that was going to go, and we kind of had
Speaker 4: a pre pre planned position where we were going to
Speaker 4: link up, you know, if that had happened. And you know,
Speaker 4: we got the word that they were loading on the
Speaker 4: extortion and we weren't sure which way they were going
Speaker 4: to come into the valley, and we kind of said, hey,
Speaker 4: we recommend, you know, if you overfly our objective, then
Speaker 4: we could at least, you know, provide groundcover for anything.
Speaker 4: And you know, but well, you know, we only get
Speaker 4: a small amount of say, and it doesn't really carry
Speaker 4: that much weight as far as what the airplanners are doing,
Speaker 4: you know, because these are conventional aircraft. So the pilots
Speaker 4: are only flying what's been improved through their S three
Speaker 4: Air shop and and so, you know, what we were
Speaker 4: saying to our job is not necessarily making it over
Speaker 4: to theirs. And so we were like, well, okay, so
Speaker 4: you get the call that their wheels up and they're
Speaker 4: ten minutes out, and so we wanted to clear one
Speaker 4: more building. So we've kind of pushed to try and
Speaker 4: clear the building real quick and get the call that
Speaker 4: you know, there are six minutes out, and then three
Speaker 4: minutes out, and so we held our assault and what
Speaker 4: we're doing, and we're just kind of sitting there waiting
Speaker 4: and I'm waiting. I'm waiting to see the bird's flush
Speaker 4: after infill and so that we're not you know, if
Speaker 4: we end up shooting on target, that we're not getting
Speaker 4: to ricocheting something into aircraft because they're within you know,
Speaker 4: small arms distance, and then that that never happened, kind
Speaker 4: of wondering what's going on, and then we get over
Speaker 4: the fires in it from the FOS that there's a
Speaker 4: fallen angel and I had known what the you know,
Speaker 4: the pro word, if you will is, and it's just
Speaker 4: kind of dumb struck by and I said, say that
Speaker 4: again and He's like, where I've fallen angel? And I
Speaker 4: was like, okay, now, so that my brain and my
Speaker 4: you know, it's all connecting, you know, speaking English, and
Speaker 4: he goes, extortion has been shot down, and I was like, okay, great.
Speaker 4: So then it was you know, how fast can we
Speaker 4: back out of this target building? How fast can I
Speaker 4: get the guys on the road and get them to
Speaker 4: start moving even though we don't know exactly where it
Speaker 4: is yet, it's I just know the general direction that
Speaker 4: we need to go, which was to the west. And
Speaker 4: so we got the boys back out of the objective,
Speaker 4: off the objective and we're moving in about three minutes,
Speaker 4: you know, as far as getting guys pushed out, and
Speaker 4: then it's trying to all the weapons and everything that
Speaker 4: we had accumulated on our objective. Is trying to take
Speaker 4: all that stuff with us and you know, get everybody
Speaker 4: and everything on the move and not leave. You know,
Speaker 4: all this stuff too potentially be shot in the back
Speaker 4: with it, so send it forward and find a place
Speaker 4: to blow it in place. And you know, then the
Speaker 4: question comes to, like what do we do with all
Speaker 4: these detainees, and so it just becomes well, leave them,
Speaker 4: and you know, people are like, well, you're gonna untie them.
Speaker 4: I was like, nope, somebody will come over and cut
Speaker 4: them loose later. I'm not not cutting anybody loose. They
Speaker 4: can figure it out, right. And so we've got off
Speaker 4: the objective and start moving. I just, you know, well,
Speaker 4: I'll never forget you know, when the lead element and
Speaker 4: the snipers and the dog handler finally got with an
Speaker 4: eyesight of you know, around the terrain feature and it
Speaker 4: was just this you know, I won't use the profanity,
Speaker 4: but it was one of those oh my god moments.
Speaker 4: You know, the whole night sky is just lit up
Speaker 4: with just fire and you know, the burning wreck of it,
Speaker 4: and you know, you know, we're still trying to figure out,
Speaker 4: you know, the fastest way, and you know, should we
Speaker 4: you know, so the tangy road that runs through this
Speaker 4: valley is heavily ied'ed. I mean it's ied like every
Speaker 4: three to four hundred meters. There's something planted in that
Speaker 4: road and it's to stop you know, the trucks. And
Speaker 4: so there was this you know, do we want to
Speaker 4: go over land? And I told the po's like, hey,
Speaker 4: look sir, my recommendation. We got to assume the risk
Speaker 4: the force and we're just going to have to stay
Speaker 4: on the road because we got to get there. And
Speaker 4: he said, I agree. So we just you know, I
Speaker 4: told the dog and the handler up front. It was like,
Speaker 4: if it looks suspicious or he wants us, you know,
Speaker 4: to you know, say that there's something in the road,
Speaker 4: and just mark it and mark it good, and just
Speaker 4: tell everybody to stay out of the way because we
Speaker 4: got to go. And so it took us about an
Speaker 4: hour to go the five k to get up there,
Speaker 4: and then you know, it's a kind of trying to
Speaker 4: put this whole thing together on the fly, and you know,
Speaker 4: everybody's radios are going nuts as far as you know,
Speaker 4: the pl these you know, like basically glue to the
Speaker 4: stat radio and just like, hey, sir, we've got to
Speaker 4: I need some information here, you know, we gotta you
Speaker 4: gotta tell me how many people on this aircraft, you know.
Speaker 4: So we're working through that and it's you know, I
Speaker 4: finally get the numbers and I'm thinking, you know, it's
Speaker 4: half the force, and I'm like, okay, so and they
Speaker 4: you know, but he gave me the number thirty eight
Speaker 4: and I was like, so, how many are on the
Speaker 4: other aircraft. You know, I'm not joking about it. I'm like,
Speaker 4: I'm in disbelief. It's like, how many people are on
Speaker 4: the other aircraft then goes empty ship and I was like, oh,
Speaker 4: you know, it's like for those people that don'ts you know,
Speaker 4: that aren't listening, that aren't you know. In the military
Speaker 4: mindset of this is that, you know, it's a technique,
Speaker 4: and it's not a bad technique. You know, it's a
Speaker 4: it's a risk of force risks the aircraft decision that
Speaker 4: leaders make. Do we put everybody on one aircraft and
Speaker 4: only risk one aircraft to enemy fire and get the
Speaker 4: force all in it once, or do we only put
Speaker 4: half the element on one aircraft and the other half
Speaker 4: on the other. And the problem with that, you know,
Speaker 4: split force on multiple aircraft is that lead aircraft makes contact,
Speaker 4: that second aircraft is not getting on the ground right,
Speaker 4: and so then you only have half your force on
Speaker 4: the ground. So, given the situation that they were going
Speaker 4: in to pick a fight with you know, of anywhere
Speaker 4: twelve plus fighters on that side, it made more sense
Speaker 4: to just risk one aircraft and put everybody on the
Speaker 4: ground all at once. And it's not a bad decision.
Speaker 4: It's just you know, people ask me, well, why didn't
Speaker 4: you do that? Then, well, I brought fifty five guys
Speaker 4: to the fight that night, and we don't fit on
Speaker 4: one aircraft.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So, you know, we finally get up there on the
Speaker 4: crash and we start you know, saying calling for supplies
Speaker 4: that we're gonna need, and you know, the backside support,
Speaker 4: you know, from you know, guys in the rigger shop
Speaker 4: to doing CDs drops because we're out of we're out
Speaker 4: of water by this point. You know, there are supplies
Speaker 4: that we just don't have. And the whole way up there,
Speaker 4: I'm in my mind, I'm I'm flashing back to all
Speaker 4: the stuff that we brought in the night we did
Speaker 4: the you know, the turbine three three in the Marcus
Speaker 4: the trail, you know that six years ago. All that's
Speaker 4: floating back into my mind and I'm trying to think
Speaker 4: of all the stuff that we had and all the
Speaker 4: stuff that one Charlie had, and I'm trying to you know,
Speaker 4: request this stuff because at this point in the game,
Speaker 4: as far as you know, the g WYT, this is combat.
Speaker 4: Struch and rescue is not something that we have time
Speaker 4: to train on anymore. And it was something that you know,
Speaker 4: back in the day when we assumed Ranger ready for
Speaker 4: US one. It was one of those one day, two
Speaker 4: day taskings that you know, we all trained, you know,
Speaker 4: crash axes and smashing through and this is what we
Speaker 4: do now. We get fan egress once a year when
Speaker 4: we do rotor wing violets. You know, if the aircraft
Speaker 4: has a hard landing, not destroyed, but it has hard landing.
Speaker 4: You know, this is how we destroy the radios is
Speaker 4: how you destroy you know, the airframe if need be,
Speaker 4: you know, and so on and so on. But at
Speaker 4: this point, it's like, okay, well I need I need
Speaker 4: body bags, I need water, I need bio hazard, you know,
Speaker 4: and if you can find them, I need Class D
Speaker 4: fire extinguishers. And so I'm trying to get all this
Speaker 4: information requested to the jock so that they can build
Speaker 4: this weird CDs palette to hopefully help us, you know,
Speaker 4: get everybody recovered, because by the time we got on
Speaker 4: the crash site, you know, it was still a fireball.
Speaker 4: It was still on fire for hours after and you know,
Speaker 4: it was one of those learning points, I guess if
Speaker 4: you will for the for the job that Hey, look,
Speaker 4: you know this is the second time I'm in less
Speaker 4: than ten years that we've had this happen. And we
Speaker 4: don't have any classic fire extinguishers to put out a
Speaker 4: middle fire, right, and helicopters have a lot of magnesium
Speaker 4: in them, right, And so you know, we did correct that,
Speaker 4: you know later on that that all this stuff did
Speaker 4: make it into country, and thankfully that never had to
Speaker 4: be used it again. But it was one of those well,
Speaker 4: we probably should have some of this stuff at least
Speaker 4: on standby.
Speaker 2: And given given that you are already in a non
Speaker 2: permissive environment, I imagine that you probably had a decent air
Speaker 2: package you start with. But what happened at that point?
Speaker 1: I mean, did they start pushing all the assets you
Speaker 1: guys needed.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so the air package, you know, we had a
Speaker 4: patches on station, and then we had AC one thirty,
Speaker 4: and then we had fast movers in the stack at altitude.
Speaker 4: And so what happens is when this kind of situation
Speaker 4: happens is everything in the country shuts down. Doesn't matter
Speaker 4: where at in the country, it is. All operations are
Speaker 4: ceasing assist. If you're not on target, you'd better be
Speaker 4: calling for expill or you're walking home because you know
Speaker 4: every ISR platform mann is unmanned, you know, fast movers,
Speaker 4: rotor wing assets, they're all coming to wherever that crash
Speaker 4: is at. And it was nuts the amount of support
Speaker 4: that we had, you know. And then so the big
Speaker 4: Armies Combat search and Rescue element, the pathfinders in the book,
Speaker 4: they're not you know, pathfinder pathfinders. That was just our
Speaker 4: call signs pathfinder. You know, those guys almost didn't make
Speaker 4: it in because they were shutting everything down, and so
Speaker 4: it was either going to already be there, which was us,
Speaker 4: or it was going to have to come in on
Speaker 4: a truck. So they made it in just moments, moments
Speaker 4: before everything got shut down as far as rotor wing assets.
Speaker 4: And the strange part is is that you know, transport
Speaker 4: aircraft have flying pairs or triplets, and so Extortion one
Speaker 4: six the other aircraft in the flight I had to
Speaker 4: get special permission to fly back from the objective area
Speaker 4: as a single ship.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I I'm actually misunderstood because I thought when you were
Speaker 1: saying everything in the country got shot shut down, I
Speaker 1: thought you meant because it was all pushed to you guys.
Speaker 1: But why would they shut down the path fight or
Speaker 1: the combat search and rescue efforts.
Speaker 4: The rotary wing aircraft are getting shut down. It's not
Speaker 4: the fixed wing aircraft or the IR platforms or any
Speaker 4: of that stuff. It is the uh you know, uh,
Speaker 4: the apaches are getting grounded. All all rotor wing air
Speaker 4: assets are getting shut down at this point, you know,
Speaker 4: And it's it's a timing issue of can we get
Speaker 4: these in? And basically what it is is it's allocation
Speaker 4: of assets. And we just had a helicopter shot down,
Speaker 4: so we're not going to commit any more helicopters into
Speaker 4: this area. And so what their whole thing was is
Speaker 4: that they had to get on the ground after we
Speaker 4: had containment of the area to provide a ground force
Speaker 4: security element on their HLZ for them to be able
Speaker 4: to come in. And so we had that just you know,
Speaker 4: right before the sun came up.
Speaker 1: So it almost, i mean, it almost sounds like they
Speaker 1: get super risk adverse, like we have.
Speaker 2: One helic very risk.
Speaker 1: Yes we have that we have, and so we're not
Speaker 1: going to risk another helicopter to get you guys assets
Speaker 1: you need because we don't want to lose another helicopter.
Speaker 4: Right And that's so then a lot of it becomes
Speaker 4: like things that we were requesting that normally would come
Speaker 4: in like on the back of a forty seven and
Speaker 4: just get kicked out in a kit bag. Yeah, it
Speaker 4: has to get put on a fixed wing aircraft, so
Speaker 4: see what thirty and then has to get CDs drop
Speaker 4: combat delivery system has to get dumped to us that
Speaker 4: way so they can fly in you know a tens
Speaker 4: as air support and and all that other kind of stuff,
Speaker 4: and it just becomes a risk aversion to more ground fire,
Speaker 4: so red ry wing assets.
Speaker 5: So how did this unfold?
Speaker 3: As as the sun came up and you're continuing with
Speaker 3: this recovery mission.
Speaker 5: Now that's what this has turned into.
Speaker 4: Right, it's you know, so it is all this is
Speaker 4: going on and uh, you know, we're trying to figure
Speaker 4: out what you know it is there gonna be anybody
Speaker 4: else that's coming in, and you know, so we're we're
Speaker 4: securing the crash site in a you know, kind of
Speaker 4: a football shaped perimeter as loose as we can and
Speaker 4: uh to start working the recovery efforts of it. You know,
Speaker 4: it's still dark and night vision is not working because
Speaker 4: it's so bright with all the fire. It just becomes
Speaker 4: this basically sent two fire teams out on the north
Speaker 4: side of the the create that the Tangy River and
Speaker 4: one on the south side. We just started doing concentric arcs,
Speaker 4: you know, basically fire teams online just kind of calming
Speaker 4: around this. And what we're looking for is anybody that
Speaker 4: had been possibly ejected from the crash, you know, whether
Speaker 4: they had survived or you know, hurt or whatnot. And
Speaker 4: so that was the first thing is you know, how
Speaker 4: how how much of this can we clear within reason,
Speaker 4: you know, get out you know, one hundred and two
Speaker 4: hundred meters and make sure that you know, when we
Speaker 4: start pulling remains, we're not missing somebody because they got
Speaker 4: pitched out of the back. So that's how we found
Speaker 4: like the first sticks to eight guys were kind of
Speaker 4: in this arc pattern that had been kind of thrown
Speaker 4: out within you know, fifty meters, and then you know,
Speaker 4: we got started getting the accountability and so then we
Speaker 4: started finding chunks of the aircraft. The rotor assemblies, the
Speaker 4: front and rear rotor assemblies, you know, are in these positions,
Speaker 4: and we're kind of assuming that that's the farthest that
Speaker 4: any of this wreckage is going to get as you know,
Speaker 4: people aren't going to get that far, but you know,
Speaker 4: the rotor blades are still spinning and and torqued out,
Speaker 4: and they're going to you know, wobble off and you know,
Speaker 4: end up in an orchard here, or get slammed into
Speaker 4: a tree, you know, cluster of trees over here. And
Speaker 4: so then it becomes you know, how can we work
Speaker 4: this problem while it's still on fire? And so then
Speaker 4: it becomes you know, how long can we sustain you know,
Speaker 4: the exposure to the heat and things cooking off and exploding,
Speaker 4: and you know the risk of force for us to
Speaker 4: make this as fast as possible, and you know, it's
Speaker 4: just kind of one of those the real moments if
Speaker 4: he will, because he start you know, as the sun's
Speaker 4: coming up, you're starting to see the look on everybody's
Speaker 4: face of just you know, horror and disbelief that you know,
Speaker 4: I can't believe this has happened, and you know, you
Speaker 4: try not to expose everybody to that, so you're really
Speaker 4: relying heavy on the guys that have a little bit
Speaker 4: more seasoned under their belts and the squads that are
Speaker 4: a little bit more mature, and you know, so I
Speaker 4: was really relying real heavy on second squad at the
Speaker 4: time too, you know, to work this and then as
Speaker 4: they started to get gassed and just worn out, you know,
Speaker 4: rotating one other squad in two take over until we
Speaker 4: kind of got this all, you know, accounted for, right.
Speaker 3: And I mean I don't, I don't, I don't want
Speaker 3: to get like too graphic, but I mean they're actually
Speaker 3: having to recover the remains of these seals and attachments.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and we're picking them up out of the firing
Speaker 4: you know, wreck and stuff.
Speaker 5: So it's a pretty difficult.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, you know, if you were for the
Speaker 4: guys that were there, you know, we we had talked
Speaker 4: about it later. It's like, you know, Hollywood couldn't have
Speaker 4: written anything more graphic for people that you know, want
Speaker 4: to imagine what this is like. I mean, you couldn't
Speaker 4: have written a script like this any any more graphic
Speaker 4: than what it actually turned out to be. As far
Speaker 4: as the way movies are made now, it's crazy. And
Speaker 4: you know, and I give the credit to the boys
Speaker 4: because they you know, they handled a lot that night,
Speaker 4: and you know, for some of them, you know, it's
Speaker 4: their first deployment and you know they're seeing the worst
Speaker 4: that can happen, and so you know it's trying trying
Speaker 4: to make sure that everything was okay, right right, and
Speaker 4: so you know, we I think it was probably about
Speaker 4: four four and a half five hours and we had
Speaker 4: everybody you know, pulled out and accounted for, and you
Speaker 4: know it wasn't there wasn't a lot of some people left.
Speaker 4: So because that was one of the questions you know,
Speaker 4: later when talking with the jock and and things after
Speaker 4: it was all said and done, you know, there was
Speaker 4: you know, questions, questions over you know, how did you
Speaker 4: get accountability because you know through the investigation. I mean
Speaker 4: there was investigations that went on. This thing went on
Speaker 4: for weeks of you know, there's everybody wants all these answers,
Speaker 4: and so then you know, one of the questions comes
Speaker 4: is like how did you you know, come up with
Speaker 4: that you had accountability of all of these people? You know,
Speaker 4: and it wasn't prefaced. The statement wasn't prefaced correctly because
Speaker 4: they're getting information from like mortuary affairs that says, you know,
Speaker 4: you can't count it as a human unless you have
Speaker 4: fifty one percent of the remains, and some of these
Speaker 4: guys are you know, not to be graphic there's you know,
Speaker 4: c spines and skulls.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, and you did the best that was you
Speaker 3: did the best you possibly could under combat conditions, right.
Speaker 4: Right, And so you know, we go, you know, we
Speaker 4: go up for the ramp ceremony, and so anybody who's
Speaker 4: spent any time in the range of regiment, you know,
Speaker 4: personnel and accountability of people and equipment. That is the
Speaker 4: senior n CEO's bread and butter. That's his baby. And
Speaker 4: so I just remember going into the jock and you know,
Speaker 4: we're up there for the ramp ceremony. I'm kind of
Speaker 4: talking with the you know, the regimental staff and officers,
Speaker 4: and you know, bumped into somebody that I you know,
Speaker 4: knew and I respected, and he goes, you know, hey,
Speaker 4: you really good under the circumstances. And I said, so,
Speaker 4: I got a bone to pick, and I don't care
Speaker 4: if it gets me fired. You know, it was one
Speaker 4: of those, uh, since winning the Ranger Regiment is personnel,
Speaker 4: accountability of man, weapons and equipment, not the NCO's job.
Speaker 4: And when you grill my opportunit leader over something that
Speaker 4: he's not involved in, I have a big problem with that.
Speaker 4: And so you know, I'm being polite about it, you know. Uh,
Speaker 4: but uh, it was one of those those things where
Speaker 4: you know, it's like, you know, we we did the
Speaker 4: best we could under the circumstances. And you know, I
Speaker 4: wouldn't have given you a false report in the circumstances
Speaker 4: if I wasn't sure that we had everybody right.
Speaker 2: And so you're.
Speaker 1: Your p always taking heat like they were trying, like
Speaker 1: your p always taking Yeah, there.
Speaker 4: Was a there was a a vtc SO video teleconference
Speaker 4: like a few days later, and he was being grilled
Speaker 4: over you know, accountability and how did we get these numbers,
Speaker 4: But they never prefaced where they're getting their questionable you know,
Speaker 4: right numbers from, or or how we could say we
Speaker 4: had accountability and and so uh, you know that came
Speaker 4: to light and I just I, you know, I was
Speaker 4: still short feused from the whole thing, and I just
Speaker 4: was like, well, I don't care.
Speaker 5: Not, I get it.
Speaker 3: You're you're the platoon sergeant and the buck stops with you,
Speaker 3: and you've said that, you know, I understand.
Speaker 4: Well, no, I mean what was fun is that you know,
Speaker 4: I excused myself from the big jock, and you know,
Speaker 4: we went over to the ramp to stand by for
Speaker 4: the ceremony, and somebody came over and they actually apologized
Speaker 4: to michaeltoon leader or you know that grilling if you will,
Speaker 4: and I was I actually thought that, you know, the
Speaker 4: the fabled Bleckshook was going to come in and carry
Speaker 4: them off and I was going to be without a
Speaker 4: tune leader. But it didn't happen, and uh, you know
Speaker 4: it's I felt, you know, justify after that that you know,
Speaker 4: he got raked over the coals for something that wasn't
Speaker 4: in his lane, right, and you know I got him
Speaker 4: in apology and so then everything was straight. Not not
Speaker 4: trying to brag on this situation, but you know it's
Speaker 4: you guys, because.
Speaker 1: Also that they are using an administrative standard for you know, yes,
Speaker 1: you know this right, this is this is a sailor,
Speaker 1: but it's not enough of a sailor to be counted
Speaker 1: like yeah, exactly, yeah, you know, like.
Speaker 4: I said, you know, we you can't nobody can have
Speaker 4: more than one school and one c spine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, now I I did did the.
Speaker 2: Did the army or did the military.
Speaker 1: Take steps to make sure that that your guys were
Speaker 1: okay after that? Because that especially if you think about
Speaker 1: some yeah, his first deployment, so sorry.
Speaker 4: We had you know, throughout the rest of the deployment,
Speaker 4: we had you know, the the psychologists and the chaplains,
Speaker 4: you know, they were always coming in and checking on
Speaker 4: the guys, and you know, as leaders, you know, we
Speaker 4: were constantly asking if they were you know, doing okay,
Speaker 4: and you know, if everybody was still having issues from
Speaker 4: the floor. But the hardest challenge as a leader was
Speaker 4: to you know, look, look the boys in the face
Speaker 4: when it was all done and everything got cleared to
Speaker 4: operate again. Is to you know, tell them, hey, we're
Speaker 4: going out and we're going to load back on these
Speaker 4: aircraft and we're just going to keep doing business. And
Speaker 4: you know, to see the look in some of their faces,
Speaker 4: it's just, you know, there's timidness in their eyes that
Speaker 4: you can see is because they've seen the worst that
Speaker 4: could happen, and you know, ask them to step back
Speaker 4: on those airframes and to you know assume that risk.
Speaker 4: You know, that was the hardest, you know, and then
Speaker 4: it got easier for them, you know, as we kind
Speaker 4: of settled back in. But you know, then we started
Speaker 4: and we went back in the Tangy like six weeks later,
Speaker 4: and we lost one of our guys, Tyler Holtz, was killed,
Speaker 4: had one other guy Specialists was wounded, you know, all
Speaker 4: in the same area of you know, where that crash
Speaker 4: had happened, within about four hundred meters five hundred meters
Speaker 4: of the crash site itself. Because what we had done
Speaker 4: was we had gone back through all the video and
Speaker 4: the ISR and you know, figured out where that those
Speaker 4: rocks were fired from, and so that became a target
Speaker 4: in itself, a very deliberate target. And you know, we'd
Speaker 4: brought the rest of Bravo Company up and did a
Speaker 4: big company off in there, and you know, we'd put
Speaker 4: one hundred and fifty rangers on the ground, and you know,
Speaker 4: we were just basically what it was was to just say, hey, look,
Speaker 4: you may have shot an aircraft down, but we're not
Speaker 4: afraid to come in here. And you know, then you know,
Speaker 4: unfortunately we have a team leader that's killed, another guy
Speaker 4: that's you know, severely wounded, and you know, so it
Speaker 4: just kind of this big, big downer for that and
Speaker 4: uh and then you know, and then I get hurt
Speaker 4: a few weeks later, and so it's just kind of
Speaker 4: where just one brather just continues to just take a meeting,
Speaker 4: either physically or emotionally or mentally. And it was a
Speaker 4: it was a rough trip. I always you know, guys
Speaker 4: always asking you know, what was that one? Like I
Speaker 4: was like, well, at that point in time, you know,
Speaker 4: one Bravo had been in more gunfights that deployment than
Speaker 4: the rest of the Talian together all the other platoons.
Speaker 4: We had been in more gunfights on that trip, and
Speaker 4: guys were just spent.
Speaker 1: Yeahs before we get into the operation that led to
Speaker 1: your injury. I I wanted to ask you because it's
Speaker 1: something we've talked about on the show before, and as
Speaker 1: a senior in CEO, you know, you mentioned the one
Speaker 1: side of how the guys responded to the extortion one seven,
Speaker 1: the timidity or the tim midnus, how is it?
Speaker 2: How is an n c O. Did you have to.
Speaker 1: Deal with the other side of that too, of reigning
Speaker 1: in the guys that wanted to get some that wanted
Speaker 1: payback and and would look and and that was a
Speaker 1: broad definition of a payback.
Speaker 4: Sure, I know what you're I know what you're getting at,
Speaker 4: and it's to say, hey, look, you know we're going
Speaker 4: back in here, but we're still going to be as
Speaker 4: professional as we possibly can, and there will be no shenanigans.
Speaker 4: You know it is to beat that into them, is like,
Speaker 4: no matter what you feel, no matter what happened with
Speaker 4: those guys, We're not going to get shut down operationally
Speaker 4: because somebody wants to do something stupid as payback. We're
Speaker 4: gonna it and we're going to give it to them
Speaker 4: in the right way, and we're going to do it
Speaker 4: our way, you know, within the rules of engagement, and
Speaker 4: you know, and that's going to be it. There's there's
Speaker 4: not gonna be any shenanigans.
Speaker 2: Were there during your time in the Rangers?
Speaker 1: Were there like leadership challenges and if in that in
Speaker 1: that sense, and if so, how were they dealt with?
Speaker 4: Not really, I'm I know what you're getting at. And
Speaker 4: you know, if as the Ranger regimen or even just
Speaker 4: the battalion as a whole, you know, the kind of
Speaker 4: when you look back at the way things were when
Speaker 4: when everything started in two thousand and one, you know,
Speaker 4: we started kind of as a special operations support. You know,
Speaker 4: we're there to you know, provide security and blocking positions
Speaker 4: and things for you know, Delta Force and Team six
Speaker 4: and you know, to get to the point where we're
Speaker 4: now we're running a gun and on the same target
Speaker 4: decks and you know, the same targeting lines, and we've
Speaker 4: earned our right to be in this point. Most of
Speaker 4: the guys at this point as part of the squad
Speaker 4: leaders and and you know, even some of the senior
Speaker 4: team leaders, but you know, team starters, we know what
Speaker 4: it's like to be the guy on the outside looking in,
Speaker 4: and now we're on the inside right there. There was
Speaker 4: no way that anybody was gonna risk, you know, ruining
Speaker 4: that reputation that we had for anything.
Speaker 1: And so now that's it's it's really interesting because sounds
Speaker 1: it sounds like it really was a amount of responsible
Speaker 1: leadership in the sense of, yeah, you know, setting the
Speaker 1: tone and making sure that that making certain that that
Speaker 1: tone is stuck to.
Speaker 4: Right, you know, and you know a lot of that,
Speaker 4: you know, it comes down to the to the people
Speaker 4: that you know, we pick as ntos to continue to
Speaker 4: lead inside the regiment. It's not you know, it's not
Speaker 4: just me. You know, it's all the other eleven ten
Speaker 4: sergeants that were there at the time, and you know,
Speaker 4: it's all the squal leaders that we say, hey, this
Speaker 4: guy has what it takes to be that squal leader.
Speaker 4: It's that guy that has that personal integrity to you know,
Speaker 4: continue to push push the you know what we're doing
Speaker 4: in the right direction. It's not to compromise our integrity
Speaker 4: or or any of that stuff, because you know, when
Speaker 4: those kind of things start happening and you start getting
Speaker 4: questionable uh cera answers on target, you know, then then
Speaker 4: your freedom of maneuver and freedom of movement and and
Speaker 4: you know what you do, it starts getting you know,
Speaker 4: put under the microscope. And so nobody wants to be
Speaker 4: under the microscope. And so you know, I give it
Speaker 4: to the guys that that took over after I got hurt,
Speaker 4: and you know, the guys that are even still doing
Speaker 4: it today. You know, it's it is carrying on that
Speaker 4: legacy of what we started twenty years ago and still
Speaker 4: continue to develop you know where it's going in the future.
Speaker 4: And you know, it's awesome to be, you know, a
Speaker 4: part of that history. You know, because I look at
Speaker 4: what the Ranger Regiment is now and back to what
Speaker 4: it was when when you were there, and you know,
Speaker 4: when I was a young private and you know, it
Speaker 4: is hands down a completely different organization and you know,
Speaker 4: we can do all that old stuff, but we are
Speaker 4: so much better at fitting into the operational roles that
Speaker 4: we have now.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So we'll just talk about the incident where you
Speaker 1: were wounded, and then we'll take some viewer questions and yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so can you tell us about Yeah, the operation, which.
Speaker 5: Presumably a Purple Heart is in the works here.
Speaker 4: So yeah, so it is October six seven, twenty eleven.
Speaker 4: We're taking a swing at an ied and weapons facilitator.
Speaker 4: It's mid level target, you know, kind of the middle
Speaker 4: of the deck. It gets you the guys above and
Speaker 4: the guys below, which the guys below are you know,
Speaker 4: the targets in the pyramid that you know, the bus
Speaker 4: battlespace owners are dealing with. And so when you slice
Speaker 4: out the middle, you can work the targeting from both sides.
Speaker 4: You can get the guys who are providing stuff from
Speaker 4: across the border, and then it gives you the ability
Speaker 4: to pass on to the battle space owner who's putting
Speaker 4: this stuff in the roads that's trying to blow their
Speaker 4: trucks up. So, you know, that's kind of where we're
Speaker 4: swinging across the food pyramid. If he is right in
Speaker 4: the middle and so we're in Baraki Barack, or well,
Speaker 4: Brocky Barock was the little the town. But we're in
Speaker 4: Logar Province, kind of on the east side of the
Speaker 4: Tangy Valley. And the target grids dropped in a little
Speaker 4: cluster of four buildings that all shared walls. So it's
Speaker 4: like a plus symbol, and you know, you get twenty
Speaker 4: five chance of taking the swing right the first time.
Speaker 4: And so we swung wrong, and so we were reset
Speaker 4: all the pieces to move and strike the next compound.
Speaker 4: And as we're resetting all the pieces, you know, I
Speaker 4: made a stupid decision that I had preached a thousand
Speaker 4: times before, and shoot houses, don't ever put your body
Speaker 4: in front of an open doorway, and I had just instinctually,
Speaker 4: I just stupidly put my leg across this doorway. And
Speaker 4: as soon as I did it to hold the door
Speaker 4: were open. I took a three round verse. Took first
Speaker 4: round to the right thigh, and I took one as
Speaker 4: I was getting spun out of the way. I took
Speaker 4: one through the right arm pit and entered in my
Speaker 4: armpit and exited out my bicep, and then I took
Speaker 4: the last one through the through my helmet.
Speaker 5: Through the helmet.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean it split the helmet, like the kevlar
Speaker 4: opened up, so it hit right temple right here, and
Speaker 4: then it blew my nods off my mouth. It came
Speaker 4: out right right on the top.
Speaker 5: I'm looking at the picture in your book. I mean,
Speaker 5: that's that's.
Speaker 2: From your leg.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's bad.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So you know, dual TB, dual tube night vision.
Speaker 4: You know when I when I got everything, when I
Speaker 4: hooked it back on and and went to flip it down,
Speaker 4: everything was offset and uh so I always people go,
Speaker 4: what does that feel like? I was like, well, I
Speaker 4: know what a baseball feels like when somebody hits a
Speaker 4: home run.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, and honestly, all those I mean all
Speaker 1: three of those areas you're like, you know, with the
Speaker 1: femoral and everything down there and then right and then
Speaker 1: your arm pit like around going in them is one
Speaker 1: of the worst things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, is one of the worst things.
Speaker 4: Uh Right. So when I finally, you know, after it
Speaker 4: was all said and done and I got you know,
Speaker 4: I finally made it to Germany and I was talking,
Speaker 4: you know, had a chance to kind of talk with
Speaker 4: one of the surgeons who happened to be one of
Speaker 4: the old battalion surgeons. Uh. And you know, he came
Speaker 4: in and he was kind of joking with me. I
Speaker 4: heard about this cranky old ranger n c O who's
Speaker 4: down here, just you know, he's just given me a
Speaker 4: hard time. And so uh, I was like, you know,
Speaker 4: I was asking questions. I said, I know I got
Speaker 4: shot through here, but you know what were the you know,
Speaker 4: how how how lucky am I?
Speaker 2: Or how yeah right was it?
Speaker 4: And he goes, well, you have the the you know,
Speaker 4: the Federal artery and the Federal nerve. They they run
Speaker 4: parallel to each other down the inside of your thigh.
Speaker 4: And he said that round went right between both of them.
Speaker 2: God oh.
Speaker 4: And I was like, well, okay.
Speaker 5: And all those ops and this was the one that
Speaker 5: got you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, all that and this was the my stupid mistake.
Speaker 4: And uh so you know that being said, that night,
Speaker 4: that gunfight went on for uh. You know, they brought
Speaker 4: in the q r F two. Bravo came in to
Speaker 4: back up first pretendent because we had I was wounded
Speaker 4: urgent surgical uh specialist Sara's was expectant and uh then
Speaker 4: we had an Afghan partner who was expectant he had
Speaker 4: taken around to the face, and uh, you know, we
Speaker 4: had two other guys that were wounded severely, but they
Speaker 4: didn't say anything about it because they were still able
Speaker 4: to conduct op some uh. And then we had twelve
Speaker 4: other guys that had received fragmentation because I got shot
Speaker 4: and then you know, there was an exchange of gunfire
Speaker 4: and then the enemy threw a hand grenade out in
Speaker 4: this little alley and so then it went off, and
Speaker 4: you know, I got a whole bunch of fragmentation in
Speaker 4: the back of my you know, hamstrings from it, and
Speaker 4: then a bunch of other guys caught frag off it.
Speaker 4: But that that objective alone that night, we gave out
Speaker 4: fourteen purple hearts. Wow. Wow.
Speaker 1: So even after you got shot, you kept getting like
Speaker 1: they just wouldn't leave you alone.
Speaker 2: You kept thinking, you were like frying, You're like, I'm out,
Speaker 2: was like I got.
Speaker 4: Shot and then yeah, you know it's like time out.
Speaker 2: No, yeah, right right, I'm already out.
Speaker 4: Guys. Everybody goes, everybody goes. You know, did you have
Speaker 4: this uh you know, surreal moment where it's like time
Speaker 4: slowed down? Yeah, because what I perceived in my mind
Speaker 4: as being you know, just a minute or two is
Speaker 4: turned out. You know, it's probably about six or seven minutes,
Speaker 4: because you know, my bell's wrung. Yeah, the lights got
Speaker 4: real dim in the tunnel, if you will, and uh,
Speaker 4: I'm in my mind. You know, we do all this
Speaker 4: casually played during training, but when it actually happens, you've
Speaker 4: got it. It's a conscious thought effort to go, Okay,
Speaker 4: I have to put a tourniquet on. You're like, I
Speaker 4: know where they are, but can I reach it? Can
Speaker 4: I get to it? Because I'm kind of laid over
Speaker 4: on it. It's like, well, I can't really move. And
Speaker 4: I knew my femur hadn't been broken because I stupidly stepped,
Speaker 4: you know, I put pressure down on my leg when
Speaker 4: I lost my balance after I got shot in the head.
Speaker 4: So I was like, okay, good. You know, in my mind,
Speaker 4: I'm like, my fever's not broken. And uh so then
Speaker 4: I'm like, okay, I've got a tournique in my mid
Speaker 4: pouch and then I also have one down on my
Speaker 4: left calf. But I've got all this crap and I'm
Speaker 4: kind of in this weird position. Can I even reach it? Yeah,
Speaker 4: you know, because I've got a I've got a team
Speaker 4: leader and two other guys who are straddling over top
Speaker 4: me trying to get guns through this doorway, and they're
Speaker 4: you know, in the in the fight, and I'm not
Speaker 4: in the fight anymore. And I'm trying to like reach
Speaker 4: between their legs and my legs and grab this turn
Speaker 4: quit and put it on. And then you know, that
Speaker 4: just sucks. And then you're like, okay, but I still
Speaker 4: have to crank this thing down and you know, get
Speaker 4: it as tight as I can get it. And then
Speaker 4: there's a lull and then you know, I know that
Speaker 4: Cress is hurt, you know, so I know I can
Speaker 4: get I can probably walk, and so you know, I
Speaker 4: get help stood up, and then I try to get
Speaker 4: myself out of the way, you know, as best I can,
Speaker 4: and so I start walking, uh back down the alley
Speaker 4: way to where we're gonna have the CCP, and then, uh,
Speaker 4: you know, then then my leg starts going dumb and
Speaker 4: it's like, hey, doc, come here, you're gonna help me,
Speaker 4: and uh, you know, really, what I'm trying to do
Speaker 4: is just get out of the way so that the
Speaker 4: other medic can get in there and helps Cerro's and
Speaker 4: and get him kind of drug out of the way
Speaker 4: into the CCP. But I didn't really start panicking about
Speaker 4: the whole thing until I got my equipment cut off
Speaker 4: and my radios came out, and so then I lose
Speaker 4: all situational awareness to the fight, and then it's like
Speaker 4: anxiety comes in. It's like I have no idea what's
Speaker 4: going on anymore, and I am not in control of anything,
Speaker 4: you know, as a leader, and that that just sucks.
Speaker 4: But I knew when we reorganized the priority for METOVAC
Speaker 4: and it became myself and one of the snipers who
Speaker 4: took Frag through the nose took took Frag through the
Speaker 4: bridge of his nose. I knew that when I and
Speaker 4: him went from being on the second aircraft out being
Speaker 4: on the first aircraft out in the Afghan and Cero's
Speaker 4: ended up on the second aircraft, I just knew that,
Speaker 4: you know, thanks, we're not not going well. And you know,
Speaker 4: wasn't gonna tell me anything anymore because I'm not in
Speaker 4: you know, the first start and so on the objective.
Speaker 4: So he's kind of taken over those duties, and I just,
Speaker 4: you know, it was bad at that point. In my mind,
Speaker 4: It's just you know, everything that's gone sideways can go
Speaker 4: sideways and inside out.
Speaker 1: And and so they metavaced you. And then when did
Speaker 1: you when did you become aware of how the operation went.
Speaker 4: So I got metavacked and got back to Shank. It
Speaker 4: was probably about thirty minutes after I'd gotten shot by
Speaker 4: the time we got you know, from the c C
Speaker 4: you know, point of impact to the CCP and then
Speaker 4: over to the HLZ to metavac and then loaded on
Speaker 4: and then into the cash and then surgery. And then
Speaker 4: I didn't find out that Sarah's was killed till I
Speaker 4: got the ball room and then you know, some of
Speaker 4: the guys that were in the S four shop come
Speaker 4: over to tell me what was going on on the
Speaker 4: objective and that game. The QRF came in and the
Speaker 4: boys are still out there, and you know, the whole
Speaker 4: thing went for like six more hours before you know,
Speaker 4: the sun you know, it was done and over with
Speaker 4: and they were pulling both flatuns out just as the
Speaker 4: sun was coming up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so then you both you begin that long
Speaker 3: process of rehabilitation.
Speaker 4: Uh yeah, yeah. Uh. So you know it was uh
Speaker 4: probably three or four days in Afghanistan and Bogram waiting
Speaker 4: on the Metavac transport to go to Germany, and it
Speaker 4: was a week in Germany and then back to the
Speaker 4: Madigan and you know, another week to ten days at Madigan,
Speaker 4: and you know, by the time it was all said
Speaker 4: and done, it was a dozen surgeries and then uh,
Speaker 4: you know, rehab. So I didn't make it back on
Speaker 4: active duty status until after New Year's Toy twelve?
Speaker 2: Did did did you?
Speaker 1: Were you able to contact your wife from the theater
Speaker 1: or when did she find out about it?
Speaker 4: Uh? I called her right after I got out of
Speaker 4: the first surgery in shank and but they handed me
Speaker 4: the SAT phone and I'm still, you know, trying to
Speaker 4: come out of sedation from that and so you know,
Speaker 4: sat phones don't work well when the antennas pointed to
Speaker 4: the ground, and so I was kind of frustrated. You know,
Speaker 4: my mouth's all cotton bold from you know, the anesthesia
Speaker 4: and the fentanyl, and you know, I'm frustrated that I
Speaker 4: cannot be coharent enough. I just remember handing the phone
Speaker 4: up to the UH thirty tune. I'm like, just please
Speaker 4: tell her, And so he gave her the you know,
Speaker 4: the you know, the information that was going on and
Speaker 4: then uh, you know, the Battalian commander called her a
Speaker 4: little bit later. I was in surgery and in my
Speaker 4: ball room and so uh she she knew within you know,
Speaker 4: a couple of hours.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you're right in the in your book that
Speaker 3: you know, probably the most difficult conversation you had to
Speaker 3: have was with the family of specialist serahs and you know, yeah, and.
Speaker 4: You know that that was a you know, it was
Speaker 4: It's always tough, you know when you have to look
Speaker 4: you know them in the you know, in the face
Speaker 4: and say, hey, I'm you know, I'm sorry that your
Speaker 4: son died. And he died, you know, right next to
Speaker 4: me from you know, not not getting shot, but you know,
Speaker 4: he died from fragmentation that just happened to catch him
Speaker 4: under the arm and just the right spot where there
Speaker 4: was a gap in the armor. And you know that
Speaker 4: I survived and your son's dead, and you know, that's
Speaker 4: that's one of those those tough situations. And you know,
Speaker 4: because they can go one to two ways. You know,
Speaker 4: they could be they can hate you for life, or
Speaker 4: they can embrace you. And you know, luckily enough, his
Speaker 4: dad had spent uh time in the army, uh so
Speaker 4: he understood and so that was okay, And you know
Speaker 4: that was kind of one of the harder things. You know,
Speaker 4: last year, I got a chance to meet a bunch
Speaker 4: of the gold Star families for the Seal team that
Speaker 4: was killed, and you know, I'm always proud to meet him.
Speaker 4: But it's kind of one of those double edged things
Speaker 4: is that you know they're still holding on at anger
Speaker 4: grief and you know, uh, which way is it going
Speaker 4: to go? You know, are they gonna embrace you or
Speaker 4: are they gonna hate you? And you know that that's
Speaker 4: tough because I never not want to meet them, but
Speaker 4: you know, on the same same side of it, you know,
Speaker 4: I'm you know there, their son is not here, and
Speaker 4: I am right, you know, but regardless of the fact,
Speaker 4: you know, I I have a sense of pride, and
Speaker 4: all the boys that were there that night have a
Speaker 4: sense of pride. You know that. Hey, you know, regardless
Speaker 4: of whether you like us or hate us, you know,
Speaker 4: we brought him home and you know we're willing to
Speaker 4: accept you know, your anger or frustration at the situation.
Speaker 4: You know, that's just the way it is on the
Speaker 4: survivor's side of it.
Speaker 1: Right right, yeah, you I mean, you can't blame people
Speaker 1: for their emotions and the circumstances.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: So how did how did you end up finishing out
Speaker 3: your career after getting shot up pretty badly?
Speaker 4: I spent six months on the Talian staff and running
Speaker 4: the S two shop, and then we had an incident
Speaker 4: happened where we had to relieve a platoon sergeant in
Speaker 4: one of the companies, and so I ended up moving
Speaker 4: over to snipers for my last year, and I was
Speaker 4: running the sniper platoon for the last year, and then
Speaker 4: I was on the sniper range. We were out eastern
Speaker 4: Washington shooting on a Department Energy range over there, and
Speaker 4: you know, the company commander of the first sergeant come over,
Speaker 4: and you know, off site training is always fun because
Speaker 4: everybody gets to be out of the office. So you know,
Speaker 4: I'm hobbling around and and kind of dragging my leg
Speaker 4: and at first start and like, hey, you're going to
Speaker 4: see a specialist when we get back. And so I
Speaker 4: went and saw the specialists and he kind of just
Speaker 4: laid it out, you know, bluntly for me. He goes,
Speaker 4: do you want to walk when you're forty? And I said,
Speaker 4: well yeah, and he goes, well, then you need to
Speaker 4: stop now, and so you know, that started the whole
Speaker 4: uh you know, medboard process. And so then I was
Speaker 4: out of the Army about six months later. Wow wow.
Speaker 4: So I know a lot of guys that take some
Speaker 4: a year or two or three to get out. But
Speaker 4: because I wasn't on any kind of pain medications or
Speaker 4: any of that stuff, you know, was they didn't have to,
Speaker 4: you know, worry about substance abuse or any of that.
Speaker 4: And so my packet kind of went a little bit
Speaker 4: faster than than some of the other guys. Some of
Speaker 4: the other as from they had gotten shot that deployment.
Speaker 4: You know, we're still in for another year or so
Speaker 4: even after I got out, because they had to get
Speaker 4: you know through kind of a I don't want to
Speaker 4: say rehab process, but you know, they kind of had
Speaker 4: to get leaned off the meds and you know and
Speaker 4: finish the rehabbing and stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I also I noticed it in your book. You
Speaker 2: also are you involved with Gallant few?
Speaker 1: I know that you have the PostScript for them.
Speaker 4: They I'm friends with, you know, some of the guys
Speaker 4: that had to Gallant for you, tim Abel and I'm
Speaker 4: drawing a blank. Carl Monger and some of the others,
Speaker 4: but it was one of those things. Yeah, Carl Monger did,
Speaker 4: so it was one of those things that he Carl
Speaker 4: asked me if we would put that in there, and
Speaker 4: I said, I will most definitely gladly, you know, put
Speaker 4: that in there to kind of help you know, all
Speaker 4: the film is out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, since it's in your book. Hey, folks,
Speaker 1: if you have a spare of five bucks this month
Speaker 1: or whatever, why don't you head over to Gallant Few.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I haven't spoken to Carl in a while, and probably
Speaker 3: I should correct that, but he's a good guy and
Speaker 3: Gallant Few does a lot to help guys out.
Speaker 1: But it's a gallant Yeah, Gallant Gallant Few dot org.
Speaker 2: Check them out, throw them a buck or two. You know.
Speaker 5: So.
Speaker 3: I know we've kept you for a while here, uh, Nick,
Speaker 3: but let's hit up these user questions real quick.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we've only got a couple one from Jackson, Thank
Speaker 2: you very much.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: Did you ever work with any of the Tier one
Speaker 1: units Delta Seal Team six hr T and a SOW
Speaker 1: which impressed you the most of the bunch?
Speaker 2: And why.
Speaker 4: You worked with all of them, you know, in in
Speaker 4: some aspect or another. I lean towards you know, I
Speaker 4: did enjoy working with Delta Force a little bit more,
Speaker 4: and a lot of it is just because there's kind
Speaker 4: of this I don't know, you know, and all the
Speaker 4: tier elements have their own personality, and you know, we
Speaker 4: kind of sometimes fit better with guys in Delta Force
Speaker 4: because especially early on, you know a lot of the
Speaker 4: team leaders and squad leaders and guys, you know, the
Speaker 4: career progression is, you know, from the Ranger regimen is
Speaker 4: to go to that organization, so there is a familiarity
Speaker 4: with people who understand where you're coming from as a
Speaker 4: unit or an organization, whereas we didn't really have that
Speaker 4: for a while with Team six, and so we always
Speaker 4: kind of got looked at as like the kid brother thing.
Speaker 4: And then as far as the HRT, I've only worked
Speaker 4: with a few guys from there, and that was in
Speaker 4: the kind of middle part of Iraq, you know, it
Speaker 4: was only a select view, and that was the kind
Speaker 4: of we were building the terrorist database with the you know,
Speaker 4: the three letter agencies for you know, Homeland security and whatnot.
Speaker 4: So as far as that goes, but you know, everybody's
Speaker 4: they're all a great bunch of guys. I mean, I know,
Speaker 4: you know, in certain aspects, you know, we all talk
Speaker 4: trash on each other because we can, and you know,
Speaker 4: it's a cultural thing, and if you're not a part
Speaker 4: of the culture, then sometimes it gets looked at it's unprofessional.
Speaker 4: But you know, you read enough Seal books and they
Speaker 4: take cheap shots on us, and so this some of
Speaker 4: this was, you know, a chance to you know, level
Speaker 4: the field if you will, and take a few shots
Speaker 4: at them, and so yeah, professional then you know, then
Speaker 4: so be it.
Speaker 1: But yeah, Elms, thank you for the donation. So Elms
Speaker 1: gave us a sticker and I'm not and Alms later
Speaker 1: comments that sicker didn't work out right, dang, So I don't.
Speaker 1: The sticker is either somebody raising us up and worshiping us,
Speaker 1: or I'll go with it, or it's uh, it's I
Speaker 1: don't know, it's like holding up a new baby. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure, but I'm gonna go with the worst. That
Speaker 1: the three of us, the four of us including d
Speaker 1: the four of us are are the new pantheon for Ohms.
Speaker 4: Hey, can we take like a five minute break?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, go ahead, man, we'll yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, sure,
Speaker 1: thanks yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So guys, uh, next episode is going to be
Speaker 3: Hold on a second, I'll tease this out here. Uh okay,
Speaker 3: So on the third, actually we have an extra episode
Speaker 3: that we crammed in here James Laporta, who's an investigative
Speaker 3: journalist with the Associated Press. He is also a former marine,
Speaker 3: and he's broken some of the stories about what's that
Speaker 3: guy's name, Majewski, guy running for Congress who's a stolen
Speaker 3: I shouldn't say he's a stolen valorie guy.
Speaker 5: He he actually did serve, but he's still.
Speaker 2: Still on valor. If you say that you did top
Speaker 2: secret deployments and you.
Speaker 3: Didn't, my deployments are classified, Yeah, that's still I think
Speaker 3: that's still still.
Speaker 1: We'll let you guys vote whether it's stolen valor or not.
Speaker 1: But then dude makes step stuff about his military career
Speaker 1: that's kind of not cool, stolen valerie ish.
Speaker 5: And then next Friday is Tim Winer. Tim is a journalist.
Speaker 5: He wrote, He's written a number of books.
Speaker 3: He's written some pretty definitive histories of the Central Intelligence
Speaker 3: Agency and the FBI in a history of political warfare
Speaker 3: between America and Russia. So that'll be a pretty interesting conversation,
Speaker 3: I think. And then on the tenth another extra episode
Speaker 3: Joan Barker and she was facilitating some of the aviation
Speaker 3: for an internal de fence in Afghanistan. And in both
Speaker 3: Tim and Joan they will be in studio interviews, and
Speaker 3: so will on the fourteenth John Fox, who he was
Speaker 3: a marine and he worked or he went and he
Speaker 3: became an international volunteer with the YPG in Syria, and
Speaker 3: he wrote this book that I'm almost done with it now.
Speaker 3: He wrote a book about it's co authored him and
Speaker 3: two other guys who are foreign volunteers and fought with
Speaker 3: the Kurds in Syria against ices. So it's a pretty
Speaker 3: fascinating book.
Speaker 5: I think it'll be a good interview.
Speaker 2: Good stuff, good stuff.
Speaker 1: And if you haven't joined our patron, join our patron,
Speaker 1: like hook us up, hook yourselves up.
Speaker 2: There's a ton of bonus content on there.
Speaker 1: Like I said, you get to see John Jack and
Speaker 1: I and are I said smoking pajamas earlier.
Speaker 2: I'm not smoking jackets smoking, but we keep it casual.
Speaker 5: We don't have smoking jackets.
Speaker 2: We keep it really casual. And our wife who pillows.
Speaker 3: That we have that we have the human door and
Speaker 3: the cigars are on their way, so we'll see who
Speaker 3: wants to smoke it up.
Speaker 2: Mecheless.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much man for for spending a Friday night
Speaker 1: with us.
Speaker 2: We we really appreciate.
Speaker 5: Yeah, quick, quick, quick one from what.
Speaker 4: I appreciate you guys having me what of our what if?
Speaker 3: Our Patreon users asked if, since you were two seven five,
Speaker 3: did you ever serve with Pat Tillman and his brother.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean they were in Alpha Company and I
Speaker 4: was in Robert Company and Charlie Kenedy, But yeah, they were.
Speaker 4: Kevin and Pat were both there at the same time.
Speaker 4: Do I know them? Not really? I mean I know
Speaker 4: him about as well as I, you know, know Matt Best,
Speaker 4: which is I I know who he is, and I
Speaker 4: know he was in Alpha Company, and you know that's
Speaker 4: about where it's at.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, fair enough.
Speaker 1: So everybody some great eight great war stories, I mean
Speaker 1: on the ground stuff for for so many things that
Speaker 1: have happened during the g y first hand accounts run
Speaker 1: to the sound of the guns.
Speaker 2: Check it out, get it on, you know, we say Amazon.
Speaker 5: The link is down the links down.
Speaker 1: Below, but yeah, we highly recommend it.
Speaker 2: Check it out.
Speaker 1: Uh, do you have anything that you want to plug
Speaker 1: an aside from gallup you or you involved in any
Speaker 1: charities or organizations or businesses that you want to plug,
Speaker 1: anything that you want to do.
Speaker 4: Not currently you know. No, I'm not involved in anything
Speaker 4: of this deal. Retired guy who got conned into writing
Speaker 4: a book if you will, and uh, well if people
Speaker 4: ask me, you know, hey, would you would you write
Speaker 4: another one? And I was like no, because I don't
Speaker 4: know what it was going to take to write the
Speaker 4: first one. I would not have even written that one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a great book, tons of references, a lot
Speaker 1: of great pictures too, which is something you know, you
Speaker 1: see a lot of pictures in Vietnam era books, but
Speaker 1: you don't see a lot of pictures I think in
Speaker 1: like modern g WAT books a lot of times, which
Speaker 1: is I think it's it's really cool, you know, it's
Speaker 1: something that a lot of really interesting.
Speaker 2: And that one of your wound I've never seen a
Speaker 2: pump like that sucks. Yeah, it's very interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, actually it does suck because it's a wound back.
Speaker 4: Yeah whatever.
Speaker 5: Sorry, all right, all right, thank you Nick so much.
Speaker 3: You know again, I really appreciate it, appreciate your family's
Speaker 3: patience with us while we suck you away on a Friday,
Speaker 3: and you know, if there's anything you know we can do,
Speaker 3: feel free to reach out anytime and hope talk to you,
Speaker 3: talk to you again soon.
Speaker 4: All right, I appreciate it.
Speaker 5: Thanks guys, have a good night. Thank you everyone who
Speaker 5: joined us. We'll see you next Friday, or we'll see
Speaker 5: you before that. With my names