Speaker 1: The Team House with your hosts Jack Murphy and David Park.
Speaker 1: Welcome to episode three hundred and eighty two of The
Speaker 1: Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with tonight's guest on
Speaker 1: the show, varpis Dessa Pereira. He served as a Marine
Speaker 1: Corps infantry officer and then jumped over to the Army
Speaker 1: and served in a Yususaki unit, multiple deployments to Iraq,
Speaker 1: Middle East Africa, and ended up getting out of the
Speaker 1: Marine Corps and is now a clinical psychologist working at
Speaker 1: Veterans Affairs, obviously working with veterans and veterans issues. So
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about the whole spectrum of all
Speaker 1: of that in the interview. Varpus, thanks for joining.
Speaker 2: Us, Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: I should also mention upfront two. He is also the
Speaker 1: author of the book Warrior Withdrawal. It's a well you
Speaker 1: tell the audience for what's your book about.
Speaker 3: So the book is about this cluster of symptoms that
Speaker 3: I found that sort of in between this idea of
Speaker 3: adjustment disorder and post traumatic stress disorder. I haven't gone
Speaker 3: through school and looking at the diagnostics and statistics manual
Speaker 3: kind of what happened to me is like patient zero
Speaker 3: of getting out of the military. Didn't really fit in
Speaker 3: either of those diagnoses. The cluster of symptoms for PTSD.
Speaker 3: One of them is avoidance. I didn't have avoidance of combat.
Speaker 3: I sought out combat. I had an affinity for being
Speaker 3: with veterans and being in the military, so that would
Speaker 3: be a disqualifier for PTSD. And then the other thing
Speaker 3: that could be described, you know, explain to symptoms would
Speaker 3: be adjustment disorder that has a time limit though of
Speaker 3: about six months, and so ten years later, I'm still
Speaker 3: struggling with wanting to be back on the front line.
Speaker 3: So it's like that can't be it either, So what
Speaker 3: is the what is happening here? And ultimately the closest
Speaker 3: thing that I could find was substance abuse disorder, And
Speaker 3: so there's something about being a warrior that feels like
Speaker 3: you're addicted to something and so that when you get
Speaker 3: out you experience.
Speaker 2: The withdrawal symptoms.
Speaker 3: So the book is about my experiences, the multiple tours
Speaker 3: that I did getting out, the struggles of getting out
Speaker 3: and then going through school and working at the VA
Speaker 3: and sort of finding a way to help veterans recognize
Speaker 3: what has happened to them, the training that they went through,
Speaker 3: that they get spit out into the world with no untraining,
Speaker 3: and then how do you manage it.
Speaker 1: Well, we'll get a little bit more in depth on
Speaker 1: that further along in the show, but I'm going to
Speaker 1: start you off at the beginning. You mentioned to me
Speaker 1: before the show. Your first name is Lithuanian, your last
Speaker 1: name is Portuguese. Tell us about the origin story of varpis.
Speaker 1: Where did you grow up, How did you grow up,
Speaker 1: How did that eventually take you towards the Marine Corps.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I guess both of my parents are immigrants,
Speaker 3: both naturalized American citizens. Mom is Lithuanian by way of Canada.
Speaker 3: Her parents fled the Communists and so we're stuck in
Speaker 3: between the Nazis and Communists during World War two.
Speaker 2: Displaced Persons camp ended up in Canada, and then it
Speaker 2: moved down.
Speaker 3: To Chicago with this big Lithuanian population, where she met
Speaker 3: My dad, who was born and raised in Rio, went
Speaker 3: to school in Rio, became a physician, and then moved
Speaker 3: to Chicago seeking basically freedom. Like he talks about, how
Speaker 3: we don't understand this in the US. The first time
Speaker 3: he could vote, there's only one person he could vote
Speaker 3: for because it was a dictatorship. So he's like, I'm
Speaker 3: out of here. He showed up in Chicago. My parents
Speaker 3: met ended up moving to the East Coast, Massachusetts, big
Speaker 3: Portuguese population there. They needed a Portuguese speaking doctors predominantly
Speaker 3: where I grew up is in Massachusetts, speaking Lithuanian to
Speaker 3: mom where she used to dad, and sort of thinking
Speaker 3: that that was everybody's life, house life, Like we just
Speaker 3: used English in school and then we all went home
Speaker 3: and spoke in our native tongues.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think it was in third grade when I realized
Speaker 3: that's not that's not the case in everybody's house. So
Speaker 3: the last name Brazilian Portuguese first name. It is a
Speaker 3: Lithuanian word. It is not a common name. It's not
Speaker 3: like Joe. It's it's literally translated to large bell.
Speaker 2: And so I think I've joked about it before.
Speaker 3: Like my mom was Gwyneth Paltrow before Gwyneth Paltrow was
Speaker 3: naming her kid Apple, So she named her second son
Speaker 3: Large church Bell.
Speaker 1: Basically, well what did the first one get?
Speaker 3: So he's got my same his dad's name, sorry, our
Speaker 3: dad's name, and our dad has a same name as
Speaker 3: his dad's name, which is not much better because it's
Speaker 3: most So he's the third yr. So he's sort of
Speaker 3: the third except he also grabbed my mom's dad's name
Speaker 3: for his middle name, so he's not technically the third.
Speaker 3: But monsieur means article of pain.
Speaker 2: In Amazon Indian. Wow, so so we go, so.
Speaker 3: We go like article pain large bell and then my
Speaker 3: two younger brothers, Skydris, which is like sort of made
Speaker 3: up ish name of like clear, and then my youngest brother.
Speaker 3: They were sure he was going to be born a girl,
Speaker 3: so they only chose the name Lima, which is actually
Speaker 3: a common girl's name for luck. But then when he
Speaker 3: popped out a boy, they're like, okay, well he can't
Speaker 3: have a female name, so they gave him the masculine
Speaker 3: version of Lima, which is Limas, which you can imagine
Speaker 3: basically means male fairy.
Speaker 1: Okay, so your parents maybe need a little work on
Speaker 1: the naming conventions for the children.
Speaker 3: Yes, my mom was not a Johnny Cash fan. A
Speaker 3: boy named Sue is not in her uh not in
Speaker 3: her eight track player, so I definitely tried not to
Speaker 3: do that with my own kids.
Speaker 1: So you grow up speaking Lithuanian and Portuguese growing up
Speaker 1: in Massachusetts. What piqued your interest in military service? How
Speaker 1: did that come about?
Speaker 2: So? I was actually born in Maryland.
Speaker 3: At Thethesida Naval Hospital because my dad, in order to
Speaker 3: try to fast track his citizenship, took UH commission, got
Speaker 3: commissioned in the reserves as an Army physician. So he's
Speaker 3: immediately promoted a major as an internal medicine infectious disease specialist,
Speaker 3: and so he was sent out to UH for Dietrich.
Speaker 2: And so my dad was in the Army.
Speaker 3: I don't know why, but I had an affinity for
Speaker 3: the Navy, and then through high school I was pretty
Speaker 3: sure I was going to go to Annapolis. It's really
Speaker 3: the only place I applied. And then the senior year
Speaker 3: I had to have surgery, and so I was dequed
Speaker 3: for Annapolis. And then I got a scholarship to Boston University. Sod,
Speaker 3: all right, I'll do that, and then I'll go to Annapolis.
Speaker 3: You know, after the year, i'll reapply. But BU had
Speaker 3: an RTC program and so they gave me the Navy
Speaker 3: RTC scholarship. And after a year there in Boston, I
Speaker 3: was like, I have three years of college. Now like
Speaker 3: a year's worth of AP credits or two years worth
Speaker 3: of AP credits plus the year's worth of actual college.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to go back.
Speaker 3: And restart at zero at the academy because all roads
Speaker 3: lead to for me Aquantico as a marine. So at
Speaker 3: that point I was like, right, I'll just stay here.
Speaker 1: So you commissioned through ROTC.
Speaker 3: I did, and just like every other boy, basically you
Speaker 3: know g I Joe's camouflage, I did it. All square guns,
Speaker 3: water guns, Capture the Flag was my favorite thing to play.
Speaker 3: And through grade school and high school playing three sports,
Speaker 3: you know, sport every season, and then continue to do
Speaker 3: that through college.
Speaker 1: And so you came into the Marines nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 1: you got commissioned, and now you have to go through
Speaker 1: Infantry Basic Infantry Officer course, what do the Marines call it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So we do something a little bit different.
Speaker 3: We have Officer Candidate School and then all Marine officers
Speaker 3: go then through the basic school. So independent of your
Speaker 3: commissioning program, whether it's the academy or OCS, everybody goes
Speaker 3: to the basic school and everybody shows up with no mos.
Speaker 3: So officers go to Quantico. Nobody has an mos some
Speaker 3: people have flight contracts. But then over the course of
Speaker 3: those six months, depending on how well you do, you
Speaker 3: get ranked from one to whatever it is, one hundred,
Speaker 3: and then you select your MOSS. Now, in order to
Speaker 3: ensure quality spread, they cut that hundred into thirds and
Speaker 3: then disperse the mos is sort of equitably, which means
Speaker 3: that in the if you're in the top third, you
Speaker 3: need to be in the top of the top third
Speaker 3: to get combat arms, and if you're in the bottom third,
Speaker 3: usually it's the bottom guy, mister irrelevant usually gets infantry.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the army does something similar so that
Speaker 1: you don't end up with purely just dumb asses in
Speaker 1: the infantry. Otherwise, I mean it's bad enough as it is.
Speaker 3: I think what they try to do is they know
Speaker 3: just about everybody wants to be in infantry combat arms,
Speaker 3: and then they don't want like your logistitions to be
Speaker 3: the the lowest all of the lowest performers at the
Speaker 3: basic school, or your logos, your supply guys, because then
Speaker 3: things don't get done. As the general to say, you know,
Speaker 3: we think logistics not tactics. Then from TBS I got
Speaker 3: I was high enough to choose Infantry. Then I went
Speaker 3: to the Ifetry Officer course for about ten weeks, got
Speaker 3: my orders to my first unit, so first time fifth
Speaker 3: Marines out of Camp Pendleton, and linked up with them
Speaker 3: as they're preparing to do a boat package. So I
Speaker 3: went right away to Cornado for a month doing the
Speaker 3: Scout swimmer school and then stayed there for probably another
Speaker 3: month doing the small boat raids.
Speaker 1: That's pretty cool. I mean, it must have been exactly
Speaker 1: what you were looking for, right.
Speaker 3: It was, And it was basically a row Schambau to
Speaker 3: determine who was going to get to go be the
Speaker 3: scout swimmer, and luckily I won. And I was only
Speaker 3: in the row Schambeau because I had already done my
Speaker 3: the maximum swim call that you could still struggled with
Speaker 3: the brick you know, part of the call for the
Speaker 3: Scouts swim of course, So managed to do it. And
Speaker 3: all of that boat rating stuff was to prepare us
Speaker 3: for a deployment at the front end of two thousand
Speaker 3: and one to Okinawa.
Speaker 1: Did that Okinawa deployment materialize or did other things take Yeah?
Speaker 3: No, no, no, so so two thousand and one, so
Speaker 3: we deployed. We flew out January of one sort of
Speaker 3: standard rotation. It's a thirty first Marine Expeditionary Unit sailed
Speaker 3: around Australia EUO Jima and it was only a six
Speaker 3: month tour. So we fly back around July of one
Speaker 3: and then we're on our off cycle basically, so we're
Speaker 3: looking at you in like Operation Bright Star, I think.
Speaker 1: In Egypt SINAI.
Speaker 3: Yeah, September eleventh happens, and then you know, everybody starts
Speaker 3: to get think that things are going to change for me.
Speaker 3: They did because so here's the funny story. In two thousand,
Speaker 3: two thousand, I was the youngest Marine officer in the
Speaker 3: first Marine Division. So if you're not aware of how
Speaker 3: we do our birthday balls, it's the oldest marine present
Speaker 3: and the youngest marine present share the first piece of cake.
Speaker 3: And of course we're marines, so everything has to be
Speaker 3: done and rehearsed and practiced. So as the youngest officer present,
Speaker 3: I had to go to the practices for the honor
Speaker 3: guard to like practice eating the cake or at least
Speaker 3: receiving it from the oldest marine present.
Speaker 2: That put my name, so you can imagine that.
Speaker 3: Plus my name got me skylined with the General staff
Speaker 3: and so then when I came back.
Speaker 2: When we came back from the deployment to Okinawa.
Speaker 3: From Okinawa, the chief of Staff and the staff sect
Speaker 3: we're already like, oh hey, that guy, good to go,
Speaker 3: you know, he's a first lieutenant, Like we were to
Speaker 3: pull him up.
Speaker 2: And I show up to my interview with the.
Speaker 3: General General Cowdrey and the staff sex like, and the
Speaker 3: General was also like, do you want to be here?
Speaker 2: And I'm like, hell no.
Speaker 3: You know, I want to go to Ricon, you know,
Speaker 3: And he's like, oh, well, you know, it's exactly who
Speaker 3: you want here. You want the guys that don't want
Speaker 3: to be here, because if you wanted to be here,
Speaker 3: that would be a problem.
Speaker 1: Reverse psychologies bullshit, they got you.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So fortunately for me though, that ended up being a
Speaker 3: second deployment because he's the assistant division commander and we
Speaker 3: got flown to Kuwait for four or so months as
Speaker 3: part of a a CJTF for consequence management. As far
Speaker 3: as I understand it, I think we're sort of kind
Speaker 3: of trying to build the backbone of the eventual division
Speaker 3: command for an eventual invasion into I Rock. So from
Speaker 3: around Christmas one through two, you know, I'm in the
Speaker 3: Middle East, flying around with the General, going to all
Speaker 3: of the embassies in the Middle East, talking about whatever
Speaker 3: they wanted to talk about, and then we come back.
Speaker 3: And the benefit for me was it was only gonna
Speaker 3: be for six months that I was the AID and
Speaker 3: then I would in theory sort of have a choice
Speaker 3: of duty station coming home. So I wanted to go
Speaker 3: to Ricon, interviewed with the recon Italian commander and he's like,
Speaker 3: I'm only going to make you the H and S coo.
Speaker 3: I don't have any platoons open for you.
Speaker 1: What's H and S?
Speaker 2: So hg oh okay.
Speaker 3: Hot dogs and SODA's Company. So that was not a
Speaker 3: deploying unit, and none of us at the time, so
Speaker 3: this is like mid two thousand and two, thought that
Speaker 3: the entire divisions were going to get deployed for for
Speaker 3: a rock. So I said no, thank you to that
Speaker 3: and took a job as an executive officer for another
Speaker 3: boat company. So I found myself back in Cornado for
Speaker 3: a couple months, getting ready to set sale in January.
Speaker 2: Of O three.
Speaker 1: So you kind of hit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well basically, so set sale in January, full speed ahead.
Speaker 3: I think we had thirty six hours in Singapore, between
Speaker 3: San Diego and Kuwait. I got flown ahead into Kuwait
Speaker 3: and then it was, you know, all of February and
Speaker 3: most of March kind of waiting waiting for the green
Speaker 3: light to go.
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Speaker 1: So what was sort of like your platoons mission and
Speaker 1: your idea of how the Operation Iraqi Freedom was supposed
Speaker 1: to unfold?
Speaker 2: I had no idea.
Speaker 3: I mean I was an executive officer our specific job.
Speaker 3: So we're because we're part of the new we actually
Speaker 3: got attached to a British Commando brigade, so the three
Speaker 3: Commando Brigade as they're part of their combat element, and
Speaker 3: we were tasked with crossing the border and then securing
Speaker 3: the deep water port facility of Boom Kasser. Well the
Speaker 3: four zero or two Commando the Royal Marines. I think
Speaker 3: we're taking the Alphal peninsula to us. This is down
Speaker 3: like Bosra, south of Bosra right so literally right across
Speaker 3: the border is the Zoom Casser.
Speaker 2: And then move we moved.
Speaker 3: My battalion ended up moving further north up to Azubayr
Speaker 3: and then a little bit further north. Uh and then
Speaker 3: we got detached from the Brits because of Jessica Lynch,
Speaker 3: that whole fiasco, So we all moved north up to
Speaker 3: nazarea and uh so my battalion was part of the
Speaker 3: diversion attack to go rescue Jessica Lynch out of nazarea.
Speaker 3: Me specifically, I was probably asleep in my in my
Speaker 3: black bag while all this stuff was going on.
Speaker 1: Were any interesting incidents that happened during that deployment though
Speaker 1: that you were involved in.
Speaker 3: There are a few. I try not to to speak
Speaker 3: ill of other people, don't There there was one specific
Speaker 3: incident that I'll talk about this one because I bring
Speaker 3: it up in the book where we're in Azoo by year.
Speaker 3: We strong pointed the port because it's just our company
Speaker 3: providing security, and I'm driving around with my company gun resergeant,
Speaker 3: which in the Army it's like your first sergeant because
Speaker 3: he's the logistics guy, and we hear fifty cow fire
Speaker 3: or sniper fire, and my company gun he's a former sniper,
Speaker 3: so he's like, that's outgoing.
Speaker 2: We're trying to figure out what are we shooting at.
Speaker 3: I get down to the platoon that's on that strong
Speaker 3: pointing to the south, and the platoon sergeant asked me like, Hey,
Speaker 3: what's the what's the drama, sir? And I'm like, I
Speaker 3: don't know, that's why we're here. The platoon commander tells me,
Speaker 3: you know what's going on. They've got eyes on a target,
Speaker 3: but it's not a target. It's women and kids, you know,
Speaker 3: maybe some men in vans and they're just kind of
Speaker 3: looting a warehouse and and uh, the platoon sergeant that
Speaker 3: platoon tells me that our company commander had just called
Speaker 3: for a mortar mission, so he was going to use
Speaker 3: his sixty mortars on on that target. And uh, it's
Speaker 3: in that point in time where I was like, no,
Speaker 3: that's not happening. I had inscribed on my my cover
Speaker 3: or my hat, no women, no kids, borrowed from Leon
Speaker 3: the professional, and so I threw the platoon commander in
Speaker 3: our truck and we drove to the CP and I
Speaker 3: just asked them, like, hey, did my CEO just.
Speaker 2: Asked to do fire mission?
Speaker 3: I said, astitute of fire mission and they and they
Speaker 3: said yeah, but we're going to deny it.
Speaker 2: And I was like, okay, good.
Speaker 3: I was getting ready to walk out, but there had
Speaker 3: been some other incidents that had happened a couple of
Speaker 3: days before. So the battalion gunner, the chief one officer,
Speaker 3: it's like, no, no, you know, you tell him everything
Speaker 3: that's going on. And so I said, okay, out of
Speaker 3: out of uh just curiosity. When you call for fire,
Speaker 3: you have to give a target description. And so I said,
Speaker 3: what was the target description that my CEO gave? And
Speaker 3: he said ten to fourteen men in black with aks.
Speaker 2: I said, okay, that's that's not what's there.
Speaker 3: Here's the platoon commander that had eyes on it's women
Speaker 3: and kids and they're looting, and I thought that was
Speaker 3: sort of done. I thought that justice would sort of
Speaker 3: square things away. I did not expect what happened next,
Speaker 3: which was I got called in as insubordinate.
Speaker 2: And then.
Speaker 3: One of the other things that had come up was
Speaker 3: that that company commander had pointed his rifle at the
Speaker 3: fire support team leader, like, if you should call another
Speaker 3: fucked up the fire mission, I'm going to kill you
Speaker 3: because I should backtrack. As soon as we crossed the border,
Speaker 3: we stopped, and then we had incoming. My company commander
Speaker 3: was sure that there's no way the Iraqis could be
Speaker 3: shooting are pready had us, So he just was so
Speaker 3: sure that this was blue on blue fire.
Speaker 2: That he was going to cause harm.
Speaker 3: To the fire sport team leader, and he actually called
Speaker 3: the training timeout. So the fire for effect went, you know,
Speaker 3: we got away, I got away, We all ran away.
Speaker 3: So I actually had my Plateam commander's tactical notebook is
Speaker 3: as Iraqi shrapnel embedded in it, and he kind of
Speaker 3: calls a training time out, pulls the nap out on
Speaker 3: a humbie, calls all the platoon leaders and meet the
Speaker 3: humby and it's like, how did this happen? And like,
Speaker 3: we can't stay here, like if that was if that
Speaker 3: was their just fire mission. You know, we're bracketed now
Speaker 3: and we're not in a good place. Sure enough, we
Speaker 3: got hit again. Eventually we moved and then our counter
Speaker 3: battery or somebody else took care of that D thirty battery, so.
Speaker 2: That came up. And then back to the mortar incident.
Speaker 3: Though, my company commander asks me like, didn't you so
Speaker 3: did you hear the call for fire on the radio?
Speaker 3: I said no, I didn't. Oh, so you didn't hear
Speaker 3: what the grid was that I called in. I said no, no, sorry,
Speaker 3: I didn't hear what grid you called it. And he said, aha, see,
Speaker 3: so you didn't realize that I had actually offset the grid.
Speaker 3: He was going to use the sixty millimeter mortars as
Speaker 3: warning shots danger close to our own troops warning shots,
Speaker 3: and he got me with that.
Speaker 2: I was speechless.
Speaker 3: But anybody who knows anything about fire support is like,
Speaker 3: that's just preposterous.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's not how the fire support center works, that's.
Speaker 3: Not how any of that works. And your warning shots
Speaker 3: with the fifty cow already are not working. So I
Speaker 3: really wasn't sure what to do in that scenario. But
Speaker 3: he said he could work with me, or I could
Speaker 3: go to another company, and I had to weigh that decision.
Speaker 2: It's actually.
Speaker 3: Maybe one of the first times that I selected to
Speaker 3: or I chose to do what's better for everybody else
Speaker 3: and what's best for me. I called in my fellowcal
Speaker 3: team commanders, all the other lieutenants, and I said, what's
Speaker 3: best for me is to leave this company. And I
Speaker 3: don't think that's what's best for you, because I can.
Speaker 3: I can withstand this, and so I did.
Speaker 2: I stayed. We go to nazarea.
Speaker 3: Basically I don't see the company commander anymore. Fly home
Speaker 3: or sorry, I fly home, fly back to Bahrain and
Speaker 3: get on the ships and sail home. I get in
Speaker 3: more trouble for the Shenanigans that allegedly I did in combat.
Speaker 3: And at that point, it's like late two thousand and three,
Speaker 3: most if most of all of the Marines are gone
Speaker 3: from a rock and I'm like, that was it, that
Speaker 3: was my combat.
Speaker 2: Where's where's over for us?
Speaker 3: It's it's uh, it's standing operations now, big army time
Speaker 3: like we that was and all of my peers are
Speaker 3: like getting their awards with v and bronze stars. And
Speaker 3: all that stuff, and I get a big fed zero
Speaker 3: because of all the things that happened.
Speaker 2: So I was like, that's going to hurt me down
Speaker 2: the road.
Speaker 3: But no matter, I still was thinking I can get
Speaker 3: over to recon or force recon the path at that
Speaker 3: point in time for me, it was going to be
Speaker 3: through through Fast Company, which is the fleet and at
Speaker 3: tears and security teams. So I get orders there, I
Speaker 3: show up and Al Rashid Hotel had been rocketed. So
Speaker 3: they pulled in the two platoons from Fast that were
Speaker 3: that were already I mean were they're always four deployed,
Speaker 3: but they pulled into platoons that were for deployed into
Speaker 3: Baghdad to reinforce the what would eventually become the embassy
Speaker 3: and the hotel, and so in order to maintain that
Speaker 3: force protection posture, they started to grab platoons from stateside.
Speaker 3: So I had, you know, within a month or so
Speaker 3: of showing up to Virginia with FAST, I was back
Speaker 3: in Baghdad.
Speaker 1: And what can you tell people what the mission is
Speaker 1: of the FAST teams?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's anti terrorism, whatever form anti terrorism can take.
Speaker 3: Usually it's going to be like a heightened security, heightened
Speaker 3: force protection measures. They're used for whenever there's submarines that
Speaker 3: have nukes on them, that bring out these this marine
Speaker 3: platoons to help secure those areas for refuel defuel.
Speaker 2: They'refore deployed.
Speaker 3: You know, when I was in Bahrain with Fast, We're
Speaker 3: on a pager to reinforce embassies to go provide expeditionary security.
Speaker 3: We come with the Fast platoons, come with a ton
Speaker 3: of skill sets to do all of that. They're kind
Speaker 3: of like a swat team, if you will, and the
Speaker 3: naval swat team.
Speaker 1: And so the first assignment was you were going back
Speaker 1: to Iraq, you said, for this hotel was getting hit.
Speaker 3: So the hotel was multiple you know, it was hit
Speaker 3: with a bunch of rockets. And so the concern became
Speaker 3: that what was then the Coalition Provisional Authority, which is
Speaker 3: Al Rashid Alice I think, was going to get hit
Speaker 3: and it is now the US embassy there on the Tigris.
Speaker 3: So they wanted to bring in a company's worth of
Speaker 3: Fast marines to provide better security for that place.
Speaker 1: How did that situation unfold for you guys?
Speaker 3: It was so drastically different from oif one like I
Speaker 3: was in the Green Zone. I mean I was eating
Speaker 3: catered food made by Pakistanis, you know, in a palace
Speaker 3: with marble floors and toilet, which was a far cry
Speaker 3: from and going two months without a shower and then
Speaker 3: and then only getting kind of a quasi shower because
Speaker 3: they brought the NBC truck and we're like, hey, you
Speaker 3: guys need to be decontaminated. Ah, the palace had a pool.
Speaker 3: David Letterman visited our palace. Some motivated CAV officer and
Speaker 3: his stetson jumped into the pool to catch a football
Speaker 3: that David Letterman threw.
Speaker 2: And it was different.
Speaker 3: Uh, it certainly was a different side of the war.
Speaker 3: And and still you know, the Brown Irish was a
Speaker 3: big deal. Going from from buy from Bagdad or National
Speaker 3: to the CPA. We were rolling around and SUVs that
Speaker 3: are unarmored, and Solder City was still not really secure.
Speaker 3: But this was just it was a unique time in
Speaker 3: Lado three and into I guess a little bit earlier
Speaker 3: four there in Baghdad where you could actually go to
Speaker 3: the souk not for are from the combat searchical hospital
Speaker 3: with no body arm or no weapon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was before things got dad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so then that changed it was basically guard duty
Speaker 3: for a few for three or four months for us.
Speaker 3: So I came home from that, we got we got
Speaker 3: believed in place so that I could come home with
Speaker 3: the platoon and then make a regularly scheduled deployment to
Speaker 3: Bahrain where we would be on the pagers for everywhere
Speaker 3: else and so on that deployment, there was an American
Speaker 3: who was beheaded in Saudi and so there was some
Speaker 3: additional concerns about threats to the embassy. So they launched
Speaker 3: us to go reinforce Riad for about a month in July,
Speaker 3: and same with yeah, go ahead, and then we got
Speaker 3: sent down to Africa, so I got I got my
Speaker 3: taste of the Horn of Africa in four again different
Speaker 3: than like Alfager and what was happening in Fallujah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, what did they send you down to
Speaker 1: the Horn of Africa?
Speaker 2: For?
Speaker 3: Some of it was training and some of it was
Speaker 3: just to make sure the embassy there was fine. It
Speaker 3: was good to have a platoona Marines there to reinforce
Speaker 3: whatever it might be going on. And that also kind
Speaker 3: of started to make me aware of how wild west
Speaker 3: it is out there. Like they sent us down to
Speaker 3: this one range where I think it took us like thirteen.
Speaker 2: Hours to drive.
Speaker 3: This is out in Jibbetis, Djibouti. Yeah, so we go
Speaker 3: way down south. It's like a two hundred and seventy
Speaker 3: degree range where they're on our owns. My one assistant
Speaker 3: or one of the other platuity commanders was it was
Speaker 3: supremely afraid that we're going to get overtaken by baboons,
Speaker 3: so he wanted to make sure that the firewatch had
Speaker 3: a fully auto M four. But in my mind, I'm like, hey,
Speaker 3: we're doing this live fire training and if we have
Speaker 3: a casualty, there is no medical support. Like our case
Speaker 3: of that plan was.
Speaker 2: This was the H fifty three's.
Speaker 3: They're on one eighty alert, meaning that if we have
Speaker 3: something bad happens and we get on a sat phone
Speaker 3: and we call up to Camp le Monnier one and
Speaker 3: eighty minutes later, a H fifty three is flying thirty
Speaker 3: minutes down south to come get our casualty. Interesting foreshadowing
Speaker 3: because when I was back in Djibouti and nine we
Speaker 3: had an event where we had some casualties, and so
Speaker 3: it became fortunate for those guys that the French Foreign
Speaker 3: Legion was there and they could land one of their
Speaker 3: linkses anywhere and that's how they got those guys to
Speaker 3: the hospital.
Speaker 1: Well this is a bit of a sidebar, but I
Speaker 1: worked on a story a few years ago and it
Speaker 1: was an Army National Guard unit in Djibouti. They were
Speaker 1: making that same trip, driving from the base out to
Speaker 1: the range through all these canyons and valleys and everything,
Speaker 1: and what none of them knew. And you know what
Speaker 1: surprised them was this huge rainstorm came through. It just
Speaker 1: poured rain and they got trapped out in the you know,
Speaker 1: driving through these waddies going through driving l mtvs. And
Speaker 1: I actually got video of one of the l mtvs
Speaker 1: rolling over in the water and they had three or
Speaker 1: four soldiers end up in the water and they recovered,
Speaker 1: like three of them managed to make it back to
Speaker 1: the shore. One of them got washed all the way
Speaker 1: out to like the ocean and the French picked them
Speaker 1: up but survived, thank god.
Speaker 3: I believe it. Even with light rain didn't seem like anything.
Speaker 3: And if you're use I mean from these coasts or
Speaker 3: wherever Seattle has ran all the time, the lightest amount
Speaker 3: of rain and then we had about forty eight inches
Speaker 3: of water that we had to afford or land cruisers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's wild.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: And after the fast teams, you did six months on
Speaker 1: division staff.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I came back from that deployment and they told
Speaker 3: me I was a captain and I was too senior
Speaker 3: to take another platoon, and rather than you know, to
Speaker 3: suffer on battalion staff, I volunteered for her to be
Speaker 3: an individual augment with my goal to be to go
Speaker 3: on a military transition team. My initial set of orders
Speaker 3: were to be for G four logistics in Kuwait. So
Speaker 3: I check in Camp Le June with those orders and
Speaker 3: I'm like, hey, I'm a infantry guy from Fast, I
Speaker 3: don't know anything about logistics.
Speaker 2: Can we change that.
Speaker 3: I'm here to be a myth And luckily they swapped
Speaker 3: me for some logistics officer and put me into G
Speaker 3: three down at the division. So I deployed as a
Speaker 3: frag order writer. Within a few months, it became clear
Speaker 3: in Ramadi that that's not a really difficult job, so
Speaker 3: the intentions message writer took up the frag order writer
Speaker 3: duties and I got pulled as an ada Hi admit
Speaker 3: to go out to further West and Ambar.
Speaker 2: With the two seven. So the second Brigade.
Speaker 3: Seventh Iraqi Infantry Division with our three battalions and hit
Speaker 3: Adfa and Murwa.
Speaker 1: This is two thousand and five ish.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I spent just about all of two thousand
Speaker 3: and five in Iraq, which is great because then I
Speaker 3: could pretend like the Red Sox were still World Series.
Speaker 1: Champions and in Iraq was kind of like the Tutorio
Speaker 1: rating pretty seriously by this time frame, you know.
Speaker 3: So five I think started the a little bit of
Speaker 3: the Awakening. I remember being on Camp Blue Diamond when
Speaker 3: they brought in I think the the tribes there to
Speaker 3: start negotiating with them so that we could all focus
Speaker 3: on a q i Z and a q I Am
Speaker 3: instead of you know, fighting fighting the Shia. Everybody wanted
Speaker 3: to geinst Arkaui. And then when I moved further out west,
Speaker 3: they were still fighting out in all Crime, a little
Speaker 3: bit around around Raua, but most of the there's really well,
Speaker 3: I want to say that Fallujah was basically done. Second
Speaker 3: Fallusha was done, Rockets would still hit Camp Blue Diamond,
Speaker 3: and it wasn't a lack of combat.
Speaker 2: Happening in Ramadi.
Speaker 3: It just was not I think at the same level
Speaker 3: that it wasn't a four for me personally. It was
Speaker 3: a lot of driving on like Route Bronze, Route Uranium
Speaker 3: between all of the different Iraqi battalions, and that was
Speaker 3: also a different experience because it's you know, minimum minimally
Speaker 3: staffed v's with you break all of the requirements and
Speaker 3: minimums just to get out the door where we're basically
Speaker 3: going with nine Americans, three vehicles out to wherever it
Speaker 3: is or we're going. And then that really came to
Speaker 3: a point when we got you know, I was lead
Speaker 3: truck and so our truck I hit with a small
Speaker 3: I ed.
Speaker 2: Not enough to disable us.
Speaker 3: And we're pretty sure that this pickup truck in front
Speaker 3: of us is the one that dropped it. So we
Speaker 3: we chase it down, we shoot at it together to stop.
Speaker 2: It pulls over.
Speaker 3: We have three trucks, so one goes far side security,
Speaker 3: one stays backside security, and then my truck with the
Speaker 3: fifty col is is oriented to the target. And it's
Speaker 3: really only at that moment that I realize I am
Speaker 3: the dismount. I'm the vehicle commander and the dismount, and
Speaker 3: the only other dismount is my turf who's not armed,
Speaker 3: and so I was like, oh, all right, Well we
Speaker 3: close on the truck. You know, I don't need my
Speaker 3: turp to be armed. But then when we get closer,
Speaker 3: I have them come with me. We flanked the truck.
Speaker 3: Two guys get out, and at that point I realized
Speaker 3: I'm going to have to search them because although I
Speaker 3: trust my it's like, which which way do you go
Speaker 3: with that? Do I trust my turp to do the
Speaker 3: searching and I cover him or do I have So
Speaker 3: I handed my M four on semi to the turf
Speaker 3: and I'm like, you pulled the trigger.
Speaker 2: It's going to go.
Speaker 3: Please stand in enfilade, you know, And I close the
Speaker 3: last whatever it is, ten meters with my nine and
Speaker 3: search these guys. I know they dropped the id through
Speaker 3: the there's a hole in the passenger side floor wall
Speaker 3: or floor, but you know there's there. I had no evidence,
Speaker 3: and so I wasn't going to detain these guys on
Speaker 3: a hunch, you know, I was. They're in the wrong place.
Speaker 3: You don't know where they're going. Their story, their cover
Speaker 3: for action doesn't check out. It's like, yeah, you guys
Speaker 3: missed your turn to Albuquerque back there, so I know
Speaker 3: you're lying about this but what was I going to do?
Speaker 3: There was There was no more explosives and so it
Speaker 3: might have just been an eighty two millimeter or mortar
Speaker 3: rigged a blow that hit us.
Speaker 2: So we sent them on their way.
Speaker 1: Geez, what a mess. And then after that deployment, you
Speaker 1: did the Captain's career course.
Speaker 2: I did, went down to Benning again.
Speaker 3: The common theme of my military career is deploy as
Speaker 3: often as possible, and they stateside as little as possible.
Speaker 3: So I took the Army's course because it's six months
Speaker 3: instead of the Marine Corps because it's thirteen months.
Speaker 2: Went so went to.
Speaker 3: Benning for that, finished, got my orders to back to
Speaker 3: Camp Pendleton as a company commander, and then it was
Speaker 3: a patter of a few months. Caught them on the
Speaker 3: tail end of their work up, and by I want
Speaker 3: to say, July of seven, I'm back.
Speaker 2: In I rock.
Speaker 1: Wow, where did you guys go? H?
Speaker 3: So north of Fallujah is a place called Sokowa, And
Speaker 3: you know, no offense to calve guys intended beyond.
Speaker 2: You know what your job is and your job is
Speaker 2: not coined.
Speaker 3: So you know the five seven cave, mechanized cave, you
Speaker 3: net that's there, really did no patrolling in the AAR
Speaker 3: that I inherited. Anytime they needed dismounts, it'd have to
Speaker 3: borrow them from the marine battalions that were nearby. And
Speaker 3: so what ended up happening prior to me showing up
Speaker 3: was the cave unit would go out and they'd hit
Speaker 3: IEDs and and so they stopped patrolling, and then they
Speaker 3: would only patrol if we're oute clearance, like two to
Speaker 3: four engineers would come clear their route. Then they would
Speaker 3: patrol from their bradley's and then you know, and then
Speaker 3: they would go back right up until they had like
Speaker 3: a catastrophic event where I don't know if it was
Speaker 3: even combat related, but they had about thirteen heat casualties,
Speaker 3: oh man, that had to get evacuated because they got stuck.
Speaker 3: I you know, I inherited that aor it was the
Speaker 3: wild West. So August of seven we start clearing it
Speaker 3: and that's the one of my patrols goes out and
Speaker 3: hits an ID into a canal. We go to reinforce them,
Speaker 3: my QRF kind of blows past them.
Speaker 2: It's a second IED.
Speaker 3: And so now I have two down truck and we're
Speaker 3: trying to find where the trigger guys are So we're
Speaker 3: trolling through the area, can't can't quite find them, recover
Speaker 3: the vehicles best as we can leave them in place
Speaker 3: so we can come back the next day with some
Speaker 3: wreckers to pull these things out of the the one
Speaker 3: out of the canal and then the one off of
Speaker 3: the side of the canal, and as we're driving that back,
Speaker 3: we hit with another ied.
Speaker 2: Recovering that vehicle complex ambush.
Speaker 3: So this is sort of the unfortunate drawing of boundaries.
Speaker 3: The boundary was the canal, which was maybe ten meters
Speaker 3: across and so not my AO is where I'm getting
Speaker 3: RPG fire from, probably where the command was detonating all
Speaker 3: of these i ds. So it's like I get authorized
Speaker 3: crossbow and the rickety mud bridges didn't really look like
Speaker 3: they would hold up for us to cross, so I'm like,
Speaker 3: we're good on our side. And the fire support were
Speaker 3: troops in contact. They're like, okay, well we can support
Speaker 3: you with artillery from Fallujah, and I had done the
Speaker 3: math already.
Speaker 2: I was like, no, thank you.
Speaker 3: We're kind of at their max range and I'm looking
Speaker 3: to hit somebody who's twenty meters from me. So what
Speaker 3: else you got sent us some cobras, and so it's
Speaker 3: cobras I could manage because I could say, hey, keep
Speaker 3: all your fires north of the canal.
Speaker 2: Well, we're I.
Speaker 3: Mean, we're so close that my Mark nineteen's gunner like
Speaker 3: hist his forty millimeters grenades weren't donating it, weren't were Yeah,
Speaker 3: we wouldn't hit their minimum spins to arm and my
Speaker 3: fifty cow like we as pulled the rear cotter pin
Speaker 3: everything get try to free gun that thing. He couldn't
Speaker 3: depress it far enough to hit where the bad guys were.
Speaker 2: So you put your mind to use.
Speaker 3: And I was like, well, shoot all your flares, shoot
Speaker 3: all our pop ups into the reeds. They catch fire,
Speaker 3: and then we'll shoot them as they're running out of
Speaker 3: the out of the reads.
Speaker 2: They're not that flammable because they're right now.
Speaker 3: But the bad guy, so I bad guys, you know,
Speaker 3: whatever they were, they decided to try to egress out
Speaker 3: of the area, hopped into a vehicle.
Speaker 2: The cobra saw it, so that was the end of them.
Speaker 1: Smoked them. Yeah, the cobra pilots don't screw around.
Speaker 2: They do not.
Speaker 3: After that kind of the rest of the tour just
Speaker 3: progressed in the way that you wish it would encounterinsurgency operations.
Speaker 3: So we cleared the area, got some host forces or
Speaker 3: some host nation people to stand up a provisional security force.
Speaker 3: I start working with them, partner with them. They run
Speaker 3: the checkpoints. Near the end of my tour there to
Speaker 3: give me a call like, hey, these two guys that
Speaker 3: we know are bad guys came into the area. They
Speaker 3: both suicide bombers. We took care of them. One guy
Speaker 3: detonated himself but the other guy didn't. And so we're asking,
Speaker 3: can you can you shoot some illum and bring out
Speaker 3: your EOD. It's like, sure, this is awesome. You know,
Speaker 3: local people saw the local bad guys, called the local
Speaker 3: law enforcement. They managed it, and so now all they
Speaker 3: need is like our support with illum and EOD. And
Speaker 3: then I get told I actually can't shoot a loom
Speaker 3: because this is almost two thousand and eight, or it
Speaker 3: might have been two thousand and eight.
Speaker 2: And the ROE is.
Speaker 3: Like, no, no, that the tiny little bass plate could
Speaker 3: land on somebody and kill them. So no more looms allowed.
Speaker 3: It's like, all right, well, how long we're we waiting
Speaker 3: for EOD? Two hours? And so Finally I go out
Speaker 3: there with EOD and talking to my Iraqi counterparts there
Speaker 3: and they're like, you guys took so long.
Speaker 2: Like I wish you would have told us you were
Speaker 2: to take this long. We were just blown them up.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It was always like that with E O. D.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So to me, that was success story, right, like
Speaker 3: the tour started with the wild West.
Speaker 2: You know, we cleared it out, we took.
Speaker 3: Our licks, we gave back, and then by the end,
Speaker 3: you know, the locals are managing their own.
Speaker 2: Stuff and go ahead, I'm sorry, well and it it uh.
Speaker 3: You know, you you leave thinking that everything went great,
Speaker 3: and then you know, I remember it was like three
Speaker 3: or four months later, you're like, oh, you know there's
Speaker 3: there's still id's going off at ECP five or whatever
Speaker 3: it is outside.
Speaker 1: Of Lucia, and you, I don't know, this is kind
Speaker 1: of rare in the army. I don't know about the Marines,
Speaker 1: but you got to pick up a second company command.
Speaker 3: I did, right, So, when I was at Benning, I
Speaker 3: went to that no form brief and kind of wanted
Speaker 3: to go to that unit, and the ass the recruiters,
Speaker 3: hey you take Marines, and they said yeah, and I
Speaker 3: was like, great, how do I join? And they said
Speaker 3: you got to be branch qualified and I said, I
Speaker 3: eat crayons. I don't know what that means. And they said,
Speaker 3: you got it. If you're an infantry guy, you got
Speaker 3: to be a company commander. So I did that first
Speaker 3: tour as a company commander and then kind of called
Speaker 3: Headquarters Marine Corps and said, hey, let me go try
Speaker 3: out for this other unit and they said, no, you're
Speaker 3: not up for PCs orders.
Speaker 2: So then I was like, all right, well what do
Speaker 2: I do now?
Speaker 3: And what I did next was I went over from
Speaker 3: a line company to weapons company and kind of became
Speaker 3: the fire support coordinator for another deployment.
Speaker 1: That's awesome. Back to Iraq.
Speaker 2: Well, so we set sail.
Speaker 3: This is two thousand and nine, and so I really
Speaker 3: don't know what we thought we were going to do.
Speaker 3: I sort of figured maybe we'd get pulled into Afghanistan
Speaker 3: or a rock. That's sort of the tendency with Marine
Speaker 3: expeditionary units is they just go to places for thirty
Speaker 3: days and ruin it for all the people that have
Speaker 3: to stay there for longer. That's the experience that I
Speaker 3: had as the guy like hate this marine unit comes in, like,
Speaker 3: you're just gonna like eat and defecate in my area
Speaker 3: thirty days, blow up stuff and I'm going to have
Speaker 3: to live with the results. Like you're gonna shoot a miklick,
Speaker 3: it's clear possible, IEDs Like, do you know what that's
Speaker 3: going to do to all my locals?
Speaker 2: Like no, no, thank you.
Speaker 3: So what we ended up doing is we got attached
Speaker 3: to the counter piracy guys outside of the Horn of Africa.
Speaker 3: Oh interesting, And in a fun fact, my ship was
Speaker 3: hit by a submarine crossing through the Straits.
Speaker 1: And horror moves, who's submarine?
Speaker 2: Our submarine? Oh?
Speaker 1: No shit?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I was on the USS New Orleans and we
Speaker 3: were hit by the USS grotten.
Speaker 1: Did you have to like go to go into port
Speaker 1: for repairs after that?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: So the USS New Orleans had to go dry dock
Speaker 3: in Bahrain, which meant, you know, you had half of
Speaker 3: battalion's worth of infantry guys twiddling their thumbs. So they
Speaker 3: ended up shipping most of us down to Africa.
Speaker 2: Again.
Speaker 1: Someone got relieved for that. I don't think you can
Speaker 1: crash a submarine without getting in trouble.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the sub captain got relieved for that.
Speaker 3: Our captain did not and in reality, like normally you
Speaker 3: think if you hit something like that, you go to
Speaker 3: general quarters, you know, to deal with all the damage.
Speaker 3: But that didn't happen. And I know that didn't happen
Speaker 3: because I didn't even wake up when the shub hit us.
Speaker 3: This is al So then I got so I got
Speaker 3: sent over to the Boxer and this is two thousand
Speaker 3: and nine. So part of what we were doing is
Speaker 3: is the Boxer ended up getting a whole bunch of
Speaker 3: guys from Damn Neck parachuted in to deal with the
Speaker 3: Mariscala Dama.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, so you guys were down in the Horn
Speaker 1: of Africa when that happened. Cool, And I mean, how
Speaker 1: did it? How did that unfold from your perspective?
Speaker 3: Well, so from my perspective, I basically had nothing to
Speaker 3: do with it, and you know, because I was just
Speaker 3: a regular guy and they're going to bring in there
Speaker 3: on fires guys, And it sort of kind of escalated
Speaker 3: that way where all of these marines in this in
Speaker 3: this youth thought like, hey, we'll get to participate in
Speaker 3: this in some fashion, and then one by one there
Speaker 3: whoever thinks that they're going to do something kind of
Speaker 3: got written off, like the recon guys who were like, hey,
Speaker 3: we're the visit board, search and seizure people.
Speaker 2: This is what we train. We're the experts on this.
Speaker 2: No thank you. We got this other asset that's going
Speaker 2: to do that.
Speaker 3: Even my buddy, the Cobra pilot, was like, well, I'm
Speaker 3: the I'm the Ford air controller Airborne, you know, like
Speaker 3: I will be the.
Speaker 2: Guy who's flying fire support for these guys.
Speaker 3: And he thought he was going to get to play,
Speaker 3: and then here's the you know, the unit's air controller,
Speaker 3: Like hey, they have this stuff and bringing these little
Speaker 3: birds and all of that. So he got frustrated that
Speaker 3: he wasn't going to get to do anything. And so
Speaker 3: I think the only eight Marines that ended up supporting
Speaker 3: that at all was probably the Harrier pilots sort of
Speaker 3: flying you know, with ISR over Somalia, while the Bainbridge did.
Speaker 2: The work with the lifeboat.
Speaker 1: So let's uh, let's circle back around here, Like now
Speaker 1: you're getting to the point where you're able to go
Speaker 1: to assessment and selection. So you mentioned that they came
Speaker 1: in and gave you guys a brief while you were
Speaker 1: down at Fort Benning and the Captain's career course. Like,
Speaker 1: I know you can't get into the details of the brief,
Speaker 1: but what what was it that kind of sparked your
Speaker 1: interest in the in this organization?
Speaker 3: Uh so, I I had known about all those organizations.
Speaker 2: Well, I had known.
Speaker 3: About that organization before, mostly through I guess Hollywood and
Speaker 3: and reading Eric Haney's book. Uh it was, it's up
Speaker 3: until that no Foreign brief that it just was into
Speaker 3: my cards. They don't take marines, and marines are kind
Speaker 3: of like a bucket of crabs sometimes where if you
Speaker 3: want to go do that thing, some of the Marines
Speaker 3: are going to put you down and say, no, you can't.
Speaker 3: They'll never take you, which is why I was. I
Speaker 3: had I would not have even gone to the no
Speaker 3: Form brief except it was required, so I went. And
Speaker 3: then I was just kind of on a whim. Let
Speaker 3: me ask the army guy, I hate you take marines
Speaker 3: and he said yeah.
Speaker 2: So I was like, all right, well, what do I
Speaker 2: need to do? It was always my goal.
Speaker 1: And so the Marine Corps kind of stymied you for
Speaker 1: a little bit, although I mean again, being a company
Speaker 1: commander twice is pretty awesome. You finally come up for
Speaker 1: PCs orders and you had to go camp out in
Speaker 1: the School of the Infantry until you could go to ANS.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you know, because we're sometimes not able to
Speaker 3: see second and third order effects. When they told me
Speaker 3: I was not for PCs orders, I couldn't apply for ANS.
Speaker 3: Then when I was up for PCs orders, it was like, okay,
Speaker 3: well now you can start your application for ANS, and
Speaker 3: it's going to take a while. So I was like,
Speaker 3: all right, well, I have to find a job in
Speaker 3: the interim. So they stashed me in the ops shop
Speaker 3: for the regiment for a little bit, and the monitor
Speaker 3: the detailer branch manager which you call it in the army,
Speaker 3: but the guy who cuts you orders, it's like, hey,
Speaker 3: I can't they're deploying to Afghanistan RCT their regiment is
Speaker 3: you're not, So I need to cut your orders somewhere
Speaker 3: else while you square all this stuff away. So I
Speaker 3: got PCA orders to the School of Infantry at Camp Pendleton.
Speaker 3: I show up there as I'm getting my invitation to
Speaker 3: go to the selection. So I show up and I'm like, hey,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna be your XO for the Infantry Training Battalion
Speaker 3: and also I'm going to go away for forty five days,
Speaker 3: and then at the end of this year, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm up for orders to somewhere else, probably.
Speaker 1: I and so tell us about assessment and selection.
Speaker 2: What was that experience, Like, that's a good question.
Speaker 3: Because a lot of ans, we relies on novelty in
Speaker 3: order to get good reads on people, So the general
Speaker 3: things that happen there they don't want to talk about. However,
Speaker 3: I will say that allegedly after I finished, the woman
Speaker 3: that I was married to at the time said would
Speaker 3: you do it again?
Speaker 2: And I said absolutely not.
Speaker 3: Now I'm like, of course I would do it again, right,
Speaker 3: And occasionally I will go back to help them out
Speaker 3: with ans, And it's only like now ten or fifteen
Speaker 3: the years later aultmost that I'll hear things and then
Speaker 3: in my mind I'll think, like, here's some of the
Speaker 3: cadre I talk about this candidate mess this thing up,
Speaker 3: and I'll be like, oh, that must be new. And
Speaker 3: it's only then that I realized, no, no, I also
Speaker 3: did that task. I just don't remember it because the
Speaker 3: stress level is so high that some of these memories don't.
Speaker 1: Encode and they're throwing Like when you say novelty, they're
Speaker 1: like putting you in scenarios that take you outside your
Speaker 1: comfort zone.
Speaker 3: Basically, yeah, so the stress phases you know everybody uses.
Speaker 3: Land navigation is a great tool because it's sort of
Speaker 3: self correcting if.
Speaker 2: You if you have a good sense of geography.
Speaker 3: It's a simple task that should be simple to accomplish,
Speaker 3: and it's hard because of the terrain and the distances,
Speaker 3: and so it's self correcting. Like if you choose bad routes,
Speaker 3: it becomes apparent because you don't make your times and
Speaker 3: all that stuff. So land navigation is a piece, and
Speaker 3: then there's all these other things that come up that
Speaker 3: you weren't prepared for. You didn't know you were going
Speaker 3: to get tested on. And I really liked how in
Speaker 3: the instruction phase basically like med school, where it's see it,
Speaker 3: so see it, do it, teach it is med school,
Speaker 3: And that was basically how it was. So you know,
Speaker 3: like an ivy, like you see somebody doing it. Okay,
Speaker 3: here's your fake arm. Practice it, all right, turn to
Speaker 3: your buddy stick them. I'm like, all right, let's see
Speaker 3: how this goes.
Speaker 1: And so you make it through assessment and selection and
Speaker 1: then there must be the whole train up process. It
Speaker 1: must have been pretty cool. Now you're getting to do
Speaker 1: commando's stuff right.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 3: So so the Marine Corps had a little bit of
Speaker 3: a pause there as well, because even though I passed ans,
Speaker 3: They're like, ah, but you you still you still owe
Speaker 3: us some time here at Camp Pendleton. So I had
Speaker 3: to wait. I had to defer for a year to
Speaker 3: go to OTC. So I did and then went to
Speaker 3: OTC and it was it.
Speaker 2: Was fantastic, Like, I mean really really hard work.
Speaker 3: I think in a year I had seventeen non consecutive
Speaker 3: days off. It was all almost all new and all challenging,
Speaker 3: and no feedback, almost no feedback. So to me, like
Speaker 3: somebody who strives or thrives on criticism or feedback or
Speaker 3: whatever it is or validation if I'm doing it well,
Speaker 3: like that was difficult.
Speaker 2: It's like did I do a good job or did
Speaker 2: I not do a good job?
Speaker 3: Like I need to know what the ham sandwich is
Speaker 3: that what does it look like that you're looking for?
Speaker 3: So I could produce it and I did pretty well
Speaker 3: at the Captain's course. So it's like I know the doctrine.
Speaker 3: If what you want is a ham sandwich, I can
Speaker 3: do that.
Speaker 2: I can do.
Speaker 3: You know, light infantry combat brigade tactics. You're not asking
Speaker 3: for that, So I'm stepping outside of that comfort zone.
Speaker 2: But you know, this is so nebulous, and they're like,
Speaker 2: just well, what do you think? I'm like, I don't know.
Speaker 3: You tell me, is this a good idea or a
Speaker 3: bad idea?
Speaker 2: I have? You know, I'm a straight leg dude.
Speaker 3: Basically I have no concept of of you know, if
Speaker 3: this is good or not.
Speaker 2: They're like, y, you use your imagination, Like, all right,
Speaker 2: well then we'll do it this way.
Speaker 1: And that was usually good for them.
Speaker 2: GOT mean apparently yeah, they like that.
Speaker 1: They like the creativity.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: And I you know, you would learn from your classmates
Speaker 3: because some of them had had there are other courses
Speaker 3: that you can take that can help prepare you for for.
Speaker 2: Some of that work. I had none of them, and
Speaker 2: so you know, it was all OJT for me.
Speaker 3: And then you know, even within that that class I
Speaker 3: could see that rookie mistakes that I had made in
Speaker 3: the beginning, I was no longer making them at the end.
Speaker 1: Is this mostly like human stuff that you're working on?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Close target reconnaissance.
Speaker 1: Work and what is you know, do you know what
Speaker 1: I mean? You have to have some conception of like
Speaker 1: the job you're training for, like what is the actual
Speaker 1: position that you're going to be doing.
Speaker 3: So at A and S I had no idea. I
Speaker 3: had none, really, And then when I got to OTC,
Speaker 3: I started to get a sense of what the job
Speaker 3: would be if I was the person, if I was
Speaker 3: the operator on the ground, And they were starved for
Speaker 3: officers at the time, so it started to become a
Speaker 3: little bit more clear to me that what I was
Speaker 3: going to do is going to be.
Speaker 2: A troop commander.
Speaker 3: And so while while I could also be a trigger
Speaker 3: puller or humbe driver or whatever, more likely than not
Speaker 3: I would get staffed into task force positions.
Speaker 1: And this is kind of I can't remember if we
Speaker 1: mentioned it here, but it's kind of interesting that the
Speaker 1: Marine Corps kind of suggested that you go this route
Speaker 1: instead of going to the other army unit that they
Speaker 1: felt you would have like better command time in this one.
Speaker 3: I think it's sort of like rewind all the way
Speaker 3: back to the beginning. When you grow up speaking the
Speaker 3: three languages and your parents are immigrants, there's a preference
Speaker 3: to send you to one place over the other if
Speaker 3: you desire, So the question to me is like, do
Speaker 3: you want to be a super soldier? But in the
Speaker 3: reality is that if you go there, you're really just
Speaker 3: going to be a true handler in some respects. Or
Speaker 3: you could go to this other place where there's the
Speaker 3: possibility that you could also be the guy that operates.
Speaker 3: And so to me that was a little bit of
Speaker 3: a no brainer. Even though I didn't know what the
Speaker 3: job was.
Speaker 2: I was like, let me do that.
Speaker 1: And after you finished OTC, like, what was it like
Speaker 1: when you took this position? When you arrived there?
Speaker 2: It was a little bit of a shock.
Speaker 3: And so the standard line that I used when I
Speaker 3: would go forward to talk to people at the Tea
Speaker 3: sox the theater special Operation Commands is I would they
Speaker 3: would all want to be read into the unit and
Speaker 3: the SAP and all this stuff, and I would say,
Speaker 3: you know, ninety five percent of what we do and
Speaker 3: then that last five percent is uninteresting. And also I
Speaker 3: borrow the line from the Disney movie Aladin, It's like
Speaker 3: we have infinite cosmic power in an ADBD living space,
Speaker 3: Like the breadth of the things that we can do
Speaker 3: is massive, and you know, the actual what we can't
Speaker 3: what we're allowed to do is very very constrained. That
Speaker 3: came up a couple of times because this was during
Speaker 3: the Obama administration, and so there were two events which
Speaker 3: I can't remember the dates of, but I definitely got
Speaker 3: called into the Office US on a Saturday in the
Speaker 3: snow to sit down and come up with and we
Speaker 3: called it like the Chinese food menu of like what
Speaker 3: can we do to strike back because the president's embarrassed
Speaker 3: by what Sulivani said about you know him, So what
Speaker 3: are our options? It's like okay, like you tell me
Speaker 3: like no limits, right, yes, no limits. It's like okay, man,
Speaker 3: we're gonna be here all day because yeah, here are
Speaker 3: of things that I can do, you know, from from
Speaker 3: A to Z. And then we're going to start adding
Speaker 3: numbers to these things because we're in all of these places.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: And we generated the list and then nothing was selected.
Speaker 3: It's like no, thank You'll.
Speaker 2: Just have water. The other was the Syria gas attack.
Speaker 3: Now that I think about, it was that the redline
Speaker 3: had been crossed, and then the question was I think
Speaker 3: I've just been in the front leaning rest there because
Speaker 3: we leaned so far forward. So we called in and
Speaker 3: it's like, hey, that's it's my area. What have you
Speaker 3: got that can go assess all this stuff, go find everything.
Speaker 3: So we got ready and then no call came, and
Speaker 3: then by seventy two hours later, you know, like, hey,
Speaker 3: our information is probably no longer accurate and I don't
Speaker 3: know that I can get anybody.
Speaker 2: In there now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember when that happened, and there was some
Speaker 1: movement that they like Rangeer regiment, like they were like
Speaker 1: going to drop the hammer for a minute there, but
Speaker 1: then yeah, Obama decided not to do.
Speaker 3: It, which is why it's interesting to hear the guys
Speaker 3: talking about it now, Like Mariskalabama, that was his time
Speaker 3: frame too, and I was I wasn't on the box
Speaker 3: in a bottom bad too, but yeah, so he allegedly
Speaker 3: gave the green light on that, and then what is
Speaker 3: unknown is there was also a German ship that was
Speaker 3: taken by Somali pirates, so the Boxer for a brief
Speaker 3: period of time had a bunch of German commandos on
Speaker 3: it as well. And then as the Germans are briefing
Speaker 3: their chains of command about how this is going to
Speaker 3: go down, I think they do the standard army of like, hey,
Speaker 3: we expect ten percent casualties, and the BBSs. You know,
Speaker 3: the number escalates to I don't know, fifteen or whatever,
Speaker 3: and their chain of commands started to balk a little
Speaker 3: bit like, well, well, you know, casualties, Like no the
Speaker 3: Americans is they did this with no casualties, No problem.
Speaker 2: This is different.
Speaker 3: You know, it's the big deck from what I hear,
Speaker 3: and this is hearsay. The way that kind of went
Speaker 3: down is the Germans asked the President, hey, you know,
Speaker 3: what do you think. He's like, I don't know, it's
Speaker 3: your ship, and so they kind of took that as
Speaker 3: don't don't do the strike, gotcha.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's kind of interesting what you say about the
Speaker 1: the Chinese food menu because I've had, as I understand it,
Speaker 1: even when the President signs a finding for the CIA
Speaker 1: and it has all this stuff on there from like
Speaker 1: cyber warfare to assassination. But then it's like, hey, hold on, Skippy,
Speaker 1: you got to read the fine print down here where
Speaker 1: it says if you want to use any of this,
Speaker 1: you have to go back to the president and get permission.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean, I don't know what your opinion is,
Speaker 1: but I mean, is there like Jason Bourn really is
Speaker 1: not a thing like that's a fantasy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a fantasy. There's no Treadstone project, you know,
Speaker 3: to my knowledge, there's nobody who walks into the cafe
Speaker 3: and knows the numbers of all of the vehicles they
Speaker 3: are in the parking lots. Like I mean, if you
Speaker 3: have that kind of idactic memory, you're that autistic, then great,
Speaker 3: I mean maybe we can make use of that, but
Speaker 3: then we also don't have the charisma if you actually
Speaker 3: do a job.
Speaker 1: Well, speaking of which, because of your background, did you
Speaker 1: ever do any work in your up sitting in a
Speaker 1: cafe smoking a cigarette speaking Lithuanian.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 3: Near the end of my tenure was the invasion of CROMEA,
Speaker 3: so of course the Baltic States got very nervous and
Speaker 3: SOCPAC hosted a few working groups, and I got sent
Speaker 3: out there since Europe was my AAR or part of
Speaker 3: my AAR, and kind of the questions came up, like well,
Speaker 3: what have you got that can help there? And I
Speaker 3: said nothing, but if you want something built there, I
Speaker 3: can build it. It's going to take you about two years,
Speaker 3: and you need to tell me now because the guy
Speaker 3: who's going to do it is retiring.
Speaker 1: Right. Did any of that go forward as far as
Speaker 1: building like clandestine infrastructure for them.
Speaker 2: That's my knowledge.
Speaker 1: No, that's too bad.
Speaker 3: There may be and you know, I just may have
Speaker 3: been on the outside of the gate by the time
Speaker 3: it started to happen.
Speaker 2: HM.
Speaker 1: So I take it you did two three years as
Speaker 1: troop commander and before we move on to the next thing,
Speaker 1: anything any final thoughts on that period of your career,
Speaker 1: anything that's interesting that you're able to talk about.
Speaker 3: Not not really the only interesting things are the prices
Speaker 3: that are uninteresting. How the Marine Corps really doesn't like
Speaker 3: guys that go and become special and so uh ironically, like,
Speaker 3: as soon as I finished OTC, they're like, hey, you're
Speaker 3: going to get orders to Command and Staff School.
Speaker 2: I was like, no, I'm not.
Speaker 3: There's no way, Like I didn't just finish this program
Speaker 3: to get yanked into, you know, yanked over to Quantico
Speaker 3: for for Command Staff College.
Speaker 2: And I think.
Speaker 3: This is a problem that we often have as we
Speaker 3: have to promorphize you know, big Army or Marine Corps,
Speaker 3: like the Marine Corps has knew No, it doesn't, it
Speaker 3: is it's not an entity. There's somebody who wrote this
Speaker 3: piece of paper directing this scene to happen. I just
Speaker 3: need to go find that person and talk to them.
Speaker 3: And so I got myself TDY to Quantico, found the
Speaker 3: guy who wrote the order that was going to send
Speaker 3: me to school, and I said, what I needed you
Speaker 3: to get off of this list because I know Person
Speaker 3: X and Person why aren't on this list and like, yeah,
Speaker 3: we scratched them off because this guy needs to get
Speaker 3: back into the cockpit and this guy's over at Marsok.
Speaker 3: And I was like, I'm at Marsok. You know, can
Speaker 3: you a freaking break, like scratch my name off the list?
Speaker 3: So they did. I did still have to do distance
Speaker 3: learning program, and because I got enrolled into that, I
Speaker 3: got pulled off of going to be the task force
Speaker 3: commander in Afghanistan. I just ended up sending someone else
Speaker 3: that comes up later as I talked to guys that
Speaker 3: got out, because I would make the comment now that
Speaker 3: I was so frustrated that I did Command and staff
Speaker 3: it's a waste of time because I didn't end up
Speaker 3: becoming a lietenant coronel or going to a staff. I
Speaker 3: could have been the task force commander within a year
Speaker 3: or two years of.
Speaker 2: Having gotten out.
Speaker 3: Now I would say, well, command of staff was still
Speaker 3: a waste of time, but I could have been my
Speaker 3: son's soccer coach, or I should have put work into
Speaker 3: who I am that's going to persist after the uniform
Speaker 3: is gone, and I didn't.
Speaker 1: And because of that, where you getting to the point
Speaker 1: now where like you're kind of done with the Marine Corps.
Speaker 3: Well, So in order to work for that organization, I
Speaker 3: had to be a geographic bachelor. The woman that I
Speaker 3: was married to at the time didn't want to leave
Speaker 3: her job and travel to the East Coast, so I
Speaker 3: left her and the kids just north of Camp Hamilton.
Speaker 3: And then when the Marine Corps was calling back and saying, hey,
Speaker 3: you need to go back to regular infantry, I said,
Speaker 3: that's fine. I'm more than happy to at least send
Speaker 3: me to Camp Pendleton, that's where, you know the time
Speaker 3: my wife and kids were.
Speaker 2: And they said, no, you're going.
Speaker 3: To go to Twin I Palms, which is the Marine's
Speaker 3: version of NTC. So at that point I was like, no,
Speaker 3: thank you, I'm just going to take again. The Obama
Speaker 3: administration offered early retirement, so I took it, and then
Speaker 3: was the I got the lived experience of how when
Speaker 3: you decide to get out because that is so contrary
Speaker 3: to the value set of the people staying in you
Speaker 3: kind of become persona non grada.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And even now, as I talked to veterans, I've lived
Speaker 3: on both sides of that. So if you go back
Speaker 3: to my first company commands to go into outside of Fallujah,
Speaker 3: Like I had an e sergeant that was literally the
Speaker 3: best sergeant in the division because he'd won this Super
Speaker 3: Squad challenge, he'd done his two tours. Even though we
Speaker 3: were going back to the same place, all he wanted
Speaker 3: to do is go to Texas and open up a
Speaker 3: business that was a fitness gym slash strip club. I
Speaker 3: don't know how it's gonna make it work, but you
Speaker 3: thought you could make it work.
Speaker 1: God bless.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I went through all of the same, you know,
Speaker 3: all of the pressure that I could put on him
Speaker 3: to make that enlistment, guilt tripping him, like, hey, we're
Speaker 3: going back to the same place.
Speaker 2: If you don't, if you don't also go, people are
Speaker 2: gonna die. You know the area.
Speaker 3: Don't you want your guys to succeed, Like you've got
Speaker 3: to come with us, reenlist, re enlist, And good for
Speaker 3: him that he didn't. And then I realized like, oh,
Speaker 3: this is this is a problem of ours and we're
Speaker 3: a lot of what have you done for me lately?
Speaker 3: I also saw that in Baghdad when there was a
Speaker 3: couple of guys is that you know, they were partying
Speaker 3: at the Al Rasheet hotel and we're not in the
Speaker 3: place where they're supposed to be when the when the
Speaker 3: rockets hit, and so their commander was so embarrassed that
Speaker 3: he basically you know, wrecked their careers and would give
Speaker 3: them the combat action ribbon. So they all left the
Speaker 3: Marine Corps. It's like, wow, you know, this is what
Speaker 3: we do to to, you know, allegedly our brothers. And
Speaker 3: now at that point I was feeling it, you know,
Speaker 3: feeling that weight on myself, like my six colonel was
Speaker 3: treating me like a liar about how I was trying
Speaker 3: to separate, trying to try to check my story with
Speaker 3: the other Marines at the unit.
Speaker 2: This doesn't make sense, totally makes sense. And so it
Speaker 2: was a.
Speaker 3: Little bit of a that seems to be common enough
Speaker 3: of a theme. If it's not ubiquitous, it's at least,
Speaker 3: you know, the preponderance of guys that it out the
Speaker 3: departure is not pretty and so that sets you into
Speaker 3: that six months to a year time frame post service
Speaker 3: where you're kind of lost. And so we at the
Speaker 3: VA that's the danger zone, I think where we see
Speaker 3: a lot of guys that start with substance abuse, major
Speaker 3: depressive episodes. Most divorces will happen within those first six
Speaker 3: months because you lose everything. You lose your sense of purpose,
Speaker 3: who you are, identity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the military kind of true to you like a
Speaker 1: leper when you're getting out. But expanding on that, so
Speaker 1: you begin the retirement process. What was your transition like
Speaker 1: out of the Marine Corps?
Speaker 2: It was like immediate, you know, I got my orders.
Speaker 3: Maybe maybe it was in the springtime, and so I
Speaker 3: thought in every way that I could to try to
Speaker 3: modify and change them, find.
Speaker 2: Loopholes, you name it.
Speaker 3: And then I think I basically had two months two separate.
Speaker 3: The other thing that the Marine Corps did, which was
Speaker 3: so awesome was they that's when they audit your record,
Speaker 3: and that's when they decided that my pay entry base
Speaker 3: date was wrong and so they had been overpaying me
Speaker 3: for fifteen and a half years and so they just
Speaker 3: stopped paying me.
Speaker 2: What they're like, you owe the government.
Speaker 3: We overpaid you sixty thousand dollars, so we're just not
Speaker 3: going to pay you for your last two months of service.
Speaker 3: And by the way, here's your bill for what we
Speaker 3: overpaid you. Luckily, I ended up, you know, filing.
Speaker 2: Paperwork that said it's no pay due.
Speaker 3: Like, hey man, I didn't intentionally, you know, defraud the government.
Speaker 3: Like I had no idea that you know, the extra
Speaker 3: five dollars you were giving me for paycheck or whatever
Speaker 3: would amount to sixty grand at the.
Speaker 2: End of my career.
Speaker 3: But you know, for for the months of October November,
Speaker 3: I was like, where's my paycheck?
Speaker 2: And it just didn't exist.
Speaker 1: They just cut you off, like mommy and Daddy say
Speaker 1: no more, your allowance is canceled.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So with that kind of departure, it's like, go after yourself, Marines.
Speaker 3: And for a while it was like, I will, I
Speaker 3: will never work with Marines again because I couldn't I
Speaker 3: couldn't believe it that this brotherhood would do this to,
Speaker 3: you know, an alleged brother.
Speaker 2: But that's so went yep.
Speaker 1: But years later, when they need you again, you're a brother.
Speaker 1: Suddenly we're family, right, We're family.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And uh so, you know, at the beginning, I would
Speaker 3: say as a contractor ice like I wouldn't work with marines.
Speaker 3: And then even as a psychologists like, I prefer not
Speaker 3: to work with marines except for people that I knew
Speaker 3: before I got out, And so I would work with
Speaker 3: Recon because some of my lieutenants went over there and
Speaker 3: I would do you know, if they asked for a favor,
Speaker 3: I would do a favor. And even then, you know like, ah,
Speaker 3: there's a recompleatent commander who went after those two, a
Speaker 3: Recon company commander, and he's asking me like, hey, you know,
Speaker 3: what are the what are the black ops that we
Speaker 3: can do on this view?
Speaker 2: Like what are the black ops we can do.
Speaker 3: In in Southeast Asia? I was like none, Like they're
Speaker 3: not gonna nobody's gonna have you do that. And oh,
Speaker 3: by the way, like where's all the ope that these
Speaker 3: two guys I know before you did, like they prepped
Speaker 3: your battlefield, they gave you all of these things. Oh no, no,
Speaker 3: you know, like we're going to do something different. And
Speaker 3: it's like, oh, I see, I'm also guilty of this,
Speaker 3: Like you can't teach the marine anything. They were all
Speaker 3: experiential learners, so I can tell you to do the thing,
Speaker 3: but you're going to do it. No, I'm going to
Speaker 3: do it my way. And then oh, my way doesn't work.
Speaker 2: Right now, I'll come over. You're gonna try your way.
Speaker 1: And what were you doing as a contractor at that time?
Speaker 3: I would contract for my old unit, either as a
Speaker 3: tactical instructor or as a role player.
Speaker 1: Cool. And at the same time, you are becoming acquainted
Speaker 1: with being a full time or part time dad.
Speaker 2: Mister mom, yeah, daddy uber.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's how I feel now my daughter's a teenager.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so yep. It was a drastic difference. I think
Speaker 3: I talk about it in the book how I went
Speaker 3: from briefing sack her on a kill capture mission in
Speaker 3: his aor probably early of twenty fourteen to December twenty fourteen.
Speaker 3: My only responsibility is wiping my two year olds?
Speaker 1: But how is that going for you? You know psychologically
Speaker 1: that like, this is a big, big adjustment that you're making.
Speaker 3: It was a massive adjustment, which is when the reasons
Speaker 3: why you know, I got drawn to write this adjustment
Speaker 3: stuff into the book Warrior Withdrawal, And you know I
Speaker 3: was trying to figure out because I mean, everything was
Speaker 3: gone basically, so the fifteen and a half years of
Speaker 3: service and no more, thank you for your service. And also,
Speaker 3: you know, active duty keeps on active duty ing. And
Speaker 3: I saw this one comment on LinkedIn the other day
Speaker 3: where some person writes in that she's been out for
Speaker 3: a year and her company commander hasn't called her once,
Speaker 3: like well, of.
Speaker 2: Course, and I laughed at it. I was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's that.
Speaker 3: Maybe that's a problem, you know, like that they just
Speaker 3: don't care about you anymore because they had they got
Speaker 3: to keep the army keeps marching along, right as the
Speaker 3: song goes. So twenty fifteen, I was mister mom for
Speaker 3: a year. The woman that I was married to you
Speaker 3: at the time. You know, she could increase her travel,
Speaker 3: so she did do that. And then by twenty sixteen
Speaker 3: I was like, I got to do something, and so
Speaker 3: contracting opportunities came up, and as long as there are
Speaker 3: acona Is based, I would take them. And it was
Speaker 3: on one of these contracting gigs that I chatted with
Speaker 3: my op psych from the unit. I had a candidate
Speaker 3: that I was like, Hey, this guy's a narcissist.
Speaker 2: How do I write that up? You know?
Speaker 3: And he's like like execure, you go write it up
Speaker 3: this way that way, And we had a longer discussion
Speaker 3: about how kind of I was in this these doldrums.
Speaker 3: Having gotten out, I feel more like myself on these contracts,
Speaker 3: you know. So that's why it's like a withdrawal symptom.
Speaker 3: And he's like, you should be a psych or special
Speaker 3: operations units. Like he said, they'll talk to you in
Speaker 3: a way that they'll never talk to me, because you've
Speaker 3: been to the coronet, you've gone through a and as,
Speaker 3: you've done.
Speaker 2: All of these things.
Speaker 3: So I was like, all right, write me the recommendation,
Speaker 3: and I started school and then.
Speaker 2: Six years later I was done.
Speaker 3: Four years of academics, a year of internship, and then
Speaker 3: and then post talk at the VA.
Speaker 1: What as what was kind of like your speciality when
Speaker 1: you went to psych school? Was it always, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: an idea that you were going to work with veterans or.
Speaker 2: Yeah? So initially that's that's what my goal was.
Speaker 3: I had gone through the SERGS, the FBI's Crisis Response
Speaker 3: Groups Hostage Negotiator course, because I figured I would do
Speaker 3: that well.
Speaker 2: I did actually try.
Speaker 3: While I was mister Mom to volunteer to be a
Speaker 3: hostage negotiator here in southern California, and I got turned
Speaker 3: down because basically that's nobody's primary gig. In fact, the FBI,
Speaker 3: there's only like six or seven or so full time negotiators.
Speaker 1: We had one of Barry Nosner.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for everybody else, it's a it's an ancillary duty,
Speaker 3: so secondary job, right, So for the you know, like
Speaker 3: the local townships. I was like, hey, I will, I
Speaker 3: will come to your negotiator. You know, you don't even
Speaker 3: have to pay me. I've got a pension. I just
Speaker 3: you know, this is the work that I want to do. Uh,
Speaker 3: like I can't because of the liability reasons. So that
Speaker 3: also sort of pushed me into the doctor route almost
Speaker 3: as soon as I started psych school, though, that kind
Speaker 3: of soft guy, not yes special operations guy took over
Speaker 3: where you're always trying to get to the.
Speaker 2: Left of the boom.
Speaker 3: So, you know, with with special operations, it was all
Speaker 3: right before the i D blows up, and then before
Speaker 3: the i D gets implanted, and then before the hole
Speaker 3: is dug, and then before the i D is made,
Speaker 3: and then you know, before the guy buys the parts
Speaker 3: of the i D. That's how we get to the
Speaker 3: left of the boom and in psych school, I was
Speaker 3: like to me, that means I should be a child psychologist,
Speaker 3: so help people out before they develop all of these problems,
Speaker 3: because the adults are fully baked cakes and I don't
Speaker 3: want to unbake the cake now it's impossible, So just
Speaker 3: give me the raw materials of the kids and then
Speaker 3: we'll bake a good cake. So for three years, for
Speaker 3: three practical years, I was a child psyche working with
Speaker 3: at risk teenagers at the Children's Hospital of Orange County
Speaker 3: and another intensive outpatient program with UCLA for kids that
Speaker 3: are teenagers kids that have OCD, and then over in
Speaker 3: San Bernardino County and out patient clinic.
Speaker 1: This was your post doc work.
Speaker 3: So that was practical work and internship in San Bernardino County.
Speaker 3: And then when it came time for postdoc, I had
Speaker 3: gone to a buddy's retirement ceremony and paddle pass I
Speaker 3: mentioned that kind of or actually I mentioned that exactly
Speaker 3: in the.
Speaker 2: In the books introduction out.
Speaker 3: While I'm there, the thoughts of this warrior withdrawal piece,
Speaker 3: like that missing thing kept coming back, and I was
Speaker 3: back among all these veterans and spouses, and I was
Speaker 3: like I feel like I need to something is calling
Speaker 3: me to write this thing, and so I took a
Speaker 3: residency postdoc year at the VA to sort of flesh
Speaker 3: out my hypothesis, which was largely based off of doctor
Speaker 3: freeze work operator syndrome. So at the time, I had
Speaker 3: thought what I went through was because I was an operator,
Speaker 3: and so my hypothesis was, Okay, it's going to be
Speaker 3: the same. It's the TBI, it's the constant deployment, it's
Speaker 3: all this stuff that's caused me to have this difficulty transitioning.
Speaker 3: And so I went to the VIA to confirm that assumption,
Speaker 3: and then very quickly learned that's not the case at all,
Speaker 3: because right off the bat I started to get veterans
Speaker 3: that had not gone to combat, and then veterans who
Speaker 3: had not deployed, and you know, all the way down
Speaker 3: to I had one soldier who was separated at a
Speaker 3: t and the symptoms were the same. So the loss
Speaker 3: of identity, loss of sense of purpose, why bother getting
Speaker 3: out of bed, communications issues, anger management problems, reliance on
Speaker 3: maladaptive coping skills like substance abuse, video games, isolation. So
Speaker 3: the way I all of those tend to be learned
Speaker 3: in the military because they're adaptive or effective. So, like
Speaker 3: my tour at Okinawa in two thousand because or two
Speaker 3: thousand and one, nothing's going on. So the joke about
Speaker 3: Okinawa tours is you either become an alcoholic or a
Speaker 3: pete stud and then some people like me try to
Speaker 3: do both.
Speaker 2: There's nothing to do, so you just try to.
Speaker 3: Fast forward through the deployment because there's an end date,
Speaker 3: and so if I can sleep twice as long, then
Speaker 3: the deployment's half as long, and so I'll get home
Speaker 3: as fast as I can. And then, unfortunately, when you
Speaker 3: get home usually it reverses and it's like, oh, I
Speaker 3: can't wait to be deployed right right, And so now
Speaker 3: you have a countdown to how can I get in
Speaker 3: this next deployment? And we fast forward through time with
Speaker 3: video games, substance abuse, you know, you name it. Unfortunately,
Speaker 3: when you get out out and now you're a veteran,
Speaker 3: what am I fast forwarding to? There's no I'm just
Speaker 3: going to fast forward the rest of my life drinking
Speaker 3: default not to fall asleep and sleep. Well, I'm going
Speaker 3: to drink through the weekend and go back to work
Speaker 3: Monday to get to Friday to drink through the weekend
Speaker 3: because I don't want to deal with anything. So I
Speaker 3: saw all of that at all levels, and so my
Speaker 3: hypothesis shifted to basic training. Boot camp is sufficient enough
Speaker 3: to drag you into this warrior culture. And I absolutely
Speaker 3: think that there's a significant cultural component to it. It's
Speaker 3: one of the smallest cultures we have in the country.
Speaker 3: So few people are in it, and it's so tightly
Speaker 3: bound that when you're out of it, you struggle with
Speaker 3: trying to be assimilated back into the civilian culture.
Speaker 1: I've described it in the past that it's like, especially
Speaker 1: for what you did, that you were part of a
Speaker 1: sub sub subculture that probably there were certain things that
Speaker 1: you were read onto that thirty five people in the
Speaker 1: entire world were read onto, and so it becomes like
Speaker 1: this increasingly small circle of like people who can relate
Speaker 1: to your experiences.
Speaker 3: That is absolutely true, and that I noticed that last November.
Speaker 3: In this November, when I went back out to contract
Speaker 3: for my own unit, and I'm sitting at a table
Speaker 3: and it's one of the few places where I can
Speaker 3: speak completely unguarded because everybody there and there's I think
Speaker 3: less than three hundred of US or something like that
Speaker 3: that have completed the entire thing. So to be in
Speaker 3: a room with forty or fifty of them or just
Speaker 3: sitting at a table with five or six of them
Speaker 3: is is it's really distressing and in a good place
Speaker 3: to be, however, because I was seeing the same types
Speaker 3: of communications issues. You know, the you know, it's it's
Speaker 3: the guy that was the cook or the the motor
Speaker 3: tea guy that's walking around town with you know, the
Speaker 3: US Army veteran hat and then the you know, the
Speaker 3: nine Line Apparel T shirt and then they don't tread
Speaker 3: on me sticker on the on the back or the
Speaker 3: entire DT two fourteen on the back of their pickup,
Speaker 3: and it's this is the identification friend or foe. It's like,
Speaker 3: don't mess with me because I would see all of that.
Speaker 3: It's also I f f because I want veterans to
Speaker 3: approach because again that's when I that's the withdrawal symptom.
Speaker 3: That's how I know it's a withdrawal symptom because when
Speaker 3: you chat with another veteran, all of that goes away.
Speaker 3: Same is me sitting at that table with all my
Speaker 3: unit bodies. It's like all of that you know, the anger, everything,
Speaker 3: all of that goes away.
Speaker 2: It's like I could just be me again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's incredible. And one of the things you mentioned
Speaker 1: to me earlier, and I think you touched on it
Speaker 1: a little bit, was the sort of difference between PTSD
Speaker 1: and adjustment that there is this process of transition and
Speaker 1: adjusting out of that military culture which is sort of
Speaker 1: separate from PTSD. You need not have gone through some
Speaker 1: sort of traumatic combat event.
Speaker 2: Right, So.
Speaker 3: Had the opportunity to kind of really speak quickly through
Speaker 3: this at Austin for America. What I and the way
Speaker 3: that I do is I just go through the symptoms.
Speaker 3: So with post traumatic stress disorder, you know, as you
Speaker 3: were talking to doctor Free right now at the VA,
Speaker 3: we don't really even bother asking about the trauma. I mean,
Speaker 3: we try to get the index trauma, but the post
Speaker 3: traumatic stress Disorder checklist doesn't bother. It only asks about
Speaker 3: the other four symptoms. So those major symptoms, so those
Speaker 3: are re experiencing, so nightmares, flashbacks, that kind of thing,
Speaker 3: you know. The second one is avoidance, so I don't
Speaker 3: go to do the things that caused me to remember
Speaker 3: the traumatic experience. The third thing is negative thoughts about
Speaker 3: self negative emotions, So you know, I can't be happy, right,
Speaker 3: I didn't do the best that I could or could
Speaker 3: have done better. And then the last one is hypervigilance
Speaker 3: or hyper arousal, so is there a trauma? And then
Speaker 3: those those four symptoms with the PCL only measuring those
Speaker 3: those four So when I looked at that for myself,
Speaker 3: it's like, okay, well, yeah, I mean I was around
Speaker 3: death and dying.
Speaker 2: Check.
Speaker 3: I have a whole bunch of veterans that weren't. We
Speaker 3: have the same symptoms, so re experiencing. Do I have nightmares? Lashbacks?
Speaker 2: Now? I don't have those, you know, not at all.
Speaker 3: So it's like, okay, well maybe mine's just a little
Speaker 3: bit different. The avoidance piece, I didn't avoid at all.
Speaker 3: I had the affinity for Like I said before, I
Speaker 3: will seek out veterans. I feel more like myself when
Speaker 3: I talk to veterans. Most of my friends are veterans,
Speaker 3: so I'm not avoiding those things that might remind me
Speaker 3: of the trauma. I go to Camp Penalton. You know,
Speaker 3: I live close enough where I can hear the art fire,
Speaker 3: So it's like, Okay, if I don't avoid, then I
Speaker 3: don't meet that criteria either, and so then the negative,
Speaker 3: negative cognitions, negative emotions, and then the hyper arousal. It's like,
Speaker 3: well that was my training. So we don't call it
Speaker 3: hyper arousal. We call it good situational awareness. And if
Speaker 3: you have good situational awareness and you spot the ied
Speaker 3: and you save people's lives, we give you a medal
Speaker 3: for that. And so what we don't realize then afterwards
Speaker 3: is if you don't train that away, the way that
Speaker 3: your brain works is it can modify that. So now
Speaker 3: I'm on the highway and I'm driving, and so I'm
Speaker 3: hyper alert at all the other drivers. And then when
Speaker 3: I get home and I haven't had a car accident,
Speaker 3: that's sufficient for my brain to reinforce well, that's because
Speaker 3: you were. You were hyper alert, So continue to be
Speaker 3: hyper alert. Or you know the classic one of I
Speaker 3: have to have my back to the wall when I
Speaker 3: go to the restaurant on you know, because somebody may
Speaker 3: come in and shoot up the place. Well, that almost
Speaker 3: never happens, and yet you're going to go home and say, well,
Speaker 3: but if it did, I was ready. So my brain
Speaker 3: is internally rewarding itself for maintaining that high level of
Speaker 3: hyper arousal, and that's why sometimes you have to get
Speaker 3: a reset on that, which is like the SGB or
Speaker 3: some other forms of therapy. So when you put all
Speaker 3: that together, it's like, Okay, then if it's not PTSD,
Speaker 3: maybe it's just the adjustment, which is kind of a
Speaker 3: more nebulous diagnosis, which is, hey, you have physical symptoms,
Speaker 3: emotional symptoms, you know, maybe.
Speaker 2: Some somatic symptoms.
Speaker 3: The problem with adjustment disorders is usually tied to you,
Speaker 3: all right, well, six months after whatever the adjustment is gone,
Speaker 3: it's no longer adjustment disorder now, it's like it's something else.
Speaker 3: So if you lost your leg in combat, okay, well,
Speaker 3: for six months you have adjustment disorder, and then if
Speaker 3: you're still sad about it, it's like, okay, well it's
Speaker 3: not adjustment disorder anymore because the leg's gone. That's done
Speaker 3: now it is you're just depressed. And so that didn't
Speaker 3: make sense to me either, because I was still having
Speaker 3: those same challenges ten years after I retired. Man, I
Speaker 3: had like eleven years after retirement now and I'm still
Speaker 3: pulled to do and still contract for my old unit.
Speaker 3: So it's not PTSD. It's not adjustment disorder. The only
Speaker 3: thing that made sense to me was and I talked
Speaker 3: about this in the introduction too. I had a chat
Speaker 3: with a Green Beret buddy in our teamhouse or our
Speaker 3: team room about why do I have to deploy like
Speaker 3: that Afghanistan tour?
Speaker 2: Why did it have to be me?
Speaker 3: Obviously I didn't go, and they sent somebody else, and
Speaker 3: I'm sure they did as good a job as I
Speaker 3: could have, but it had to be me. And he
Speaker 3: felt the same way. And so I said, I feel
Speaker 3: like I'm an addict to patre triotism or something like that,
Speaker 3: like I'm just blindly doing this or something. I don't
Speaker 3: know why jump forward whatever it is eight years and
Speaker 3: now I'm going through the substance abuse disorder symptoms and
Speaker 3: I'm like, all of these fit me if I just
Speaker 3: instead of saying substance, you say.
Speaker 2: Being a warrior.
Speaker 3: So there's eleven symptoms for substance abuse disorder, And when
Speaker 3: I teach a class about warrior withdrawal, I would go
Speaker 3: through all eleven. And I don't try to define it
Speaker 3: for anybody. You say, all right, whatever causes you to
Speaker 3: feel like a warrior, or you label it for yourself
Speaker 3: is it positive reinforcement that I'm tough. Is that what
Speaker 3: I was looking for and that's why I kept climbing
Speaker 3: the spear to be in the toughest, most selective unit.
Speaker 2: I don't know, maybe that's what it was for me.
Speaker 3: But if you take that and then you go through
Speaker 3: the symptoms, is that, okay? Was I deploying more off
Speaker 3: to than was healthy for me? Did I continue to
Speaker 3: deploy even though it was causing me physical harm? And
Speaker 3: you know it was I deploy instead of spending time
Speaker 3: with family, as I spending more time trying to go
Speaker 3: on deployments than is necessary? Was I trying to quit
Speaker 3: deploying and I was not able to? It's like all
Speaker 3: of these are substance that's substance abuse symptoms, and then.
Speaker 2: The final two being tolerance and withdrawal.
Speaker 3: So for me, tolerance was one deployment not enough, Two
Speaker 3: deployments not enough? So I did oif one, two, three, four, five, six,
Speaker 3: seven into eight? Still not enough? How to go to
Speaker 3: special operations?
Speaker 2: Still not enough?
Speaker 3: And then the last symptom is withdrawal, which is when
Speaker 3: you take that substance away. So when you're out of
Speaker 3: the military and you're no longer active duty, you're no
Speaker 3: longer you don't no longer feel like a warrior. You
Speaker 3: have all of these withdrawal problems, which that's what I cataloged,
Speaker 3: is that's the anger management, communications issues, maladaptive coping skills,
Speaker 3: a loss of sense of self, loss of identity.
Speaker 2: Loss of purpose.
Speaker 3: And then as soon as we put you back into
Speaker 3: a warrior event either like a you know, a martiall hobby,
Speaker 3: like when we put you back into an MM agent,
Speaker 3: you become a law enforcement officer and so you have
Speaker 3: a tribe again, and you wear a uniform again, and
Speaker 3: you have a sense of purpose again, and you feel
Speaker 3: more like yourself. Almost all of those things go away.
Speaker 3: So it's like that's how it works with substances as well.
Speaker 3: If you are an alcoholic and we take you off
Speaker 3: of alcohol, you have withdrawal symptoms and a small spit
Speaker 3: of alcohol that we give you back those clear away,
Speaker 3: which is why we use this hair of the dog
Speaker 3: business when you're you know, had a wild night partying,
Speaker 3: and it's like, just take a shot and you'll be regular.
Speaker 3: So when I go through all of the eleven symptoms
Speaker 3: with the veterans that I work with, I asked them hey,
Speaker 3: just keep score. And then at the end I asked them,
Speaker 3: you know, just keep in mind with your score is
Speaker 3: if you have three of those symptoms, you have a
Speaker 3: substance abuse diswater. If it's streen three, it's more than
Speaker 3: streeen three, and six it's you know, in the mild
Speaker 3: moderate range, it's more than six you get into the
Speaker 3: severe range. And then for me, I'm like, I'm at
Speaker 3: eleven of eleven, and so right now I'm like a
Speaker 3: sober warrior. And when I would talk to the Nexus
Speaker 3: guys or the Skills Bridge guys, you know, the d
Speaker 3: D still thinks that the solution is you just need.
Speaker 2: A job when you get out. Like, that's not quite it.
Speaker 3: That's a little bit antiquated unless you just go ahead
Speaker 3: and identify with whatever the job is that you get next.
Speaker 3: If you stick with my substance abuse model, which is
Speaker 3: the only one that seems to fit, the solution has
Speaker 3: to be detox.
Speaker 1: It would be good place.
Speaker 3: So, like, you know, so they're saying, well, that's skills Bridge,
Speaker 3: isn't it, And I'm like, no, it's not, because you
Speaker 3: still pull that guy back and make him do a PFT.
Speaker 3: You still pull him back and make him do all
Speaker 3: of these other things like he's he's not out of
Speaker 3: the military, you're still in the military, or she is
Speaker 3: still in the military. And then oh, by the way,
Speaker 3: when they finish their skills Bridge, there's no guarantee that
Speaker 3: there's a job for them there either. So it's like,
Speaker 3: you know, you may have forestalled something, but that identity
Speaker 3: shift is still coming. So the detox has to be
Speaker 3: zero warrior stuff. And I don't know for how long.
Speaker 3: I do know that it takes thirteen weeks to make
Speaker 3: a marine, you know, basically train marine, and you know
Speaker 3: it takes what ten weeks to make a basically trained
Speaker 3: to eleven bravo, and then we do zero on the
Speaker 3: back end to undo any of that. So somewhere in
Speaker 3: there you have to do that where you have to
Speaker 3: find a way to help somebody get clear of that substance,
Speaker 3: educate them that that's what is happening. So that's what
Speaker 3: I try to do in my groups, so that you
Speaker 3: if you want to go back to it, you go
Speaker 3: in there clear eyed. Otherwise you do your skills Bridge.
Speaker 3: It's like hey, all right, yeah, yeah, we put you
Speaker 3: in rehab and then as soon as you got out
Speaker 3: of rehab. We're like, we're going to a bar and
Speaker 3: we're all going to drink. It's like, ah okay, and
Speaker 3: then we're right.
Speaker 2: Back at it.
Speaker 1: And you've found some success in treating veterans in that nature.
Speaker 3: So it's less of a treatment and more of what
Speaker 3: I try to do is increase I mean, it does,
Speaker 3: it does work, it does reduce symptoms. But more what
Speaker 3: it does I think is it increases someone's openness to therapy. Gotcha,
Speaker 3: even though we're like I don't like saying therapists, like
Speaker 3: calling myself a therapist, because there's all these connotations along
Speaker 3: with that word. Nobody wants to go to therapy. It's
Speaker 3: also why you know the second but the subtitle of
Speaker 3: my book is when BA NF the Loger meats bad
Speaker 3: Ass motherfucker. Because PTSD is means I'm broken, it means
Speaker 3: I need to be fixed. It is a symptom, it
Speaker 3: is a disease. It is a disorder that I have
Speaker 3: and you know you have to fix it. I don't
Speaker 3: want to have that title, whereas BAMF or I will
Speaker 3: take that title like yeah, And so for the BA,
Speaker 3: I call it baseline adjustment due to military functioning it's like,
Speaker 3: I will enroll into that group, I will learn about Okay,
Speaker 3: I was trained to be this way. I was trained
Speaker 3: to be hyper vigilant, called situational awareness. I was trained
Speaker 3: to think of myself as a bullet sponge. They scrubbed
Speaker 3: away all my personal boundaries. Yeah, you know, I was
Speaker 3: trained to jump on the grenade before anybody else, So
Speaker 3: you know, I was trained to seek the sound of
Speaker 3: the guns, so not avoid. I was trained to have affinity.
Speaker 3: So we trained you and I cite this in the
Speaker 3: book too. There's you know, you got E three who
Speaker 3: said PTSDs which it had to get to survive in Afghanistan.
Speaker 3: It's like exactly, and then we never undid that. Nobody
Speaker 3: ever told you you're a human being. You deserve to
Speaker 3: have X, Y or Z, and it's okay to have emotions.
Speaker 3: You don't have to shove them all down and maintain
Speaker 3: your good military bearing.
Speaker 1: During the process of your work with VA, Like, when
Speaker 1: was it that the idea for this book for Warrior
Speaker 1: withdrawal came about?
Speaker 3: I had started to think through the cluster of symptoms
Speaker 3: and trying to map it onto the substance abuse disorder.
Speaker 3: And then while I was working at the VA, two
Speaker 3: more things came up in my mind, one being Marsha's identity.
Speaker 3: It's like a squirre or a chart quad chart where
Speaker 3: you've either kind of know what you're going to be
Speaker 3: or you don't know what you're going to be, and
Speaker 3: then you either have gone through some things and try
Speaker 3: some things out or you haven't gone through some things
Speaker 3: and tried some things out. So where most veterans find
Speaker 3: themselves because you're in that identity forming part of your
Speaker 3: life at seventeen eighteen. When you enlist, you become what's
Speaker 3: called identity foreclosed. It's like you are going to be
Speaker 3: eleven Bravo, and you're going to be eleven Mike, and
Speaker 3: you're going to be eleven Charlie, and it's like, oh,
Speaker 3: I don't want to do that, I want to be
Speaker 3: an MP. Sorry, your identity is foreclosed. You don't get
Speaker 3: to choose. You didn't get to be a rock star.
Speaker 3: You get to try out as a carpenter or whatever.
Speaker 3: You're a soldier now and that is who you are,
Speaker 3: identity foreclosure. And then then when you get out, it's
Speaker 3: the various culturation model where civilians are the predominant culture
Speaker 3: and we want you to assimilate, which means you give
Speaker 3: up all of your warriors self. You give up all
Speaker 3: those values values like integrity, accountability, responsibility, punctuality. You'd be
Speaker 3: like all the other civilians, especially here in southern California.
Speaker 3: When you tell somebody to show up at three o'clock,
Speaker 3: it's like.
Speaker 1: Maybe they do, maybe they don't.
Speaker 2: Three thirties close enough.
Speaker 1: See that that's an East Coast thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so then you know, okay, well, what we aim
Speaker 3: for is for you to be integrated. Right, I'll keep
Speaker 3: those things that I like about my warrior yourself, and
Speaker 3: I will make them work in the civilian environment.
Speaker 2: That's very hard to do.
Speaker 3: So we end up kind of going below the water
Speaker 3: line where we're either separated, which is I only have
Speaker 3: veteran friends, I only hang out with veterans. I will
Speaker 3: only do things I'm a law enforcement office or whatever
Speaker 3: it is, and I won't engage in the civilian culture.
Speaker 3: But more often than not, and this is where we
Speaker 3: have that problem at the six months to one year mark,
Speaker 3: is you're marginalized. So I'm not they're a soldier, nor
Speaker 3: am I a civilian, And that's when we have the
Speaker 3: depression all of the issues like my guy that failed
Speaker 3: aiit it's like, I'm not even a soldier.
Speaker 2: Who the hell am I?
Speaker 3: So when I added all that, sort of halfway through
Speaker 3: my postdoc year, I started the BANF groups and decided
Speaker 3: to sit down and write the book.
Speaker 1: And I mean, I presumably the book is about all
Speaker 1: these things we've just been talking about, But I mean,
Speaker 1: what's in the book? Who did you write it for?
Speaker 3: So I basically wrote it for the veteran who is
Speaker 3: just getting out, so that they can understand. And I
Speaker 3: didn't want to talk about myself at all. And then
Speaker 3: I was told by the publishers, like, yeah, you can't
Speaker 3: write a textbook.
Speaker 2: Nobody's going to buy it. You have to tell your story,
Speaker 2: and I accept that as I note.
Speaker 3: I think in the book, like at the Unit is
Speaker 3: the first time I ever got exposed to PTSD, And
Speaker 3: it's a sergeant major who came in and his his
Speaker 3: version of what happened kind of manifested as alcoholism.
Speaker 2: And it was hard to track because the guys are.
Speaker 3: So good that even his seventy percent was still, you know,
Speaker 3: enough to be some other guys one hundred percent until
Speaker 3: we had a catash. Until he had a catastrophic opsect
Speaker 3: issue and so he got fired and sent away. So
Speaker 3: he's talking to us about that, and it's at that
Speaker 3: point in time that I reached out so active duty
Speaker 3: to my opsite and I said.
Speaker 1: You were there when there were a couple of suicides
Speaker 1: too in the unit, weren't you around that time frame
Speaker 1: two thousand and ten?
Speaker 3: I don't ish not that I recall, you know, my
Speaker 3: memories all.
Speaker 1: I don't recall the.
Speaker 3: Motor vehicle accidents as well, But yeah, I don't recall specifically.
Speaker 2: Either way.
Speaker 3: Because that sergeant Major had kind of been open about it,
Speaker 3: I feel like I owe it to all the other
Speaker 3: veterans to say, like, okay, well if this happened to
Speaker 3: me as a guy who climbed all the way.
Speaker 2: To the tip of the spear, then you know.
Speaker 3: It's the umbrella that allows you to also then say
Speaker 3: it's okay to be sick.
Speaker 2: That guy says he was sad, and it's okay for
Speaker 2: me to say that I'm right right.
Speaker 3: So that's kind of the beginning part of the book
Speaker 3: is a lot of what we talked about, and then
Speaker 3: the back end of the book is kind of going
Speaker 3: through the symptoms how it's different from PTSD, how it's
Speaker 3: different from adjustment disorder, and then a little bit about
Speaker 3: the groups that I would run.
Speaker 1: So the book is out now, it's called Warrior Withdrawal.
Speaker 1: We'll have links down the description for folks who want
Speaker 1: to check it out. Where's the best place they for
Speaker 1: people to go buy it?
Speaker 3: Probably Amazon, Okay, it's probably the easiest. Or they can
Speaker 3: go to the publisher, Dallas Books.
Speaker 1: And then another topic you had mentioned to me, I
Speaker 1: don't know if you want to get into it or
Speaker 1: how deep you want to get into it, about the
Speaker 1: courts being in some instances prejudiced against veterans, but like
Speaker 1: just simply for their service, that you know, this guy's
Speaker 1: a highly trained combat killer, blah blah blah.
Speaker 3: So that's a great segue too, because I published a book,
Speaker 3: and because there are some literary devices to sort of
Speaker 3: make manifestor make it easier to understand the challenges that
Speaker 3: are going inside of somebody's head, that the book that
Speaker 3: I publish is being used against me in a court
Speaker 3: of law during my divorce.
Speaker 2: So thinking, you know, maybe.
Speaker 3: This was unique to me again, I reached out to
Speaker 3: some here and I realized that this is extremely common
Speaker 3: for veterans as as a community to struggle in the
Speaker 3: family court systems because my profession.
Speaker 2: Is being used against me.
Speaker 3: And you know, there's some attorneys are sneaky and they'll
Speaker 3: try to say like, all right, do you have a
Speaker 3: VA disability rating? Okay, well, isn't it true that you
Speaker 3: have you know, PTSD, and aren't you going to go
Speaker 3: shoot up the school? And I'm like no, and no
Speaker 3: or sorry first, none of your business and no. You know,
Speaker 3: the irony is that going back to that Aladdin line
Speaker 3: infinite Cosmic Power ADBD, living space, It's like, yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: I have all of the training in the world, and
Speaker 3: it's like that meme from the Patriot where hey, if
Speaker 3: you don't have the capacity for violence, then you doing
Speaker 3: nothing is just being a pussy.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: It's like, if you so the guy who has all
Speaker 3: of the control to manage all of this violence, that's me.
Speaker 3: I'm the least the last person you should be afraid of.
Speaker 3: And yet the family courts don't understand that. And so
Speaker 3: anybody whose spouse goes to the family courts because there's
Speaker 3: no requirement for actual evidence and you can just get
Speaker 3: a restraining order right away and so it's so common
Speaker 3: that there's reddits about what's called the silver bullet divorce,
Speaker 3: where your spouse can just allege domestic violence, allege child abuse,
Speaker 3: and then that sets in motion the dynamics of the
Speaker 3: court that now you're constantly on the defensive and you
Speaker 3: can't even do what you need to do. And then
Speaker 3: if you step out of line even slightly, so even
Speaker 3: if the domestic violence temporary restraining order is garbage, if you,
Speaker 3: by accident broke the three hundred foot boundary, now you
Speaker 3: have a criminal charge that's going to get upheld, and
Speaker 3: you lose your rights to your kids. And so that's
Speaker 3: not just happening to me. I find that this is happening,
Speaker 3: and among my patients, I do twenty to twenty five
Speaker 3: unique intakes per week. I've done over a thousand intakes
Speaker 3: of veterans in the last couple of years, and almost
Speaker 3: always I will carry one or two who are in
Speaker 3: a similar situation where I have a guy that I
Speaker 3: talked to you ab out that long ago who thinks
Speaker 3: he has PTSD because of a car crash.
Speaker 2: And he drives for uber.
Speaker 3: So I'm like, okay, well we're back to that, Like, hey,
Speaker 3: avoidance and reexperiencing. These don't quite match up, and so
Speaker 3: we delve more into his personal history, and he's got
Speaker 3: an extremely awful situation in his marriage, and you know,
Speaker 3: there's events in his life that are going to cause
Speaker 3: it to come to a head here in the next
Speaker 3: year or two.
Speaker 2: Like that may be why you're having these nightmares.
Speaker 3: Your brain is unable to explain, you know, appending divorce
Speaker 3: in a way that makes sense. So it goes back
Speaker 3: to the last time you were ever this scared and
Speaker 3: afraid of an impending wreck, and so it plays that
Speaker 3: out in your head as a car crash.
Speaker 1: It's unreal to me that a person that goes out
Speaker 1: and gets treatment, you know, that goes through the process
Speaker 1: to get help and has a VA disability rating, they're
Speaker 1: going in to see someone like you, they're going to therapy,
Speaker 1: and the courts see that as derogatory information that they
Speaker 1: can use against you, as if you're some sort of
Speaker 1: menace to society, even though you don't have a criminal record.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so we're stuck with the conundrum again. Where
Speaker 3: so again the book is written for the veteran to
Speaker 3: read to learn more about themselves, and I almost I
Speaker 3: believe that more likely than not, it's going to be
Speaker 3: the spouse that buys it or somebody that can cares
Speaker 3: for the veteran that buys it. And it's like, hey,
Speaker 3: you read this thing because this is you, and it's
Speaker 3: another barrier to treatment for me. Already, I get veterans
Speaker 3: that don't want a PTSD diagnosis, or they're concerned about
Speaker 3: who can see their health record because they're concerned that
Speaker 3: they'll lose their security clearance, or you know, everybody's heard
Speaker 3: some apocryphal story about somebody who had a PTSD diagnosis
Speaker 3: and it got leaked and then they took away their weapons.
Speaker 2: It's like, that's not supposed to happen. That's not how.
Speaker 3: Your medical record is protected. And yet you know it
Speaker 3: is a barrier to treatment. Guys will not come in,
Speaker 3: they will not admit that anything is wrong because they
Speaker 3: don't want to lose access to these things.
Speaker 2: And so now this is just another one.
Speaker 3: And so somewhat ironically or not ironically, and maybe working
Speaker 3: on another book to try to create a guide book
Speaker 3: for veterans and divorce to explain to them, we've just
Speaker 3: added moral injury into the Diagnostics Statistics manual. So that
Speaker 3: kind of compounds the warrior withdrawal, stuff like justice is
Speaker 3: not served or I thought I was going over to
Speaker 3: Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction and then that
Speaker 3: wasn't the case, and so in my mind it's like, well,
Speaker 3: was it all worth it? Or more recently, we had
Speaker 3: all those guys that you know, twenty years of combat
Speaker 3: in Afghanistan and for nothing, and so that regenerates issues
Speaker 3: in veterans' minds of this moral injury because we do
Speaker 3: the right thing, we follow the rules. I mean there's
Speaker 3: a ten percent of us to get Article fifteen. Of course,
Speaker 3: the pituority of guys follow the rules, and we believe
Speaker 3: in truth, justice the American way. We have honor, courage, commitment, integrity,
Speaker 3: and the opposite side doesn't. For I can think of
Speaker 3: ten cases off the top of my head, false child
Speaker 3: abuse allegations, false domestic violence allegations, whatever technique, tactic, or
Speaker 3: procedure where they've got TTPs to box you into a
Speaker 3: hole where you can't even fight out of it. And
Speaker 3: the veteran like me included, I trust that the system
Speaker 3: is going to figure this out, and unfortunately the system
Speaker 3: still runs on money. It's like, what's going to happen. First,
Speaker 3: does the system figure it out or does the money
Speaker 3: run out?
Speaker 2: And that's an awful place to be so again, because
Speaker 2: most divorces.
Speaker 3: Happen within six months of separation from the military. You
Speaker 3: have the veteran who has loss of identity, loss of
Speaker 3: sense of purposes, relying on substances, whatever it takes to
Speaker 3: get through the day, and now their spouse is accusing
Speaker 3: them of being a monster and filing, you know, to
Speaker 3: move away, and in the court this guy is crazy.
Speaker 3: He has all these guns. Uh, he's gonna go kill everybody.
Speaker 3: And then you know, all of those things that you
Speaker 3: left the military for get stripped from you, your family,
Speaker 3: your kids, and then you're left with, you know, an
Speaker 3: empty house and it's like, what do I do?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we know what a lot of guys do. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: right man, anything else that we haven't talked about, vorpiss
Speaker 1: that you want to make sure we cover tonight.
Speaker 3: So I am on the board of this nonprofit called
Speaker 3: Operation Shield. It's we're trying to grow into more states.
Speaker 3: We're really only in California for now, and what we're
Speaker 3: trying to do is bridge that gap.
Speaker 2: So catch the.
Speaker 3: Active duty soldier sailor, airman, marine or guardian before they
Speaker 3: get out out and there's that kind of dead space
Speaker 3: between their enrollment into the VA where we can provide
Speaker 3: mental health services for them.
Speaker 1: So Warrior Withdrawal is out now. People can find it
Speaker 1: on Amazon. Maybe a second book coming. Yeah, Varpus, thanks
Speaker 1: for sharing your story with us tonight, Sir, thanks for
Speaker 1: having me any final thoughts before we roll out of
Speaker 1: here tonight.
Speaker 3: I would just say to all the veterans out there,
Speaker 3: you're not broken. You don't need to be fixed, just
Speaker 3: need training.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Thank you Varpus, and thank you everyone who watches tonight.
Speaker 1: Maybe there's a veteran in your life that you want
Speaker 1: to share this video with or get, or get Varpus's
Speaker 1: book for so we'll see all of you guys next time.
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