Speaker 1: Special operations. Cobert asked me and the Team House with
Speaker 1: your hosts Jack Murphy and David Park.
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome to episode one and fifty six of
Speaker 2: The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park.
Speaker 2: We got deproducing and we have a special guest tonight,
Speaker 2: Drew Mullins, and I want to apologize first off, to
Speaker 2: Drew for wasting some of his time last night, and
Speaker 2: also everyone else who tuned in. We take a lot
Speaker 2: of pride in doing a consistent, well produced show every
Speaker 2: Friday eight pm. Were there, and last night we screwed up.
Speaker 2: It's not Drew's fault, it's totally us. We had some
Speaker 2: we moved into a new studio, we have some technical
Speaker 2: issues to iron out, but I'm really glad that we did.
Speaker 3: We did a lot of work today, got a lot.
Speaker 2: Of things accomplished, and I'm just glad we're all here,
Speaker 2: and I'm really glad that Drew is here with us.
Speaker 2: Drew is a former Navy seal. He went through BUDS
Speaker 2: Class one hundred and fifty six, which coincides with this episode.
Speaker 2: You'd see that back there and his helmet back there
Speaker 2: in his office, and Drew went on to serve in
Speaker 2: a Jaysox special mission. Unit did some of the AFO
Speaker 2: mission over in Iraq in two thousand and three with
Speaker 2: some other previous guests of the show, so.
Speaker 3: We're really excited to have you here today. Drew. Thank
Speaker 3: you so much for taking some time out of your Saturday.
Speaker 4: Hey, hey, guys, thanks, thanks for having me man.
Speaker 3: I appreciate it absolutely, Man, and thank you for joining us.
Speaker 5: Even after we consistently blamed you for all of our
Speaker 5: problems last night, it turned.
Speaker 4: Out to be us. I thought it was me, I did.
Speaker 4: I thought, you know, what a shit show I was,
Speaker 4: you know, representing you know, like you said repeatedly, this
Speaker 4: has never happened before, so I felt good.
Speaker 2: Thanks, thanks, Yeah, sorry, man, no it has. We've never
Speaker 2: had to reschedule a show like that before. But hey,
Speaker 2: Drew jumped through. It was so many, it was it
Speaker 2: was it was definitely not on Drew's head. So Drew,
Speaker 2: to kick off the show, I'm going to ask you
Speaker 2: kick kick to you the same question we asked really
Speaker 2: most of our guests, is about your origin story. If
Speaker 2: you can tell us a little bit about your upbringing,
Speaker 2: how you grew up, and sort of what that path
Speaker 2: was that took you towards military service.
Speaker 4: Okay, So, having listened to some of the other guests,
Speaker 4: I won't go through the whole retirement speech version of
Speaker 4: what got me here. But I grew up in California,
Speaker 4: on the beach in California, and I was born and
Speaker 4: raised there. My dad was in the Navy in the
Speaker 4: sixties for about eight years, so I was born on
Speaker 4: a on a Navy base, as were three of my
Speaker 4: other brothers and sister, and I just had a kind
Speaker 4: of a normal wildhood, I guess. But then my parents
Speaker 4: got divorced and so there was four of us, and
Speaker 4: just as you know, life would have it, we kind
Speaker 4: of had to just fend for ourselfs but great, great upbringing.
Speaker 4: Played A lot of sports and worked in the oil
Speaker 4: fields for a while. And in the mid to mid eighties,
Speaker 4: I was a young man and kind of drifting. I
Speaker 4: was playing rugby with uh. I started playing rugby after
Speaker 4: college and had had a lot of fun. I met
Speaker 4: some some of the guys on our team just happened
Speaker 4: to be Vietnam Era seals. So and I didn't really
Speaker 4: know what a frog man was. I mean, back then,
Speaker 4: you didn't know anything about it. You did tea or
Speaker 4: any of that stuff unless you knew someone, and except
Speaker 4: for that book Men with Green Faces or whatever it was.
Speaker 4: And I was kind of I was had gotten into
Speaker 4: an early marriage, I had a son, kind of out
Speaker 4: of wedlock. I was feeling pretty much like a dead
Speaker 4: bee dad kind of thing, and was trying to figure
Speaker 4: out how to how to navigate the waters as a
Speaker 4: as a young man. And one of the one of
Speaker 4: the games we had, we were down in San Diego
Speaker 4: and this my mentor, the guy who saved my life, basically,
Speaker 4: Eddie Farmer, shout out to Eddie Farmer. He'd get together
Speaker 4: when we play the other team, and there'd be other
Speaker 4: guys he knew from Vietnam, and they start telling these
Speaker 4: stories and I'm like, what the hell are you talking about?
Speaker 4: You know, you know, like crashed helos with oga stuff
Speaker 4: in it that they had to get out, and ambushes
Speaker 4: and all those kind of things, and you know, they
Speaker 4: tell all these stories and I thought, wow, tell me
Speaker 4: more about that. Well, it was what it was, and
Speaker 4: I and I thought, that's that's pretty cool. And then
Speaker 4: one day Ed pulled me aside and he kind of
Speaker 4: had the father talk with me because I didn't really
Speaker 4: have a strong father figure at the time, and I
Speaker 4: didn't want to repeat some of the same mistakes that
Speaker 4: happened to me when my parents broke up. So I figured,
Speaker 4: at least if I joined the Navy, I could take
Speaker 4: care of my son, you know, ay a child support
Speaker 4: and all that kind of stuff. So I went to
Speaker 4: the recruiter and I was a little bit older. It
Speaker 4: was twenty four, I think, and he starts, you know,
Speaker 4: going down the list. Hey, so tell me about you know,
Speaker 4: what education you have, what do you do, what kind
Speaker 4: of jobs you have, And he gets to the part
Speaker 4: where it's it's like, did you ever do any drugs?
Speaker 4: I'm like, I looked at him, like pretty serious and
Speaker 4: and and he said, yeah, I mean, you know, did
Speaker 4: you just I had to choose a rate at the time,
Speaker 4: you know, it wasn't the pipeline is now. So before
Speaker 4: that I'd asked him, well, what do the Seals need,
Speaker 4: and he said they need corman really bad, and they
Speaker 4: need radio right now. So I said, oh, I'll be
Speaker 4: a Corman. I get hurt. I can take care of myself.
Speaker 4: But then when he got to the drug screening parties,
Speaker 4: He's like, he asked me that question, and I said, uh,
Speaker 4: And then he said, wait, wait, wait, stop before you
Speaker 4: answer that, if you've experimented with anything more than five times,
Speaker 4: you might not be eligible for the program. Ah okay, thanks, Yeah,
Speaker 4: I experimented with pot five times whatever and anything else.
Speaker 4: I'm like, come on, dude, really he's And I said, okay, no, anyway,
Speaker 4: I joined I made it through that, but I was,
Speaker 4: let me just say that, you know, it was the
Speaker 4: eighties and I was kind of sweating the Hiss test
Speaker 4: when I went through MEPs. But I mean, and I
Speaker 4: made a deal with myself. Hey self, but you're not
Speaker 4: gonna do that shit anymore. Yeah, your career, yeh for
Speaker 4: that kind of stuff. And and it wasn't a big deal.
Speaker 4: It was just kind of like the usual West Coast stuff.
Speaker 4: But I went to Buds, or actually I went to
Speaker 4: corn At school and then went to BUDS. Classed up
Speaker 4: in uh the winter of eighty eight with class one
Speaker 4: fifty three. That was my whole week. Class had one
Speaker 4: hundred you know, the typical numbers, one hundred and sixty
Speaker 4: something sixty six, I think, guys, and I think forty
Speaker 4: made it through Hell week or something like that. And uh,
Speaker 4: talk more about it later about like you know, some
Speaker 4: of the bud stuff. But made it through Hell week.
Speaker 4: I got rolled back because I got it. I got hurt,
Speaker 4: but ended up graduating with class one fifty six and
Speaker 4: then uh, you know, started the pipeline. Went to Airborne
Speaker 4: school and I had a funny stories. I was only
Speaker 4: Corman to graduate from my class. And when orders came out.
Speaker 4: You know, you probably do the same thing in the army.
Speaker 4: You feel out a dream sheet, like where do you
Speaker 4: want to go? Right? And I had this girlfriend at
Speaker 4: the time. I was trying to, you know, put distance
Speaker 4: between and a nice person. I just just wanted to
Speaker 4: be free. So I put down every West East Coast
Speaker 4: team SIL team I could on my dream sheet, and
Speaker 4: of course I didn't get orders to the East Coast.
Speaker 4: I got orders to the West Coast, but uh the
Speaker 4: orders were weird because it wasn't like SIL Team three,
Speaker 4: Silteam one, SUL Team five. It was like some weird name,
Speaker 4: and uh, you know, the instructors are looking at me like, hmm,
Speaker 4: how did you get those orders? I'm like, dude, I
Speaker 4: only even know what this is. And so I went
Speaker 4: and talked to the Phase master chief and he said, hey, uh,
Speaker 4: that's uh, that's the cover name for Red Cell, right,
Speaker 4: So I don't know if you know what red Cell is,
Speaker 4: but that was the second Marsenko command that he created,
Speaker 4: and they were basically the real world kind of up
Speaker 4: a red team for security, for defenses and things like
Speaker 4: that for bases, and that kind of went sideways a
Speaker 4: little bit right after that. But so they sat me down,
Speaker 4: they said, hey, this is these are pretty awesome orders,
Speaker 4: but if you want my advice, I mean, you'll you'll
Speaker 4: have a lot of fun. You'll get a lot of
Speaker 4: really high speed schools, and you'll get a lot of
Speaker 4: calls and a bunch of things that you'll really enjoy,
Speaker 4: but you won't get the opportunity to learn how to
Speaker 4: be a good frogman. Ah okay, good seal Because you know,
Speaker 4: the pipeline was STT, which is now SQT. I mean
Speaker 4: back then most of us, as you probably know, would
Speaker 4: go to our team. He'd be on probation for six
Speaker 4: months or a year and a year sometimes longer depending
Speaker 4: and you went through advanced training seal tactical training, and
Speaker 4: you're evaluated by your peers basically. So it was it
Speaker 4: was one of those kind of things, which I think
Speaker 4: is a really good way of doing it. But anyways,
Speaker 4: they said, yeah, if you do that, you know you're
Speaker 4: not going to get the opportunity to really cut your
Speaker 4: teeth in the traditional way. And back then the teams
Speaker 4: were kind of geographically specialized. So I said, okay, sounds
Speaker 4: like good advice. But then when I talked to the detailer,
Speaker 4: He's like, yeah, you're going to stil Team five. And
Speaker 4: I'm like, it's like right next door, right, you know.
Speaker 4: And in Coronado and uh, seal teammate had just come
Speaker 4: on board. They just commissioned it and they needed corman.
Speaker 4: So I swapped with a guy and went out to
Speaker 4: seal teammate, drove my Volkswagen bus all the way across
Speaker 4: the United States with everything I owned, straight to Airborne
Speaker 4: School and subsequently to Virginia Beach.
Speaker 3: And create the distance with the girlfriend that you needed
Speaker 3: at the time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I think you did. I don't know how
Speaker 4: much further I kind of went. And to be to
Speaker 4: be quite honest with that, she was a great person.
Speaker 4: I just wasn't you know how women? Sure? Young? You
Speaker 4: were young? You were young? Yeah? And hot?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 4: Muscular? Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Speaker 5: You're like a lot of like a lot of women
Speaker 5: deserve all this, Like I can't be selfish and just
Speaker 5: deprived of this little slice of heaven exactly.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there was there was a lot to conquer still,
Speaker 4: but it was it was good. Yeah, there's along the way,
Speaker 4: I had some pretty cool adventures just uh was one.
Speaker 4: Getting from getting from there to Virginia Beach was another,
Speaker 4: and et cetera. So that nothing real outstanding.
Speaker 3: I guess, well that's that's okay.
Speaker 2: I mean, let's let's hear a little bit more about
Speaker 2: what it was like at steal teammate. I mean, you
Speaker 2: said you were one of the plant owners of that team,
Speaker 2: since they were just standing it up when you got there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's something I didn't really realize at the
Speaker 4: time because I always thought plant owners were like the
Speaker 4: people that were on the roster when they actually broke
Speaker 4: the champagne bottle of ship. Right. But but technically, if
Speaker 4: you're one of the first people to go there within
Speaker 4: a I guess it's within a year, first year or whatever,
Speaker 4: you know, where they're filling out the roster. The billets
Speaker 4: Yere Plank Conner show. I haven't really pursued that, like
Speaker 4: I'd like to get, you know, some certificate or piece
Speaker 4: of wood or something. But yeah, so I show up
Speaker 4: at Virginia Beach and you know, back then, I don't
Speaker 4: know if you've ever been to Naval Amphibious Space a
Speaker 4: little creek, but it's changed a lot, of course, But
Speaker 4: it was just Seal Team four, Team two and STB
Speaker 4: two were there. Teammate was brand new, and I remember
Speaker 4: going through the gate and asking someone, Hey, where's Seal teammate?
Speaker 4: And the guard said, go down here and make a
Speaker 4: left all the way to the end. Make another right.
Speaker 4: You'll be right there. Turn the corner and I see
Speaker 4: the signs and I see the compound on the left
Speaker 4: and it's the right it's the teams, but on the
Speaker 4: right it's a bunch of like a chain link fence
Speaker 4: and a bunch of trailers trailer park, and that was
Speaker 4: teammate went in and checked in, and it was it
Speaker 4: was an interesting time back in eighty nine ninety because
Speaker 4: a bunch of the guys who were there were had
Speaker 4: just come back from Persian golf, so they did Iran
Speaker 4: a jar and you know those ops that that a
Speaker 4: certain guy named Malcolm says he did, but he didn't.
Speaker 4: Uh yeah. So we had this really kind of a
Speaker 4: unique mix of folks there some basically it was known
Speaker 4: as Dump eight at the time, right, so that's where
Speaker 4: you kind of like cast off all your you know,
Speaker 4: free agents that that you want to get rid of
Speaker 4: your problem kids. At the same time, there was a
Speaker 4: bunch of guys who were really solid who volunteered to
Speaker 4: go because they wanted to be part of creating a dug.
Speaker 4: So we had this really eclectic mix of folks. And
Speaker 4: to give you an example of what I mean by colectic,
Speaker 4: we're in we're at ranks for quarters one morning and
Speaker 4: Exo's up there doing give them the plan of the day,
Speaker 4: and all of a sudden you hear some of these
Speaker 4: guys like yelling, and all of a sudden, whack. I
Speaker 4: look down the line. There's these guys are in a fistfight, right,
Speaker 4: you know, like at the end of the line, just
Speaker 4: beating each other up. And you know it's over a woman,
Speaker 4: of course, you know, that's how it works. And I'm like, oh, wow,
Speaker 4: this is awesome. What do I get myself into? But
Speaker 4: you know, over time, you know, being in the first
Speaker 4: platoons was it was fun, you know, it was really
Speaker 4: cool to learn from some really great talented guys and
Speaker 4: started to point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what were the deployments like back then?
Speaker 2: I mean, like some of the I mean you're talking
Speaker 2: about nineteen nineties now, late eighties, early nineties.
Speaker 3: And that's when Charlie Sheen was the Sealed nineteen nineties.
Speaker 2: Some of the guys a little bit before that would
Speaker 2: say that, you know, back back in those days, the
Speaker 2: Seal teams were basically, you know, a mask, pair of fins,
Speaker 2: a snorkel, a weight belt, and a k bar knife
Speaker 2: and not not a whole lot else. But what was
Speaker 2: your experience like when when you started to playing with
Speaker 2: seal teammate?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it actually my first platoon was h was a
Speaker 4: marg so we actually got spun up to go to
Speaker 4: Desert Storm, Desert Shield, Dessert Storm, So that was what
Speaker 4: ninety ninety one, right, ninety was Desert Shield. Yeah, And meanwhile,
Speaker 4: at the same time was the invasion of Panama, so
Speaker 4: some of the other teams were you know, silking Ford
Speaker 4: was was doing that and we had some some guys
Speaker 4: get killed down there. My roommate at the time, uh
Speaker 4: was a sixty gunner and one of the squads that
Speaker 4: took the tier airfield. He took around. Luckiest guy in
Speaker 4: the world. I mean, he took around like imagine you're
Speaker 4: running and you got your your legs hot up in
Speaker 4: the air and the round went onunderneath his thigh, missed
Speaker 4: his balls by an inch and came out the other
Speaker 4: end of his his ass. And when he came back,
Speaker 4: of course I like to tell him the story because
Speaker 4: I had to like change his dressings all the time
Speaker 4: so I can stick and his ass the whole time
Speaker 4: changing it. Uh but uh yeah, so we were we
Speaker 4: thought we missed our chance to go to war, because
Speaker 4: that's what the mindset was back then. It's like, dang,
Speaker 4: are we ever going to go? You know that kind
Speaker 4: of thing, like everyone and we scrambled. We deployed to
Speaker 4: go to Turkey and the they started the shock and aw,
Speaker 4: I guess it was, you know, the air war part.
Speaker 4: And by the time we get to inter Lick, it
Speaker 4: was over right. So it was like we're handing out
Speaker 4: MRI's to courage and not trying to step on mines
Speaker 4: and stuff like that. Pretty uneventful, but we had a
Speaker 4: fun time in the med for the rest of the
Speaker 4: six months. So you're basically on a marg you're with
Speaker 4: a mew breen Uh expeditionary unit. And we got off
Speaker 4: the ship a lot because we had things bilats and
Speaker 4: j sets and training set up. So we had a
Speaker 4: lot of fun which we trained a lot with other counterparts,
Speaker 4: the French, Spanish, the Turks. We did Bright Star in Egypt.
Speaker 4: What a shit show that is? Man on the Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: it's funny. There's a We did a jump, you know,
Speaker 4: one of the one of the things to do is
Speaker 4: that kind of combined thing where you do parachute jumps
Speaker 4: static line jumps in the desert. And this might have
Speaker 4: been in another platoon, but I remember we were in
Speaker 4: a see one thirty and the Egyptians must have just
Speaker 4: like said on their base said, hey go get a parachute,
Speaker 4: you're going to jump with these guys, right, And so
Speaker 4: we get up there. Everybody snaps in because it wasn't
Speaker 4: prey fall, it's just a static line and you could
Speaker 4: tell none of them had ever jumped before and were
Speaker 4: literally kicking them out the back of the point, right.
Speaker 4: It was hilarious, right, And of course we went out
Speaker 4: to and yeah, so we had you know, that was
Speaker 4: kind of Shenanigan's but it was it was good. That's
Speaker 4: when you back then you felt like a sailor, which
Speaker 4: I think is kind of cool. Yeah, it's a lost
Speaker 4: art these days. You know. You we didn't have internet.
Speaker 4: You know, the you know mail call was a big deal. Yeah,
Speaker 4: uh perfume and other things inside, yeah, packages and you
Speaker 4: and selling Copenhagen for twenty dollars a can to ships board,
Speaker 4: stuff like that.
Speaker 5: Getting a big package of rum cake, you know that
Speaker 5: it's like dowst and rum yeah yeh.
Speaker 4: Or like my sister would send me Listerine. Yeah, Jim
Speaker 4: Beam in it. So it was lister Beam right, you
Speaker 4: know that kind of stuff. So, I mean, you know,
Speaker 4: typical Shenanigans, but uh got it, got to experience part
Speaker 4: of the part of the world and uh maybe a
Speaker 4: story of to a pop into my head from then
Speaker 4: I just felt, you know.
Speaker 3: It was it was yeah, you're living a life. Yeah.
Speaker 4: That was my first deployment. So and then uh spun
Speaker 4: right back around and got ready to do another one.
Speaker 4: And so the second platoon was a strike platoon at
Speaker 4: the time, it was uh which was was based on
Speaker 4: a carrier instead of with the Marines, and so we
Speaker 4: all got free fall called we all. I was a
Speaker 4: bunch of high speed guys. I mean it was stacked
Speaker 4: platoon of you know, the airlready had two three four
Speaker 4: deployments and we were on the John F. Kennedy deployed
Speaker 4: on that and the probably don't remember this, but the
Speaker 4: Saratoga was the this carrier we were leaving and they
Speaker 4: were off station off of Interlick I believe no, Yeah,
Speaker 4: they were off Turkey and they were doing some kind
Speaker 4: of exercise. And this is when someone on the Saratoga,
Speaker 4: like fire control guys, shot a missile and hit a
Speaker 4: Turkish ship, you know, killed some dudes. And so when
Speaker 4: we get there to do turnover, we hung this big
Speaker 4: sign off the side of the Kennedy saying, you know,
Speaker 4: don't shoot us kind of thing, many sheets and we
Speaker 4: just had a blast doing that me and ended up
Speaker 4: doing some fun stuff in Africa and just tooling around.
Speaker 4: But living on a carrier was it was a pretty
Speaker 4: good life I actually can consider compared to living on
Speaker 4: a on a ship that you know, a barg Yeah, pinionship.
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Speaker 4: H o U S.
Speaker 3: Thanks guys, Drew, kick it back over to you.
Speaker 2: Like Somewhere around this timeframe, there was well we already
Speaker 2: mentioned Navy Seals with Charlie Sheen and Michael Bean, but
Speaker 2: there was another Navy Seal movie coming out with Demi
Speaker 2: Moore called g I Jane. And you'd said that you
Speaker 2: had a g I Jane story to lay on us.
Speaker 4: Oh you how about that? There you go, I gotcha
Speaker 4: getting to use this use to this board here. Well, first,
Speaker 4: maybe maybe I should tell you my Navy Seals story first. Okay,
Speaker 4: go for it, because that was you know, let's be
Speaker 4: chronologically accurate. So I'm a new guy, mccormyan a lot
Speaker 4: to learn and paid for it dearly. A lot of
Speaker 4: the things I did wrong during STT. I don't know
Speaker 4: if you're allowed to say hazing, but that was you
Speaker 4: writes of passage.
Speaker 3: Maybe you know the physical correction.
Speaker 4: Yes, exactly. So I was cocky to say the least.
Speaker 4: I had a jeep c J shaven, you know, lifted
Speaker 4: and everything, and I thought i'd be cool to like
Speaker 4: get a personalized license plate, you know, real real smart
Speaker 4: move five and as a for a thing. So I
Speaker 4: got this played that said sealed doc right, and I
Speaker 4: co driving into through work one day and didn't last long.
Speaker 4: I we're like eighty monsf we go, let's have a talk, right, So,
Speaker 4: about an hour and a half after being in the
Speaker 4: dip tank riggers taped up breathing through a snorkel kind
Speaker 4: of thing, got the message. I don't know if you've
Speaker 4: ever seen that or not. But yeah, you know, you
Speaker 4: can dip your rig and a dip tank and see
Speaker 4: if it's see if it's leaking air. It also works
Speaker 4: you can put a guy into there and you just
Speaker 4: rigor tape a snorkel to his mouth so you can breathe. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so I got rid of that. But so it's what
Speaker 4: this would be in I'm going back a little bit.
Speaker 4: This will be eighty nine. This was I was. I
Speaker 4: was in this bar watching the World Series as the
Speaker 4: A's and the Yankees, I think, and I'm sitting at
Speaker 4: the bar just paying attention to the game, and I
Speaker 4: looked down at the end and I'm like, fuck, I
Speaker 4: know that guy from some place right, And it turns
Speaker 4: out it was trying to wrap my brains who he
Speaker 4: was at the time, but it was Michael Bean.
Speaker 6: If you know him or not, Yeah he was. He
Speaker 6: played the ceiling like, yeah, he was Corporal Hicks. And
Speaker 6: I come, yeah, so Michael Bean's down there and.
Speaker 4: I don't know, We're only like two stools away and
Speaker 4: we're talking about the game and whatnot, and he says, hey,
Speaker 4: so what do you do? And I go, I'm the Navy,
Speaker 4: and he goes, really, what are you doing. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 4: I'm in the teams or really And I said, yeah,
Speaker 4: what do you doing? I said him a corman? And
Speaker 4: he goes, really, he introduced himself and he said, you know,
Speaker 4: we're talking more. And I just finished like the short
Speaker 4: course eighteen delta, right, so I know I was stick
Speaker 4: things and you know, the goat the gold labor because
Speaker 4: back and we didn't have the pipeline, so it was.
Speaker 3: Like the traumas the trauma.
Speaker 4: Here's the trauma met Yeah. Yeah, yeah, so you know
Speaker 4: you're carrying around this awesome you know, bed bag and
Speaker 4: just hoping people have car crashes in front of you
Speaker 4: so you so you can cry them exactly. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you were in two large varieties whatever. Yeah. So he says,
Speaker 4: you know, after we talked for a while, he says, hey,
Speaker 4: would you mind like like meeting us over at our
Speaker 4: hotel coming days. I want you to look at the
Speaker 4: script we're doing. We're doing a film, a movie, and
Speaker 4: it's just they lost their director or changed their writers
Speaker 4: or something like that. So it was I said, sure,
Speaker 4: you know, to do local, you know, real reality kind
Speaker 4: of check on because what's his name? Rick Rossovich was
Speaker 4: playing played the corman remember Rick with from Top Gun, right, yeah,
Speaker 4: and uh he was Iceman's Iceman's yeah. Yeah. So I
Speaker 4: go there and remember reading the script and I'm like
Speaker 4: it was just cheesy, like this is when the chief
Speaker 4: gets shot or somebody gets shot, and they you know,
Speaker 4: they do some bullshit stuff and then they close his eyes.
Speaker 4: He's going all kind of stuff like, well, that's not
Speaker 4: exactly how we do it, right, we do this, this
Speaker 4: and this, And I kind of demonstrated you know, full
Speaker 4: sweep and air away and all that kind of stuff,
Speaker 4: and made some they made some script changes and and
Speaker 4: then you know, that kind of comes out later on
Speaker 4: in the in the film to a degree. I mean
Speaker 4: some of it got cut, but but uh, prior to that,
Speaker 4: back to the bar, incomes Charlie Sheen. That's right, I
Speaker 4: forgot this part. Incomes Charlie Sheen with his freaking entourage
Speaker 4: with people, and uh, they're you know, women and stuff,
Speaker 4: and I'm like, yeah, hey, what's up? You know, you know,
Speaker 4: typical like, yeah, who are you? I don't care, right,
Speaker 4: you know, And it was I think because I didn't care.
Speaker 4: I mean, I knew who he was, but you know,
Speaker 4: you kind of hit it off and and one thing.
Speaker 4: Let to know that. Then I went the next a
Speaker 4: couple of days, went over to their thing and we wrote,
Speaker 4: helping me write some of the scenes in the script.
Speaker 4: And uh so that's that's, that's my contribution to Navy seals.
Speaker 4: I didn't you know, ah, when there's a gun running,
Speaker 4: gun battle and a couple of guys get killed, you know,
Speaker 4: Rick at least tries to do the right thing, right,
Speaker 4: he used the right verbiage and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 4: So so there's that. And I never told anybody about
Speaker 4: that because I was already in kind of on the
Speaker 4: on the fence anyways with thee my own Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: I was giving enough trouble, you know, them home on
Speaker 4: accident and my roommates like, what the fuck is this?
Speaker 4: And you know, sorry for the language.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's an adult show, so don't hold back.
Speaker 4: Okay, I just got to my lips.
Speaker 3: What are you drinking tonight there, Drew.
Speaker 4: Well, I didn't plan on drink can sasaac, but okay,
Speaker 4: I was gonna do one of those other ones back there.
Speaker 4: You have a nice collation back there. That's that's a
Speaker 4: tip of the iceberg, bro. I mean, this is this
Speaker 4: is this is my wife's office. Okay, I had to
Speaker 4: like throw ship into props in here like to so
Speaker 4: you wouldn't see all the World Bank development.
Speaker 3: Going on here, all the new World Orders stuff.
Speaker 7: Yeah, to be honest with you, she's she's a rock
Speaker 7: star at the world back and I probably wouldn't say
Speaker 7: because now whatever kill you.
Speaker 4: But she's an expert in frog and corruption, anti money laundering,
Speaker 4: lives an exciting life.
Speaker 3: I bet.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So back to that actually happened before Second Deployment
Speaker 4: I think. And then coming back to the Second deployment,
Speaker 4: g I Jane, that movie came out, I think it
Speaker 4: was early nineties. Yeah, and we knew that they were
Speaker 4: shooting some scenes in Virginia Beach, a couple of them.
Speaker 4: And so every year the Sealed Community, Naval Special Warfare,
Speaker 4: including you know, Swick and everybody who supports them, they
Speaker 4: do a reunion on both coasts different times. But it's
Speaker 4: at Little It's and it's like starts on the meetinghouse
Speaker 4: on Friday, you know, you it's a Chiefs club. That's
Speaker 4: wherever he meets, and you know there's a whole lot
Speaker 4: of good times there drinking and then Saturdays, you know,
Speaker 4: various events like uh, there's a demonstration, there's a run,
Speaker 4: there's a swim you know where kids and everybody can
Speaker 4: run in that different classes and then categories. Saturday night
Speaker 4: is a oh and we do a KPEX kind of demonstration,
Speaker 4: you know where I did a bunch of those where
Speaker 4: bass rope in and snipers come out of the water
Speaker 4: and you know, things like that for the for the families.
Speaker 4: And then in the evening on Saturday is the beach party.
Speaker 4: So it's at the Officers Beach. I think I don't
Speaker 4: know if it's still his anymore. I think it's in
Speaker 4: forts story now, so it might be different. But and
Speaker 4: we'd heard rumors that that she was going to come.
Speaker 4: What's her name, DEMI mere me to me, to me
Speaker 4: more to me, it's like Kamala, I can't say it
Speaker 4: right whatever to me mour was coming. And so sure enough,
Speaker 4: you know, at midnight or eleven thirty or whatever, we're
Speaker 4: all kind of like hammered. Anyways, she ends up showing up,
Speaker 4: and she's got like four older frogmen, retired dudes who
Speaker 4: are escort and around kind of their bodyguard escort kind
Speaker 4: of thing, so she can navigate the you know the environment,
Speaker 4: and let's just say. It wasn't real popular, right, I mean,
Speaker 4: people weren't real excited, yah, yeah to see her. And uh,
Speaker 4: you know, so I remember looking ours with some guys
Speaker 4: and I said, I'm gonna go get her a beer.
Speaker 4: So I went over and got a beer red solo cup,
Speaker 4: brought it over to her. I said hey to me,
Speaker 4: and I was smoking cigar or something. You're gonna be
Speaker 4: a if you're you're gonna be a seal. Here, here,
Speaker 4: have a beer, you know, drink a beer with me.
Speaker 4: And she's like, oh, I don't. I don't drink, and uh,
Speaker 4: I was like, oh really, So I just had it
Speaker 4: and I wanted it at her and I just turned
Speaker 4: it upside down and dumped it on her feet and
Speaker 4: just dropped the solo cup and wopped away right now.
Speaker 4: I mean, I don't think I meant to drop it one.
Speaker 4: I meant to just pour it out there, but I
Speaker 4: was kind of wobbly, and uh walked back to my
Speaker 4: guys and uh, you know, that was it. And then
Speaker 4: later on, you know, kind of came back years later,
Speaker 4: a couple of years ago where other guys were talking
Speaker 4: about that, and he said, you know, yea, I heard
Speaker 4: about that I know if it's true, and yeah, that
Speaker 4: was true, but you know, nothing happened. I an't get
Speaker 4: in trouble or anything. But I just feel like that's
Speaker 4: you know, they're going to be you want to be
Speaker 4: a team guy or team gal or what you gotta
Speaker 4: you gotta play the part man.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, so you tell that like her not drinking
Speaker 3: was was more was more unbelievable. It was more unbelievable
Speaker 3: than her being a woman.
Speaker 4: Frog. I wish I could remember more. There was more
Speaker 4: to it, but I think I might have even been
Speaker 4: I'm probably being kinder now and retelling the story.
Speaker 3: And kind of yeah about kind of yourself you mean
Speaker 3: or to her?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, because there was more dialogue but.
Speaker 3: You know, some slur language going back and forth.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean it was respectful, but you know, still,
Speaker 4: you know what it was.
Speaker 3: What what did you think of the feature film, Drew?
Speaker 4: You know, I don't remember if I watched the whole
Speaker 4: thing or not, because it was so I mean, at
Speaker 4: least Sheen and Bean's navy seal. There was there was
Speaker 4: things that were accurate, right right. The thing about that
Speaker 4: movie that's it's generally accurate is we pride ourselves on
Speaker 4: the East coast. Let's just put it this way. The
Speaker 4: West coast seals right, and there's a lot of they're
Speaker 4: all great, everybody's the same, but they like to surf.
Speaker 4: You talk about hairjel you know that's them. Uh yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: they're you know, they're they like to do all that
Speaker 4: kind of stuff. And they even put out a calendar.
Speaker 4: This was hilarious back in the like early nineties, this calendar,
Speaker 4: and it had all these beefcake shots of these guys, right,
Speaker 4: and we just never let them live live it down right,
Speaker 4: because it was like a fundraiser of deal and a
Speaker 4: bunch of guys. I went through buds with it, and
Speaker 4: of course we made find like hey, if you're on
Speaker 4: the East Coast, our calendar would be picture of a
Speaker 4: guy jumping out of a second story bedroom window because
Speaker 4: the you know, the boyfriend came home or you know,
Speaker 4: up against the wall getting arrested by the cops or
Speaker 4: pulled over for d u I or something like that.
Speaker 4: That's that would be like more of the East Coast stuff.
Speaker 4: And yeah, so that I forgot what I was going
Speaker 4: to say about that.
Speaker 6: You know, you're a question that that that the Navy
Speaker 6: Seals Seals Yeah, ok, yeah, Seal Team or the Navy
Speaker 6: Seal movies.
Speaker 4: So you know they do a fairly because that was
Speaker 4: written by Chuck Farr, I think, you know so who
Speaker 4: used to be in the teams. Yeah, because he also.
Speaker 3: Did d he wrote a bunch of he did.
Speaker 4: He did yeah, And and it's it's not his fault
Speaker 4: that the movie turned out the way it did, because
Speaker 4: you know, it's always budget, it's always director, it's always
Speaker 4: you know, a bunch of other people can can influence things.
Speaker 4: But there was some things that were you know, I
Speaker 4: don't think and little little you know, clip claven worthless
Speaker 4: bit of information. The scene where Charlie jumps out of
Speaker 4: the back of the CG seven going across the bridge
Speaker 4: to Portsmuth into the water. If you if you watch
Speaker 4: that again you can see it. The stuntman kind of
Speaker 4: didn't enter the water the right way and end up
Speaker 4: getting hurt pretty good. Really. Yeah, there's back or something
Speaker 4: like that, but you know, it just kind of like
Speaker 4: and then the golf course stuff is classic and all that,
Speaker 4: but G I. Jane just seemed to be just way
Speaker 4: too contrived. I mean, they couldn't even simulate buds, right, yeah,
Speaker 4: you know it was.
Speaker 2: It was terrible, crazy and if Ego Mortensen in that movie, yeah,
Speaker 2: confronting to me in the showers.
Speaker 8: Yeah yeah, it's like, yeah, you know that. That's so
Speaker 8: you've seen the movie. I have seen the feature film. Yes,
Speaker 8: there's a whole seer school scene in there. Yeah, but
Speaker 8: I digress, I digress. Let's get back.
Speaker 4: So we want to hear this stuff.
Speaker 2: Let's get back to Drew. Drew, what was what was
Speaker 2: deployment number three? Like, are we getting towards the point
Speaker 2: where the Balkans are starting to come up on your radar?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so let's see second platoon the Balkans. Yes, it
Speaker 4: was the early nineties, so that was a full scale
Speaker 4: war going on. We actually did the G and C.
Speaker 4: The carrier did sorties into the war zone at the time,
Speaker 4: right into the Balkans while they were still fighting, and
Speaker 4: we did, you know, a couple of little vanilla kind
Speaker 4: of recon things, but they were just there were nothing
Speaker 4: to speak of thinking. But mostly we were there for trap,
Speaker 4: you know, like if playing with down, we were supposed
Speaker 4: going to be the crew to go help get the pilot,
Speaker 4: and uh, there was a pilot shot down but the
Speaker 4: Marines did that that mission from US uh oh what's
Speaker 4: it called there? Right? The Air Force base?
Speaker 8: Uh?
Speaker 3: Was that was?
Speaker 9: That?
Speaker 3: Was that when Scott O. Grady got shot down?
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yep. And so we didn't get to do that,
Speaker 4: but but that was like, as your partner can attest
Speaker 4: to you, that was a suitcase full of cash kind
Speaker 4: of exchange. You know, the movies say, you know, do
Speaker 4: have one version but the oh really yeah, I mean yeah,
Speaker 4: there's more of a more of a greed kind of thing.
Speaker 4: But you know, prior to that actually taking place, there
Speaker 4: was some you know, real world stuff going on, people
Speaker 4: looking for him and everything. So that second deployment on
Speaker 4: the carrier, we didn't uh, we did a lot of that.
Speaker 4: But so Balkans was on my radar. Yugoslavia came back
Speaker 4: then that was still teammate. I screened for dam Neck
Speaker 4: at the time and got selected, but I was also
Speaker 4: let's see, how make sure we get this right. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so I didn't know what I was going to get.
Speaker 4: And the orders came out to go to Gray Green,
Speaker 4: which would have been the boats, but I was on deployment,
Speaker 4: so it was on the carrier and they had a
Speaker 4: policy at the command not to take guys off mid
Speaker 4: deployment to come, you know, so that you know, just
Speaker 4: lucky to draw at that point. So I got back,
Speaker 4: re screened and got a positive screening. But at the
Speaker 4: time I was at E six Corman, they had just
Speaker 4: kind of retooled the whole pipe line for becoming a chief.
Speaker 4: You know, I had to have eighteen Delta qualification or
Speaker 4: or Navy I d C school independ to do the
Speaker 4: Corma school. So I went out to actually I went
Speaker 4: out to dl I first, that's right, and I came
Speaker 4: back and screened. But so I went out to dl
Speaker 4: I learned French Ish.
Speaker 3: How amazing is dl I when you're an enlisted specofs.
Speaker 4: Guy, dude. I tried every way to extend out there.
Speaker 4: I could, right, you know, it's like, oh, can I
Speaker 4: take intermediate French or no, can I take advance or whatever?
Speaker 4: Can I break my foot or whatever? But I learned
Speaker 4: a golf out there, and it's just it's so beautiful. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you know, it's monitoring Carmel or just Pacific grower, which
Speaker 4: is awesome. Yeah. That came back and that's when I
Speaker 4: guess that's when Haiti happened ninety four, right, went to
Speaker 4: Seal Team five. All right, I'm sorry stil Team too.
Speaker 4: So I went from teammates and in the in the process,
Speaker 4: in the meantime, teammate had they had a proper compound built,
Speaker 4: you know, we we'd be you know, we were normal
Speaker 4: by then, you know, by the by the end of
Speaker 4: our deployments, my deployments there had proper compound, establishing a reputation.
Speaker 4: It was all good. Checked into Team two and that
Speaker 4: was like, I'm really in the teams now, you know.
Speaker 4: It was awesome. The uh it's just Rudy Bosh was
Speaker 4: the command master chief, you know, and it was like,
Speaker 4: you know, you'd walk around and be like, uh, check
Speaker 4: the watch built, you know, because if your hair wasn't
Speaker 4: cut right, you're you're on weekend duty and stuff like that.
Speaker 4: I mean, it didn't matter where you came from. Even
Speaker 4: in even a regular team guy. I mean, they were gentle,
Speaker 4: gentler in welcoming you than than a brand new guy.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: With that was always fun orders to see a new
Speaker 4: guy check in and truss blues and it's like the
Speaker 4: command master chief and the exo would be like, say, hey,
Speaker 4: so and so walk up here and introduce yourself and
Speaker 4: they say I'm seeing it. They shut up, you know
Speaker 4: that kind of thing, and then they walk away. And
Speaker 4: it was a scheme one welcome, welcome, and mean them
Speaker 4: to the command. But yeah, Team two was to this
Speaker 4: day I it's it was the lore and uh you
Speaker 4: know one of the original two teams. They have a
Speaker 4: great Vietnam history. And I was just just stellar performers.
Speaker 4: It was like the Triple A Club for for Damn
Speaker 4: Neck basically, you know, so you know, they were recruited
Speaker 4: out of there heavily, and they had like a pipeline
Speaker 4: going so guys would rotate from from Damn Neck you know,
Speaker 4: to training and platoons and then passing knowledge on. But
Speaker 4: my first platoon there, let's see in between between that
Speaker 4: platoon and after d L I, I didn't j c
Speaker 4: O mission in the Balkans. I don't know if you
Speaker 4: know what that is, jack Joint Commission Observer. So they
Speaker 4: had just declared the ceasefire okay in in Yugoslavia, Cirpska
Speaker 4: and all that. So NATO or SPUR was going into
Speaker 4: you know, carve it up and they had the British
Speaker 4: sector of tie sector for yeah, I think these. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so it was true. It was really an s F
Speaker 4: eighteen mission, right, but they didn't have enough guys, so
Speaker 4: they would, you know, let us play. So one or
Speaker 4: two of us per house would would pair up and
Speaker 4: go living on in a house in the different sectors Bonya, Luca, everywhere, Tusla,
Speaker 4: you know, all the all the different places, and the
Speaker 4: s F guys did their s F you know, i
Speaker 4: W stuff and what was cool about it While everybody
Speaker 4: else in the whole AO was in full battle rattle
Speaker 4: and kevlar and helmets and body arm and all that.
Speaker 4: We were driving around thin skin vehicles with turps, just
Speaker 4: wearing cameis with no idea on them and maybe a pistol,
Speaker 4: and we go anywhere we want, We blew past every
Speaker 4: checkpoint in the country, just did whatever we wanted to do.
Speaker 4: And then they did their collection and stuff and it
Speaker 4: was it was basically the mission was, you know, collect
Speaker 4: information that might be intel and established relationships, you know,
Speaker 4: kind of figure out stuff and then you know, the
Speaker 4: precursor to some stuff that our cousins were already doing.
Speaker 4: We you know, kind of in the open helped them
Speaker 4: out with that. But it was a great time. Tenth group. Again,
Speaker 4: that was my first exposure to those guys. I wish
Speaker 4: I could remember their names, but we were in the
Speaker 4: Sarajevo house, which was actually on the ser side. So
Speaker 4: I don't know how familiar you are with the with
Speaker 4: the conflict or not. But what was telling What was
Speaker 4: really amazing about Sarajevo when I went there's uh that
Speaker 4: it was they still had snipers and they still had
Speaker 4: the occasional stuff going on, but you could really tell
Speaker 4: who had the most arms by the condition of what
Speaker 4: side of town you were in because it was just
Speaker 4: destroyed and being on the Serbian side, you know, they
Speaker 4: did what the what the Serbs did is they displaced
Speaker 4: a lot of people. They just basically came and said, hey,
Speaker 4: we're taking your house. You can go live in Croatia.
Speaker 4: Beat it, you know, that kind of thing, and some
Speaker 4: family would take it over. But uh, it was it
Speaker 4: was a really interesting time, you know, just driving around
Speaker 4: with those guys and working with them, and at the
Speaker 4: same time we you know, got to move around doing
Speaker 4: other things. So that was a that was a fun time.
Speaker 4: The j c O Mission. Sometimes I forget about that, uh,
Speaker 4: but that really kind of opened me, opened my eyes
Speaker 4: to kind of what was really going on, the ethnic cleansing,
Speaker 4: and then you know the post Tito world and you
Speaker 4: know the influence of this, you know the Soviet Union
Speaker 4: once the Soviet Union fallen, just how how that affected
Speaker 4: different uh parts of the world. So let's see. So
Speaker 4: back to Team too, did a deployment there went We
Speaker 4: actually left early for that. This is when Momboto Seiko okay,
Speaker 4: he was the leader of what used to be called
Speaker 4: zaiir H. There was a civil war going on and
Speaker 4: the embassy and uh serially no in capital of u Zaire.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, why can't I think of that? I think
Speaker 4: a Sasarak moment right now. Anyway, we had to go
Speaker 4: early because there was that going on, it was unstable,
Speaker 4: they're thinking about doing the neo. And then also Serial
Speaker 4: Leon was was a shit show too, So I mean
Speaker 4: that's just like everybody who's been an s F guy
Speaker 4: or a Team guy in the in the nineties has
Speaker 4: been to either Seria Leone or Liberia, right, you know,
Speaker 4: because they kept collapsing. So we went early. We got
Speaker 4: on the USS care starge, my squad with six eight
Speaker 4: other seven other guys and the and the LT. So
Speaker 4: the way they broke up a sealed platoon is sixteen guys.
Speaker 4: You have an AOI O I see who's usually a
Speaker 4: tenant uh three, and then an ao I C he's
Speaker 4: going to be an O two or you know usually
Speaker 4: or a hard charge in O one. And then you
Speaker 4: have a chief and uh leading petty officer. So I
Speaker 4: was leading petty officer, which which is he six? Help ill?
Speaker 4: So I pair up with the lieutenant my squad, Alpha squad,
Speaker 4: and then Bravo squad. It was you know, they paired
Speaker 4: up with the chief, the chief and and the AOS.
Speaker 4: So my squad leaves two weeks early. We get on
Speaker 4: the care Sarage and steam full speed over to West
Speaker 4: Africa to Zaire and uh we wait for you know
Speaker 4: what we're going to do. We did an intel mission,
Speaker 4: which is kind of training, but no one knew where
Speaker 4: the guy was. Right, he had left the country because
Speaker 4: he's you know, was wanted by the Hague and everybody else.
Speaker 4: But but things were going south. The Marines were planning
Speaker 4: a non combatant evacuation operation across the river in Brazzaville,
Speaker 4: in Cootevar, and the we were wondering what we were
Speaker 4: going to do. So remember divots for divots, the sat
Speaker 4: com thing where you could go take photos and then
Speaker 4: blast them back over.
Speaker 2: It was like it was like a very early form
Speaker 2: of yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: So we just had to get off the ship. So
Speaker 4: we we just convinced. We convinced the pops officer a look,
Speaker 4: you know, let's go do this thing and in in
Speaker 4: uh point in Noir. It's just like this little town
Speaker 4: right on the Atlantic to this airfield and we go
Speaker 4: there and land. You know, we get some some marine
Speaker 4: heels bring us to this place and drop us off.
Speaker 4: We're taking pictures all these old megs like make fifteens,
Speaker 4: make seventeens or you know, just rotten away on this airfield.
Speaker 4: And we were bored, bored. F aug Man's a dangerous thing.
Speaker 4: So we my leathermen. I broke into one of those
Speaker 4: cockpits and took a bunch of gyroscopes and instruments out
Speaker 4: of there souvenirs. But while we're sitting, you know, okay,
Speaker 4: we're gonna do our training, we take some pictures or
Speaker 4: Intel specialists guy on the team, he's got his big
Speaker 4: camera out and this seven O seven I think or
Speaker 4: seven sixty so I don't know what it was. Some
Speaker 4: big plane lands on the other side of the airfield
Speaker 4: and he's looking through hist his camera and he sees
Speaker 4: they opened the door and it's like all this gold
Speaker 4: stuff's inside there, like gold handles and you know, really ornate. Well,
Speaker 4: it just turns out that that was the president of
Speaker 4: the country, the dictator about to Hasey Sayclo's plane, and
Speaker 4: we accidentally found where he was because he you know,
Speaker 4: he's leaving the country and they were getting fuel or whatever.
Speaker 4: We sent it back and and so it's happenstance. But
Speaker 4: that was the extent of what we did there. Marines
Speaker 4: actually did more. But in the meantime stuff started going
Speaker 4: sideways and I always get him mixed up. I apologize,
Speaker 4: library are serial leone. So we had to zoom up
Speaker 4: there and evacuate the embassy and brought a bunch of
Speaker 4: people off the neo there. But the fun part, the
Speaker 4: interesting part of this whole thing is right, so the
Speaker 4: MAGTAF the new commander is a Marine. He's six and
Speaker 4: the Navy guy who's running the ship is uh, you
Speaker 4: know obviously in six to two as well. So in
Speaker 4: the Navy, if you're at sea for more than thirty days,
Speaker 4: you get a beer ration, right, and we were at
Speaker 4: sea for sixty five days. We only people to get
Speaker 4: off the ship by the time we did get off,
Speaker 4: where before that was our squad and the Marines that
Speaker 4: actually went to the embassy and we crossed the If
Speaker 4: you cross the equator in the Navy, you're what's known
Speaker 4: as a shellback. If you heard of that ceremony, yeah
Speaker 4: that okay, Well we crossed the equator at the primary
Speaker 4: so we crossed at zero zero zero zero, which makes
Speaker 4: you the most unique shell back in the world. Right,
Speaker 4: so you have a special neptune, you have a special ceremony,
Speaker 4: and uh that's you know, another fun time. But for
Speaker 4: whatever reason, they didn't want to give us a beer ration.
Speaker 4: So now we're like, hey, we're two and a half.
Speaker 4: What the what the f? You know, we do all
Speaker 4: our work. Ship cruises north. The first place we're going
Speaker 4: to pull into port is the Canary Islands. So it's
Speaker 4: like the way they do it in the in the Navy. Right.
Speaker 4: You they set I don't know if you guys ever
Speaker 4: been on ship, but they set what's called seeing anchor detail.
Speaker 4: So that's you know, you have the cruise divided up
Speaker 4: into two or three ships and see an anchor. Those
Speaker 4: are the guys who manned the ship and and take
Speaker 4: care of when it comes into port, getting it all
Speaker 4: tied up. And then they do you know, they have
Speaker 4: to have certain manning on the ship and then embarked company.
Speaker 4: Can they get liberty call? And I thought, ah, you know,
Speaker 4: my my squad was like, yeah, we're gonna go out.
Speaker 4: I'm like, I'm gonna stick around. Me and a couple
Speaker 4: of guys are just gonna stick around. We'll go. We'll
Speaker 4: go in the next liberty. So the Canaries are are
Speaker 4: just like sick you know, that's where everybody goes. You know,
Speaker 4: that's where all the reality kind of shows are film
Speaker 4: from England, you know, the all that stuff, real destination place.
Speaker 4: And so I thought, I'm gonna go down to the
Speaker 4: Sick Bay and work with the junior Corman down there
Speaker 4: because I had already finished Independent Duty Cormer School, which
Speaker 4: is a year long basically your pas so to speak.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's of course that people don't know about that much,
Speaker 3: but it's they don't like it's it's it's like the
Speaker 3: eighteen Delta course, only it's geared more for like civilized
Speaker 3: medicine and not so much like what you might encounter
Speaker 3: in the village. But it's very comprehensive.
Speaker 4: Yeah to that point. It's so i'd done the at
Speaker 4: the time. We didn't know in the teams, we didn't know.
Speaker 4: You know, it's all it's all fixed.
Speaker 9: Now.
Speaker 4: You go to JFK, you know, you go to the schoolhouse,
Speaker 4: you know, you get the same training. But we went
Speaker 4: they sent us to ninety one Bravo right early because
Speaker 4: they didn't know it, and it was like basically going
Speaker 4: to Cormany school all over time. So I'm in San
Speaker 4: Antonio for that as a young guy with three other
Speaker 4: two other frog men, junior guys, and I don't even
Speaker 4: know if I had my trident at that time or
Speaker 4: not yet maybe I did. Anyway, San Antonio is the
Speaker 4: wrong place to send you young seals who you know,
Speaker 4: who already know this stuff. Right.
Speaker 3: It's a medical campus, right, but it's also just the
Speaker 3: most target rich environment in the world, because it's that's
Speaker 3: what I mean.
Speaker 4: It's like everything from med school to every mos that
Speaker 4: teaches any kind of medicine, and the Air Force and
Speaker 4: then and the Army is there, right and while we
Speaker 4: were there. It's I remember, you know, the first couple
Speaker 4: of formations, you know how that you know how they
Speaker 4: have that formation for a formation in the morning.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
Speaker 4: It's like you like you wake up and you're there
Speaker 4: and you're like, what's what's going on. They're like, they're
Speaker 4: just going to tell us when the next formation is
Speaker 4: and we'll go to child. I'm like, what the fuck
Speaker 4: do we get up for if you just tell us
Speaker 4: what time to be ready to go? Really that kind
Speaker 4: of thing. And then one day it's like we're we
Speaker 4: look outside, it's rain and so we put on our
Speaker 4: cortex jackets, go outside and it's raining, and everybody else
Speaker 4: is like, doesn't have anything on? Why don't you have
Speaker 4: rain gear on? There? Like because no one told us
Speaker 4: to put our punchos on. And I'm like, what do
Speaker 4: you mean no one told you to put your punch on?
Speaker 4: It's raining, you know, It's like did people have to
Speaker 4: tell you that? You know, it's a lot of junior guys.
Speaker 4: So it was just kind of like our our introduction
Speaker 4: to it. So essentially it was like at that point
Speaker 4: we figured out, okay, this is how we get around this.
Speaker 4: We went to the first sergeant of our company. I
Speaker 4: guess it is Dave. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Crazy.
Speaker 5: It was because it was basically you were going you
Speaker 5: were already a corman.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you were going to basically the A I.
Speaker 3: T Or A School of the army for their medics
Speaker 3: and you're like, what what is going on here?
Speaker 4: Right? Like you're not teaching me anything, right, right? So
Speaker 4: they had this pool, its outdoor pool there and it
Speaker 4: was like the wintertime so it wasn't open. So we
Speaker 4: convinced that first sergeant, hey, we have to maintain our
Speaker 4: swim or swim calls. And uh he's like, well okay, yeah,
Speaker 4: I see he was, so, well, we'll just uh what
Speaker 4: we're gonna do is you know, every morning or we're
Speaker 4: going to go swim in the pool and then we'll
Speaker 4: just meet the company at the chow hall, right, which
Speaker 4: meant we would just could stay out later and then
Speaker 4: just you know, take a shower and go to chow
Speaker 4: hall like that, you know, normal civilized hour. We actually tried,
Speaker 4: we actually tried to do it actually for real, but
Speaker 4: it was so damn cold, Like we were like, yeah,
Speaker 4: now we're just gonna just milk this thing and the
Speaker 4: other thing. I remember that that I can speak about
Speaker 4: openly is well, the one thing about the army back
Speaker 4: then is there's a lot of smokers, right, and so
Speaker 4: whenever they we take a break, you know, these guys
Speaker 4: would rush outside and start smoking, and we're like bored.
Speaker 4: You know, what, are we gonna do push ups? You
Speaker 4: know whatever. So one weekend we're like, okay, let's let's
Speaker 4: go build some pull up bars outside the place, right,
Speaker 4: So we went to home depot and bought four by
Speaker 4: fours and some cement and some keep or some pipe
Speaker 4: doug holes and put two different height pull up pull
Speaker 4: up bars right outside. And it was like remember that
Speaker 4: scene in Planet of the Apes when when the monkeys
Speaker 4: see the the apes see the monolith. Oh that's two
Speaker 4: thousand and one one. Yeah, yeah, sorry, uh, two thousand
Speaker 4: and one where they're like looking at it like what
Speaker 4: the you know they're touching. And it was like Monday,
Speaker 4: and people were like looking at these pull up bars
Speaker 4: like they where those come from? And so we, you know,
Speaker 4: on breaks, we go out and do pull ups. You know,
Speaker 4: we're young, young guys, still like in the best shape
Speaker 4: of our lives, just out of buds and everything. But yeah,
Speaker 4: that was that was. That was a fun time. Ended
Speaker 4: up getting out of there and then anyway, getting back
Speaker 4: to back to the story, I'm in the Canaries and
Speaker 4: I'm an id c and in these quad zeros. You know,
Speaker 4: that's just that's just a corman in the Navy who
Speaker 4: doesn't have any particular specialty like rady, like radiology tech
Speaker 4: or respiratory therapist or whatever. And I swear to god,
Speaker 4: we set seeing Anchor. We were at the Brow. The
Speaker 4: gangway went down at like two o'clock, between two and three.
Speaker 4: By six o'clock, sure patrol was bringing drunk marines and sils. Okay,
Speaker 4: because we've been at sea for sixty five days, right,
Speaker 4: and people just were like, I'm getting hammered, right, So
Speaker 4: people were coming back and they were passing out. So
Speaker 4: we just were like bringing in a sick bay. And
Speaker 4: I was teaching teaching these young guys. Okay, what's the
Speaker 4: unconscious protocol? God't know what that is, right, because you
Speaker 4: don't know what's wrong with this guy, and he could
Speaker 4: be a diabetic. You could you know, you could be
Speaker 4: on drugs whatever. So I'm gonna teach you the unconscious protocol,
Speaker 4: which basically was I'm going to teach the patient not
Speaker 4: to do that again. Right, So two large bore ivs
Speaker 4: nisel aharyngeal uh you're wreath uh cather you know you're
Speaker 4: wreath the cather.
Speaker 5: Well it starts with that sternal rub right, oh yes, yeah, right, right,
Speaker 5: you do that.
Speaker 4: You know, sess uh whatnot? And you know, of course
Speaker 4: they're going to throw up whatever. Right, So the captain
Speaker 4: the surgeon comes in. This six Naval medical Navy officers
Speaker 4: doctor comes in. He's like, hey, h what are you doing.
Speaker 4: I go, hey, we're just doing some training, sir, what
Speaker 4: do you mean training? Yeah, well, you know these guys
Speaker 4: are coming back and they're unconscious and you know, they're
Speaker 4: drunk and whatever. I'm teaching the young guys how to
Speaker 4: do ivs and you know, how to do catheters and
Speaker 4: nasal fare and airways and you know, blah blah blah.
Speaker 4: And he goes, you can't do that. You can't, you can't,
Speaker 4: you can't do invasive. You know this is what you
Speaker 4: do in the teams, right, you do it to each
Speaker 4: other right all the time. But uh, I mean I
Speaker 4: didn't get in trouble or anything. But he's like, yeah, good,
Speaker 4: good initiative. Bad maybe not quite the best judgment.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So anyway, that story goes to where like, okay, it's
Speaker 4: like you had to be back depending on your rank
Speaker 4: at a certain time on the ship. You know, if
Speaker 4: you're a chief. The chiefs went out seven, so they
Speaker 4: went out and rented hotel room. So you know, they
Speaker 4: had they had a base of operation out there. They
Speaker 4: did it right. Chiefs mass always did it right. Everybody
Speaker 4: else had to be like for E six, you had
Speaker 4: to be back by two or something like that. And
Speaker 4: the next day, of course, you have to submit a
Speaker 4: mustard mustard report for your guys. So you know, I
Speaker 4: wake up and like four of the racks, four or
Speaker 4: five of the racks were empty, Like my guys didn't
Speaker 4: come back. I'm like, fuck, you know, but I ran
Speaker 4: into some chiefs and at breakfast and they're.
Speaker 9: Like, hey man, we ran into your guys. You know
Speaker 9: the awesome We partied with them all night. You know,
Speaker 9: they're blah blah blah. And I'm like, okay, you know,
Speaker 9: so I knew they were alive. But I had this dilemma, Right,
Speaker 9: do I fill out the the muster report right that
Speaker 9: you know the guys are here president or not?
Speaker 4: Right? Right, Yeah, I thought, yeah, all present account for
Speaker 4: handed it in, you know, because they you know, otherwise
Speaker 4: balloons start going up and everything. And I this guy
Speaker 4: is friend of mine, Paul, who ended up going to
Speaker 4: the command and doing like fifteen years there. Paul, let's
Speaker 4: go do those guys, and uh went out in town
Speaker 4: and found them, you know, they were still drinking and everything,
Speaker 4: and they could see me coming from from away down
Speaker 4: the street and they're like, oh, Andy's pissed, and like, motherfuckers, Man,
Speaker 4: I had a false fire muscle report. And you're you're
Speaker 4: lucky you're alive, because it wouldn't be if I, you know,
Speaker 4: And I said, here's the deal. You're my bitches for
Speaker 4: the rest of the deployment, right, That's how it's going
Speaker 4: to work. And uh, you know, it was all good
Speaker 4: after that, and they were I mean, you know.
Speaker 3: I mean to get us some context.
Speaker 5: It puts you in a predicament because you know, you
Speaker 5: don't you don't want to rat your dudes out for
Speaker 5: just being out drinking all night. But if one if
Speaker 5: one of them got seriously hurt or had gone missing,
Speaker 5: and you say, yeah, he's president and accounted for, and
Speaker 5: then all of a sudden he ends up like dead
Speaker 5: and some ali you know, then it comes back on you.
Speaker 3: So what's uh, Drew? I want to ask you.
Speaker 2: You're making your way through the seal teams here, Yeah,
Speaker 2: you kind of you kind of I don't want to
Speaker 2: say got screwed over, but I mean as far as
Speaker 2: like where you were at in your career, it was
Speaker 2: very difficult for you to make that transition over to
Speaker 2: damn Neck without really getting kind of screwed over.
Speaker 3: So you kind of missed that opportunity.
Speaker 2: What when did this thought come into your mind or
Speaker 2: this realization that like, hey, there's this entire other endeavor
Speaker 2: out there in special operations that I could potentially go
Speaker 2: and assess for.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm glad you riled me in Jack. It's that's
Speaker 4: a good point because I don't want to sound like
Speaker 4: someone guy who's making people jump off the channel right now.
Speaker 4: But when that happened, I had some good, good senior
Speaker 4: guys at the command at the team who had been
Speaker 4: over over to tow or to dam Nick and they said, hey,
Speaker 4: you know there's other places you can go, So just
Speaker 4: to give context and then I'll move I'll jump into that.
Speaker 4: Sure my second time after this deployment I'm talking about
Speaker 4: right now. This is my fourth deployment. Fifth. Actually, when
Speaker 4: I got back, it was like, hey, I went back
Speaker 4: to the command and they're like, yeah, you're in E six,
Speaker 4: you're a korman. But here's the thing. If you go
Speaker 4: through Green Team, we're not going to cut you loose
Speaker 4: to go to eighteen delta because even though I was
Speaker 4: an id C, to get advanced, you know, you had
Speaker 4: to check the other blocks because you're competing against every
Speaker 4: other corman in this in this society, and said, we're
Speaker 4: gonna need our two years of of use before we
Speaker 4: can you know, and they might put you off cycle
Speaker 4: for chief, right And and that's kind of like when
Speaker 4: I'm like, ah, you know, and they were, you know,
Speaker 4: they were like, you know, it's one thing to and
Speaker 4: you know how it is they like to grow their
Speaker 4: own h enlisted dudes before they become chief, because then
Speaker 4: you're a boat crew leader, you know, and if you've
Speaker 4: not cut your teeth on you know, a bunch of
Speaker 4: deployments as as a team got team member you know,
Speaker 4: a unit or a squad remember or troop troop member,
Speaker 4: then you know you're kind of like not you don't
Speaker 4: have the corporate knowledge to be troop chief.
Speaker 3: So just out of curiosity, I don't mean to derail you,
Speaker 3: but I'm curious, how did uh damnet deal with corman
Speaker 3: then at that time, because it's really hard to grow
Speaker 3: your own corman, especially since you can't really it's tough
Speaker 3: to make East seven as a corman without I D
Speaker 3: C or whatever like, So how did they do that?
Speaker 3: How did they manage that?
Speaker 4: That's a good question, you know, And a lot of
Speaker 4: guys didn't care, you know. Some guys are like, hey,
Speaker 4: I want to be Assaulter, you know, So it didn't
Speaker 4: it didn't matter, so they.
Speaker 3: Wouldn't compete for promotion in order to go damnac.
Speaker 4: Basically, I think I think you definitely got looked at
Speaker 4: differently by the because Navy. Why back then it was
Speaker 4: it was in the Navy chiefs, senior master chiefs, whatnot
Speaker 4: who who picked people and for advancement to chief It
Speaker 4: still is, but but now we have our own special
Speaker 4: Operations Special Operator mls. So but so those guys, some
Speaker 4: of them would be like, yeah, it's going to be
Speaker 4: assalter I don't care. And then at some point someone
Speaker 4: would say, hey, you're you know you've been in a
Speaker 4: six too long. You need to go to Punch's ticket
Speaker 4: and get it. And you can, you know, because we
Speaker 4: want you to be a chief. We want you to
Speaker 4: be a leader. But back then it was just kind
Speaker 4: of it was in between the scene, kind of seams
Speaker 4: of advancement, so it was, you know, you had to
Speaker 4: kind of make your own decision on that. And yeah,
Speaker 4: I talked to some guys who told me about this
Speaker 4: unit back that time. It was called torn Victor that
Speaker 4: was its diagraph name or whatever you call it. And
Speaker 4: you know, they go back the union goes back to
Speaker 4: the uh what do.
Speaker 3: You call it, nineteen eighty operation eagle Claw?
Speaker 4: Eagle Claw exactly right, and uh even you know, some
Speaker 4: make the case back to the USS. So they told
Speaker 4: me about that, and up until that point they said, yeah,
Speaker 4: if you go, because these are guys who were at
Speaker 4: damn Neck and they knew about it because they worked
Speaker 4: with them. They said, you'd be you'd be a good
Speaker 4: fit up there. Blah blah blah. So I've made chief
Speaker 4: that year ninety eight, I went to soacon Or to
Speaker 4: soccer as a j thirty three chief ciliers on up there,
Speaker 4: and then found out and then I applied. I applied before,
Speaker 4: filled out a package for that for that smooth and UH.
Speaker 4: I thought I was going to come back to the
Speaker 4: team and be a platoon chief whatever, and they they
Speaker 4: selected me to go to assessment selection. So I went
Speaker 4: in ninety nine, early ninety nine, so March went out
Speaker 4: to UH went out to to Nevada and did the
Speaker 4: long walk and stuff and UH had a real good
Speaker 4: assessment selection got picked up by the By that at
Speaker 4: that time, there had only been one other seal who
Speaker 4: was there before me. There was there'd been a couple
Speaker 4: of other guys, but they were of like liaison guys
Speaker 4: or you know whatnot. So yeah, so ninety nine went
Speaker 4: to the went to the unit and did a year
Speaker 4: worth of what we call c Q c q T.
Speaker 4: You know, it's been called a bunch of different acronyms,
Speaker 4: but it's basically the you know, a year long trade
Speaker 4: craft slash stuff. So you it was a really I
Speaker 4: must say to this day, I love Buds. I loved
Speaker 4: everything about it. It was the hardest thing ever did
Speaker 4: at the time, but the assessment selection aspect of screening
Speaker 4: for the for the unit was the most rewarding thing
Speaker 4: I've ever done, because you don't get any feedback on
Speaker 4: any decision you make, you know, and a lot of
Speaker 4: people try to g to it, and you can tell
Speaker 4: g to it because I late years later, I ended
Speaker 4: up being Cadre. Right, So you're you're that Wizard of
Speaker 4: Oz guy behind the screen, right, you know how it
Speaker 4: all works, right, and then you you're able to see,
Speaker 4: you know, how people try to game it. You know
Speaker 4: when they're when they are not. But yeah, it was,
Speaker 4: it was awesome.
Speaker 3: Now, did you say that you were the first.
Speaker 5: This second seal, because they also know around that time
Speaker 5: that they started taking like rangers and they hadn't in
Speaker 5: the past. It was at the time had been sort
Speaker 5: of kind of an SF pipeline or whatever pipeline. Do
Speaker 5: you know, did you ever get any insight into why
Speaker 5: this particular lesson you decided to like broaden the the
Speaker 5: recruiting pool.
Speaker 4: That's a good question as to why they did. I
Speaker 4: think they realized that, you know, the Tenth Group Mafia
Speaker 4: was strong in UH in that unit for good reason.
Speaker 4: But but they also realized that they were having a
Speaker 4: hard time finding the right candidates just in the army, right,
Speaker 4: so they opened it up to the sister services and
Speaker 4: and you know, of course the leaps and bounds after
Speaker 4: Desert Storm took off, I mean after UH nine to eleven,
Speaker 4: just you know a lot of Marines and and but rangers, yeah,
Speaker 4: they you know, and some of the best guys I
Speaker 4: worked with were former rangers or rangers still you know,
Speaker 4: at the unit whatnot. You could see the pedigree in
Speaker 4: the senior n CEO guys were rangers, so as Yeah,
Speaker 4: I'm gonna speculate on that, but I but I believe
Speaker 4: it was just kind of like Manning issue. They wanted
Speaker 4: to grow more more troops in the squadron they had,
Speaker 4: you know, they have various levels of capability, you know,
Speaker 4: you know, and.
Speaker 5: It's it's interesting because we've also heard of another Army
Speaker 5: SMU that you know, used to recruit uh or like
Speaker 5: uh R D for instance, or RC that used to
Speaker 5: only recruit rangers and then started then made it like
Speaker 5: Army wide in the sense of, you know, sometimes the
Speaker 5: best people can come from places that we don't necessarily
Speaker 5: expect them to come from.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think so, especially when you you know, you're
Speaker 4: dealing with frogmen, because we're pretty non plussed about a
Speaker 4: lot of things sometimes, you know what I mean, like,
Speaker 4: uh yeah, whatever, you know that kind of attitude and
Speaker 4: that could be misread, you know, like you don't care
Speaker 4: and uh right.
Speaker 2: I wanted I wanted to ask you about that, Drew, Like,
Speaker 2: what was it like for you coming from being a
Speaker 2: frogman to suddenly Leord and all this different types of
Speaker 2: trade craft. I mean, it sounds like you had a
Speaker 2: little bit of exposure to to Clint DestinE operations, but
Speaker 2: moving into that and also moving from seal culture to
Speaker 2: Jason culture, was that sort of difficult or interesting to
Speaker 2: try to navigate that?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so that's a great question. I felt like, you know,
Speaker 4: I was always this is the story of my life.
Speaker 4: I'm always the older guy, the guy who comes in late,
Speaker 4: the guy who learns things differently. But I've also have
Speaker 4: a different level of life experience. So you know that
Speaker 4: that is a plus and a minus. A lot of
Speaker 4: times from a perception point of view, it can be
Speaker 4: being negative because people think you just you know, you
Speaker 4: come across as and know it all. But but I
Speaker 4: was also a criminal at heart, right, I mean a
Speaker 4: lot of the things I did before I joined the
Speaker 4: Navy were survival mode stuff, right, you know, just getting
Speaker 4: getting by. So when I got to the unit, it
Speaker 4: was still it wasn't a JAS unit or jsuck smooth.
Speaker 4: Then it became one shortly thereafter for a number of reasons.
Speaker 4: But definitely had to adapt to a strong army culture.
Speaker 4: But this is a very unique army culture right right,
Speaker 4: and a long history of things that the country doesn't
Speaker 4: even know about what they did, and the you know,
Speaker 4: great men and women. I mean, I'm not talking about
Speaker 4: just men. There's some awesome, stellar operator women who've gone
Speaker 4: through that whole pipeline who've done amazing things. But to
Speaker 4: your question, I guess I did have to adapt to that.
Speaker 4: And then when you realize that, suddenly you were an
Speaker 4: asset and everybody wanted your opinion except for the fact
Speaker 4: it was an army manned unit. When it came to advancement,
Speaker 4: like I many times was the de facto troop chief
Speaker 4: or troop sergeant major, uh for for whatever reason. But
Speaker 4: I'm never going to get selected to be the troop
Speaker 4: Stargeant major because it's an eighteen series billet. It's an
Speaker 4: eighteen X ray billet. Oh wow, right, okay, yeah, now
Speaker 4: that might have changed for our years, and I imagine
Speaker 4: it has, but you know, that's kind of one of
Speaker 4: the things you have to wrestle with. But the good
Speaker 4: side of the the upside to it was to go there,
Speaker 4: you go to your actually covered under a different place
Speaker 4: in the Navy. Right, So when it came to advancement,
Speaker 4: I was one of one all the time, and all
Speaker 4: my oe R s or fit reps were signed by Cno.
Speaker 4: I mean almost, I want, I almost busted them out
Speaker 4: because it's hilarious to read him. You know, you know,
Speaker 4: Admiral Mullen, Admiral this admiral that you know, promote this guy,
Speaker 4: you know, blah blah blah, make him an officer, all
Speaker 4: this kind of stuff. So, you know, was the time
Speaker 4: I was a chief that I made senior chief there eight.
Speaker 4: So on the inside baseball part, I didn't have any
Speaker 4: problem for advancement. It's just, you know, you kind of
Speaker 4: discount that because it doesn't really matter when you're when
Speaker 4: you're at a tier one element, a tier one organization,
Speaker 4: it's about performing, right, you know. It's it's not like
Speaker 4: I need to bank rank too, so I can you know,
Speaker 4: teach people how to blost their freaking pants or something
Speaker 4: like that. It's it's you just want to operate, right, okay.
Speaker 3: And the thing is is that, honestly, like getting getting
Speaker 3: it promoted.
Speaker 5: Is almost like a detriment to that because it has
Speaker 5: the possibility of taking you out of that operational status.
Speaker 4: Absolutely and and the the army guys in particular had to.
Speaker 3: Deal with that, right because of the upper out type
Speaker 3: of stuff and everything else.
Speaker 4: Yeah, now what what you know they fixed that for
Speaker 4: those guys because they would rotate out puns their ticket
Speaker 4: as a fifth group, you know, sergeant major come back,
Speaker 4: you know, be the S three or Army in the whatever. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: so you're you know, you're cycling that you're you're taking
Speaker 4: care of your troops. Well uh yeah, so the army guys,
Speaker 4: you know, they had to deal with that. But but
Speaker 4: once you're in, you're in. You know, you you just
Speaker 4: come back. And and interestingly, if I were to name
Speaker 4: names in the Army right now, uh, all the key
Speaker 4: leader g os or a big handful of them or
Speaker 4: guys that I worked with, right I went through CTQC
Speaker 4: with or or deploy with, you know, and uh, there's
Speaker 4: a reason why those guys are leading you know, two
Speaker 4: stars and three stars.
Speaker 3: So you you assessed the ninety nine.
Speaker 2: I go through your training pipeline for a year plus,
Speaker 2: and I would like to ask you the question that
Speaker 2: I mean, I think so many people went through. I
Speaker 2: assume you were probably focused on the Bulkans again even
Speaker 2: though you were in Jaysack.
Speaker 3: You correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 2: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit
Speaker 2: about that and then how things changed when nine to
Speaker 2: eleven happened, how that changed the as far as what
Speaker 2: you can say about operations, and also the culture, the
Speaker 2: orientation of the unit.
Speaker 3: And how that changed after September eleventh.
Speaker 4: You know, first of all, I want to say, Jack,
Speaker 4: you're awesome. You recognize I got a d D and
Speaker 4: OCD at some time, so I appreciate you been doing
Speaker 4: this for a while. Again on track here, but yeah, okay,
Speaker 4: great question. And so again to be fair, to be accurate,
Speaker 4: prior to nine to eleven, we weren't we were still
Speaker 4: an army smooth okay, sap. I mean it's I'm not
Speaker 4: going to say any more than that. But the riding
Speaker 4: was on the wall, okay. And I'm trying to remember
Speaker 4: the the order, whether the other commands created their own
Speaker 4: counterpart to what we were doing, you know, I'm talking
Speaker 4: to the other squadrons. Yeah, each each particular Tier one
Speaker 4: unit created.
Speaker 3: Their own everybody. Everybody said yeah, and that's the thing.
Speaker 4: Everybody said they could do it. And I remember going
Speaker 4: down to damn neck me and and and the other
Speaker 4: guy who's you know, senior to me. They were steal
Speaker 4: and we're like, hey, and Mike, you know the master
Speaker 4: a chief for that squadron. You know, he was my
Speaker 4: honor man and in my Budds class, and was saying, look, dude,
Speaker 4: we can tell you how to do this so you
Speaker 4: don't make the same mistakes, you know when it comes
Speaker 4: to all these other things you got to do, approvals, docs, covers,
Speaker 4: all that kind of stuff, you know, in typical fashion
Speaker 4: like yeah, we got it, but don't your help. Yeah,
Speaker 4: even though they were receptive, it was what it was.
Speaker 4: But so it was an army unit manned by jointly
Speaker 4: manned and as far as the Balkans go. So I
Speaker 4: get out of our advance, our our pipeline training. And
Speaker 4: this is this is an interesting little side note. So
Speaker 4: we started out with twenty two dudes, twenty two people
Speaker 4: because they weren't all dudes and at the end there
Speaker 4: was ten. We go to the board. I'd had a
Speaker 4: really good final exercise, I thought, and you probably know
Speaker 4: what I'm talking about. We do real world stuff. I mean,
Speaker 4: just the best training in the world, the best exercises,
Speaker 4: the most realistic stuff. And I went to the board
Speaker 4: and they cut They murdered five people right there at
Speaker 4: the boards. And I would have been number six because
Speaker 4: I go into the in the room and they're all like, yeah,
Speaker 4: they did run down the list of stuff and we
Speaker 4: we just don't think and you did this and that
Speaker 4: good and blah blah blah. And see right before that,
Speaker 4: my fact was telling me like to hey, you just
Speaker 4: keep doing what you're doing. You're great, You're fine, Everything's
Speaker 4: be fine. So I'm like, okay, I got one little
Speaker 4: exercise left, you know, chill. Go to the board and
Speaker 4: uh They're like yeah, but we're just not sure that
Speaker 4: you're suitable for the Okay, I got it, walked out
Speaker 4: and uh so I would have been number six. But
Speaker 4: then the uh command start, a major comes out and
Speaker 4: he goes I for a bit and he said like, hey,
Speaker 4: they just don't they think you, you know, they don't
Speaker 4: understand your meant you know your affect. They think you're like,
Speaker 4: like you don't give a fuck, like I don't give
Speaker 4: a fuck exactly. In fact, at one point they said,
Speaker 4: at some point during the actual course, it's like, hey, man,
Speaker 4: if you if you don't like it here, we can
Speaker 4: just send you back to seal teams. I'm like, dude,
Speaker 4: send me the funk back to the seal teams. I
Speaker 4: did for fourteen years. I loved every fucking day I
Speaker 4: went to work. It didn't matter how hungover I was.
Speaker 4: I loved my job. Okay, go right ahead, you feel froggy, jump,
Speaker 4: send me back. I don't care. But you know, you
Speaker 4: know it was a little more frank than that. But
Speaker 4: uh yeah, so it was like, oh, threaten me with
Speaker 4: sending me back to something I like to do right right,
Speaker 4: But you know, he said, hey, you know I'm gonna
Speaker 4: you know anyway, long story short, Uh, you know, he
Speaker 4: basically had the overriding the vote, and I'm glad he did.
Speaker 4: You know, if I said his name, you probably know
Speaker 4: who it was. I just don't want to do it.
Speaker 4: Sure he ended up being Jason Sorry major.
Speaker 2: But that's interesting that he kind of saw through that,
Speaker 2: like this is just a super laid back guy, but
Speaker 2: he has his ship under control.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's this one. There's this one exercise they do
Speaker 4: all the time when you're out out west and you're
Speaker 4: you know, they bring into this room, you sit in
Speaker 4: a chair and then you know, they gotta you shoe
Speaker 4: what do you call it? Horseshoe shaped layout of everybody
Speaker 4: and they ask you, hey, go rank these five priorities,
Speaker 4: you know, family, God, country, unit, whatever, right, and you
Speaker 4: do it and then they tear India about what your
Speaker 4: priorities were, and it's there's no right answer, right, It's
Speaker 4: like how much you believe what you're what you believe,
Speaker 4: you know. And that was the same kind of carried
Speaker 4: over to the end, you know, the board, the final thing.
Speaker 4: But but I but I knew my work was good.
Speaker 4: So anyway, I don't want to sound like a bragging
Speaker 4: but fortunately for me, he was there, uh and and
Speaker 4: and it all worked out. Now that's ninety nine and
Speaker 4: we're full board, going looking for you know, Jaysock, Blue
Speaker 4: and Green are and O g A are over in
Speaker 4: the Balkans hunting person's indicted for war crimes. You know,
Speaker 4: Karate and Melisavich and all their minions and so we
Speaker 4: immediately started deploying over there, and I did, like I
Speaker 4: think I did four deployments over there from varying degrees
Speaker 4: of sixty days, ninety days, you know, ninety nine, two thousand,
Speaker 4: and that was awesome. I mean, that was just like
Speaker 4: the most fun stuff. You know, you're running around doing
Speaker 4: tech stuff, doing surveillance. Just I'm sure your partner can
Speaker 4: talk more about that, if he knows more about that.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 2: I mean, we've had a number of people on the
Speaker 2: show who've been over to the Balkans hunting war criminals
Speaker 2: at this point, and yeah, it's fascinating.
Speaker 3: Sounds like you were living the life Drew.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was, it was It was cool. I mean,
Speaker 4: I wish I could go into like kind of details.
Speaker 4: I mean, I will say this one this one day,
Speaker 4: so some of the guys that I were at my
Speaker 4: team and Team two that were my counterparts, went over
Speaker 4: to Damn Neck and one of them was uh Neil Roberts,
Speaker 4: you know Roberts Ridge and Operation and Anaconda, and I'm
Speaker 4: I'm over there with the unit doing doing stuff and
Speaker 4: and uh uh a bunch of guys from Red Red
Speaker 4: Squadron came over and they had just come back from there,
Speaker 4: and they were the the unit, the team that was
Speaker 4: going to like do the hits, you know, go round
Speaker 4: up dudes. And one of them was Goodie, you know,
Speaker 4: Goodie Kay Yeah, I mean I know you yeah, Okay. Anyway,
Speaker 4: those guys, you know, were awesome. So it was getting
Speaker 4: ready time for me to rotate out. And we had
Speaker 4: a bunch of cars and we just got this new
Speaker 4: Audi A eight and right, and I was like, oh,
Speaker 4: I wanted to drive that thing. So I said, hey,
Speaker 4: I'm gonna I'm gonna take the AA out. I'm gonna
Speaker 4: see if I can set the record to whatever that
Speaker 4: town was in Cerbska, and I did zoom, you know,
Speaker 4: full full speed, blowing through checkpoints and everything, get there
Speaker 4: in like fifty five minutes. It's normally an hour and
Speaker 4: forty five minute drive or whatever it was, right, And
Speaker 4: I remember driving through town, cruising through town, past the
Speaker 4: Italians or or the Dutch or whoever they were, and
Speaker 4: I look over the right and I see this car
Speaker 4: as BMW, a red BMW, sitting in a driveway and
Speaker 4: there's someone out there barbecuing. And I called back, I said, hey,
Speaker 4: you know, you know, texting is uh you know what
Speaker 4: kind of car does Joe drive? He drives a red
Speaker 4: I said, you know, oh, okay, is it you know,
Speaker 4: license plate blah blah blah. It turns out I accidentally
Speaker 4: found this one guy. Yeah, that was they we were
Speaker 4: looking for and passed it on p I d D them.
Speaker 4: They came, we came back, I came back. And then
Speaker 4: it turned out that those guys ended up going and
Speaker 4: getting them. And it's kind of one of those Oh yeah,
Speaker 4: they set up with you know, they had a set
Speaker 4: up a place and you know, it's it's a classic
Speaker 4: story where they wait for it because he washed his
Speaker 4: car every Sunday right in his driveway and and so
Speaker 4: they just rolled up one day and with a van
Speaker 4: and and did the did the thing, you know, punch
Speaker 4: some punch some in mouth through in the van. Black
Speaker 4: hood over the head. Yeah, I don't even know if
Speaker 4: there's a black hood. I don't think they even gave them.
Speaker 4: You know, they didn't even give the ship. You know,
Speaker 4: like the disrupted this family barbecue and took this guy
Speaker 4: off the street. And I always thought that was pretty satisfying. Yeah,
Speaker 4: just like again, luck, total total luck, right, But that
Speaker 4: we did a lot of really fun cool things that that,
Speaker 4: you know, we we performed instead of having surrogates to
Speaker 4: it or whatever. Very satisfying. I went out after that.
Speaker 4: I went out to the Bundle of course, Tanne Bundle
Speaker 4: course out and out West and Tucson and Mariana and
Speaker 4: well that.
Speaker 2: Must have been a gas of a time. I mean
Speaker 2: it's like a six hundred pounds bundle, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, we were jumping. They were doing everything. Motorcycles,
Speaker 4: cruise boxes, you know, sono tubes, you know those things
Speaker 4: full of like you see, full of kit. You know
Speaker 4: they've gotten it, they made it, you know. You so
Speaker 4: you're a tandem monder muster when you get out. But
Speaker 4: but here's here's the cool thing about nine to eleven
Speaker 4: if you want to know, so me and a buddy
Speaker 4: back up to ninety. This is gonna be the year
Speaker 4: two thousand. We go down to this course and we
Speaker 4: got invited by our cousins to say, hey, if you
Speaker 4: want to go to this course where we got, uh,
Speaker 4: where you can learn all these boats, different kind of
Speaker 4: boats and different kinds of diving, and you can come
Speaker 4: down here and and uh take this course. It was
Speaker 4: a month long, so we learned all kinds of different
Speaker 4: similar vessel driving and and whatnot. And and then you
Speaker 4: mix trade crafting with that, so you're using you know,
Speaker 4: you're learning how to do that. And and then we
Speaker 4: did mixed gas diving. Get her little certificate. You know,
Speaker 4: I made a little diver card so we you know,
Speaker 4: we could do any kind of mixed gas diving and whatnot.
Speaker 4: And so I made friends with these guys that were
Speaker 4: down there, and later on there they invited me up
Speaker 4: to this barbecue up and up in Arlington and we're
Speaker 4: sitting outside. You know, you know if I said their names,
Speaker 4: I mean, I know you know them. But one thing
Speaker 4: led to another, and Mick, who's there at the time, yeah,
Speaker 4: Mo as well as Thomas is the last n Anyway,
Speaker 4: they're like, hey, we're getting ready to go do this thing,
Speaker 4: this thing called the Nile right in Iraq, and we're
Speaker 4: gonna we're taking these Tenth Group guys and Pilot team dudes,
Speaker 4: and we got we got extra slots. You know, what
Speaker 4: do you think you want to come? You want to
Speaker 4: do it for us? I'm like, I'm like, yeah, that
Speaker 4: sounds good. You know what's his name? Who's the famous
Speaker 4: CIA guy who wrote the books uh, before that about
Speaker 4: that they made Curproco not Curproco.
Speaker 10: Anyway, you talked about like like like Bob Bear, Bob Bear,
Speaker 10: Bob Beart was like one of the legacy guys who
Speaker 10: rotated in and did that stuff priory.
Speaker 4: But it kind of I don't know the actual you know,
Speaker 4: timeline of of whatnot. But but by this time it
Speaker 4: was after nine to eleven, it was game on. You know,
Speaker 4: things were going to happen. So you know, I kind
Speaker 4: of skip past nine eleven because I don't even to
Speaker 4: talk about there if you know, but sure the just
Speaker 4: realize I need to plug in power here if you can,
Speaker 4: we take a real short break as.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, Hey, everybody, please shook out our Patreon. It's listed
Speaker 3: in the link or underneath the thing. We just moved
Speaker 3: into new studio. We still drink a lot, and we
Speaker 3: could really use your money to to pay the rent.
Speaker 2: And I'll just take that segue to say that we
Speaker 2: really appreciate all of you who support the channel in
Speaker 2: various different ways, and we have to, like Dave said,
Speaker 2: we just moved into this new studio.
Speaker 3: We got really big plans for it.
Speaker 2: We're in a much better place here and it's because
Speaker 2: of you guys. Literally, it's a safe space. It's a
Speaker 2: safe space sa for Brose to drink some scotch.
Speaker 3: And even if you know you don't contribute to our Patreon,
Speaker 3: please subscribe to our channel YouTube channel like the video
Speaker 3: and get your LARTs and share our videos when you can.
Speaker 3: It really helps us out. We have just hit fifty
Speaker 3: thousand subscribers, which is really a milestone for us.
Speaker 2: And if you subscribe to the patreon, you get access
Speaker 2: to bonus episodes that we do, and also you'll get
Speaker 2: access to all these episodes ad free. So like if
Speaker 2: you listen to the podcast or you watch this on YouTube,
Speaker 2: you will see some ads. If you're subscribing to the Patreon,
Speaker 2: you'll get the episodes completely at of free.
Speaker 3: So when we're at ten thousand subcribers, we actually shaved
Speaker 3: Jack's head during an episode. We said it fifty thousand
Speaker 3: my COVID bullet. We would do costplays.
Speaker 5: Now we realize at this point that doing cosplay during
Speaker 5: an episode would kind of be insulting to our actual guests.
Speaker 5: But I don't know, man, I mean maybe we gonna
Speaker 5: be talked into like getting done up for a bonus
Speaker 5: episode on the Patreon and only if your Patreon subscriber,
Speaker 5: can you see Jack and I cosplay.
Speaker 4: Maybe that'll happen. I don't know.
Speaker 3: Well, Comic Con is coming up in October, right, it
Speaker 3: is Comic Con every year October. Yeah. We I took
Speaker 3: Jack to his first comic con. Shit, yeah, my first
Speaker 3: New York Comic Con. First New York Comic Con. That
Speaker 3: was a fun time. So anyway, and welcome.
Speaker 2: Back next next I'll also tease next episode if you
Speaker 2: want to grab that book behind you there, Dave Chris
Speaker 2: Cox fire Force. Chris served in the Rhodesian Light Infantry
Speaker 2: and he wrote this book fire Force. He's going to
Speaker 2: be on next week's episode. I've read a lot of
Speaker 2: war memoirs. This is one of the better ones. It's
Speaker 2: incredibly well written in just horrific and terrifying account of war.
Speaker 2: If you haven't read this book, I highly suggest you
Speaker 2: guys go and check it out. So we'll have Chris
Speaker 2: on next week's episode. So Chris Cox, fire Force, One
Speaker 2: Man's War in the Rhodesion Light Infantry. Suggest you guys
Speaker 2: go and check this book out?
Speaker 3: True? How are we looking?
Speaker 4: Can you guys here them? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, we hear you.
Speaker 4: Okay, technical difficulty on my end. Can you see me?
Speaker 3: Yea, yeah, we got you a lot and clear.
Speaker 4: Okay, Lima, Charlie, you got here. Okay.
Speaker 3: Before we go any further, I just want to say
Speaker 3: that I was a Navy corman. I was a dive medtech.
Speaker 3: So I was a corman in the dive community. I
Speaker 3: feel your pain when it came to promotions in in
Speaker 3: a in a specialized field with when you had to
Speaker 3: compete against corman worldwide. I feel your pain.
Speaker 4: Well, that makes you feel a lot better, to be
Speaker 4: honest with you, So I think by having I'm having
Speaker 4: an issue with zoom on my end.
Speaker 3: We see you like, yeah, yeah, it's all good on
Speaker 3: our end. D did you do something break yourself?
Speaker 4: Hang on? That's a little attractive, isn't it.
Speaker 3: Uh well, yeah, what what what's the issue? Because it
Speaker 3: all looks good on our end here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's I plugged into power and and uh
Speaker 4: I think I'm okay, okay, can we continue? I might
Speaker 4: I just see the split screen anymore because I might
Speaker 4: have just connected from my version of the zoom.
Speaker 3: So okay, oh well, we see you, we hear you.
Speaker 3: So let's uh, well, if you could jump back into it.
Speaker 3: Pick up, pick up, pick up your story.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I fixed it.
Speaker 3: Okay, great, I'm not.
Speaker 4: All apped up. Thanks for thanks for coming from me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no worries.
Speaker 4: All right? Where were you? What am I?
Speaker 2: You were talking about? After nine to eleven? You were
Speaker 2: talking to Mulroy. He was saying that there's this thing
Speaker 2: popping off?
Speaker 3: Do you want to get in on that?
Speaker 4: Well, because we had a really good relationship with with
Speaker 4: our cousins, our unit died, we were re all tight.
Speaker 4: He told me about it. They gave me the details,
Speaker 4: They told me who to talk and everything. So I
Speaker 4: ended up scribbling it down like a piece of paper,
Speaker 4: some numbers and names, and I remember going. I went
Speaker 4: back to the to the to the command, to the unit,
Speaker 4: and a friend of mine who's now in charge of
Speaker 4: the Death Star. He was one of my h teammates,
Speaker 4: but he was also the squadron commander at the time,
Speaker 4: and I said, hey, sir, here you think of this?
Speaker 4: I want to do this. They they're asking us if
Speaker 4: we want to do it. We want to be part
Speaker 4: of this going in before war the War one in
Speaker 4: two thousand and two, Right and long story, short phone
Speaker 4: calls were made relationship. You know, things were vetted and
Speaker 4: that's the reason why our unit got into ah, the
Speaker 4: AFO mission, into the into the the deal before. You know,
Speaker 4: we are part of the Nole team. We went in
Speaker 4: in October of two thousand and two and it started
Speaker 4: doing Ope AFO whatever you want to call it, and uh,
Speaker 4: it was just again you know, God loves freaking progament
Speaker 4: and Lucky right place, right time. Uh. The rest is
Speaker 4: kind of history is so that's how we actually got
Speaker 4: into the whole war before.
Speaker 2: And your your story intersects with some of our previous guests.
Speaker 2: You brought up Nick March with tenth Group was out there.
Speaker 2: Who else have we interviewed? Uh, Sam Fattis was out there.
Speaker 2: I think we've interviewed a number of people who are
Speaker 2: who are out on that that initial uh you know OPE.
Speaker 3: Mission into northern Iraq.
Speaker 2: Could you tell us about how that went from your
Speaker 2: point of view as far as like infiltration and then
Speaker 2: what the operation, what what the mission was like?
Speaker 4: Yeah, sorry, I'm getting myself on Yeah, no worries. Yeah.
Speaker 4: So so we had a really interesting journey over there
Speaker 4: to Turkey and then into the and our whole thought
Speaker 4: process was we're going to be the the gateway for
Speaker 4: the Northern front. We're going to set the conditions to
Speaker 4: the collection f O O P for fourth I D
Speaker 4: I was gonna come in through the north. Of course,
Speaker 4: we know that we got the heismand they got the
Speaker 4: heismand from Turkey they didn't happen. It ended up being
Speaker 4: that it was us, you know, us and the Kurds
Speaker 4: and Tenth Group, which you know had a role in
Speaker 4: the initial invasion anyways, but they ended up taking a
Speaker 4: bigger piece of the pie because that was it, you know.
Speaker 4: And then of course we all know about Viking Hammer,
Speaker 4: which what those guys did, we did actually planned it.
Speaker 4: It was uncle Uncle Andy and some other nick and
Speaker 4: some other guys along with you know, and then the
Speaker 4: Tenth Group guys came in and fine tuned to their
Speaker 4: order of battle. But it just, uh, it was It
Speaker 4: was a good time because for three months we were
Speaker 4: let's see November, December, October and nover in December of
Speaker 4: two thousand and two, we were in there by ourself
Speaker 4: running around doing ricons. I mean I ended up lasing
Speaker 4: sixty two dimpies for that wow, not just myself, but.
Speaker 3: You know, sure it was you know, but like Layson
Speaker 3: to get grids or laser for air strikes for uh, tomahawks.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh so when they when they fired those cruise missiles.
Speaker 2: Mark talked about that when we had him on here.
Speaker 2: It was like what they fired like one hundred and
Speaker 2: twenty tomahawks that night.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so the twenty eighth or whatever it was. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so there was sixty two tomahawks fired at least sixty
Speaker 4: something like two three four whatever. They were launched from subs,
Speaker 4: ships and whatnot. And it was just it was just
Speaker 4: most awesome because we were at this ford little place
Speaker 4: that Mark point talks talks about too. I can't remember
Speaker 4: the name of it, but and it was like this
Speaker 4: light show. You get jets flying over, but they weren't jets,
Speaker 4: they were you know, tomahawks. And then we just watch
Speaker 4: him hit and and just waylaid all these all these targets.
Speaker 4: And then then within a day or two after that,
Speaker 4: we let's see, the tenth group might have already been in. Yeah,
Speaker 4: they were, they were already in, and we had planned
Speaker 4: the four prongs for Biking Hammer and then we launched
Speaker 4: that assault afterwards. But prior to that, we also had
Speaker 4: this CCT guy. The true hero of the whole Viking
Speaker 4: Hammer thing was was the Air Force CCT slash come
Speaker 4: back controller guys. They just were like composers of an orchestra.
Speaker 4: Was amazing. Like when we did our assault on Viking Hammer,
Speaker 4: we'll call this guy Jack. He he had aircraft stacked
Speaker 4: up like loss like la x yeah from you prior
Speaker 4: heard the story and it was poetry emotion.
Speaker 5: We we have talked about the talent of j tax
Speaker 5: As CCT guys before and how they are operating at
Speaker 5: a level that most of us can't possibly understand, controlling
Speaker 5: so many different assets at a time and being able
Speaker 5: to guide them on like calmly, coolly collectively just.
Speaker 3: Like rolling in asset like. It's just amazing to see
Speaker 3: them in action.
Speaker 2: So for folks out there who haven't watched those previous
Speaker 2: episodes we've done, I hope they will. But Viking Hammer
Speaker 2: was an operation between US Special ops and the Kurdish
Speaker 2: Peeshmerga to go and fight Onsar Islam in northern Iraq
Speaker 2: in two thousand and three. There are Islamic terrorist organization.
Speaker 2: The fear was that this terrorist organization could kind of
Speaker 2: bog down our invasion of Iraq, so we had to
Speaker 2: have kind of a northern front in that conflict during
Speaker 2: the invasion, Drew, could you tell us a little bit
Speaker 2: of out what you did. You sent me some pretty
Speaker 2: cool pictures actually of you out there in the field
Speaker 2: with the peshe Murga. Can you tell us a little
Speaker 2: bit about what your role was and what you were
Speaker 2: helping facilitate at that time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So it was broken up by I wish I
Speaker 4: knew the actual order battle for tenth group, so I
Speaker 4: don't want to misrepresent that, but it was evenly divided
Speaker 4: amongst the was it one O three or one or
Speaker 4: two Toto's battalion and the s F guys and then
Speaker 4: various levels of Peshmerga and myself like a counterpart of
Speaker 4: mine and a combat controller. And I was paired up
Speaker 4: with UH, with Baffel no No, with jelal No.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: There there was uh Palant Talabani Talabani horror.
Speaker 4: Well sure, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he he became the intelligence chief, I believe.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, So I was spreed up with him UH
Speaker 4: and Jack and I and we were on the yellow
Speaker 4: or green prong. I forgot, but we ended up being
Speaker 4: with the guys the snipers from tenth group that were
Speaker 4: taking out. They did some great stuff with the with
Speaker 4: the Bearents.
Speaker 3: What's that with the fifty cows.
Speaker 4: Yeah, with the Barts. Yeah. In fact, I think one
Speaker 4: of the pictures I essentially that was taken from that
Speaker 4: was that day that both of those were. But yeah,
Speaker 4: so we we fought our way uphill through you know,
Speaker 4: we had we had pulverized a bunch of positions with
Speaker 4: AC went thirties the night before h fought our way uphill.
Speaker 4: We're taking effective fire. And and the thing that struck
Speaker 4: me about that whole thing was these s R s
Speaker 4: lam were clearly not just some forgive my terminology, raghead,
Speaker 4: you know, just amateurs. These people were they were trained, right, Yeah,
Speaker 4: they actually had defense and Depth center. So as they
Speaker 4: they knew, you know, gradually, you know, obviously we're going
Speaker 4: to buy out our way uphill. So they would just
Speaker 4: leap brought back to fortified positions where they had weapons, and.
Speaker 2: It was suspected they had a chemical weapons facility in
Speaker 2: that valley, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. So kerml H was a suspected weapons chemical
Speaker 4: weapons facility, and that just we just pummeled that with
Speaker 4: twenty or thirty freaking tom hawks. But I'll leave that
Speaker 4: up to historians to decide what it was interesting things
Speaker 4: found me, let's put it down. Yeah, as we fought
Speaker 4: our way uphill, these guys lead brought back and then
Speaker 4: they would rain down scuning on us, and and uh
Speaker 4: we had to call in closer our support. And I
Speaker 4: distinctly remember this one episode where we had navy pilots
Speaker 4: off of Roosevelt or something. There was a female and
Speaker 4: Jack's talking to her and she dropped her bombs and
Speaker 4: then He's like, I need you to do some straping
Speaker 4: runs along this ridge line. And so the ridge line
Speaker 4: essentially on the other side of it was I ran right.
Speaker 4: So she came in and just freaking lights gun in
Speaker 4: on him, took out some machine gun positions, and we
Speaker 4: were able to advance forward. Yeah, but it was interesting
Speaker 4: to get shot at all day long?
Speaker 5: And what was it like working amongst like not everybody
Speaker 5: had the same You work with different elements, and not
Speaker 5: everybody had the same sort of actions on type of maneuver, right,
Speaker 5: not everybody had this some sort of TTPs when it
Speaker 5: came to maneuver and fire. What was it like working
Speaker 5: with a disparate group in an actual firefight when you're
Speaker 5: moving towards target and trying to like.
Speaker 3: Coordinate that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I got this great picture of Lahore, I know,
Speaker 4: butcher in his name.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm sorry, I probably did too. Was sure.
Speaker 4: Buffs brother basically, And and so it's like, hey, you
Speaker 4: know it was a bomb rush with the Kurds but
Speaker 4: the SF guys and I don't know how it worked out,
Speaker 4: but it just it just worked. You know, we just
Speaker 4: you know, we passed the past the you know, we
Speaker 4: leap frog up to you know, some some cover and
Speaker 4: and you know, those guys were charged up, the Curds
Speaker 4: were charged up, and commands were passed and but but
Speaker 4: the game changers were the air cover and the tests.
Speaker 4: I mean, I was I was so frustrated that day
Speaker 4: because I decided because I had brought my SR twenty
Speaker 4: five with me, and I was like, I want to
Speaker 4: hope this fucking apples and uh, all these these magazines
Speaker 4: and whatnot, or I'll just take my end for right,
Speaker 4: And I regretted it to this day. It's like, because
Speaker 4: that was shoot, I was like lobbing shots at these
Speaker 4: guys four hundred and five hundred meters away, right, having
Speaker 4: it like you know, Kentucky. Yeah, yeah, and and of
Speaker 4: course we're fighting uphill. So it's like at some point
Speaker 4: I was like carrying a bunch of shit. So I
Speaker 4: took my rear played out and just you know, toss
Speaker 4: it on the ground and get it later. So but yeah,
Speaker 4: to this day, I was like, never go anywhere without
Speaker 4: a seven six two rifle in the open.
Speaker 3: You know, it's funny because we were just talking about
Speaker 3: the sr AT lunch to that. We were just talking
Speaker 3: about it today and like my experience of it in
Speaker 3: the late nineties, it didn't have a ford Assistan at
Speaker 3: the time. I don't know if that changed, and I
Speaker 3: fucking hated it because of that.
Speaker 4: You know, I'll be honest with you. I you know,
Speaker 4: like everybody else, I knew it was a sniper. I wasn't,
Speaker 4: but I was. I'm a real good shot, or was
Speaker 4: back then. And I let me put this, I got
Speaker 4: a Jerry Barnhardt sure hat oh kice.
Speaker 5: Which Jerry Barnhart was like one of the know, He's
Speaker 5: an amazing shooter and one of the principal teachers for
Speaker 5: a lot of the soft units.
Speaker 3: And you had to shoot first in his class. Did
Speaker 3: you have to shoot him or you just had to
Speaker 3: you just had to be the best of the to
Speaker 3: be in the best of the group to get the hat.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know I probably should warning that so far
Speaker 2: from what you experienced out there that day. I mean,
Speaker 2: I reflect back on what j. R. Seeger said when
Speaker 2: we had him on thought, the combination of US Special Forces,
Speaker 2: c I A paramilitary and American air power was just
Speaker 2: a very deadly combination.
Speaker 4: Absolutely it was. It was I just remember, like I said,
Speaker 4: you know, it was like it was a spectator half
Speaker 4: the time, right, other than rounds, you know, and the
Speaker 4: thing that the interesting party and I want to sound
Speaker 4: like there wasn't you know, me deep and grenade pins,
Speaker 4: but you know, they were shooting at us and the
Speaker 4: rounds were hidden. But they were also shooting from paraway too,
Speaker 4: so you know, it wasn't like you know when it
Speaker 4: wasn't like Blue Jar or Maddy or anything like that.
Speaker 4: But I remember this one occurred taking around the chest
Speaker 4: right Bot right next to me and kind of in
Speaker 4: between me and Jack and uh, and I went to
Speaker 4: him and pulled open all of his you know, they
Speaker 4: had layers of clothes on, right, because it's like march
Speaker 4: right a rack of snow on the mountains, right, it
Speaker 4: was cold, and I pulled all these layers of clothes
Speaker 4: out and the round, the seven sixth two round was
Speaker 4: like sticking out of his chest. It wasn't even like
Speaker 4: it hardly even penetrated because.
Speaker 3: It's so it bled off so much velocity.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly right. You know, I shouldn't made it more dramatic.
Speaker 4: You know, it was just it was just kind of funny.
Speaker 4: But yeah, it's you know, we did that. I ended
Speaker 4: up clearing some caves and then getting some guys that
Speaker 4: were hiding some caves, a couple of couple of cards,
Speaker 4: and and I remember leaving that. At the end of
Speaker 4: the day, I'm like, ash, am I gonna I need
Speaker 4: to write a report on this. Am I going to get?
Speaker 4: You know, it was like the dilemma. No, I'm not
Speaker 4: gonna tell because I don't I don't want to do
Speaker 4: the paperwork, right, you know, so I'm gonna like, you know,
Speaker 4: back then it was like, you know, we're gonna get
Speaker 4: in trouble.
Speaker 2: Why were you put yourself in harm's way kind of thing. Well,
Speaker 2: it wasn't that.
Speaker 4: It was more like you just didn't know everything was new,
Speaker 4: right unless you rush Afghanistan, you were you know, Afghanistan
Speaker 4: was was ahead of us by year, right, right, half
Speaker 4: a year so for a year or more. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: So that was that was that was a really good time.
Speaker 4: That was only the beginning too, because then we did
Speaker 4: other things Kirk Cook, you know, we had to take
Speaker 4: Kirk Cook with the Kurds. Uh. It just kept going
Speaker 4: and it was a real good time with with ten
Speaker 4: group and looking forward to the reunion, you know, I
Speaker 4: think they're going to do a twenty year anniversary of
Speaker 4: that Viking Hammer coming up here next year, early early
Speaker 4: early next twenty three.
Speaker 3: Were there, you know you said that Afghanistan was a
Speaker 3: year ahead of you at this point in time. Have
Speaker 3: there been? Were there were there visible changes at your
Speaker 3: particular unit as a result of nine to eleven? Did
Speaker 3: things change? Did they morph evolve?
Speaker 4: Yeah? I mean they did, of course, you know nine
Speaker 4: to eleven changed everyone's life. I mean, for me example,
Speaker 4: I was on a on a my This one trip
Speaker 4: I did after doing a bunch of balking trips was
Speaker 4: to a country to Georgia, excellent, and I remember taking off.
Speaker 4: I just why I'd just gotten married at the time,
Speaker 4: to to I just got married, just leave it that way.
Speaker 4: The a few weeks before and it was getting ready
Speaker 4: to leave on September ninth. And so September ninth, I
Speaker 4: get on the plane, fly to fly out there to
Speaker 4: the Caucasus and land, you know, because you lose a
Speaker 4: day when you're flying that way. Right, So check into
Speaker 4: our place, turn on the TV. I'm with another another
Speaker 4: teammate and they were watching CNN and he's like, hey, man,
Speaker 4: check out the TV. There's like a plane just crashed
Speaker 4: one of the towers. Like, oh okay, think of you know,
Speaker 4: World War two, when that be twenty five at the
Speaker 4: Empire State Building or whatever. And you know, I'm watching it.
Speaker 4: And then we like everybody in America has the story,
Speaker 4: same story. We watched the second plane the time. So
Speaker 4: at that point it was like, holy shit, war with someone, right,
Speaker 4: So you know, we're on the horn, we're talking to
Speaker 4: the chief at the base at the station, and next
Speaker 4: thing you know, we're we're doing stuff. So from that
Speaker 4: point on, it was everything was like laser focused. It
Speaker 4: was awesome, great times to be alive. You know, we
Speaker 4: just got everything we needed. Uh, we did a lot
Speaker 4: of great stuff. I just feel like it was you know,
Speaker 4: a bleusts time to be an American. Yeah, so.
Speaker 3: What came for you then? After after Viking Hammer.
Speaker 2: That whole two thousand and three invasion, what was the
Speaker 2: next step for for you in the now now in
Speaker 2: your army career, so to speak.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so Viking Hammer happened, and you know, it was
Speaker 4: kind of like the you know, you didn't really think
Speaker 4: of it as Viking Hammer. It was like it was like, okay, work,
Speaker 4: another deployment did to s. You know, we we went
Speaker 4: to all these different places and and that the stuff
Speaker 4: we pulled off of all these different little villages. And
Speaker 4: I mean you took this this one particular. I should
Speaker 4: have sent you the picture.
Speaker 11: Man.
Speaker 4: It's a it's a kind of famous picture actually sitting
Speaker 4: in sitting in a conference room up at another office.
Speaker 4: It's with myself, Nick, all the guys from our team
Speaker 4: after we just took this little town and me and
Speaker 4: Mick are holding an American flag up.
Speaker 3: Oh I think I've seen that one.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you probably have. It's it's actually in all the
Speaker 4: Viking if you go to Wikipedia and all that kind
Speaker 4: of stuff, you can see it. You know, all the
Speaker 4: bikes you're you're wearing Oakley's and most of them. Exactly. Yeah, you're.
Speaker 3: Understand, but that I said, you're a seal, so we understand,
Speaker 3: but I'm I'm honest kid.
Speaker 4: Yeah, cool dude always.
Speaker 3: And and for your for our viewers, you don't know.
Speaker 3: S SC is sensitive site exploitation and it's it's the
Speaker 3: phase after an assault where you basically search for search
Speaker 3: for evidence, but like search like like the FBI looking
Speaker 3: for like you searched like I would.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't quite call it what the FBI does on
Speaker 2: a crime scene.
Speaker 3: It's more like it's a it's what a ranger does
Speaker 3: on a crime scene.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, it's not like you're not wearing gloves
Speaker 5: and dusting for prints, but you're ripping pop everything. You're
Speaker 5: looking for everything you can. And yeah, and you find
Speaker 5: all their porn, you know, all all the udal indeed.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, So we did that s
Speaker 4: S stuff. I went to to the Fromal place and
Speaker 4: it was just devastated, and then some other folks came
Speaker 4: in and we just shifted focus to to the the
Speaker 4: Iraqi Republican Guard uh InCor cook and taking that place
Speaker 4: with groups again. So that I ended up getting the
Speaker 4: third Republican Iraqi Republican Guard Division flag took it down
Speaker 4: from whatever that base was there. And what's funny is
Speaker 4: like you could see these guys as they left their base.
Speaker 4: They were like literally taking their clothes off and throwing
Speaker 4: them off, you know, in the street, their uniforms and knowing,
Speaker 4: you know, soveying close. And this flag was it had
Speaker 4: to be twenty feet long or something like that. I
Speaker 4: ended up giving it to someone in some general and
Speaker 4: com But yeah, we found a bunch of really interesting
Speaker 4: things there, missiles and things that more interesting. But to
Speaker 4: put it, wow, But it's just it's too bad that
Speaker 4: the political narrative is what it is as far as
Speaker 4: the level of evidence. But you know, there's cases to
Speaker 4: be made on both sides of WMD. You know, finding
Speaker 4: Sarah is one thing. Finding effective Sarah rounds is another thing,
Speaker 4: right right, right, I would say, there's yeah.
Speaker 3: Right, and and you know sort of and again, you know,
Speaker 3: if the premise is yellow cake, then w m d
Speaker 3: S may not fit that definition. But finding you know uxo, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: finding finding toxic gases or finding what you know, chemical
Speaker 3: weapons does get downplayed in in you know, in certain narratives.
Speaker 4: For sure, yeah. I mean there was enough evidence prior
Speaker 4: to that of you know, makes being buried in the desert,
Speaker 4: and you know we were we were played to by
Speaker 4: by a lot of shakes, right right, that's that's out
Speaker 4: of my pay. Yeah.
Speaker 3: What what what came after that deployment though? What was
Speaker 3: the next step?
Speaker 4: Okay, so it came back from that. Well, before I left,
Speaker 4: I had to go down so we were we were
Speaker 4: also planning how we're going to get into buy it,
Speaker 4: get into back dead first, just conditions for the guys
Speaker 4: who were you know, first I D and one math
Speaker 4: and third id H and Uh. I ended up going
Speaker 4: down there with a group of guys that Mark was
Speaker 4: running and linking up at Baghdad International Seeing Airport it
Speaker 4: was called, and doing a little bit of stuff in
Speaker 4: Baghdad before I got shipped up. By that point, i'd
Speaker 4: been there like six plus months. So I left came
Speaker 4: back home. That's two thousand and three.
Speaker 5: H And at what point in your career how many
Speaker 5: years did you have in the military at two thousand
Speaker 5: and three.
Speaker 4: See, that would have been I listened in eighty seven,
Speaker 4: So what do the math for fifteen?
Speaker 9: Right? Right?
Speaker 4: Sixteen sixteen years? So I ended up coming back to
Speaker 4: the unit and taking U. Oh okay, so I'm a
Speaker 4: senior chief, right, So here's the here's the row, the
Speaker 4: interesting part of Iraq. I'm up for master chief and
Speaker 4: at the same time I was married, So I'm thinking
Speaker 4: about yeah, master chief E nine retirement after twenty years,
Speaker 4: twenty five years, thirty years, as opposed to like putting
Speaker 4: in a commissioning package. Right, it's a big pay difference,
Speaker 4: free time, Yeah, any difference, right, So I put in
Speaker 4: this one. I put it in a package for commission,
Speaker 4: a Mustang commission, and you get to you can check
Speaker 4: a block for war an officer or just line officer, right,
Speaker 4: Nothing wrong with foreign officers. They're awesome, right, but they
Speaker 4: don't want to run a training stuff, right. So I
Speaker 4: just thought, yeah, I'll just roll the dice line officer.
Speaker 4: So the message comes out, I'm on, I'm on an
Speaker 4: objective overnight. It's you know, December of two thousand and two,
Speaker 4: and I'm selected for master chief, right, pretty nice. Then
Speaker 4: I might have the order backwards. But I also got
Speaker 4: selected for ld O for for commission. So I come
Speaker 4: back and I have to make a decision, and I
Speaker 4: went to the boss to the CEO, and I said, hey, man,
Speaker 4: if I sirt and say, man, sir, if I take
Speaker 4: this commission, can I stay at the unit. You're like,
Speaker 4: I don't see why not right, because typically if you
Speaker 4: get commissioned, they send you off to freaking another side
Speaker 4: of the world, right, one of those who you are,
Speaker 4: so you show up as this boot and send or officer.
Speaker 4: And uh so one day I'm I'm selected to so
Speaker 4: many things at the you know, I'm gonna be a nine.
Speaker 4: And then next thing, I'm like, well, I'm manbe you
Speaker 4: know one, right, you know, we do this ceremony. Uh
Speaker 4: and uh I get uh, you know, go from E
Speaker 4: nine to or E eight promotable two one. And it
Speaker 4: was like people are looking at well, what do we
Speaker 4: call you now? I mean, yeah, you call me Drew. Right.
Speaker 4: So I stayed there for another five years, ended up
Speaker 4: taking one of the other troops, a different kind of
Speaker 4: troops that did different, uh atypical a stuff.
Speaker 3: Did some stuff in some places, say again, did some
Speaker 3: stuff in some places?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it just it was it had a different flavor
Speaker 4: to it. And it was the XO for that for
Speaker 4: a while. And then I did the m for to
Speaker 4: have kind of uh yeah, stuff where you know, I
Speaker 4: had like punch tickets, oh three, I mean S three
Speaker 4: I was a len o for or whatnot. But that
Speaker 4: wasn't the end of my you know, utility. I actually
Speaker 4: dim other stuff that was with other folks for their agencies.
Speaker 2: So but you you're still deploying in support of the
Speaker 2: war on Terror, uh, doing your thing there. And and
Speaker 2: you said eventually you became catre for the selection for US, right,
Speaker 2: you kind of came full circle.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So, I mean what happens is, you know, whether
Speaker 4: it's once a year or twice a year, it depends
Speaker 4: on you know, the year and the time. Typically it's
Speaker 4: twice a year. They're doing an assessment selection. They're bringing
Speaker 4: candidates from the military. They do you know, you do screening,
Speaker 4: uh assess them, and then you put them through a
Speaker 4: pipeline of uh of tasks and you know, they pull
Speaker 4: from whoever's available within the squadron squadrons to becaudant. And
Speaker 4: so I was very actually that was very rewarding, you know,
Speaker 4: to to do that, to teach people tasks and assess
Speaker 4: them and that now you're one of the guys in
Speaker 4: that horseshoe formation around the candidates.
Speaker 3: That come in and yeah, actually.
Speaker 4: I never got to that point. I don't think I was,
Speaker 4: you know, I'm I'm not that it was. It was senior,
Speaker 4: senior folks who do that. But yeah, yeah, I had
Speaker 4: feedback green sheets or pink sheets are there called had
Speaker 4: to fill out. But in this time frame after I
Speaker 4: came back from Iraq, that's when I went down to
Speaker 4: this special finishing school that day probably and I became
Speaker 4: a certified operations officer. So that after that, that's when
Speaker 4: I started doing you know, CEO stuff and other places.
Speaker 4: So that's when I got to, you know, really do
Speaker 4: the things that I thought was really my strategic intelligence. Yeah,
Speaker 4: run sources and you know that was a dicey sorry,
Speaker 4: dicey time, uh in the history of Somalia and the
Speaker 4: Horn of Africa, but very rewarding.
Speaker 5: And Samalia you actually you mentioned good early and that
Speaker 5: was Somalia, right.
Speaker 4: Yes, that's regrettably, that's I mean, I just got to
Speaker 4: tell you there are very I love my brothers, but
Speaker 4: of all the people in the world that I know
Speaker 4: who are just true superstar rock star heroes who've been
Speaker 4: everywhere at the right time, that's just one guy that.
Speaker 2: Uh was he was he the Bancroft guy that was
Speaker 2: killed over there?
Speaker 3: He was, Okay, I'm thinking of somewhat different.
Speaker 4: It was, yeah, yeah, but just yeah, you know, yeah
Speaker 4: he he you know, he was one of the ops
Speaker 4: in uh Anaconda and everything. Everything, everywhere he went, things
Speaker 4: happened so and regrettably, I don't think he had any
Speaker 4: family or any children, but but him and his wife
Speaker 4: were very involved in in other you know, mentoring, uh
Speaker 4: just you know, just children that had didn't have parents.
Speaker 2: Or m hm, yeah, that's incredible. Well, I hope his
Speaker 2: story can be told in further details some day. Sounds
Speaker 2: like a pretty amazing dude.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it was. I mean it's I feel like
Speaker 4: I had like an average career, you know. I mean,
Speaker 4: you know, you kind of rack yourself, you kind of
Speaker 4: compare yourself to your peers, and that's just the wrong
Speaker 4: thing to do because it ends up setting me up
Speaker 4: for problems later on, you know, right, question, could you've
Speaker 4: done things differently or whatnot? Right?
Speaker 5: And yeah, that's that's a trap because you you you
Speaker 5: are comparing your.
Speaker 3: You know, it's sort of like the whole Groucho Mars thing.
Speaker 5: I would never be a member of any club that
Speaker 5: would have me as a member, right, Like, like we
Speaker 5: see ourselves in a different light than we see everybody
Speaker 5: around us, And so many times you're like, how am
Speaker 5: I here because of what you know? And it's even
Speaker 5: like on this show, we have people who come on
Speaker 5: who have done incredible phenomenal things and they say, I
Speaker 5: don't know if I can be on your show because
Speaker 5: like you've had.
Speaker 3: Such it's like your legend too, you.
Speaker 5: Know, it's it's you know, and I think especially and
Speaker 5: and special Operations, which is an area of you know,
Speaker 5: high achievers, people who set goals and achieve those goals.
Speaker 5: And if you're consistently comparing yourself to the people around you,
Speaker 5: we tend to diminish our achievements and and see and
Speaker 5: go oh man, then I could have like, like look
Speaker 5: at what they did.
Speaker 2: I want to ask Drew about his about post retirement
Speaker 2: and or post army or post military and some of
Speaker 2: the things you did. Let's get into the viewer questions
Speaker 2: before we go there.
Speaker 4: Let me jump people.
Speaker 5: People very much care that actually people they actually give
Speaker 5: us money to ask you questions.
Speaker 4: So you know, how do I get tap into that stream? Man?
Speaker 3: You actually we'll talk, Yeah, and you're gonna you're gonna
Speaker 3: tell us about your upcoming stuff. You tap into that.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 4: Let's talk about see what your what's your what your
Speaker 4: group wants to know?
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's see what they got.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so.
Speaker 5: Let me do my broadcast voice here. John Pierre, who
Speaker 5: just donated, thank you very much. Darren Jones donated also,
Speaker 5: both very generous.
Speaker 3: We really appreciate. Jacob wall Drew is like the mirror
Speaker 3: image of Dale Comstock, yet equally if not more imposing.
Speaker 3: So what he said that you are like the mirror
Speaker 3: image of Dale Comstock, another guest of ours. Uh uh,
Speaker 3: yet equally if not more imposing. And I think what
Speaker 3: what he is saying is that, uh like Dale is
Speaker 3: is very much a large life figure, and you know
Speaker 3: in the way he carries ol of with itself and
Speaker 3: and deservedly so, like he's you know, been there, done that,
Speaker 3: and while and you are humble and yet you are
Speaker 3: also equally if not more imposting. Is when are when?
Speaker 4: Well, that's that's very flattering and and thank you for
Speaker 4: you know, I feel like, and this is gonna sound corny,
Speaker 4: but I really do believe that I was blessed the
Speaker 4: fact that I came in when I did, and I
Speaker 4: was had the fortune to walk amongst folks that were
Speaker 4: just like me who did amazing things. You know, It's
Speaker 4: sometimes you just wake up one day and you realize
Speaker 4: I belong here. Yeah, whether you're a Major League baseball
Speaker 4: player or an actor or pro football player, whatever it is,
Speaker 4: you just wake up and go, I belong here. This
Speaker 4: is this is where I live. I can do this.
Speaker 4: I can't perform I I can. And it doesn't mean
Speaker 4: I'm any more Superman. I'm not a Marvel character. It's
Speaker 4: just that you just realize you know your craftsmen, your
Speaker 4: you know what you're doing right, and there's you know
Speaker 4: when you when you get to that point where you
Speaker 4: trust your inner self. I think that's what I learned
Speaker 4: going to the unit. It's like, this is why I've
Speaker 4: made this decision because I think it's the right decision.
Speaker 4: And here's why I think it's the right decision. This
Speaker 4: is why I set the l Z up this way.
Speaker 4: This is why I aborted this mission. This is why
Speaker 4: I did this thing. And you're right because it turns
Speaker 4: out right. And so when you're when you're fortunate enough
Speaker 4: to be in that position to repeatedly over years. UH
Speaker 4: make good decisions or decisions that are productive or you
Speaker 4: know sometimes the just and where you walk away, right,
Speaker 4: you know what, right a good feeling about this.
Speaker 5: And it takes it takes a mature military unit, which
Speaker 5: which isn't always there to support you. Like some units
Speaker 5: will make your decision decision a zero or hero decision.
Speaker 5: But if the unit trusts you, then they give you
Speaker 5: the leeway to make a decision and don't like like
Speaker 5: hammer you afterwards.
Speaker 4: Yeah, to that point. I remember being in Somalia and
Speaker 4: you know, we had this certain coup of mission we
Speaker 4: were working with with uh proxies or whatever, and uh
Speaker 4: I had this uh certain O six who I love,
Speaker 4: love them to death. He's like, where the fuck is mine?
Speaker 4: You know, Commando force? Oh I need to know because
Speaker 4: he's answering to geos and whatnot. Sir, you can't make
Speaker 4: some allies and it just doesn't have an open into
Speaker 4: command right right. They don't even know how to read
Speaker 4: a map, right, you know, And and uh so you
Speaker 4: have that those kinds of challenges to deal with, but
Speaker 4: at the end of the day, they trust you and
Speaker 4: they let you kind of drive the try the train yeah, no.
Speaker 3: That's important. Hey, just to add to what he said
Speaker 3: work for in the ninth three Life, Hey, if you
Speaker 3: haven't liked this video, please please get us Yeah wrong, Yeah,
Speaker 3: you're wrong.
Speaker 4: You're wrong, straight up.
Speaker 5: And then uh, Adam White, one of our beloved guests, thank.
Speaker 3: You for the donation. He said, great interview. We're all
Speaker 3: very lucky to have you, Drew.
Speaker 5: We uh and keep making up funky and keeping it
Speaker 5: up spicy, y'all, go team go, Yeah, Drew, we are
Speaker 5: very lucky to have you.
Speaker 3: We deeply appreciate you coming on.
Speaker 4: Well, it's been my pleasure. I wish I could be
Speaker 4: more captivating and told you some better stories next time.
Speaker 2: Next time you come here in studio in New York
Speaker 2: and we'll sit down, we'll have some stokes, and.
Speaker 3: You told us some great stories.
Speaker 5: And look like, thank God for Jack because Jack, because
Speaker 5: you and I are we're both sort of the A
Speaker 5: D D. Like we go off and I would have
Speaker 5: talked to you about like naval sea stories for.
Speaker 2: Fucking you know, two hours. You're having a really bad day.
Speaker 2: If you need me to keep you on the rails.
Speaker 3: I have a bad day every Friday, yeah or Saturday. Yeah.
Speaker 3: See how bad my day is there there?
Speaker 4: Does anybody have a pointy question they want to ask?
Speaker 3: Or yeah, so and a totally Vaskovich thank you very much.
Speaker 5: Did you guys spend a lot of time on shooting
Speaker 5: and weapons and CQT?
Speaker 4: Was it a good shooting program shooting weapons win.
Speaker 3: During c QT, like during your training.
Speaker 4: For the some of you, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: I mean yes. But but part of the part of
Speaker 4: the selection, Terry was like what you brought to the team, right,
Speaker 4: So they're not going to teach you what you already
Speaker 4: know how to do. You're gonna get plenty of opportunity
Speaker 4: like to work with work with guys like Jerry Barnhardt
Speaker 4: or Pat Pat McNamara or or other folks. But that's
Speaker 4: just so you can just tweak and fine tune your skills,
Speaker 4: right mostly you get Yeah, so we did a lot
Speaker 4: of foreign weapons stuff and so, but maintaining our calls
Speaker 4: was never an issue. We wanted to set up a
Speaker 4: shooting course with some expert We did it whenever we
Speaker 4: needed to. How was it we wanted to also wanted
Speaker 4: to maintain What I've left out is that we work
Speaker 4: oftentimes integrated as part of a combined team with our
Speaker 4: brothers and sisters in Blue and Green. So you know,
Speaker 4: we needed to be able to not be.
Speaker 3: A live building us right and out of curiosity, like,
Speaker 3: how was that different? Because in the sealed teams, just
Speaker 3: like in the Rangers or most spec Ops units, you
Speaker 3: were learning to do things as a team. And while
Speaker 3: you need to be able to do things as a
Speaker 3: team and integrate, there are also times when you have
Speaker 3: to do something as a singleton or as a payer,
Speaker 3: and that's not really something that is so often focused
Speaker 3: on in these other units. So how did you train
Speaker 3: up for that?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so that kind of details into my one of
Speaker 4: my last jobs, where we had a special group that
Speaker 4: did kind of those types of things we travel around,
Speaker 4: be about yourself and notably, for example, we had a
Speaker 4: particular rock star who went on a trip and as
Speaker 4: soon as he landed, he his spotty senses went off
Speaker 4: and he realized that, hey, he thinks he's might have
Speaker 4: coverage and sure enough, you know it could have been criminal.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's one of the things you neglect were
Speaker 4: we always want to look at things from the standpoint
Speaker 4: of it, you know, as a voice or foreign intelligence.
Speaker 5: Like espionage, right right, right, right, but a lot of
Speaker 5: times it's just criminal, like too right, because you're an
Speaker 5: American in a country that's not Yeah, the lights tourists.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And regardless of what it was, you know, he
Speaker 4: had the awareness, situational awareness to recognize the situation. And
Speaker 4: sure enough, the van pulls up, guys jump out, so
Speaker 4: I'm put sticks a gun in his chest, and he
Speaker 4: does the freaking swim move, takes a gun away, takes
Speaker 4: around it, takes the gun away, shoots back at the guys,
Speaker 4: hits a couple of them, and they speed off. And
Speaker 4: he's got to do the Jason Bourne ship right, you know.
Speaker 3: And he right, and he can have he could have
Speaker 3: like the embassy x X for him, but then he
Speaker 3: would blow everything. So instead he decides to make his
Speaker 3: own way.
Speaker 4: He just he does Jason Bourne as it goes to
Speaker 4: the you know, gets his supplies from, you know, some
Speaker 4: pharmacy where takes care of himself, does the right thing,
Speaker 4: notifies you know, we got a procedure, and and to
Speaker 4: that to your point, you know, that's what happened. So
Speaker 4: but it was completely below the radar. Did the right
Speaker 4: thing wells the level of stuff that really does happen,
Speaker 4: and you're proud of when your guys your gallop.
Speaker 3: That's super hardcore.
Speaker 2: Like the way that accounts published in the book is
Speaker 2: that that guy was, uh, you know, mugged in a
Speaker 2: gas station essentially by crooks.
Speaker 3: But what you're laying out is like a kind of
Speaker 3: a pretty different situation.
Speaker 4: No, it wasn't a gas station. It was you know,
Speaker 4: he's on his way too from the airport.
Speaker 3: And these are not criminals. These are people who know
Speaker 3: who this dude is and they want to bag him up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, one can. One could definitely make that assumption.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, right, it gets off airpl at that moment.
Speaker 5: He doesn't know that he's just responding to the situation
Speaker 5: exactly right.
Speaker 4: And that's the that's where the Crucible and Killy McCann
Speaker 4: and and all that training, all the cold, every freaking
Speaker 4: day of the week, three times a week or whatever
Speaker 4: it was, you know, pays off. Yeah, it's it's muscle memory,
Speaker 4: it's it's it's all that stuff. It's you know, you
Speaker 4: fight like you train, and h question becomes part of
Speaker 4: who you are. And then you know the downside of
Speaker 4: that is affectulator, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, post post.
Speaker 4: Retirement, you know you got to Facier, Fasher Demons or Facier.
Speaker 3: Right, right, And we've talked to you know, we've talked
Speaker 3: to a number of other people who have you know,
Speaker 3: talked about you know, that challenge of of what comes
Speaker 3: up after because it's easy to sort of subsume or
Speaker 3: push down or ignore that stuff when you're still going,
Speaker 3: you know, one hundred miles an hour. But then when
Speaker 3: it all stops, all of it, then what are you
Speaker 3: left with and what comes up? And did you That's
Speaker 3: kind of it with the question did you did you
Speaker 3: have to deal?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 3: Were there things for you like working through afterwards?
Speaker 4: Yeah? I mean, honestly, where I'm at in my life
Speaker 4: right now, these are the things that I really feel
Speaker 4: are important. And it surprised me, but yes I did,
Speaker 4: because when I got out, PTSD was a stigma. It
Speaker 4: was it was something you didn't of course you could.
Speaker 4: You thought only.
Speaker 12: Other people have convention of right, right, Yeah, exactly, And
Speaker 12: but you know the assimilation part of society. You know,
Speaker 12: everybody has to go through some sort of well I
Speaker 12: shouldn't say everybody, but many of us high performers, I
Speaker 12: want to say, you know, like we always joke about it.
Speaker 12: It's a performance league, right you You you know, you
Speaker 12: either have a good batting average, you drive in runs
Speaker 12: you don't, you know so uh and you constantly measure
Speaker 12: yourself based on your peers. You get out and you
Speaker 12: have to struggle with uh. You struggle with relevancy.
Speaker 4: Like I used to always joke about my my fresh
Speaker 4: my cell by date my. You know, when you get
Speaker 4: out and you cut away, you've got an amount of
Speaker 4: relevancy in the community that unless you strap hang on
Speaker 4: to another organization is going to keep irrelevant. You're gonna
Speaker 4: you know, things are going to move past you. And
Speaker 4: fortunately for me, I was able to do that. I
Speaker 4: ended up working with Mick and some other guys for
Speaker 4: a little while, and although it wasn't a real long time,
Speaker 4: I made a personal decision not to, it did keep
Speaker 4: me relevant. I did get to go do some things
Speaker 4: that I didn't get to do in the military that
Speaker 4: were just awesome. You know, I got more trigger time
Speaker 4: afterwards than I did cumulatively you know later. But it's
Speaker 4: just what it was, what it was.
Speaker 3: But there, once you leave, you're gone, right, Like the
Speaker 3: gates closed and you might still have friends, but you're
Speaker 3: closed off.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you know what it is you think, you
Speaker 4: think it's you. You don't know how to make you
Speaker 4: don't know how to navigate the watch you find yourself.
Speaker 4: For many of us, we wall ourselves off because we
Speaker 4: feel like, I don't want to call. I don't want
Speaker 4: to talk my buddies. I want, you know, I want
Speaker 4: to sound like I'm gonna say something that sounds dated.
Speaker 4: I don't want to bother them. And you stay, you
Speaker 4: try to stay in touch, but but at the same time,
Speaker 4: you re ut recognize they're still running one hundred miles
Speaker 4: an hour and and you're not so you know, it
Speaker 4: can take a toll and and and uh, for me,
Speaker 4: it did. Uh, it's it's snuck up on me. And
Speaker 4: there when I made the decision to kind of come
Speaker 4: off the you know, come off the field and and
Speaker 4: focus on a new marriage and having kids. You know,
Speaker 4: it was a deliberate decision, and uh, but it also
Speaker 4: forced me to face some things that you know, what
Speaker 4: was going to happen in the future, and at some
Speaker 4: point you're real For I feel fortunate that I recognized
Speaker 4: that I couldn't fix it myself, and I reached out.
Speaker 4: It just turned out it was this weird thing. I
Speaker 4: I got to say. I was walking into Wegman's one
Speaker 4: day and I hadn't seen Rod Gonzo. This one guy Intel,
Speaker 4: a guy in a few years and he said, Hey,
Speaker 4: what's up, Drew, And we're shooting the ship in the
Speaker 4: parking lot and maybe you could just see it. He
Speaker 4: must have been written over my face. And he's like, uh, hey,
Speaker 4: you're her headstrong, you know, And yeah, they got a
Speaker 4: lot of money. They they're helping, helping guys. And give
Speaker 4: him a call and I looked them up, ended up
Speaker 4: calling him, having this inject with someone's you know, and
Speaker 4: just kind of explaining things that I just didn't understand
Speaker 4: what was going through my head. I never thought about
Speaker 4: doing anything, you know, drastic some people with twenty two
Speaker 4: and suicide and all that I said. But but I
Speaker 4: realized I just after twenty five years or twenty seven
Speaker 4: years of doing whatever I was doing, I suddenly I
Speaker 4: found myselven waters. I couldn't control right somebody else, you know,
Speaker 4: And so I reached out and talked to this guy.
Speaker 4: Did an inject next a guy. Now I'm like talking
Speaker 4: to a psychiatrist. Next thing I know, I'm talking to
Speaker 4: you know, getting help and Headstrong was started by a
Speaker 4: marine captain or major who a bunch of his major,
Speaker 4: a bunch of his platoon members. After Ramadi and Flujah,
Speaker 4: young guys were killing themselves suicide because they came back
Speaker 4: to the world and they were you know, they had
Speaker 4: issues when they were young, young kids. But you know,
Speaker 4: the VA just hand them a bag of pills and
Speaker 4: right and uh So, the stigma of PTSD was this,
Speaker 4: you know, before Nika and Nico was formed for the
Speaker 4: guys that that Tier one units. Now where you you
Speaker 4: actually you know, get the proper treatment, the proper trend
Speaker 4: uh uh transition, an assessment like what Mark talks about. Anyway,
Speaker 4: that was before that. I was worried about my T S,
Speaker 4: s C, I t K down all that kind of stuff, right,
Speaker 4: you know I was. I was worried about, like, well,
Speaker 4: somebody finds out I got you know, issues, I won't
Speaker 4: be a case officer or whatever. So this was completely
Speaker 4: anonymous they kept. You know, it was all done by big, big,
Speaker 4: deep pocket boat donors. You got the help you needed
Speaker 4: without any kind of stigma and had strong Save save basically,
Speaker 4: and that's why you know I'm where I'm at today.
Speaker 4: Not that not that things that have necessarily been.
Speaker 11: You know, negative, but but right, I can't do it
Speaker 11: right right, And and again I get what you're saying
Speaker 11: that you're you're not you're not saying that maybe there
Speaker 11: were thoughts of self harm, but it becomes sort of
Speaker 11: an isolation and sort of a downward spiral inside of
Speaker 11: that isolation that just that just like.
Speaker 5: It's not necessarily leading to a path that is physically detrimental,
Speaker 5: but it's a path where you just sort of isolate
Speaker 5: and keep you know, push away family friends, whatever.
Speaker 4: Yeah, when when you when you're when your spouse says
Speaker 4: something innocent and you cook off right along as entire rade, right,
Speaker 4: and you're like, you know, you're just like you have
Speaker 4: this out of body experience where like you don't get it.
Speaker 4: And then you realize they don't get why should they
Speaker 4: get it right?
Speaker 3: And thank god they don't get it right.
Speaker 4: I mean, yeah, we realize, Wow, okay, I'm gonna try
Speaker 4: all these different things alcohol, I'll try this. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 4: you do, you do you go about down all the
Speaker 4: different rabbit holes and you realize, okay, you know, this
Speaker 4: is just an area where I need a subject matter
Speaker 4: expert you know, I need somebody else who you know
Speaker 4: I need to I need. I don't know what I need,
Speaker 4: but but I need something else, right, And it's good,
Speaker 4: you know. I mean, there's there's a lot more we've
Speaker 4: We've really progressed a lot since I went through that,
Speaker 4: So I, yeah, definitely.
Speaker 3: I want to ask you something.
Speaker 2: And maybe this is somewhat selfish of me, but I'll
Speaker 2: go ahead and ask anyway. And I don't want to
Speaker 2: say more than you maybe want to talk about publicly.
Speaker 2: But you have told something to me that like it
Speaker 2: kind of resonated and I can relate to it on
Speaker 2: a personal level. Like there's a time in your life,
Speaker 2: like you decide to set aside this life as an
Speaker 2: operator or a soldier or a sale or a bad
Speaker 2: ass or whatever it is, and like choose to be
Speaker 2: a father and a husband and and like play this
Speaker 2: sort of other role in life. And I was wondering
Speaker 2: if you would be willing to like talk a little
Speaker 2: bit about like the very like kind of conscious decision
Speaker 2: you made to move from one life to another, because
Speaker 2: like that's something that just it really clicked with me
Speaker 2: at least.
Speaker 4: Yeah, great question. It's like and we all have these
Speaker 4: preconceived ideas of what our life's gonna be. Like I'm
Speaker 4: gonna get out, I'm gonna work with CIA, I'm gonna
Speaker 4: be a parent military contractor. I'm gonna buy land in Montana.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna do this, this and this. I'm gonna get
Speaker 4: my past license, blah blah blah blah, you know whatever,
Speaker 4: and uh and then you know, life throws you a
Speaker 4: a a softball. You think it's a curve, but softball,
Speaker 4: and you swim a miss and if you just like
Speaker 4: paid attention to it and hit it the right way,
Speaker 4: it would have been the best thing. So you you
Speaker 4: have it. Like for me, I felt like a mhm.
Speaker 4: I met my wife and at the time and we
Speaker 4: were going to go down this path that from Dave's
Speaker 4: old place, and I realized that wasn't the right fit
Speaker 4: for me because the organization was saying, your spouse has
Speaker 4: to basically stop her career. I'm gonna be blunt about
Speaker 4: it because it needs to be said. She's you know,
Speaker 4: I look at my you know, she's a rising rock
Speaker 4: star in her field global right, and you know, within
Speaker 4: the the organization was saying, yeah, you know, but but
Speaker 4: she has contacts and I thought I put myself in her.
Speaker 4: She was like, what if somebody said that to me
Speaker 4: when I was in the beginning of my seill career,
Speaker 4: I what I have today if I had given all that,
Speaker 4: all of what I've experienced, right, And I felt like,
Speaker 4: that's not fair. I got to live my career. I
Speaker 4: got to do exactly what I chose to do, and
Speaker 4: I had. I had a great career, and I wouldn't
Speaker 4: want to put that on anybody else. So I decided, hey,
Speaker 4: you know what I'm gonna I'm gonna decouple. I'm not
Speaker 4: going to impose that restriction on my significant other and
Speaker 4: be a support element in the meantime. So I started
Speaker 4: doing you know, I see training people doing whatever. And
Speaker 4: it was hard. It was really hard. It was really
Speaker 4: hard because you know we're talking things were still very kinetic,
Speaker 4: very going on, and we've being a coin advisor in
Speaker 4: Afghanistan for a year and that was very rewarding, work
Speaker 4: with Marines and working from my Crystal and betray us.
Speaker 4: We didn't even talk about that. That's another podcast probably,
Speaker 4: but you know, you have to like some at some point,
Speaker 4: you just got to make the decision to pull the cutaway. Pillow. Yeah, right,
Speaker 4: and hope you reserve opens you pull that preserve pillow
Speaker 4: and thank god the rigor packed it right. I saved
Speaker 4: my life, right, you know, and then you have to
Speaker 4: deal with everything after that. And the transition was or
Speaker 4: a challenge, but I've embraced it. And now we have
Speaker 4: two wonderful children that I just adore and I my
Speaker 4: wife is h a rock star and I'm just glad
Speaker 4: to be her EXO and support structure.
Speaker 3: And you know, we've kind of talked about that before that,
Speaker 3: you know, especially for special operations, right, it's a volunteer service.
Speaker 3: Nobody is drafted then inspec ops like then you're volunteering
Speaker 3: two times or three times and people can say thank
Speaker 3: you for your service. But at the end of the day,
Speaker 3: we are all doing what we love and we are living,
Speaker 3: in a way, a pretty selfish life. We are. We
Speaker 3: are living our dream and you know, and what gets
Speaker 3: left behind are the wives and the children when we're
Speaker 3: doing that, And you know, they're the ones who, you know,
Speaker 3: the spouses are the ones who wonder, like what's going
Speaker 3: on when we haven't been able to contact them for
Speaker 3: two or three weeks at a time, right, or whatever,
Speaker 3: one more question, okay, And and for you to make
Speaker 3: such a I don't want to say mature because obviously
Speaker 3: you're a grown man. But but what's it's a mature
Speaker 3: decision to say, like, I've been living my dream and
Speaker 3: now if I like, if I want to keep living
Speaker 3: this thing that I've been living, then I have to
Speaker 3: sort of ask my wife to stop living her dream.
Speaker 4: Right, And yeah, that was a non starter. But but
Speaker 4: that it's it's a uh, it's a complex thing, right.
Speaker 4: I don't think I made it with the clarity I'm
Speaker 4: relaying it to you, Okay, it was it was a
Speaker 4: lot of unknowns. Sure, right is intuition, it's more like instinct.
Speaker 4: It's like I need help, right, And I didn't even
Speaker 4: know why because I was like, I know, guys who
Speaker 4: did three hundred hits lost guys in their arms. You know,
Speaker 4: people died in their arms. I mean I didn't have
Speaker 4: that kind of had a lot of very interesting experiences,
Speaker 4: I mean stuff I can't talk about right now, but
Speaker 4: but they weren't traumatic. So so when it came time
Speaker 4: for me to deal with traumatic the aspect of like
Speaker 4: I don't I mean, you know, when I'm asking people
Speaker 4: when when the Sykes asked me the question, so what happened?
Speaker 4: You know, what was a traumatic episode? I'm like, I
Speaker 4: don't know. You know, how many people did you kill?
Speaker 4: I give them a number? Right, yeah, but that doesn't
Speaker 4: bother me. It's I guess I don't have you know.
Speaker 4: But at the end of the day, it's like, how
Speaker 4: many people did I have disappeared because of what I did?
Speaker 4: Or how many people? You know? And that's the thing
Speaker 4: I don't even I don't even care about that aspect.
Speaker 4: The point is we end up at a point, at
Speaker 4: a crossroads, and whether we understand how we got there
Speaker 4: or not is not important. What's important is what you
Speaker 4: do when you get to that why in the road
Speaker 4: the crosswas and you recognize I'm lost, okay, right, and
Speaker 4: and I need you know, this is the point where
Speaker 4: you know, I got to ask for directions or I
Speaker 4: got to ask for it, right, And you don't know
Speaker 4: what that helpens, but you got to at least ask.
Speaker 3: And yeah, now we get that. I mean I think that,
Speaker 3: and that's been a common threat to that, like people
Speaker 3: want to think that, like whether it's a poached to
Speaker 3: my stress or or whatever it is that there's supposed
Speaker 3: to be this big moment when your best friend died
Speaker 3: in your arms or whatever, and there's not always that moment,
Speaker 3: like it could be a cumulative it.
Speaker 5: Can be exactly you know, it can be going from
Speaker 5: one hundred miles an hour, always on the go, always
Speaker 5: like living on the edge, to nothing and all of
Speaker 5: a sudden like there are these like shockwaves and reverberations
Speaker 5: that follow that that there's there's not a singular event.
Speaker 4: What so to that point, what happens is this, this
Speaker 4: is this is why I'm a big fan of and
Speaker 4: You're Human some other folks podcasts. There's a chemical change
Speaker 4: that happens in your body when you're constantly used to
Speaker 4: being in a high, high stress environment and performing at
Speaker 4: a high level. Your body changes. Your body chemistry changes. Okay,
Speaker 4: your quarter's all level changes. You're you know, you're you're hurt.
Speaker 4: There's so many things, I mean, and you used to
Speaker 4: find at night and sleeping there in the day, you're
Speaker 4: taking an ambient you're you know, you're doing amphetamines to
Speaker 4: do whatever or whatever on occasion. But at the end
Speaker 4: of the day, you just used to a different body chemistry.
Speaker 4: Your body chemistry physical actually changes and then you come
Speaker 4: back to to a normal life, so to speak, and
Speaker 4: you're challenged by that because now all of a sudden,
Speaker 4: everything about you. You know, you look across the street,
Speaker 4: different activity, You walk into a grocery store, you're checking
Speaker 4: your corners, you know, where's the exits? Okay, what's this
Speaker 4: driver going to do? You know, all these things that
Speaker 4: happened that it's it's part of a chemistry thing. And uh,
Speaker 4: you know we all we all have to deal with
Speaker 4: that in some way or another, oh to some another.
Speaker 4: And you don't you think that you're can complete control
Speaker 4: or command of yourself. And and then you're faced with
Speaker 4: these and you realize one day that you know, you're
Speaker 4: barking at your wife, you're you know, you're doing all
Speaker 4: this weird ship, you're hyper vigilant, whatever it is.
Speaker 5: Alcohol, pulling people out of their cars on the road.
Speaker 5: You know, yeah, whatever happens.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know you're getting angry folks, or you're
Speaker 4: just thinking. You know, I could go on, But the
Speaker 4: point is it's not you're fucked up. It's that you've
Speaker 4: also been If you know, over twenty five years, you've
Speaker 4: been conditioned your body chemistry has changed your neurological aspect
Speaker 4: of your life. You know, you can't want you know,
Speaker 4: the guys that took down took down captain you know,
Speaker 4: rescued Captain Phillips. You know, forty eight hours later they're
Speaker 4: driving through you know the drive through it at talk about.
Speaker 3: Right, right, right, it's right.
Speaker 4: You just shot some guy in the face and forty
Speaker 4: hours later, you're.
Speaker 3: Right in a world that doesn't I mean, thankfully I'm
Speaker 3: not like putting civilians down for that, but but have
Speaker 3: no concept of that. You want you went from bagdad
Speaker 3: to your living room right right, or or the Hooters
Speaker 3: or or the you know, you know, scissor or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 3: exactly what's what's the last question here? The last question?
Speaker 3: Thank you for Laurence Us for both the donations. Is
Speaker 3: there any credibility to the rumors of the Kandahar Giant
Speaker 3: and the Taliban fighters needing eight to nine bullets to
Speaker 3: go down due to captive goon or other substances beats?
Speaker 4: Yeah, even know how to answer that. I will tell
Speaker 4: you this that as far as Afghanistan goes, when a
Speaker 4: year ago, when things were going sideways in Afghanistan, I
Speaker 4: felt very betrayed as a US service member who watched
Speaker 4: a lot of h who knows of I mean, I've
Speaker 4: been to too many funerals, right, And when that happened,
Speaker 4: I jumped on the the veproo bandwagon to help get
Speaker 4: get folks out and to speak to the the issues
Speaker 4: of of PTSD. I feel like betrayal is something that
Speaker 4: people need to understand, need to check out. You know,
Speaker 4: when when you're when you sign up your defend the constitution,
Speaker 4: carry out the orders of the day, you know, blah
Speaker 4: blah blah, and you want to do your job. You
Speaker 4: kind of don't care, but you don't want what you
Speaker 4: do to be completely meaningless discountant, right, you know, it's worthless.
Speaker 4: And as far as that you know, mean type of
Speaker 4: question goes, people should recognize that when young Americans, I
Speaker 4: mean the thirteen Marines and and all, I share something
Speaker 4: in common with the fifteen Marines that died in Okay HK.
Speaker 4: They did that because they're looking at they believe in
Speaker 4: what they're doing, they believed in their brotherhood, they believe
Speaker 4: in you know, and and represent the United States as
Speaker 4: a true speaking of hope, and every now and then
Speaker 4: we need to take a reset and recognize that. But
Speaker 4: if we don't, we don't have those values anymore. You
Speaker 4: know what's going to pull that boy right?
Speaker 3: And you know, it's interesting because our veterans have always
Speaker 3: sort of led the charging that from Vietnam, like bringing
Speaker 3: home the Vietnamese, bringing Jim Morris, the Vietnamese, the mountain
Speaker 3: yards and nuns that that sacrifice so much to work
Speaker 3: with us, you know, Afghanistan, Iraq, like the Kurds during
Speaker 3: the first Gold four we we completely left them to
Speaker 3: their own devices after they trusted us so much. It
Speaker 3: you know, it's easy to blame Au a politician for
Speaker 3: those issues, but it seems to be a trend of
Speaker 3: of of the American government, like in generally it takes
Speaker 3: the veterans that worked with with those indigenous forces to
Speaker 3: to like lead the charge on getting them sanctuary.
Speaker 2: Uh, Drew, could could you talk to us a little
Speaker 2: bit about what you're doing now, some of the things
Speaker 2: you have planned for the future.
Speaker 3: What what what what's the next step? What's the next
Speaker 3: move for you?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Thanks Jack for again just being a maestrom. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so I've I've kind of like tried to, oh say,
Speaker 4: I got out as an impost a lieutenant right to
Speaker 4: be a commissioned officer in the Navy U as a
Speaker 4: well as a mustang. To retire as an officer, you
Speaker 4: have to do ten years as in service. Right now.
Speaker 4: I was. I was. I was pretty banged up. By
Speaker 4: the time I got out. I'd had like four shoulder surgeries,
Speaker 4: a couple of knee surgeries, uh, ankle plates, a bunch
Speaker 4: of other stuff. And when it came time to retire,
Speaker 4: I was like, I was all thinking about, Hey, I'm
Speaker 4: gonna go and uh work for Wexford, work for AWG,
Speaker 4: do this and that. You know, you gotta make money.
Speaker 4: And when it came time to retire, I was doing
Speaker 4: my out physical and I was pretty pretty apped up.
Speaker 4: And my squadron surgeon, to his credit, said, hey, you know,
Speaker 4: you ever thought about a medical retirement, Like, well, that's
Speaker 4: for guys that got blown up or whatever. That's not
Speaker 4: for me, because now you're you know, the definition is
Speaker 4: can you do your job right? So any one thing
Speaker 4: went another. So he helped me do a med board
Speaker 4: medical retirement board, and it just didn't turn out that
Speaker 4: I was. I was pretty apped up.
Speaker 3: I was yeah, I mean granted, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: Steroids and and motrin and and p RP injections.
Speaker 3: Yeah, one to another and right, what's that little vitamin
Speaker 3: M to get you through your day?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Yeah, yeah, I was living on. So I did
Speaker 4: a med board and I, you know, the medical board said, yeah,
Speaker 4: you're you're pretty fucked up, dude, We're gonna medically retire. Well,
Speaker 4: I got twenty two plus years of servicing. How's that
Speaker 4: going to work? So what I thought was going to
Speaker 4: happen is because I wasn't going to do the ten
Speaker 4: years as an officer, I was going to have to
Speaker 4: revert back to master chief. Right, So the poor unit,
Speaker 4: they're like thinking, they're planning my retirement as a master chief.
Speaker 4: I had to buy the uniform, the whole thing. And
Speaker 4: then you know, bum Ed comes back and says, oh, no,
Speaker 4: we're going to retire. When you get medically retired, you
Speaker 4: retire at the highest pay grade or the highest frank yet.
Speaker 4: So for like nine months I was at E nine
Speaker 4: and then all of a sudden, it was back to three.
Speaker 4: So I retired as a three. That was the best
Speaker 4: thing that could happen. So I retired with one hundred
Speaker 4: percent of disability for a number of reasons, not the
Speaker 4: least of which was the things we've been talking about,
Speaker 4: amongst the physical subject. But I went back to school,
Speaker 4: got used my gibil, got got my degree in history,
Speaker 4: abassadors into history, and then I got to master's in
Speaker 4: International affairs, and you know, turn my life for round.
Speaker 4: So I'm not sure if I I'm on track for
Speaker 4: answering your question, Jack, refreshment my memory.
Speaker 2: But you're on track and taking care of your kids, uh,
Speaker 2: being a family man. And you told me that you
Speaker 2: want to start a podcast.
Speaker 4: Right yeah, show show is in. The next step was like,
Speaker 4: what am I going to do with myself? How do
Speaker 4: I reinvent myself? And I struggled with the whole you know,
Speaker 4: ICEE World, Paramilitary, World, Case Officer World, all that kind
Speaker 4: of stuff, and uh, you know, meanwhile, these I have
Speaker 4: these two great kids. You know, I'm I'm blessed by
Speaker 4: God to you know, meet this woman who's so intelligent,
Speaker 4: I mean, uh, and and we have two wonderful children.
Speaker 4: And then suddenly I realized I had this wonderful opportunity
Speaker 4: to to raise kids and be present. I know so
Speaker 4: many friends on both sides army and maybe who in
Speaker 4: their in their weren't presentn't able to be present because
Speaker 4: they had career conflicts and then you know, their families
Speaker 4: were challenged by that. And if it wasn't for their
Speaker 4: you know, real strong spouse or or whatnot, you know,
Speaker 4: that was that determined the success. But back to you know,
Speaker 4: now I've got this opportunity, and very recently I realized
Speaker 4: that I think what I I would like to pursue
Speaker 4: is you know, the kind of the vet TV version
Speaker 4: of what we've all learned from being in special operations
Speaker 4: and having families, you know, how the lessons learned, the
Speaker 4: pros and cons, the funny stuff.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 4: I'm going to do some of what I call combat
Speaker 4: Dad basically come you know, podcasts, and it's it's to
Speaker 4: talk to vets. They don't have to be a combat
Speaker 4: vetteror necessarily, but what do you you know, how do
Speaker 4: you deal with family issues? How do you deal with
Speaker 4: you know, the challenges of raising children, Like my kids
Speaker 4: don't know nothing about my past. Like they're they're eight
Speaker 4: and six years old, right, old man, but you know,
Speaker 4: and and and they I might as well be a
Speaker 4: World War two veteran, right right, yeah, But but now
Speaker 4: they're asking questions, you know, yeah, And and I realized
Speaker 4: all the mistakes I made, all the things I learned,
Speaker 4: all the things that had I been a good dad
Speaker 4: before or in the military, I would have been a
Speaker 4: better leader.
Speaker 3: Right right, And and how does it feel as a
Speaker 3: dad when when your kids just won't follow the chain
Speaker 3: of command?
Speaker 4: Oh jeez, when you when when you realize this, this
Speaker 4: is part of the back next story to you headstrong
Speaker 4: and getting help, right when you get in the grill.
Speaker 4: You're getting your kids grill and you're like blah blah
Speaker 4: bla right, and they're like.
Speaker 2: Crying, And did I not lay out my task conditions
Speaker 2: and standards for this task?
Speaker 3: What is the problem? Here's the commander's intent here. You're
Speaker 3: left the right limits, get the get the fuck done.
Speaker 4: And you try everything right, like, okay, if you make
Speaker 4: your bed, you get to put the green check mark
Speaker 4: on the magnetic board. If you do at the end
Speaker 4: of the week, we tell you all that ship up
Speaker 4: and get you get to have you know, if you
Speaker 4: if you met the standard, you get to have moving in. Well,
Speaker 4: that sounds great, right, but it doesn't work right And
Speaker 4: then you realize is a matter of me not trying
Speaker 4: to overanalyze it, but just sitting there grabbing my kid
Speaker 4: and put my arm around him.
Speaker 3: But Drew, have you tried the the the dunk test?
Speaker 3: I mean you have you tried them? And the start
Speaker 3: the test with that round? Are taking the circle? Like
Speaker 3: maybe that'll get them in line?
Speaker 4: The pubm is it's not them, it's me, right, I
Speaker 4: don't Yeah, it's it's uh. You realize it's like you know,
Speaker 4: garbage and garbage out and and when you think you're
Speaker 4: they're not paying attention, they are, you know. So I
Speaker 4: just I just want to just say I'm blessed to
Speaker 4: have the opportunity to be president. Fact the fact that
Speaker 4: I can I get to be mister mom. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: I'm blessed.
Speaker 11: Man.
Speaker 4: I just I can't tell you I learned more from
Speaker 4: my kids than than than anything. So I have no complaints.
Speaker 3: Dad is coming the podcast? Do you do you have
Speaker 3: a channel for that?
Speaker 13: Because we want to like we want to like hook
Speaker 13: you up like like we want to we want our
Speaker 13: viewers to raid your very first podcast and and make
Speaker 13: you like, you know, unlike us with our first with
Speaker 13: our ten viewers on our first podcast, us getting drunk
Speaker 13: and and whatnot, like how can we help you make
Speaker 13: it happen?
Speaker 4: I wish i'd had the combat dads is coming. Uh,
Speaker 4: you know, maybe we can do a like a shorty
Speaker 4: in the future, Okay, and I'll give you the links. Also,
Speaker 4: Ajax Shrugged on Locals is going to be a link
Speaker 4: you can post. That's where I'm gonna talk about more
Speaker 4: serious stuff.
Speaker 3: Great, Yeah, let me let us know where the podcast
Speaker 3: comes at. And I would love to direct people. We
Speaker 3: will plug the hell out of you. We love you
Speaker 3: and we you know, we wish you all the success
Speaker 3: and it's an important topic.
Speaker 2: And Drew, I know, I know, we kind of just
Speaker 2: sort of like hit like the wave tops of your
Speaker 2: career here and there's so much more to talk about.
Speaker 2: But we've kept you for like three hours here at
Speaker 2: this point, and I really appreciate you being so patient
Speaker 2: with us and coming back on a Saturday to do
Speaker 2: the show.
Speaker 3: It's been great. It's been a great conversation. Man, my pleasure.
Speaker 4: Dude.
Speaker 3: We have one last question that came in and it's
Speaker 3: from love start and thank you very much.
Speaker 5: And guys, please, we're not accepting anymore, like we don't
Speaker 5: want you to like give us what will take you money,
Speaker 5: but we won't be able to ask you more questions.
Speaker 3: As for this, many new school labor unions are using
Speaker 3: uw unconvincial warfare tactics to conduct collective bargaining.
Speaker 5: How do you feel about homegrown submersion? Homegrown subversus challenge
Speaker 5: authority with an asymmetrical mindset, Sorry late questions, and that
Speaker 5: could be like any from from any angle and homegrown subverses,
Speaker 5: but also challenging authority, which you know, so go ahead please, okay.
Speaker 4: So one of the things I learned, Yeah, you know
Speaker 4: all we all come into the military, we all have
Speaker 4: our preconceived ideas of what we want to accomplish, and
Speaker 4: then reality sets in over time. I did fourteen deployments, right,
Speaker 4: not every one of them was combat, but but hm
Speaker 4: at least you know, many of them. Ten of them
Speaker 4: were you know, high threat slash, you know whatever. What
Speaker 4: you What you learned from that kind of repetition is
Speaker 4: to recognize not what you think, but what you see.
Speaker 4: You know, get to give the ground truth, and sometimes
Speaker 4: the ground truth doesn't dovetail with the commanders intent. So
Speaker 4: I would say maybe to answer this question, you got
Speaker 4: to dig deeper than the surface level of you know.
Speaker 4: How that applies to domestic aspects I'm I'm inferring. I'm
Speaker 4: assuming that's what's we're talking about, right, I don't even
Speaker 4: know that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm assuming that because it's homegrowns versus I'm assuming
Speaker 3: we're speaking domestically.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So, having seen what an insurgency is, having seen
Speaker 4: what counter you know, what terrorists cells of like having
Speaker 4: to sell this stuff, we're not seeing any of that
Speaker 4: level of stuff in the United States. I'm confidently I
Speaker 4: can tell you there is not that level of concern
Speaker 4: in the United States. There are people that are disgruntled,
Speaker 4: they're upset, and you know, they're making their their note.
Speaker 4: But but the actual scale or scope of folks that
Speaker 4: need to be dealt with on the on you know,
Speaker 4: that are being compared to.
Speaker 3: You know, other uh.
Speaker 4: Other elements is incorrect, right, And it's it's unfortunate that
Speaker 4: that narrative is being, in my opinion, being promoted. It's
Speaker 4: a it's a propaganda slash political type disinformation. As far
Speaker 4: as I'm concerned, now, are the people that that have
Speaker 4: those intents? Are those thoughts absolutely right? Is it? But
Speaker 4: is it wide scale enough to be considered prevalent to
Speaker 4: be considered you know, an insurgency or or something to
Speaker 4: be concerned about. I ya, it's not. It's not like a.
Speaker 3: Right and I mean I was a coin.
Speaker 4: Advisor in Afghanistan, right, And at the end of the day,
Speaker 4: it's like, I know counterinsurgency stuff like you know, as
Speaker 4: well as I know how to kill that guys.
Speaker 3: So right, and coin and coin is counter in certain
Speaker 3: for for our people who may not know and and
Speaker 3: so like what people may see whether their their you know,
Speaker 3: whether their viewpoint is from the left or the right,
Speaker 3: like they see the far right, they see the far left,
Speaker 3: and they see sort of this propaganda and this information
Speaker 3: that is sort of being put out there. But but
Speaker 3: what you're saying, is it that's more of an information
Speaker 3: war that it's not that the effort or or the
Speaker 3: ground gained is not similar to what you would actually
Speaker 3: see an accounter uncertainty from either side.
Speaker 4: Yeah, is that fair the mass? Yeah? Absolutely, I mean,
Speaker 4: I mean there's this We could do a whole podcast
Speaker 4: on counter uncertainty aspects. But at the end of the day,
Speaker 4: this is garbage and garbage out. If someone's telling you
Speaker 4: something and you choose to believe it without without challenging
Speaker 4: the source or or doing your own due diligence, then
Speaker 4: you're just you're just you know, sheep at the end.
Speaker 4: You know, in my opinion, are we at a difficult
Speaker 4: time in our country. Absolutely, we're polarized. We need to
Speaker 4: go back to civility. We need to work hard on,
Speaker 4: you know, taking care of our neighbors, our neighborhood, our
Speaker 4: cities right, our counties, right, and finding common ground because
Speaker 4: we all share ninety percent of the same common grounds.
Speaker 3: Right, So most people are just trying to put putting
Speaker 3: there table, make sure the kids are saved in schools,
Speaker 3: like like they're trying to live a normal life, while
Speaker 3: a small minority on each side is sort of controlling
Speaker 3: the dialogue in a way.
Speaker 4: Right. Yeah, you know I want to you know, be
Speaker 4: fair to your audience to so you know I could
Speaker 4: I could tell war stories all day, right, you know
Speaker 4: there was and maybe that's man, that's better. But but
Speaker 4: we're all Americans and we need to like look for
Speaker 4: common ground and take care of your neighbors, you know,
Speaker 4: pay attention to who lives next door to you, you know,
Speaker 4: you know what what's going on, and just be a
Speaker 4: good person.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Drew, I really appreciate your time tonight. Yeah, And
Speaker 2: I hope we can do this again sometime. I hope
Speaker 2: we can talk you into joining us in Brooklyn sometime,
Speaker 2: if you care, if you if you care to join
Speaker 2: the evil Empire.
Speaker 3: Yea, at some point.
Speaker 4: My wife, my wife just took my son. She's taking
Speaker 4: my daughter, my son up to New York twice now.
Speaker 4: She she does these getaways, right, yeah, yeah, one on one.
Speaker 3: Let us let us know, Drew, we'll talk.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And I keep saying I don't want to go
Speaker 4: to Manhattan again.
Speaker 3: You don't have to, You don't have to. That's the
Speaker 3: beauty of it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I don't.
Speaker 3: My heart broken into yeah you know. Yeah, Well we'll
Speaker 3: get you an uber. Yeah yeah, leave your leave your
Speaker 3: car and a secure garage. We'll get you an uber
Speaker 3: and uh yeah so folks.
Speaker 2: Next next Friday, Chris Cox, author of fire Force uh
Speaker 2: served the Rhodesian Light Infantry.
Speaker 3: We'll have him on the show. Drew, thank you so much,
Speaker 3: Thank you everyone for we deeply deeply appreciate you coming on.
Speaker 3: Everybody will we'll keep it a lookout for combat dads
Speaker 3: and and Atlas not stro shrug a jack.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, hey, thanks guys, it's been my pleasure
Speaker 2: and we'll see you next Friday, all right, brother, Thanks
Speaker 2: everybody
Speaker 4: A