Speaker 1: Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbas. Our guest in
Speaker 1: this edition is retired to US Marine Corps Master Sergeant
Speaker 1: John Daily. He spent twenty one years in uniform, many
Speaker 1: of those years in special operations. He is a veteran
Speaker 1: of the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan and played
Speaker 1: key roles in standing up multiple Marine Corps Special Forces units.
Speaker 1: He's also the author of Tough, Rugged Bastards, a memoir
Speaker 1: of a life in Marine Special Operations. And sir, thank
Speaker 1: you very much for being with us.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Speaker 1: Where were you born and raised?
Speaker 3: John born in Leesburg, Virginia. Raised in a little town
Speaker 3: outside of that called Hillsboro, Virginia whose only kind of
Speaker 3: claim to fame was that the right brother's mother I
Speaker 3: think was born there. But it's on the really close
Speaker 3: to the Virginia West Virginia Maryland tri state border.
Speaker 1: There been a history of military service in your family
Speaker 1: before you.
Speaker 3: Served, history not It was in a tradition, you know.
Speaker 3: My father had served in the Navy there in Vietnam,
Speaker 3: and his brother in the Army. My grandfather had served
Speaker 3: in the Army Air Corps in World War Two, but
Speaker 3: that was. That was about it, as far as I'm
Speaker 3: aware of. It was not an expectation.
Speaker 1: I guess you point out in the book that you
Speaker 1: knew at a very young age, maybe six or seven
Speaker 1: years old, that you wanted to be a marine. How
Speaker 1: did you know at such a young age that that's
Speaker 1: what she wanted to do.
Speaker 3: I saw a marine and I don't know what it
Speaker 3: was about him or other people's reaction to him, but
Speaker 3: it was the bi centennial celebration, so it was seventeen
Speaker 3: or nineteen seventy six, and we were at a Fourth
Speaker 3: of July parade and I saw a marine coming through
Speaker 3: the crowd. And you know, my father doesn't remember this
Speaker 3: ever happening. I think it happened. I remember it that way,
Speaker 3: but you know, I saw him and just kind of,
Speaker 3: I don't know what it was, as they kind of clicked,
Speaker 3: and I asked my dad, you know, what is that guy?
Speaker 3: And he told me he used a marine and so
Speaker 3: there had always been a rivalry between the Navy and
Speaker 3: the Marine Corps, so so he will My dad would
Speaker 3: never admit that he kind of talked about him with
Speaker 3: any kind of awe or whatever, but that's the way
Speaker 3: I recall it, and that's I guess my story. At
Speaker 3: that age, I realized or knew that that was kind
Speaker 3: of what was in store for me.
Speaker 1: I got to tell you, and this probably won't surprise you,
Speaker 1: given your many years in the Corps. When I talked
Speaker 1: to veterans about why they joined it far and away
Speaker 1: if they cared about the uniform, it was the Marines.
Speaker 1: That the uniform attracted more people to the Marines than
Speaker 1: I think the uniform of any other branch.
Speaker 3: There's something about I think, so yeah, it's it looks sharp,
Speaker 3: and then once you're in, you really don't want to
Speaker 3: wear it, the dress uniform, you know, if you can.
Speaker 2: Avoid it, but but it does look sharp.
Speaker 1: When did you actually join the Corps.
Speaker 3: I joined in nineteen eighty seven, just maybe a month
Speaker 3: after my high school graduation, So.
Speaker 2: I was seventeen.
Speaker 3: So my parents said to sign for me, but it
Speaker 3: had been you know, ten years, you know that I
Speaker 3: had been kind of prepping them for it, so well,
Speaker 3: my mother was reluctant. She's saying the papers and allowed
Speaker 3: me to join at seventeen.
Speaker 1: And shortly after that, you were sent to the swamp
Speaker 1: at Paris Island, and everyone who knows about the Marine Corps,
Speaker 1: knows about how tough those those basic training courses go.
Speaker 1: And you talk in the book about how they break
Speaker 1: you down and then they build you back up into
Speaker 1: the marine they want you to be. So what was
Speaker 1: it specifically for you where they finally broke in and
Speaker 1: what was the key to you understanding what they were
Speaker 1: doing there?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 2: I don't for me, I don't remember.
Speaker 3: I think it's just the process, you know, it's just
Speaker 3: just throughout. I mean, everything about boot camp is so
Speaker 3: foreign to anything that most of us have known before.
Speaker 3: You know, the language is different, the telling time is different,
Speaker 3: everything is absolutely different. You're all your hair shaved off,
Speaker 3: and you're kind of homogenized into this you know, this
Speaker 3: group you know that you're you're training with, and uh so,
Speaker 3: I think it's just that kind of steady state of
Speaker 3: getting day after day taught new things and you start
Speaker 3: to become you know, you graduates. Is something entirely different
Speaker 3: than than the young boys that we started as.
Speaker 1: How soon after that did you start pursuing special Forces training?
Speaker 3: I had the great fortune, through an error, to be
Speaker 3: my first unit, putting put into a sniper platoon, which
Speaker 3: was generally reserved for people who had had a little
Speaker 3: time in and they had kind of proven themselves. I
Speaker 3: got thrown into it as a you know, fresh out
Speaker 3: of boot camp, fresh out of infantry school, Marine, and
Speaker 3: so that didn't win me a lot of friends because
Speaker 3: everyone else, uh, everyone else there had you know, spent
Speaker 3: their time, done their you know, kind of made their bones,
Speaker 3: proved themselves, and then try it out for the opportunity
Speaker 3: to get into that unit.
Speaker 2: For me, I kind of fell into it.
Speaker 3: So I really had to realized very quickly I had
Speaker 3: to either prove myself or or I was gonna leave.
Speaker 3: So fortunately I was able to do that. And growing
Speaker 3: up in uh, you know, growing up in the in
Speaker 3: the hills, spending a lot of time outdoors, were you know,
Speaker 3: all skills that certainly aided me in that proceed.
Speaker 1: How good of a shot do you need to be
Speaker 1: to pass sniper school?
Speaker 2: Pretty good.
Speaker 3: We have to hit regularly at a thousand yards generally
Speaker 3: further than anyone else any other military sniper schools shoot
Speaker 3: on a for the qualification. Maybe not anymore, but back
Speaker 3: then there was a lot less technology and things were
Speaker 3: a lot more uh you know, there was a lot
Speaker 3: of math involved, which is something that nobody really prepared
Speaker 3: me for. And I was always the kid in school
Speaker 3: that was like, you know, how are we ever going
Speaker 3: to use algebra, you know, in the real world. And
Speaker 3: I came to find out that it is kind of
Speaker 3: important for a lot of a lot of skills in
Speaker 3: the military. But yeah, a thousand a thousand meters is
Speaker 3: a part of the qualification that was challenging, absolutely.
Speaker 1: And just for those who might not be that caught
Speaker 1: up on math, a thousand yards is over half a mile.
Speaker 1: How big is the target that you needed to hit here?
Speaker 3: So at that we were shooting at a man's sized
Speaker 3: cardboard target. So it's i mean, obviously as a sniper,
Speaker 3: that's kind of your your your role, right, that's what
Speaker 3: you're you're shooting at. So with the scope on the rifle,
Speaker 3: even with you know, the magnification, you're still really looking at,
Speaker 3: you know, a target the size of a pencil eraser
Speaker 3: at that distance, you know, so it are the way
Speaker 3: it appears anyway, So it's it's challenging. I mean, it
Speaker 3: takes a lot of a lot of practice. Unfortunately, you know,
Speaker 3: they gave us quite a bit of practice during the course.
Speaker 1: You also went to surveillance and target acquisition training. Explain
Speaker 1: what that is.
Speaker 3: So that really was kind of rolled in with with
Speaker 3: our sniper training. So I was in infect a platoon
Speaker 3: that I was in was called the Surveillance of Target
Speaker 3: Acquisition tune in. There we were responsible were responsible for sniping,
Speaker 3: for scouting, and for manning what at the time are
Speaker 3: called ground surveillance radars. So we wore headphones much like
Speaker 3: we both have on now and listened to a large
Speaker 3: radar that had been invented in the kind of the
Speaker 3: Vietnam era. That was really challenging to identify anything with it,
Speaker 3: but you know, with enough time on it, you got
Speaker 3: pretty good at it. So really those were our roles
Speaker 3: were to gather information to operate ahead of the regular
Speaker 3: infantry units and decide if determine if any bad guys
Speaker 3: were coming our way, and let let people know.
Speaker 1: Some of your early assignments were guarding embassies, which the
Speaker 1: Marines do of course US embassies around the world. Which
Speaker 1: nations were you deployed to?
Speaker 3: I And that's really one of the kind of unknown
Speaker 3: duty stations a lot of Marines don't know about. And
Speaker 3: again I lucked into that. I lucked into a lot
Speaker 3: of things throughout my career you'll you'll discover, but you know,
Speaker 3: I lucked into it and then found myself in Budapest
Speaker 3: in nineteen eighty nine. So that was right as the
Speaker 3: Russians were leaving, the wall in Berlin was coming down,
Speaker 3: h So it was an incredibly you know, interesting time
Speaker 3: to be there. So I spent a year in Budapest
Speaker 3: and then a year and a half in Buenos Aires,
Speaker 3: which listened to too shabby either.
Speaker 1: Not a bad assignment either. So in Hungary, were there
Speaker 1: any tense moments as the Communist government there tried to
Speaker 1: hang on and then was starting to give way or
Speaker 1: what happened there?
Speaker 2: Not?
Speaker 3: Not really when we when I first got there, we
Speaker 3: were it was more of a comical situation. The Hungarian
Speaker 3: version of the CIA would use us as the during
Speaker 3: their training course the Marines. They would surveil us, all right,
Speaker 3: So that that led to, you know, a lot of
Speaker 3: opportunities to screw with them. So we would, you know,
Speaker 3: put a bunch of us in the vehicle drive you know,
Speaker 3: our van, drive down the road and then have people
Speaker 3: need to get down below the seats and drive back.
Speaker 3: And you could see them trying to count and you know,
Speaker 3: wondering where, wondering where we went, so that we did
Speaker 3: have on on a few occasions, either Russian citizens or
Speaker 3: Hungarian citizens tried to defect and come into the embassy,
Speaker 3: and quite often there was uh, you know, they would
Speaker 3: be challenged, so we weren't allowed to go out outside
Speaker 3: of the door to assist them in any way. But
Speaker 3: it really came down to whether they could they could
Speaker 3: make it into the door. Once they made it in,
Speaker 3: then they were you know. It was our job then
Speaker 3: to to make sure we kept them safe and uh
Speaker 3: until everything could get sorted out. But it was not
Speaker 3: uncommon to have you know, people living in the entryway
Speaker 3: to the embassy for a day or two until we
Speaker 3: could get things sorted out both with with them, get
Speaker 3: their stories checked out, and determine whether they were you know,
Speaker 3: a legitimate refugee.
Speaker 1: Let's scoot ahead a little bit too, uh to the
Speaker 1: war on Tarror. Now you were about as far away
Speaker 1: from the US as you could possibly be on nine
Speaker 1: to eleven. Tell us where you were, how you found
Speaker 1: out about the attacks, and what the immediate aftermath was
Speaker 1: like for you.
Speaker 3: Certainly so we had, you know, in the Marines, you
Speaker 3: traditionally will deploy on ship for six months at a time,
Speaker 3: and on those deployments you do a lot of training.
Speaker 3: You are basically there in case something happens. But you know,
Speaker 3: for most of my time, nothing had really happened. But
Speaker 3: on this particular occasion, we had left the States. We
Speaker 3: were in Darwin, Australia, and after a couple of days
Speaker 3: of training, it was the first night that we had
Speaker 3: anytime to ourselves, time to go out, and a couple
Speaker 3: of us had gone to a pub called Kiddi Osiers
Speaker 3: in Irish pub because there's always an Irish pub no
Speaker 3: matter where in the world you go, and why we
Speaker 3: decided we picked an Irish pub, I don't know. But
Speaker 3: there was a soccer game on the television above the
Speaker 3: bar and we were having a couple of beers, and
Speaker 3: you know, at a certain point the bartender yelled and
Speaker 3: it was probably nine o'clock at night there, and you know,
Speaker 3: when we looked up it was the first tower and
Speaker 3: you know, the plane flown into it, and very very quickly,
Speaker 3: within minutes after that. Because we were still trying to
Speaker 3: piece together what happened, marines started who had been sent
Speaker 3: you know, we're poking their head in every bar and
Speaker 3: telling everybody, Hey, get back to the ship, Get back
Speaker 3: to the ship. So we finished, our beers got back
Speaker 3: to the boat, and you know, by the time the
Speaker 3: sun came up, we were we were back at sea
Speaker 3: with three ships that were we were on. By the
Speaker 3: end of the month, we were in Pakistan, and then
Speaker 3: in November we were in Afghanistan.
Speaker 1: That's John Daly, a US Marine Corps veteran of Iraq
Speaker 1: and Afghanistan who spent most of his career in special operations.
Speaker 1: When we come back being among the first Marines in
Speaker 1: Afghanistan and daily sees his first ever combat. I'm Greg
Speaker 1: Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles.
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Speaker 1: This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbas. Our guest is
Speaker 1: retired US Marine Corps veteran John Daily. He served many
Speaker 1: years in special operations and served in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Speaker 1: We now pick up his story as Daily tells us
Speaker 1: about his first assignments in Afghanistan.
Speaker 3: After nine to eleven, my platoon was a force reconnaissance platoon,
Speaker 3: and at this point so I had left the snipers,
Speaker 3: although we still kind of had a sniper mission, but
Speaker 3: our responsibility was to work ahead of the other elements
Speaker 3: and gather information. Decided you know, find out things that
Speaker 3: the commander wanted to know. So we had been tasked
Speaker 3: with going ashore in Pakistan to secure some locations where
Speaker 3: the MEW could begin to bring in equipment and personnel
Speaker 3: and stage them to fly in to Afghanistan. And so, yeah,
Speaker 3: the war started for us. The ships that we were
Speaker 3: on were firing missiles, you know, that was really I
Speaker 3: think the first action. And then the Army special operations,
Speaker 3: you know, the green Beerys were flown in up in
Speaker 3: the north in the mountains on their horses.
Speaker 1: And you had originally thought you were going to be
Speaker 1: dropped into Afghanistan as well, fairly early on. Eventually it
Speaker 1: was November of two thousand and one. Where did they
Speaker 1: send you and what were you asked to do?
Speaker 3: The entire Marine expedition Ery Unit eventually moved into a
Speaker 3: place what had been and a retreat for falconers. So
Speaker 3: rich Afghanis would go hang out. There was an airfield
Speaker 3: and they would fly their falcons and they falcons would
Speaker 3: hunt rabbits or whatever they do. Called Camp Rhino is
Speaker 3: what we called it. And so it was an enclosed,
Speaker 3: little little camp that we you know, stuffed full of
Speaker 3: marines and sailors and everybody else. And from there General
Speaker 3: Madis wound up being the mad dog everybody has heard
Speaker 3: of was well being sent over to kind of take
Speaker 3: charge of the whole lash up he you know, threw
Speaker 3: our boss asked us to find a route to get
Speaker 3: the Marines to Candahar, which was about one hundred and
Speaker 3: twenty miles away through the desert without driving on main roads,
Speaker 3: and an effort not to alert the Taliban that we
Speaker 3: were on the move. So that's you know, one of
Speaker 3: the primary missions that we did in reconnaissance woop. So
Speaker 3: we took off at night in a handful of vehicles.
Speaker 3: It's about twenty to thirty of us driving through the desert,
Speaker 3: picking a route that we could we could get vehicles
Speaker 3: up to the edge of Candahar.
Speaker 1: Now, as you point out in the book, due to
Speaker 1: your embassy assignments and other assignments you had over the years,
Speaker 1: you had not been in combat yet in the first
Speaker 1: fourteen years of your service. So what were your thoughts
Speaker 1: about finally seeing action. Were you confident that your training
Speaker 1: had prepared you well or what else was going through
Speaker 1: your mind?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that that's always I mean, anybody that's been in
Speaker 3: the service you know, has that looming right before the
Speaker 3: first time that they go into combat. And honestly, it
Speaker 3: had been so long I'd missed out on the Gulf
Speaker 3: War because I was in Budapest or in Buenos Aires
Speaker 3: during that time. So we were eventually on the evening
Speaker 3: of the seventh of December two thousand and one, sent
Speaker 3: out to interdict vehicles leaving Kandahar. And as we were
Speaker 3: kind of setting waiting for vehicles to leave Kandahar and
Speaker 3: come up to where we had established a position, you know,
Speaker 3: I really did not.
Speaker 2: Feel that this was going to be the day.
Speaker 3: I kind of felt like I was a bad luck
Speaker 3: omen or a good luck omen, whichever way you want
Speaker 3: to look at it, I guess. But when eventually they did,
Speaker 3: some vehicles came up full of weapons, full of Taliban fighters,
Speaker 3: and we engaged them and got you really, at that
Speaker 3: point don't have a whole lot of time to thank
Speaker 3: You definitely have to fall back on your training. And
Speaker 3: it wasn't until after the fact that I really I
Speaker 3: was the platoon sergeant, so I was responsible for the
Speaker 3: live so these thirty guys that I had with me,
Speaker 3: and you know, on reflection, you realize that you know,
Speaker 3: everything that you do in training has a purpose, right,
Speaker 3: and it's an absolute value in what people say all
Speaker 3: the time, being brilliant in the basics, right, just doing
Speaker 3: the little things that and doing them you know what
Speaker 3: we say a lot of times, just do it until
Speaker 3: you don't do it until you get it right, do
Speaker 3: it until you can't get it wrong. So, you know,
Speaker 3: all of the late nights, the drills, the exercises, you know,
Speaker 3: paid off. And the times when when some of my
Speaker 3: guys were you know, complaining that, hey, you know, can
Speaker 3: you know, can we get off early?
Speaker 2: Can we go home?
Speaker 3: And can we get the weekend off or whatever? And
Speaker 3: I you know, had to be the guy to say no.
Speaker 3: You know, those those times all all paid off.
Speaker 1: In terms of interdicting the vehicles there outside of Canada
Speaker 1: her how did you process who's a threat and who's
Speaker 1: just somebody trying to get away from combat?
Speaker 2: That was really the question.
Speaker 3: We were initially told that we could just shoot anybody
Speaker 3: leaving Kandor and that was uh. The military in situations
Speaker 3: has the authority to do that.
Speaker 2: Right. The declare an area or a group of people,
Speaker 2: or a.
Speaker 3: Stretch a roadway hostile, you know, meaning that anybody coming
Speaker 3: down that road is fair game. You know, I was
Speaker 3: not willing to make that call, right. One of the
Speaker 3: valuable portions of our training. We spend a lot of
Speaker 3: time doing discriminatory shooting. So like going into a shoothouse
Speaker 3: and there are people with a hair dryer in their hand,
Speaker 3: there's somebody with a pistol. You know, they look very
Speaker 3: very similar. But you you know, we were trained to
Speaker 3: identify and make sure that we were only shooting people.
Speaker 2: That needed to be shot. I guess.
Speaker 3: So the idea of of me or one of my guys,
Speaker 3: you know, shooting into a vehicle and hitting a child
Speaker 3: or hitting you know, someone who is trying to flee
Speaker 3: the uh, the you know the Taliban, all right, when
Speaker 3: we were the ones who were supposed to be, you know,
Speaker 3: freeing them from that. You know that I couldn't bring
Speaker 3: myself to give any order that would it would cause
Speaker 3: that or you know, certainly didn't want somebody or myself,
Speaker 3: you know, in years to come, having to live with that.
Speaker 1: That's John Daly, a US Marine Corps veteran of Iraq
Speaker 1: in Afghanistan serving in special operations. When we come back
Speaker 1: more about Daily's leadership in Afghanistan and later his extensive
Speaker 1: work in Iraq. Stay with us. I'm Greg Corumbas, and
Speaker 1: this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus.
Speaker 1: Our guest in this edition is John Daly, a US
Speaker 1: Marine Corps veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan serving in special operations.
Speaker 1: Soon we'll hear a lot about Daily's time in Iraq,
Speaker 1: but he now continues discussing how he interdicted potential terrorists
Speaker 1: outside of Kandahar.
Speaker 3: So it really came down to taking a look at
Speaker 3: the task that we were given and then finding a
Speaker 3: way to do it that allowed us the opportunity to
Speaker 3: identify the targets. I was confident that in a head
Speaker 3: to head gunfight, you know, my guys would win. One
Speaker 3: of the Marines in the platoon came up with the
Speaker 3: idea of, rather than treating it like an ambush, treating
Speaker 3: it like a vehicle interdiction mission, which is something that
Speaker 3: we do. Instead of normally we would use a hell
Speaker 3: of orange sniper to stop the vehicle. You know, we
Speaker 3: didn't have that luxury at the at the time, so
Speaker 3: we used concertina wire, you know, metal razor wire, essentially
Speaker 3: stretched across the road, which at that time I was
Speaker 3: had never seen it used in that way right to
Speaker 3: stop a vehicle, but it stops it very very effectively.
Speaker 3: So once the you know, the vehicle approached and we
Speaker 3: had reason to believe that they were bad guys, there
Speaker 3: were behind them there were two large trucks that had
Speaker 3: pulled off and was using the lead vehicle, which was
Speaker 3: a pickup, to scout ahead. So not the you know,
Speaker 3: not the actions generally speaking of an orphanage that's trying
Speaker 3: to you know, get the get the orphans away. They
Speaker 3: approached the Constantino are identified it, and this was middle
Speaker 3: of the night, but we had lit it with a
Speaker 3: little glow sticks so they could identify it. They identified it,
Speaker 3: tried to run through it, and at that point we
Speaker 3: could see in the back of the vehicle there were
Speaker 3: or three men with aks and it was it was cold,
Speaker 3: it really really cold, So that meant that the dual
Speaker 3: cab pickup was packed with as many people as they
Speaker 3: would hold, so it ultimately I think there were ten
Speaker 3: men in the front of the truck and I don't
Speaker 3: know how they got ten men, and there was like
Speaker 3: a clown car and then three in the back and
Speaker 3: the bed of the truck was was ultimately loaded with
Speaker 3: explosives and ammunition and RPG grenades.
Speaker 2: Approached the vehicle.
Speaker 3: You know, I tried to talk to them in my
Speaker 3: limited Afghany telling them to drop their weapons, and that
Speaker 3: didn't didn't work, so we you know, they decided to
Speaker 3: have a shootout, so we did, and then ultimately we're
Speaker 3: able to call in an airstrike on the remaining two
Speaker 3: trucks loaded with Tellawan fighters. So that really wound up
Speaker 3: being the other than like I mentioned the Army Special
Speaker 3: Operations guys who were up in the mountains. That was
Speaker 3: for the Marine Corps. Anyway, the first combat action of
Speaker 3: the War on Terror.
Speaker 1: Spring of two thousand and two. You come home from Afghanistan.
Speaker 1: About a year after that, operations in Iraq begin, and
Speaker 1: I believe it's the summer of two thousand and three
Speaker 1: when you're asked to be part of bringing forward a
Speaker 1: marine unit to be part of Special Operations Command. Give
Speaker 1: us a little brief background on where the Marines previously
Speaker 1: had or had not fit in with the larger Special
Speaker 1: Operations Command, and what exactly was being asked of you
Speaker 1: at that point.
Speaker 3: Certainly So the Special Operations Command was formed in nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty seven, and it was really a result of the
Speaker 3: failed Iran hostage crisis, the recovery operation there. So what
Speaker 3: they discovered was the special operations units throughout the services
Speaker 3: didn't coordinate well together, couldn't communicate in some cases together
Speaker 3: on radios, had different equipment, and so in nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 3: the US Special Operations Command was formed. The Army sent
Speaker 3: the Green Berets and the Rangers, the Navy sent the Seals,
Speaker 3: the Air Force sent their combat controller teams and the
Speaker 3: pair of rescue folks, and the Marine Corps was asked
Speaker 3: to send the force Freekan Marines, and the Marine Corps
Speaker 3: said no, So they kind of bowed out. And the
Speaker 3: Marine Corps has always been reluctant to have what it
Speaker 3: sees as an elite force within an elite force.
Speaker 2: So that's been the ways, been that way.
Speaker 3: For as long as the history I ever had, you know,
Speaker 3: certainly back to World War Two when the Marine Raiders
Speaker 3: were initially formed. So post nine to eleven, the Secretary
Speaker 3: of Defense recognized that there was going to be a
Speaker 3: greater requirement for special operations troops in the.
Speaker 2: War on Terror.
Speaker 3: And directed the increase of you across the board and
Speaker 3: told the Marine Corps at this time we were going
Speaker 3: to participate.
Speaker 1: Now you were asked by Colonel Codes to play a
Speaker 1: significant role in preparing Detachment one as it would be
Speaker 1: known for combat INTERAC. Do you make it very clear
Speaker 1: throughout the book you have a great deal of admiration
Speaker 1: for Colonel Codes. What made him a great leader?
Speaker 3: A lot of things he came with like a pedigree,
Speaker 3: all right. He had spent his younger years, you know,
Speaker 3: being raised kind of by the last of the Vietnam crew,
Speaker 3: all right, and then as a young Marine officer, he
Speaker 3: had spent time in El salvad Or, you know, in
Speaker 3: combat as an advisor. That was just a kind of
Speaker 3: a mythical sort of a mission that you hear about,
Speaker 3: but you know, so knowing somebody that had participated in that.
Speaker 3: But he was also just accepted nothing less than your best.
Speaker 3: And I think, you know, because of that, we gave
Speaker 3: him our best, and so he definitely brought out the
Speaker 3: best in all of us. I had the opportunity to
Speaker 3: see him last week and your first time in a
Speaker 3: couple of years, and and I still, you know, I
Speaker 3: can't bring myself to call him by his first name.
Speaker 3: It's it's a relationship that I'll kind of always always
Speaker 3: be that way, you know. I've looked at him as
Speaker 3: a mentor since the first time I met, and I
Speaker 3: had the very, i guess, unusual opportunity to work directly
Speaker 3: for him for almost half of my career, you know,
Speaker 3: over multiple units. So it was definitely a little bit
Speaker 3: of an unusual relationship, but it was the kind of
Speaker 3: feelings about him I think are pretty well shared throughout
Speaker 3: the Marines who had the opportunity to serve with him.
Speaker 1: So what was your specific role in helping to get
Speaker 1: Detachment one up and ready to go?
Speaker 3: So I was one of the four initial team leaders.
Speaker 3: I was given the opportunity to pick my own marines,
Speaker 3: which is almost unheard of, you know, opportunity in a unit.
Speaker 3: And that's you know, when I walked into his office
Speaker 3: and he told me this, like, hey, you're a team leader.
Speaker 3: You know, you know what I expect, you know, nothing
Speaker 3: but excellence. You know, you could pick your own guys,
Speaker 3: but the only stipulation being that they're tough, rugged bastards,
Speaker 3: and that When I walked out of his office, I
Speaker 3: kind of wrote that down and said, hey, you know,
Speaker 3: if I ever write a book, then that's going to
Speaker 3: be the title. Fortunately I did and was able to
Speaker 3: use it.
Speaker 1: And one of the things you talk about later in
Speaker 1: the book, but I'm sure it was a factor in
Speaker 1: bringing up detachment one is developing mental toughness. You spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time talking about that. How do you
Speaker 1: cultivate that in training? And how much can you cultivate
Speaker 1: in training as opposed from actual deployments.
Speaker 2: I think you can quite a bit.
Speaker 3: I mean we spent you know, guys like me that
Speaker 3: came in in the late eighties, you know, we other
Speaker 3: than the Gulf War, which like I said, I missed.
Speaker 3: You know, I had fourteen years of my career gone
Speaker 3: before I saw combat. So and I felt that I
Speaker 3: had been able, you know, with leaders like Colonel Coats
Speaker 3: and others, been able to cultivate a what I call
Speaker 3: like a deep well of mental toughness. And I think
Speaker 3: when you do hard things, you kind of dig this
Speaker 3: well deeper, all right, and you when you come to it,
Speaker 3: you know, there's always a reserve of water or grit,
Speaker 3: whatever you want to look at that as And I
Speaker 3: really believe, and I talk about it a lot, because
Speaker 3: it's something I talk about marines now a lot, about
Speaker 3: the requirement.
Speaker 2: To have a.
Speaker 3: Bottomless reserve of mental toughness when you know things get
Speaker 3: aren't going well, you know, you really have two choices.
Speaker 3: You can give in and die, or you can can
Speaker 3: fight and continue to fight until the fighting's done.
Speaker 1: You were deployed to Iraq and I think the middle
Speaker 1: of two thousand and four, and a lot of the
Speaker 1: missions that you undertook were to bring high value targets
Speaker 1: into custody. And I'm guessing every one of these missions
Speaker 1: has different variables that there's really not necessarily a template,
Speaker 1: although I'm sure there are different tactics that you developed
Speaker 1: over time. But one of the things that I found
Speaker 1: fascinating about your book is how you would follow lead
Speaker 1: to lead to lead to figure out where these high
Speaker 1: you targets are. And you're having conversations with people who
Speaker 1: speak different languages, and you're sifting out who is lying
Speaker 1: to you, who's telling the truth. How do you how
Speaker 1: do you process who's giving you the truth and who's
Speaker 1: trying to throw you off course, it.
Speaker 3: Was absolutely I mean, it was a lot of detective
Speaker 3: work involved in it, and fortunately we had within Detachment one,
Speaker 3: we had the guys that you would call shooter, you know,
Speaker 3: the guys that went through the door and went after
Speaker 3: the bad guys. But we had a very robust intelligence
Speaker 3: section and they was it was amazing to watch watch
Speaker 3: these people work. So from analysts to kind of gio
Speaker 3: spatial guys, to signals intelligence folks and human intelligence. So
Speaker 3: they would develop sources, you know, gather information. They would
Speaker 3: be responsible for doing the questioning generally on the site.
Speaker 3: Normally in those cases we would just kind of be
Speaker 3: responsible for standing in the corner and looking mean, like
Speaker 3: the person you know that you don't want to lie
Speaker 3: to the guy who's being nice to you. It's kind
Speaker 3: of a good cop bad cop, you know. But we
Speaker 3: were like the silent bad cop. And that's really what
Speaker 3: it turned into is when we arrived in Iraq, we
Speaker 3: were operating underneath a Navy Seal Task Unit, so but
Speaker 3: we were in an area that you had not had
Speaker 3: a seal team operating prior to this. So normally, when
Speaker 3: you would find yourself in that situation, the team, even
Speaker 3: if it was from a different service, the special operations
Speaker 3: team that you were replacing, would have a stack of
Speaker 3: target folders. Hey, here's all the known kind of bad
Speaker 3: guys in this area, here's what we know about them,
Speaker 3: here's you know, where you can can find them. We
Speaker 3: didn't have that luxury, so we had to kind of
Speaker 3: you know, shake the tree and find a bad guy
Speaker 3: and then get him to you know, hand us to
Speaker 3: another one. And ultimately we were able to be very successful.
Speaker 3: I think the like I said, the intelligence played a
Speaker 3: huge role and our I guess, our work ethic. I mean,
Speaker 3: almost every night we were just out and sometimes you know,
Speaker 3: we would go to multiple targets in a night, the
Speaker 3: determining that we bring some people back for questioning or
Speaker 3: find information or bomb components, you know, whatever the case
Speaker 3: may be. A whole lot of late nights, I mean,
Speaker 3: we should basically worked the night shift, you know, most
Speaker 3: of the times, and a lot of the success that
Speaker 3: we had was because we would not show up at
Speaker 3: your house until two in the morning. You know, regardless
Speaker 3: of how uh, how much you try to stay vigilant,
Speaker 3: you know, two in the morning, that's hard to do.
Speaker 3: So that because of that, we were able to apprehend
Speaker 3: a lot more of these targets than we had to
Speaker 3: shoot tactically.
Speaker 1: What was the most effective way of not only cornering
Speaker 1: your target but also keeping yourselves safe. And you don't
Speaker 1: know what weapons, You don't know if it's booby trapped,
Speaker 1: you don't know if people are gonna squirt out as
Speaker 1: you say in the book and maybe loop around or
Speaker 1: something like that. So tactically, what were the challenges and
Speaker 1: what were the smartest tactics to take?
Speaker 3: That changes over time, Right, That's the sort of thing
Speaker 3: that once you, uh, the enemy recognized as a pattern,
Speaker 3: then they'll change, you know, and you have to adapt
Speaker 3: to that. So for us, when we were there, the
Speaker 3: the pressure type IDs things like that were not as prevalent.
Speaker 3: When there were I D's on the roads. They were
Speaker 3: man detonated or command detonated. So we drove as fast
Speaker 3: as we could, you know, like I said, at night,
Speaker 3: you know, with blacked out lights, and then getting into
Speaker 3: the targets the houses as quickly as possible. Quite often
Speaker 3: we would you get into the far back upstairs bedroom
Speaker 3: and find a guy with a you scrambling to pull
Speaker 3: the pistol out from under his bed, like we just
Speaker 3: we'd gotten into quickly too forum, and that you know,
Speaker 3: would not have worked well if if houses that we'd
Speaker 3: run into had been booby trapped, but it was kind
Speaker 3: of a calculated risk we did. And I think I
Speaker 3: talk about in the book come into one house where
Speaker 3: we found you know, an ied that was set with
Speaker 3: a timer, and luckily we identified it early and we're
Speaker 3: able to get out and have our explosive ordnance guys
Speaker 3: take care of it.
Speaker 1: You mentioned the human intelligence aspect of this, and one
Speaker 1: of the particular missions obviously dealt a lot with this.
Speaker 1: You were able to get a young man close I
Speaker 1: think it was the driver of a figure known simply
Speaker 1: as Z. So explain how you're able to get that
Speaker 1: person close enough to the target and then how that
Speaker 1: target gets you the information you need to make the nab.
Speaker 3: Absolutely and that was again, you know, the all the
Speaker 3: work of our intel folks, just a phenomenal job, you know,
Speaker 3: given the level of technology that we had available to
Speaker 3: us at the time. So they had, you know, had
Speaker 3: a vehicle that we had stuck a normal handheld GPS in,
Speaker 3: and so it had to be you know, the batteries
Speaker 3: had to be recharged or replaced every couple of days.
Speaker 3: So it was it was not as you know, technologically
Speaker 3: savvy as things are today. But the problem with this
Speaker 3: guy Ze, and he was one of the DECA card guys,
Speaker 3: you know, the fifty two most wanted in the Saddam's regime. Uh,
Speaker 3: everybody had been after him for for you know, a
Speaker 3: couple of years at this point, and he had incredibly elusive.
Speaker 3: See I had never stayed in the same place, you know,
Speaker 3: two nights in a row. He was always on the go,
Speaker 3: very uh, just just very very cautious. So we had
Speaker 3: we tracked him for the six months of the deployment
Speaker 3: trying to figure out who he was, getting close to
Speaker 3: him and ultimately one of the and I didn't know
Speaker 3: this until later, but the young man that volunteered to
Speaker 3: work for is his parents had been killed by Ze
Speaker 3: and his cronies, so he was eager to do whatever
Speaker 3: was necessary to kind of see him brought to justice.
Speaker 3: So we were and I don't even quite understand how
Speaker 3: there our folks were able to get this guy installed
Speaker 3: as this as this driver, but it was multiple, you know, levels.
Speaker 2: Of sources that we had recruited.
Speaker 3: So one source, you know, identifies that, hey, I know
Speaker 3: a guy who might know a kid that can be
Speaker 3: your driver. You know, he's from out of town. But
Speaker 3: he's kind of with the cause and and they kind
Speaker 3: of you know, buttered this, you know, buttered up Z
Speaker 3: and uh, you know the kid and as what we
Speaker 3: called him, the kid came in and kind of earned
Speaker 3: the trust of Z by.
Speaker 2: By driving them, being reliable, being on time.
Speaker 3: And then eventually got a hold of us and said, hey,
Speaker 3: you know, he's going out to dinner with a couple
Speaker 3: of other or lunch actually with a couple of other
Speaker 3: relatively big you know figures in the Iraqi most wanted
Speaker 3: a restaurant in the middle of downtown bag Dad and
Speaker 3: you know which, And we, like I said, we tried
Speaker 3: to We tried to show up at your house at
Speaker 3: two in the morning, not at two in the afternoon.
Speaker 3: That was kind of a recipe for disaster. But it
Speaker 3: was the best chance that we were going to have
Speaker 3: to get him, and the kid, uh you know, sent
Speaker 3: a text saying that hey, we're at the restaurant and
Speaker 3: we moved in quickly. We were able to get him
Speaker 3: without any shots fired, and it was probably, I mean,
Speaker 3: it was absolute the biggest win that we had over
Speaker 3: the course of the deployment.
Speaker 1: That's John Day, a US Marine Corps veteran of Iraq
Speaker 1: and Afghanistan serving in special operations. Still to come inside
Speaker 1: another operation nabbing a high value target and targeting allies
Speaker 1: of Muktada al Soder in Najaff I'm Greg Corumbus and
Speaker 1: this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus.
Speaker 1: Our guest in this edition is John Daley, a US
Speaker 1: Marine Corps veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. In just a
Speaker 1: few moments, we'll hear about his efforts to target allies
Speaker 1: of Muktada El Soder. But first he takes us on
Speaker 1: another operation to capture a high value target, this one
Speaker 1: known simply as X.
Speaker 3: Yeah, X was worked for Z, but he was and
Speaker 3: these we had kind of worked our way up from
Speaker 3: very low level thugs to finally getting up to X
Speaker 3: initially and to Z. As we were trying to catch X,
Speaker 3: no idea what he looked like. We finally started capturing
Speaker 3: some of his relatives, and again the intel guys discovered
Speaker 3: recognized that there's a very very strong family.
Speaker 2: Resemblance among all of these people.
Speaker 3: So the expectation was that, hey, X probably looks like
Speaker 3: these guys. So whenever we found a guy that looked
Speaker 3: similar had some of the similar family traits, we brought
Speaker 3: him back with us, and ultimately we did catch X.
Speaker 3: But he was again very kind of savvy guy and
Speaker 3: wouldn't admit to being X. Wouldn't admit to anything. And
Speaker 3: at this point in the war, the power, a lot
Speaker 3: of power was being turned back over to the Iraqis.
Speaker 3: So X was going to go to court, right, he'd
Speaker 3: get his day in court judged by Iraqis. Right, It
Speaker 3: wasn't going to be in the US's decision. So we
Speaker 3: needed to provide ample evidence to make sure that he
Speaker 3: stayed put away for for a long time. And what
Speaker 3: we had, you know, some of the things that we
Speaker 3: had unearthed on him was while he was a member
Speaker 3: of Saddam's regime, he had been responsible for the deaths
Speaker 3: of a lot of Kurdish people. It had just happened
Speaker 3: that we had been kind of pulled away from our
Speaker 3: other duties to provide a security guard detail for the
Speaker 3: interim Iraqi government, right, and this was these these were
Speaker 3: the folks that were put in place so that free
Speaker 3: elections could take place. And the vice president that had
Speaker 3: been picked was a Kurd which was kind of unheard of,
Speaker 3: absolutely under Saddam's regime, and there is not a lot
Speaker 3: of love for Kords in Iraq as a as a rule,
Speaker 3: but you know, are protecting this this gentleman who is a.
Speaker 2: Great, great man.
Speaker 3: You know, by protecting him, we developed a bit of
Speaker 3: a relationship with him, and then we realized that the
Speaker 3: only way we're going to get X to talk was
Speaker 3: if he thought that he was going to be handed
Speaker 3: over to the kurdishkesh Mark. You know, we're able to
Speaker 3: use that resource as the Vice president to fly into
Speaker 3: to their hometown, pulled the hood off of the head
Speaker 3: of X, who was staring at, you know, a bunch
Speaker 3: of Kourags that were not too happy to see him.
Speaker 3: He realized then that hey, I better start talking, and
Speaker 3: so you know, he did, and we were able to
Speaker 3: make sure that he was spending the rest of his
Speaker 3: life in a cell. Wow.
Speaker 1: Well, let's talk about another major portion of your time
Speaker 1: that not only consumes a number of pages of the book,
Speaker 1: it's also part of your initial introduction to the book,
Speaker 1: and that's your time in Najaff dealing with the threat
Speaker 1: of Mctada al Soder emanating from one of the most
Speaker 1: prominent sites in all of Islam there in Najaf, with
Speaker 1: that particular mosque. What were you asked to do you
Speaker 1: and your unit asked to do when you were sent
Speaker 1: in there.
Speaker 3: So I was I was told to pick a team
Speaker 3: of snipers, and not all of our marines were snipers,
Speaker 3: but of quite a few were. So I was able
Speaker 3: to pick a group go in and provide support to
Speaker 3: the coalition forces who were already in or around the
Speaker 3: jav And it was the tricky thing with the jav
Speaker 3: was on it on the west, it's bordered by the
Speaker 3: largest cemetery in the world, as some thousand thousand year
Speaker 3: old cemetery with catacombs and structures, and it's like a
Speaker 3: little compressed city and it would be a horrible, horrible
Speaker 3: place to have to fight. It would just be a bloodbath.
Speaker 3: And so off to the west, we had a bunch
Speaker 3: of our fellow marines from the Marine expedition or unit
Speaker 3: who were kind of stationed out there waiting to determine
Speaker 3: if they were going to have to come in and
Speaker 3: fight through that cemetery. In the center of the town
Speaker 3: is the as you mentioned, the Imam a Lee Mosque,
Speaker 3: and it's the third holiest site for Shia Muslims, so
Speaker 3: it was a religious building that could not be damaged.
Speaker 3: It's very very old, very very sensitive facility. Well, because
Speaker 3: of that, there was great restrictions on who could enter
Speaker 3: the town of Najaf And as you mentioned, the Mahdi
Speaker 3: Army had they had five to ten thousand fighters, nobody
Speaker 3: quite know how many in and around the city. They
Speaker 3: had largely cleared the place out, so there wasn't a
Speaker 3: whole lot of city in activity. It was just a
Speaker 3: city full of bad guys and they were primarily living
Speaker 3: inside the complex surrounding the mosque. So the only people
Speaker 3: that were allowed to enter were Special Operations snipers and
Speaker 3: that was the simple idea was that we will hit
Speaker 3: what we're shooting at and we'll make sure that we
Speaker 3: don't damage anything that they shouldn't be damaged. So in
Speaker 3: a addition to my guys, you know, stationed around the city,
Speaker 3: there were Polish Special Operations sniper teams, Army Green Berets
Speaker 3: sniper teams, Navy Seal sniper teams. So our job was
Speaker 3: to go in and gather as much information as we could,
Speaker 3: but also to just a trit as Many of the
Speaker 3: force as we.
Speaker 1: Could identified a building, as I recall from your book,
Speaker 1: before you even entered about where you wanted to be.
Speaker 1: It had a one of the taller buildings in the
Speaker 1: area and had a good line of sight and so forth.
Speaker 1: So once you're up there, how do you determine what
Speaker 1: your targets are and how to execute?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: That, Yeah, we were able to use overhead imagery to
Speaker 3: pick the location that we wanted to go into. And
Speaker 3: it had been a hotel I think, you know, all
Speaker 3: the furniture had been removed, but you know, coming into it,
Speaker 3: you've got to obviously clear every room, every floor, all
Speaker 3: the way up, you know, to make sure that nobody's
Speaker 3: going to come in behind you. But once we got
Speaker 3: up there, it really became a kind of dispersed all
Speaker 3: of my guys to go find a place where you
Speaker 3: can observe, you know, engage targets as they appear. And
Speaker 3: obviously we did this at night so that when the
Speaker 3: sun came up, it.
Speaker 2: Was really anyone.
Speaker 3: And this was a situation where, like I talked about
Speaker 3: earlier being declared hostile, the town was declared hostile. I
Speaker 3: mean we could we could shoot anyone that was It
Speaker 3: was out and about, and I don't I did not
Speaker 3: see anyone who is a non combatant. So everybody that
Speaker 3: you saw had a weapon. They were you know, generally
Speaker 3: moving in you know, tactical formations, and there was a
Speaker 3: lot of initially, you know, as we moved in, we
Speaker 3: moved in and were undetected. So the first morning particularly,
Speaker 3: there was a whole lot of guys, you know, insurgents
Speaker 3: run around that did not know that we were there.
Speaker 3: So it took a while, and so it was kind
Speaker 3: of like shooting fish in a barrel for a while.
Speaker 3: And then uh, you know, after that they started realizing
Speaker 3: that that where we where we were, and we were
Speaker 3: driven out, you know, with mortars and rockets, RPGs out
Speaker 3: of that building. You know, it's always a dangerous thing
Speaker 3: to uh put yourself in the tallest building because you know,
Speaker 3: that's the first place that somebody looks kind of bounced
Speaker 3: to bounce around. Every night we would move to its
Speaker 3: other buildings, we would you know, kind of get closer
Speaker 3: and closer. And the other thing that we faced there,
Speaker 3: which was surprising, were some really very capable enemy snipers.
Speaker 3: At the end of the day, we were reporting signals,
Speaker 3: intelligence reporting, let us know that we had not not
Speaker 3: just our my guys, but all of the snipers, the
Speaker 3: special operations snipers were working out there, had eliminated thirty
Speaker 3: some I think I forget what the number was, but
Speaker 3: it was it was quite a significant chunk of enemy snipers.
Speaker 2: And like I said, they.
Speaker 3: Were a lot of them were definitely trained, you know,
Speaker 3: by going to watching their technics, tactics and techniques.
Speaker 1: You mentioned that you were driven from that first building
Speaker 1: by mortars. There's also a story in your book about
Speaker 1: being a camp miler in Iraq when a mortar came
Speaker 1: in and it was no, it was an average data
Speaker 1: know that mortars were being fired in your general direction,
Speaker 1: but one in particular landed very very close to where
Speaker 1: you were, So that was that was quite a shock.
Speaker 1: Was what was that moment?
Speaker 3: Like, Yeah, we had it was funny may not be
Speaker 3: the right word, but it was kind of funny because
Speaker 3: it was you know, the military is kind of known
Speaker 3: for having four morning formation, you get outside and chin
Speaker 3: in combat. You know, you don't do that as frequently. Obviously,
Speaker 3: we had not taken a lot of indirect fire, mortar, fire,
Speaker 3: rockets already, things like that where we were, but it
Speaker 3: was sporadic, and on that morning someone was getting promoted
Speaker 3: and they said, hey, let's go out have a formation,
Speaker 3: promote this this marine to the next higher rank. You know,
Speaker 3: as we were just starting to you know, get get
Speaker 3: formed up, they were getting ready to call them forward.
Speaker 3: You know, mortar rounds started hitting. We were located near
Speaker 3: the Baghdad International Airport in a place that had been
Speaker 3: Saddam's in one of Saddam's many palaces, and there was
Speaker 3: some wetlands, and the mortar rounds initially kind of walked
Speaker 3: through the wetlands, so there was far enough away and
Speaker 3: landing in the water there weren't going to cause any damage.
Speaker 3: But as we immediately took cover as the first round
Speaker 3: started hitting, we moved back inside and then uh, you know,
Speaker 3: one hit very very close, and it had been landed
Speaker 3: in the bed of a pickup truck, and the pickup
Speaker 3: truck had held our task group commander, a Navy seal
Speaker 3: and his senior enlisted leader. The task group commander had
Speaker 3: just walked inside. The master chief was finishing a phone
Speaker 3: call or doing something and he stayed in the truck
Speaker 3: and so he was pretty seriously wounded.
Speaker 2: So really, then, you know.
Speaker 3: Once we recognized how close it landed, you know, moved
Speaker 3: to him and were able to get him patched up
Speaker 3: and stabilized at least and onto a METABAC.
Speaker 1: Just a couple more questions before you saved, before we
Speaker 1: let you go. Two thousand and six, the decision has
Speaker 1: made that detachment won and the Marine component in Special
Speaker 1: Operations Command is going to end. Based on your book,
Speaker 1: it seems like it was against the wishes of Secretary
Speaker 1: Rumsfeld at the time. But ultimately, why do you think
Speaker 1: that was done? And then how quickly did you move
Speaker 1: to setting up the Marines Special Operations Command.
Speaker 3: So it was, I mean one was kind of predicated
Speaker 3: on the other. From our perspective, you know, where we
Speaker 3: were setting Most of the guys thought things should have
Speaker 3: been done differently, or we should have been like replicated
Speaker 3: and allowed to grow to kind of maintain the same
Speaker 3: level of capability, you know, to go from attached Detachment
Speaker 3: one to a detachment too. But the Secretary of Rumsfeld's
Speaker 3: plans were like, hey, no, you're going to make a
Speaker 3: three thousand person unit that you know, led by a
Speaker 3: two star and general instead of a colonel.
Speaker 2: And so it was I don't know, I.
Speaker 3: Think a lot of us we didn't see that big picture,
Speaker 3: I guess is the best way to say it. So,
Speaker 3: so as we were deactivated, the Marine Special Operations Command
Speaker 3: was being activated. Not everyone went joined it. Not all
Speaker 3: of us that were in Detachment one joined MARSAK. Some,
Speaker 3: some retired, some moved on to different jobs. I was
Speaker 3: one that kind of saw the writing on the wall
Speaker 3: that you know, we had learned a lot of lessons.
Speaker 3: I felt that we had a lot to give to
Speaker 3: this new organization, and so I asked to be you know,
Speaker 3: travel across the country, come out to North Carolina and
Speaker 3: do the job of establishing what would become the schoolhouse
Speaker 3: that trains Marine raiders today.
Speaker 1: What's to like to know that you've created a whole
Speaker 1: new generation of Marine raiders.
Speaker 3: It's pretty awesome, you know. You just stay so busy,
Speaker 3: you know. I retired from active duty in two thousand
Speaker 3: and eight, and you know, came back like two days
Speaker 3: later as a civil And so I've now been in
Speaker 3: my job as the Training and Education Branch director for
Speaker 3: over sixteen years, all right, which is I mean nearly
Speaker 3: a career. So I've seen marines join the unit, as
Speaker 3: you know, sergeants and then retire out of.
Speaker 2: The unit as E nines.
Speaker 3: So it's been incredibly rewarding. It's a little bit when
Speaker 3: you stop and think about it, you realize that that
Speaker 3: means that I'm getting kind of old. Don't stop and
Speaker 3: think as much as I probably should. You know about
Speaker 3: the awesome gift I've been given. I guess to continue
Speaker 3: to contribute in a way that's hopefully been a.
Speaker 1: Fifteen years civilian on top of twenty one as active marine.
Speaker 1: Last couple of questions here, sir, when you look back
Speaker 1: at your service, and I guess your ongoing service from
Speaker 1: a civilian perspective, what are you most proud of?
Speaker 3: I think the fact that you know, I was able
Speaker 3: to take the lessons that I learned from from people
Speaker 3: like Colonel Coats and bring all of my guys back,
Speaker 3: you know, not having lost anyone, you know, in combat. Absolutely,
Speaker 3: that's something that I'm proud of and grateful for. You know,
Speaker 3: I guess I'm proud now to be a part of
Speaker 3: a story that kind of stretches back to World War
Speaker 3: two and nineteen forty two and the Marine Raiders of
Speaker 3: then being a you know, a small a cog in
Speaker 3: that wheel that has kind of stretched throughout the entirety
Speaker 3: of US Special Operations history is pretty pretty amazing, and
Speaker 3: that's something I'm certainly proud of.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: John's a fascinating book that I encourage folks to read,
Speaker 1: and I really appreciate your time today, Sir. We're grateful
Speaker 1: for that, and most of all, we're grateful for your
Speaker 1: tremendous service to our country.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 1: John Daily, retired US Marine Corps Master Sergeant, spent twenty
Speaker 1: one years in uniform and as you just heard, sixteen
Speaker 1: years as a civilian and continuing to help develop the
Speaker 1: Marine Raiders. He's a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: played key roles in standing up US Marine Corps Special
Speaker 1: Forces units, and he's the author of Tough, Rugged Bastards,
Speaker 1: a memoir of a life in Marine Special Operations. I'm
Speaker 1: Greg Corumbus, and this is Veterans' Prodicles. Hi, this is
Speaker 1: Greg Corumbus, and thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a
Speaker 1: presentation of the American Veterans Center. For more information, please
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