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Speaker 3: Special Operations, Cobert Ox Aspionage, The Team House with Your Hopes,
Speaker 3: Jack Murphy and David Bark.
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome to episode two hundred and ninety five
Speaker 2: of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave
Speaker 2: Park and our guest on tonight's show is John Daily.
Speaker 1: He is the author of Tough, Rugged Bastards.
Speaker 2: It is a memoir about his time in the Marine Corps,
Speaker 2: his service in Force Recon Detachment one, and then helping
Speaker 2: to stand up marsk in the very beginning years, and
Speaker 2: he continues to work with Marsk today as a civilian. John,
Speaker 2: thank you for coming on the show and sharing your history,
Speaker 2: but the slice of Marine Corps history also.
Speaker 4: Thanks well, Jack Dave. I appreciate you having me on.
Speaker 4: I'm excited for the chance to talk with you guys.
Speaker 2: So let's start at the beginning of your story. Tell
Speaker 2: us a bit about you know, your upbringing and how
Speaker 2: that kind of took you towards the Marine Corps.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I grew up along the Virginia West Virginia border
Speaker 4: on both sides at various times, and I got an
Speaker 4: Appalachia foot heels and and you know, it's a great,
Speaker 4: great way to go grow up, you know, in the
Speaker 4: seventies eighties, you know, I had not a lot of
Speaker 4: of neighbors, you know, not a lot of other kids.
Speaker 4: So it was a whole lot of a lot of
Speaker 4: whole lot of meat out in the woods, running around
Speaker 4: by myself. But it taught me a lot of things,
Speaker 4: you know, uh, you know, learned about not living off
Speaker 4: the land necessarily, but you know, just being very comfortable outdoors.
Speaker 4: You know, I think the I was I think it
Speaker 4: was eight the first time I told my dad, I
Speaker 4: want to go camping out in the woods by myself,
Speaker 4: you know, and it went out, set up my tent,
Speaker 4: you got everything ready, you know, at about like two
Speaker 4: in the afternoon, and you know, it seemed like an
Speaker 4: eternity before the sun finally went down, and when it did,
Speaker 4: you know, it was it was probably you know, I
Speaker 4: was a stubborn kid, but you know, it's gets dark
Speaker 4: and I've been camping plenty with my folks, but uh,
Speaker 4: you know, all the sounds of the night time start
Speaker 4: coming out, and I really, really, you know, I wanted,
Speaker 4: I wanted to go back home, but it was it
Speaker 4: was just you know, the stubbornness that kind of kept
Speaker 4: me out. And I think that's probably one of the
Speaker 4: things I learned kind of growing up that way, and
Speaker 4: it's stubbornness was absolutely a skill that paid off and
Speaker 4: make evidence in the Marine Corps.
Speaker 2: And so as you grow up, you start hitting like
Speaker 2: your high school years, what's you know, how is the
Speaker 2: Marine Corps starting to enter into your life.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I had had kind of known. I learned about
Speaker 4: the Marine Corps at a really early age and kind
Speaker 4: of had it in the back of my head that
Speaker 4: that's what I wanted to do. When I got into
Speaker 4: high school, we moved, my parents got divorced, and I
Speaker 4: was on the West Virginia side now And just as
Speaker 4: like fate would have it, the recruiter in the recruiting
Speaker 4: office that was it was local, was a Force Rey
Speaker 4: Con marine and he had, you know, it's a sniper.
Speaker 4: He kind of everything that I wanted to do. And
Speaker 4: he had the pictures up on his his wall in
Speaker 4: his office, and uh, he kind of took me under
Speaker 4: his twing, you know, and and you started teaching me,
Speaker 4: prepping me, and so, you know, throughout my my high
Speaker 4: school years. The decision was made. I didn't have the
Speaker 4: grades really for anything else, so that that made life
Speaker 4: a little easier. We didn't have the money for college
Speaker 4: even if I would have. Uh So it was it
Speaker 4: was a pretty easy decision, but it was. It was
Speaker 4: one I was. You know, when I went in, I
Speaker 4: I operated on the assumption that you joined the Marine
Speaker 4: Corps you stayed in forever. You know. I didn't. I
Speaker 4: didn't realize that there was there were enlistments, all right,
Speaker 4: And when they they told me like, hey, how long
Speaker 4: do you want to join for? I was like yeah,
Speaker 4: until I die, I guess I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well that's pretty much what you signed up for.
Speaker 2: As it turns out, John.
Speaker 5: It did.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it uh, you know, I I loved it.
Speaker 4: I mean I I I can't say that I love
Speaker 4: every minute of it, but you know there I can't
Speaker 4: remember the minutes that I didn't didn't love. And the
Speaker 4: thing that I learned that, you know, it seems to
Speaker 4: be common among you know, special operations guys, is that,
Speaker 4: you know, the times that you really love at the
Speaker 4: times that really really sucked, you know, and you don't
Speaker 4: love them at the time they're sucking. But you know,
Speaker 4: when you get back to the you know, the rear,
Speaker 4: you're cleaning weapons and cleaning gear, and you kind of
Speaker 4: get to talk shit to other teams about how hard
Speaker 4: your patrol was or how you know, how bad the
Speaker 4: mission was, or who ran out of water. You know,
Speaker 4: it's you know with twenty four hours ago, or ran
Speaker 4: out of show and they had to x fill. You know,
Speaker 4: those those sorts of things that build teams, build communities.
Speaker 4: And that's that's what I loved about it.
Speaker 2: And so you come in what year did you join
Speaker 2: the Marines and tell us about those early years what
Speaker 2: it was like at that time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I joined in eighty seven, right out of like
Speaker 4: two weeks out of high school, and it was I
Speaker 4: think an interesting time, of course, you know know it then,
Speaker 4: but yeah, it was far enough post Vietnam where a
Speaker 4: lot of the disgruntal veterans that you I had heard about,
Speaker 4: you know, they weren't anywhere to be seen for the
Speaker 4: most part. There were still absolutely plenty of Vietnam vetts,
Speaker 4: but most of them were first sergeants and and you know,
Speaker 4: certain major master gunnery sergeants things of that nature that
Speaker 4: me as a PFC wasn't talking to anyway. You know,
Speaker 4: I would get my ass shoot by one occasionally, But
Speaker 4: so there was but we were still absolutely learning or
Speaker 4: practicing all of the you know, we were preparing to
Speaker 4: fight another Vietnam, right, so all of the lessons that
Speaker 4: that they had learned, I remember, and I just I
Speaker 4: still have. I pulled out and made copies of the
Speaker 4: other day, a relatively thick document that that GETA was
Speaker 4: just patrolling tips from from UH. I think it probably
Speaker 4: was compiled by SF guys, but you know, everything from
Speaker 4: you know, taping on your legs, tabs on your mags
Speaker 4: you could pull them out quickly to to cutting down
Speaker 4: the mag pouching inch. So it's easy to get your
Speaker 4: mags out, you know, taking the spoons under your age
Speaker 4: and all of these things. We were just just all
Speaker 4: over them, you know. We were you know expecting or
Speaker 4: hoping or whatever for another you know, Vietnam, and so
Speaker 4: that's kind of my formative years in the Marine Corps
Speaker 4: and my early years. Uh I was in the Scout
Speaker 4: sniper platoon and those that was you know Carlos Athcock.
Speaker 4: You know, his book was passed around and uh getting
Speaker 4: the opportunity to meet him, I got to meet him.
Speaker 4: Uh was like meeting you know, a freaking rock star
Speaker 4: est uh So it uh, I mean it was it
Speaker 4: was really, uh I think a good time. There wasn't
Speaker 4: a lot of money, you know, there was a whole
Speaker 4: lot of uh I mean life in the infantry really
Speaker 4: at that time. You know, on Monday morning, you you know,
Speaker 4: throw your ruck on it, you you know, hike out
Speaker 4: to the field and you'd you know, set up a
Speaker 4: camp and you do patrols, you know, Tuesday through Thursday.
Speaker 4: If you're lucky, you know, Thursday, you'd you'd hike back,
Speaker 4: clean your weapons, turn them in, you know, go get
Speaker 4: drunk Thursday night, and usually they just give you off Friday,
Speaker 4: so you get a three day week and you know,
Speaker 4: three day weekend and back at it the next week.
Speaker 4: And that was just a week after week after week.
Speaker 4: So I mean, you got really really good at the
Speaker 4: basic you know, infantry activities that you know lead to success.
Speaker 2: And then as we get towards the nineties, were you
Speaker 2: I'm trying to remember what were you? A Marine Embassy
Speaker 2: guard for a little while.
Speaker 4: I was, so I was the unit that I was in.
Speaker 4: I had initially started out in a sniper platoon, had
Speaker 4: got the opportunity to go to sniper school, but we
Speaker 4: weren't doing a lot, so there was kind of got
Speaker 4: suckered in by the I think we call them career planners.
Speaker 4: I think in the army they might called like detailers
Speaker 4: or whatever. But the guy in the unit whose job
Speaker 4: it is to get people to sign up for special duties.
Speaker 4: And I ran into a little bit of party, you know,
Speaker 4: in the in the barracks, and he was, uh, you
Speaker 4: found out that I was a sniper. And I'm sure
Speaker 4: I didn't make it hard for him to find out,
Speaker 4: you know, I just just graduated from sniper school. So
Speaker 4: I'm sure I was spouting off to anybody who listen.
Speaker 4: But he was like, hey, man, I got a deal
Speaker 4: for you. There's this duty where you go and work
Speaker 4: at foreign embassies and uh, you know, with your with
Speaker 4: your background as a sniper, you know you'll be you know,
Speaker 4: working for the CIA at no time. And I was like, what,
Speaker 4: you know, like that sounds awesome, Like sign me up. So,
Speaker 4: you know, the unit was actually kind of pissed because
Speaker 4: I had just got back from sniper school. You know,
Speaker 4: there's some expectation that I was going to help train
Speaker 4: some other guys and I was. I was on the
Speaker 4: next thing smoking to the Marine Security Guard school, which,
Speaker 4: as it turns out, is does not involve, you know,
Speaker 4: targeting people for the CIA whatsoever. It's a whole lot
Speaker 4: of wear in your dress uniform and kind of greeting
Speaker 4: dignitaries and just basically standing standing guard over an embassy
Speaker 4: at night when everybody goes home. But it was it
Speaker 4: was a really great learning experience. I know, while I
Speaker 4: was in Budapest was my first duty station, and that
Speaker 4: was right as the wall was coming down and eighty
Speaker 4: nine and the Soviets were leaving Hungary. I met the
Speaker 4: chick who had become my wife some years later, an
Speaker 4: American school teacher, So that was you know, that panned out.
Speaker 4: So we've been married for just over thirty two years now,
Speaker 4: so that that worked out pretty well. And then from
Speaker 4: there I went to Buenos Aires, Argentina. I missed the
Speaker 4: First Golf War because you know, during that that interim period.
Speaker 4: But uh, and that's I don't I don't think I
Speaker 4: talk about it in the book. But one of the
Speaker 4: kind of funny stories to come out of that is
Speaker 4: when I got I left Budapest right as the build
Speaker 4: up for the Gulf War was happening, and so by
Speaker 4: the time I get to Argentina, it's it's getting ready
Speaker 4: to kick off. And there's a form in the Marine
Speaker 4: Corps called an Administrative Action Form that you can fill
Speaker 4: out and request anything with it. And so I would
Speaker 4: go into the embassy every morning, I'd fill out one
Speaker 4: of these forms and say, hey, I want to go
Speaker 4: to you know, any unit that's it's involved in combat,
Speaker 4: and I would you know, turn it in to my
Speaker 4: you know, my boss, who was a gunny at East seven,
Speaker 4: and he would I don't know what he was doing
Speaker 4: with it, but uh.
Speaker 1: Them back across the desk to Yeah, they.
Speaker 4: Would disappear and the next day I and I'd fill
Speaker 4: out another one. So apparently what he had done with
Speaker 4: them is he was taking them and passing them on
Speaker 4: to the kind of our next boss. And the State
Speaker 4: Department chain of command was the regional security officer at
Speaker 4: the embassy, And so I had been there for a
Speaker 4: couple of weeks filling out these forms and the President Bush,
Speaker 4: the senior President Bush, came to visit, and yeah, we
Speaker 4: had the opportunity all the Marines out there to meet him,
Speaker 4: and he's shaking our hands and we're getting our picture taken,
Speaker 4: and he's getting ready to go into like a press conference,
Speaker 4: and he when I shake his hand and says, you know, hey,
Speaker 4: sorted daily, sir, He's like, daily, are you the one
Speaker 4: who keeps trying to go to Iraq? Knock it off?
Speaker 4: You're not going. So I'm sure you know somebody had
Speaker 4: put it in his ear, but it was I was like, well,
Speaker 4: I guess, you know, I guess I'll give.
Speaker 5: Up out of curiosity. Well, two questions.
Speaker 6: One, anytime somebody met you and didn't see how your
Speaker 6: name was spelled.
Speaker 5: Did they ask you if you're related to Dan daey.
Speaker 4: Oh all the time, even regardless of how it's spelled. Yeah.
Speaker 4: That was like boot camp was a kind of a
Speaker 4: horrible thing because I was just always, you know, they
Speaker 4: come up, hey, Dan Daily, come up here and go
Speaker 4: charge the machine gun nests or whatever.
Speaker 1: You got to share this. You got to share this
Speaker 1: piece of Marine Corps war.
Speaker 6: Your name is spelled like his. I'm sorry about that.
Speaker 6: I for some reason in my mind it was spelled differently.
Speaker 2: You got to it is. Yeah, his is U d
Speaker 2: A L y oh, right, it is? This is a
Speaker 2: different Yeah. Is he a Medal of Honor recipient?
Speaker 6: Do you I I don't recall my I'm I'm I'm embarrassed,
Speaker 6: but I don't remember my Marine yeah war.
Speaker 4: So yeah, Dan Daily was actually one of two two
Speaker 4: Medal of Honor recipients, So he was uh got the
Speaker 4: first one in uh China. They're in the Boxer Rocks
Speaker 4: Boxer Rebellion. Yeah, I like nineteen oh five holes. Apparently
Speaker 4: just just they put him out on a post and
Speaker 4: he just stacked bodies, I mean to the to the
Speaker 4: to the point where he literally had like the made
Speaker 4: of wall out of the out of the Chinese that
Speaker 4: he was they were attacking. And then the second one,
Speaker 4: the second was actually down in South America in the
Speaker 4: Banana Wars. Yeah, Nicaragua or Haiti.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean according to Wikipedia, but yeah, take that out.
Speaker 4: You're right. He was I think a couple of machine
Speaker 4: guns had been lost in a river and he went
Speaker 4: back like under fire and dove. They're like fifty cows
Speaker 4: and I went and swam them up. But he was
Speaker 4: kind of more famous for during World War One in
Speaker 4: bellow Wood in France. He uh, the Marines were kind
Speaker 4: of stuck, you know, behind a hedgerow, and the Germans,
Speaker 4: who was just kind of laying waste to him, got
Speaker 4: a big open field they have to cross. And his
Speaker 4: famous quote was, you know, he stood up with his pistol,
Speaker 4: started charging. I think he was the first harden at
Speaker 4: the time, and said, come on, your sons of bitches,
Speaker 4: you want to live forever. So that's of course everybody
Speaker 4: jumped up went after him, and that's, uh, that's kind
Speaker 4: of the day.
Speaker 1: So a lot for you to live up to.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I mean, well, isn't that also the Battle
Speaker 6: of the Woods. If I remember, right, that's where the
Speaker 6: Marines got the nickname devil Dog, right from the Germans.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and how much of that's accurate, I've I've come
Speaker 4: to understand that, you know, I mean, the Marine Corps
Speaker 4: always been very very good at uh their own publicity. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and and that's one of the things I don't I'm
Speaker 4: not sure that's one hundred percent. I'm not sure that
Speaker 4: it matters, you know, if it's a dred percent, right,
Speaker 4: but uh, yeah, the story was that the Germans, the
Speaker 4: German Army had a awarded uh the the term two
Speaker 4: for London to a unit the hardest fighting unit every
Speaker 4: year within the German Army, and after meeting the Marines,
Speaker 4: they decided that they would have bestowed that name on
Speaker 4: on the Marine Corps for that year. So that uh
Speaker 4: and then we took that name and earned or not
Speaker 4: or you know, made up or not and ran with it.
Speaker 6: And then my second question was you were you were
Speaker 6: not in a combat position when the First Golf War
Speaker 6: kicked off.
Speaker 5: Did you feel crushed when it first launched?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Yeah, that was uh, you know, I mean it's
Speaker 4: kind of indescribable, right you joined, you know, especially, I
Speaker 4: mean I had filled my head with you know, growing
Speaker 4: up at the time, I did like you know, Rambo
Speaker 4: and Chuck Morris, Michigan Action and just everything was you know,
Speaker 4: these these combat movies and then you know books, you know,
Speaker 4: I was devouring the longer the alert books and you
Speaker 4: know Force freaknd Diary and just so you know, everything
Speaker 4: that I had done was to prepare for combat, you know,
Speaker 4: and and then to have it happen, and you know
Speaker 4: you're setting it out, and especially setting it out you
Speaker 4: know beside the pool and Buenos Aires, you know, at
Speaker 4: the Marine housis right. Uh, you know, if you had
Speaker 4: to send it out, it was a pretty good place
Speaker 4: to be. But it's still it really hurt me. And
Speaker 4: then when I got back to the States and back
Speaker 4: to an infantry unit, the fact that there were you know,
Speaker 4: young guys you know, run around with the stack of metals, uh,
Speaker 4: you know, ribbons from a like man, you know. You see,
Speaker 4: I definitely felt that I had I had missed, you know,
Speaker 4: my calling, you know, and it didn't seem that there
Speaker 4: was you know, anything else kind of bruin on the horizon.
Speaker 4: So it was really at that point it's like the
Speaker 4: only thing that I can do is keep kind of
Speaker 4: moving up to units that will, uh offer me a
Speaker 4: better opportunity.
Speaker 1: So that was why you went to force recon.
Speaker 4: That was definitely a part of it. But I really
Speaker 4: enjoyed being in a sniper platoon. I really loved the work,
Speaker 4: you know, the all the discipline, the longering, shooting, everything
Speaker 4: that goes into that. But I had always you know,
Speaker 4: recognized that Force Recon was, you know, the kind of
Speaker 4: the tip of the spear of what the Marine Corps
Speaker 4: had in my eyes at least. And the problem that
Speaker 4: I had was that I really was not a great swimmer.
Speaker 4: And I mean I could swim, you know, well enough
Speaker 4: to get in the Marine Corps and well enough for
Speaker 4: most things. But Force ricon it requires a pretty high
Speaker 4: level of swimming ability. And so I had tried out
Speaker 4: once and didn't make it. And it's it's tough, you know,
Speaker 4: it's a tough thing to learn how to swim, you know,
Speaker 4: when you don't, you know, there's the Rene Corps doesn't
Speaker 4: give you a lot of access surprisingly to uh. Especially
Speaker 4: I was stationed at this point at twenty nine palms
Speaker 4: to the middle of the desert. You know, they did
Speaker 4: have a swimming pool, so I started, you know, hitting
Speaker 4: that up and working on that. But then I had
Speaker 4: the opportunity to try out again and made it.
Speaker 6: Can you real quick tell us the difference between Battalion
Speaker 6: reconn enforced RACON both in their mission and capabilities and
Speaker 6: things like that.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, So training, at least initial training is the same.
Speaker 4: And throughout you know, uh, a marine's career, quite often
Speaker 4: they would start out in battalion recon, you know, move
Speaker 4: over the force, you know, maybe be an assistant team leader,
Speaker 4: and then go back to battalion and be a team leader.
Speaker 4: You know. So some people would kind of have these
Speaker 4: careers where they bounce back and forth among units. I didn't.
Speaker 4: I came a little bit later. I was a sergeant
Speaker 4: when I got to Force. But the battalion recon is
Speaker 4: the asset of a battalian level commander, so it's there.
Speaker 4: He's there to answer that commander's information requirements generally speaking,
Speaker 4: you know, within five to ten miles of their kind
Speaker 4: of area of interest. Force recon, on the other hand,
Speaker 4: works for the force commander, so it's you know, whoever
Speaker 4: the kind of the big big wig is. You know,
Speaker 4: when we got into Afghanistan, it wound up being Maddis,
Speaker 4: So he was the task force commander, so we were
Speaker 4: tasked with answering his requirements. So because of that, you're
Speaker 4: more likely to have like a freefall capability in it.
Speaker 4: It's not exclusive to to Force Frican, but it's more
Speaker 4: likely to have a or advanced freefall capability. And Force
Speaker 4: Ricon also had the Direct Action mission at the time,
Speaker 4: and I was there as at IHR are an expremists
Speaker 4: hostage rescue. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Now, Force was by all majors a special operations unit,
Speaker 6: but was not fortunate enough because of the Marine Corps.
Speaker 6: Can you tell us about that why they weren't included
Speaker 6: in JASACK or you sack or anything like that.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So the whole story obviously goes back to the
Speaker 4: founding of SOCOM and after the failed attempt to rescue
Speaker 4: the Iranian, the Americans and the Iranian hostages. So in
Speaker 4: nineteen eighty seven, you know, based on kind of that
Speaker 4: all of the failures that happened there, the military was told, hey,
Speaker 4: you need to create a special operations entity that oversees
Speaker 4: all special operations and coordinates them. The SF was like
Speaker 4: Roger that you know, they jumped over the Rangers, the Seals,
Speaker 4: Air Force Special Operation his PGA's Pair Rescue and the
Speaker 4: Marine Corps was invited, but the commandant at the time
Speaker 4: said no, he had had a different vision for the
Speaker 4: Marine Corps and that was I mean, it was a
Speaker 4: great vision. But the Marine Corps formed at that point
Speaker 4: the Marine Expeditionary Unit. So at any any point in time,
Speaker 4: there are generally two Marine Expeditionary units that are on
Speaker 4: probably three Navy ships, so there's three or four thousand sailors,
Speaker 4: three or four thousand marines out at sea and there.
Speaker 4: That's kind of when we came up with the America's
Speaker 4: nine to one to one, you know, a little nickname
Speaker 4: for ourselves. So because of that, the fors Riekan assets
Speaker 4: were held to be a part of of that, and
Speaker 4: so and then we were I was just joining the
Speaker 4: Marine Corps at that time, and you know it would
Speaker 4: you know later when I got the force. Like I said,
Speaker 4: it was, it was not uncommon, you know, an uncommon
Speaker 4: topic to have, you know, when you're sitting in the
Speaker 4: ground drink and beer to bitch and moan about you know,
Speaker 4: us not not having access to the missions, the money.
Speaker 5: You know, Yeah, sorry, I said, you suck. I met
Speaker 5: so combat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, tell us then about what Force was like in
Speaker 2: those days in the nineteen nineties, what you guys were
Speaker 2: up to kind of the training and deployment schedule.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was, uh, I mean that was in my opinion,
Speaker 4: there was a heyday of it was it was they
Speaker 4: started for first Force f Reecon, which I was a
Speaker 4: part of decision in Camp Pendleton, California, had been done
Speaker 4: away with after Vietnam and they didn't stand back up
Speaker 4: until nineteen eighty seven, and they stood back up with
Speaker 4: the this direct action mission. And when they they started that,
Speaker 4: the that was really a wild like kind of wild
Speaker 4: wild West. You know. They were you know, we were
Speaker 4: bringing in l A p D Squat, who was kind
Speaker 4: of you know, new and l A p D Swat
Speaker 4: was bringing an FBI h r T. A lot of
Speaker 4: a lot of other people from a lot of places
Speaker 4: were coming and and the level of training was was
Speaker 4: incredibly high. But it was also, like we were talking
Speaker 4: about a little bit before we came on camera, like
Speaker 4: a lot of point shooting, a lot of uh, some
Speaker 4: trick trick shooting was was kind of the order of
Speaker 4: the day, and some in some places and and you
Speaker 4: can you could be really really good at that, uh,
Speaker 4: you know, at short range and as long as you
Speaker 4: are practicing every single day, you know, like we were
Speaker 4: the early days, there was you know, they were bringing
Speaker 4: back from from Vietnam. They'd actually developed the OEG uh,
Speaker 4: the occluded eye gun sight. We were throw of those
Speaker 4: on our M sixteens and and MP fives, which requires
Speaker 4: you to shoot with both eyes open all right, because
Speaker 4: it's like a clear or not not a clear test
Speaker 4: tube essentially with a red dot in it so you
Speaker 4: can't see through it. You know, you had to keep
Speaker 4: both eyes open, which is yeah, which is good. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's it's helpful obviously to shoot with both eyes open,
Speaker 4: But it was it was based on this idea, it's
Speaker 4: called the binion aiming concept, right, that if you keep
Speaker 4: both eyes open and shoot that way long enough, it
Speaker 4: becomes natural. So there was a lot of you know,
Speaker 4: testing and experimentation going on. So it was it was
Speaker 4: a really cool time to be there. By the time
Speaker 4: I rolled in, I think things had settled down a
Speaker 4: little bit and in my opinion anyway, first force recon
Speaker 4: was was recognized certainly in the Marine Corps as the
Speaker 4: pinnacle of of what marine reconnaissance could be. So I
Speaker 4: had arrived with the kind of pedigree of having spent
Speaker 4: time in a sniper platoon, you know, been you know,
Speaker 4: a sniper, been to the scout Sniper Advanced course at
Speaker 4: the Marine Corps just puts on once a year. And
Speaker 4: I had also had the opportunity to go to Ranger
Speaker 4: School and jump school, so which was which kind of
Speaker 4: unusual at that time, and it was unusual that anybody
Speaker 4: outside of Porto Rican would have gotten to go to
Speaker 4: Ranger school if quotas were available. So when I checked
Speaker 4: in to First Force in ninety two, I got, uh,
Speaker 4: you know, one of the one of the Marines was
Speaker 4: asking me, you know, asking me who I was, and
Speaker 4: this and that, and you know it was forgot. I
Speaker 4: couldn't remember my name, but he was like, hey, you know,
Speaker 4: he was telling his platoons argat he was like, hey,
Speaker 4: we should grab that guy the ranger. So I became
Speaker 4: ranger daily after that. And there's a name that's stuck
Speaker 4: with me now for thirty some years. And you know,
Speaker 4: people always you know, really curious were you in the
Speaker 4: Rangers or you know, before you joined the Rink Corps,
Speaker 4: or were you a park ranger or whatever. But no,
Speaker 4: it's just somebody couldn't remember my name.
Speaker 2: It's like when when Marines attend rangers school, they all
Speaker 2: get called gunny.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so.
Speaker 2: As times go, time goes on, I mean, as I
Speaker 2: understand it and jump in if I'm misunderstanding. Because the
Speaker 2: Force recon and recon guys were not part of special
Speaker 2: operations per se. Technically at that time, those guys had
Speaker 2: to like cycle back into infantry units conventional units, and
Speaker 2: hopefully come back again at a higher rank. But it
Speaker 2: sounds like you got to stay there pretty much through
Speaker 2: the entire time, up until Debt one came around.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I was I was lucky. There's a couple of
Speaker 4: things that happened initially the the MOS recon Marines three
Speaker 4: twenty one. That was it was not a primary MOS,
Speaker 4: so you were when you became a in the Marine Corps.
Speaker 4: If you're an infantry MS O three, doesn't matter what
Speaker 4: you are within there. You're a grunt, you're a machine gunner, mortarman,
Speaker 4: uh or a recon marine. When you become a staff
Speaker 4: sergeant Niece six, you become an O three sixty nine,
Speaker 4: which is an infantry unit leader. And at that point
Speaker 4: you can be you could be moved anywhere. And so
Speaker 4: quite often that would happen to recon marines when they
Speaker 4: became promoted to a staff sargeant, they would get moved
Speaker 4: out to the infantry and they would do some time
Speaker 4: there and come back. I was fortunate. I mean, I
Speaker 4: think there was you know, it was known that if
Speaker 4: you were you know, somebody that really put out, was
Speaker 4: good at your job, then there were way used to
Speaker 4: find it, find a way for you to stay. And
Speaker 4: and often as long as you kept deploying, you know,
Speaker 4: you were staying active in a in a platoon, then
Speaker 4: you were you were kind of safe. So at that
Speaker 4: time there were a lot of guys who were who
Speaker 4: were staying for a good while. And I was I
Speaker 4: was able to stay, uh for about ten years there
Speaker 4: and and you know, work my way up from pointmand
Speaker 4: to platoon sergeant and would have would have stayed I think,
Speaker 4: yeah longer if if I could have tell us.
Speaker 2: Where you were on nine to eleven and sort of
Speaker 2: that run up to uh, you know for Afghanistan.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so that was always uh kind of makes an
Speaker 4: interesting story on nine to eleven, you know, and then
Speaker 4: in the moments before the uh, the first plane hit
Speaker 4: the first tower. I was sitting in a pub in Darwin, Australia,
Speaker 4: you know, with with my team leaders dranking beer. So
Speaker 4: I was, uh, it was a platoon sergeant for a
Speaker 4: force free conplatoon and we had just left on deployment
Speaker 4: on the ships with the Marine Expeditionary Unit that I was.
Speaker 4: I was talking about. Our first stop had been Darwin
Speaker 4: and we spent a couple of days there training with
Speaker 4: the Australians, some snipers, so we had had a range,
Speaker 4: we're out shooting. We finally wrapped up, came back, cleaned up,
Speaker 4: and uh had our first night out on the town.
Speaker 4: And so the Australia if you haven't been, and I
Speaker 4: haven't been back in a while, but uh, you know
Speaker 4: there's the there's the woman. The man ratio is out
Speaker 4: of kilter, right, so there's all of the young guys
Speaker 4: were like super excited because there's there's tons of tons
Speaker 4: of ladies running around. I had, uh, you know, I
Speaker 4: was was married. I had my team leaders were all married,
Speaker 4: and we're like, hey, let's just go find someplace quiet,
Speaker 4: get some beers. So we find the an Irish pub.
Speaker 4: Of course there's one everywhere kiddy O'Shea's Irish pubs. So
Speaker 4: we're kind of tucked in the corner drinking beer and yeah,
Speaker 4: there's playing soccer on the big screen above the bar,
Speaker 4: and then it switches to the to the first tower,
Speaker 4: and yeah, within minutes the Marines, who were designated as
Speaker 4: the shore patrol to try to keep people out of trouble,
Speaker 4: come running into the bar, yelling get back to the boats,
Speaker 4: back to the boats. And then they were just down
Speaker 4: the street yelling in every bar. So we eventually we
Speaker 4: finished our beer and then kind of finished all the
Speaker 4: beer they would let us buy, and then eventually made
Speaker 4: our way back to the boat. And when we woke
Speaker 4: up the next morning, they had somehow managed to wrangle
Speaker 4: you know, everybody, and we were on to see.
Speaker 2: And so what was you know, your unit's mission at
Speaker 2: that point, I mean, were you kind of just like
Speaker 2: out at sea waiting for further orders what happened?
Speaker 4: We had already had a prior commitment to go into
Speaker 4: East Moor, which just kind of off the coast, a
Speaker 4: little tiny country, and they had just been on the
Speaker 4: back end of a pretty nasty civil war and they
Speaker 4: were had won their independence and they were going. I
Speaker 4: think it was. I think it was on the It
Speaker 4: was about this time. It's just before it was maybe
Speaker 4: the tenth or eleventh, or the tenth, twelfth or the thirteenth.
Speaker 4: They were going to be signing their constitution and so
Speaker 4: it's a big event. The Navy commodore and the R commander,
Speaker 4: the MEW commander had to attend this thing. So there
Speaker 4: was obviously security concerns. So we wound up providing a
Speaker 4: security detail for our commander and the Seals provided one
Speaker 4: for the commodore. So we were kind of run around
Speaker 4: east More with those guys for the day, and then
Speaker 4: from there we kind of headed straight for the closest
Speaker 4: coast to Afghanistan, which was Pakistan. Went by October we
Speaker 4: were had established some FARPs and and uh. It's got
Speaker 4: a prestaging basis in aunt ja Alabad and and Uh
Speaker 4: and then by November we were in Afghanistan. Cool.
Speaker 2: So after so many years of waiting, finally got to
Speaker 2: answer the call that you had heard the balloon went up.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, and I still you know, you know, we
Speaker 4: got there. We were I got our feet unders for
Speaker 4: a couple of days and we're tasked with doing a
Speaker 4: vehicle reconnaissance to find a route from from where we were,
Speaker 4: which was called fob Rhino got out in the out
Speaker 4: in the middle of nowhere up to Kanahar, and so
Speaker 4: me and my boys went out, uh, you know, left
Speaker 4: at night, spent two nights about one hundred miles of
Speaker 4: kind of cross compartment going through the desert finding a route,
Speaker 4: and uh eventually brought up a larger unit to uh
Speaker 4: just kind of established an essentially big patrol base and
Speaker 4: start trying to stir some shut up. We spent you know,
Speaker 4: we were going out every night looking for you know,
Speaker 4: at the time, really bad satellite images of you know,
Speaker 4: expected you know, Taliban physicians, and we'd get there and
Speaker 4: it'd be, you know, a bunch of rocks and a
Speaker 4: couple of trees, and we they thought they were vehicles.
Speaker 4: And it's the you know, things have absolutely improved over
Speaker 4: the last twenty years. But we got I got pulled
Speaker 4: in on the December seventh and by the battalion commander
Speaker 4: that we were we were out with, and he was like, Hey,
Speaker 4: I need you guys to go out and UH interdict
Speaker 4: traffic coming between Kandahar and to the to the west
Speaker 4: towards Flash Gagar, So we you know, kind of came
Speaker 4: up with a plan. We weren't going to uh at
Speaker 4: the time, everybody was declared hostile, so I mean, and
Speaker 4: you know, we were within our rights to just you know,
Speaker 4: set up machine guns and blast and a guard that
Speaker 4: went down the road. You know, I wasn't I wasn't
Speaker 4: cool with that. You know, I could imagine, you know,
Speaker 4: I didn't want my guys to approaching the vehicle that
Speaker 4: we shot up and finding a bunch of you know,
Speaker 4: a family that was trying to get out or whatever.
Speaker 4: So you know, they kind of if Ganny's had been
Speaker 4: through enough of that with the Taliban, so we you know,
Speaker 4: I put it to the team leaders. They came up
Speaker 4: with a plan to execute a essentially what was close
Speaker 4: to a mission that we trained for quite a bit,
Speaker 4: a vehicle takedown. You know, when you have a vehicle
Speaker 4: that you've got to stop and then you've got to
Speaker 4: determine whether the bad guys or not are in it,
Speaker 4: and then uh, you know, shoot them as they are
Speaker 4: right or or snatch them up. And uh, that's that's
Speaker 4: what we wound up kind of setting up. We strung
Speaker 4: constantina wire across the road. Kind of positioned ourselves off.
Speaker 4: I put one of my other vehicles on the base
Speaker 4: of fires and k things went to shed and uh,
Speaker 4: I was talking with air and pretty soon they let
Speaker 4: us know that there was a small convoy that was
Speaker 4: headed our way out of Kanadahr. And at that point,
Speaker 4: you know, setting there and this is December, Afghanistan is
Speaker 4: fucking freezing cold. We're kind of sitting there shivering, you know.
Speaker 4: And I told everybody, I'm like, hey, man, I think
Speaker 4: I'm like an anti you know, bullet magnet. Right. I've
Speaker 4: I've been uh in the Marine Corps at this point
Speaker 4: for fourteen years, and I've I barely heard, you know,
Speaker 4: a couple of shots fired in anger and and you know,
Speaker 4: I haven't returned fire on any of them. So I
Speaker 4: don't uh, I don't know that's going to happen tonight.
Speaker 4: So I was, you know, kind of talking to I
Speaker 4: didn't want guys to uh yeah, yeah, I wanted to
Speaker 4: one kind of keep it light, you know, because we
Speaker 4: were either gonna do some shit or we weren't right.
Speaker 4: And you don't want uh, you know, you don't want
Speaker 4: guys so hyper that they're uh, you know, jerking the
Speaker 4: trigger at anything. So you know, we talked just about, hey,
Speaker 4: you know we've trained, we've done this ship a million
Speaker 4: times and practiced, right, you know, there's nothing different than that,
Speaker 4: So let's just treat it like that. You know, we've
Speaker 4: rehearsed it not you know, there was one of the
Speaker 4: things that was kind of pounded in my head as
Speaker 4: a young guy. You don't rehearse and tell you you
Speaker 4: get it right. You rehearse and tell you can't get
Speaker 4: it wrong. So, uh, you know, and I had kind
Speaker 4: of tried to push out on my guys. So eventually
Speaker 4: the lead vehicle of this convoy, the other two vehicles
Speaker 4: which were larger like five ton trucks, had pulled off,
Speaker 4: and the lead vehicle was kind of scouting ahead and
Speaker 4: it pulled up. You know, shot past us saw the
Speaker 4: Constantino wire because we had hung kin lights on it,
Speaker 4: and it said, screw it, I'm going for it. And uh,
Speaker 4: watching a vehicle, you know, it's sixty miles an hour
Speaker 4: hit Constantino wires, pretty fucking astounding, all right, it you
Speaker 4: don't get far, and it didn't get far. It's got
Speaker 4: gets snatched snatched up. You know, as soon as that
Speaker 4: wire wrapped around the axles. It it shuts them down
Speaker 4: pretty quick. We had, you know, popped up onto the
Speaker 4: road way behind them. And as soon as we did,
Speaker 4: I could see, you know, sitting in the back of
Speaker 4: this dually or a yeah, dual cab truck. There were
Speaker 4: you know, three guys you know with ak's. The front
Speaker 4: was was stuffed full of guys. You know, it was
Speaker 4: like a clown car. The back of the bed of
Speaker 4: the truck was packed full of boxes and crates and
Speaker 4: things like that. So we didn't know what it was
Speaker 4: in them, but uh, my vehicle stops. I jump out
Speaker 4: of the vehicle commander's seat kind of rush up, and
Speaker 4: you know, my guys kind of roll in behind me
Speaker 4: and I yelled, hey, put your hands up. I don't
Speaker 4: don't quite know where that came from, uh, but uh,
Speaker 4: you know, it was giving them a chance. The funny
Speaker 4: thing is that at that at that moment, and it
Speaker 4: was the first time I'd experienced it, but I had
Speaker 4: I had read about it, you know, like Grossman and
Speaker 4: on killing the like time distortion, how time you know, changes,
Speaker 4: and how like a lot of you know, you know,
Speaker 4: once loud noises started, once shooting started, it didn't sound
Speaker 4: like shooting, right. It was just like little pops kind
Speaker 4: of the visual perceptual airing where you kind of your
Speaker 4: world kind of starts to collapse down onto the threat
Speaker 4: in front of you. And so all of these things
Speaker 4: started happening. And luckily, like I knew what were because
Speaker 4: I had, you know, like I said, we read about it.
Speaker 4: I talked to guys about it. The three guys in
Speaker 4: the bed of the truck were obviously the primary threat.
Speaker 4: The guy in the middle of the guys on either
Speaker 4: side had because it was so cold, had their ak's
Speaker 4: bundled up in blankets and their hands bundled up. And
Speaker 4: the guy in the middle, who was an old you
Speaker 4: know mood, you know he'd been it wasn't his first rodeo.
Speaker 4: You know, you could see his hands were red, you know,
Speaker 4: but he had his hands on his weapon, and uh,
Speaker 4: it was you know, it was comical how slowly he was,
Speaker 4: like he seemed to be moving trying to bring his
Speaker 4: weapon up on me. And so you know, I shoot him,
Speaker 4: you know, And you know, one of the weird things,
Speaker 4: you know, is that there's a thing called persistence shooting,
Speaker 4: where you know, if you shoot someone and what you'd
Speaker 4: expect to happen, doesn't happen, then you just keep shooting,
Speaker 4: all right, you expect the guy to fall down. He
Speaker 4: doesn't fall down, and he couldn't because he was propped
Speaker 4: up in all these crates. But uh, I shot him
Speaker 4: a number of times more than enough before I went
Speaker 4: ahead and and did you know what we had been
Speaker 4: you know, trained to do and shoot a turning into
Speaker 4: a box drill. But by this point, you know, I've
Speaker 4: got you know, my guy. Other guys are are up
Speaker 4: there with me. They're engaging. And then the constantina wire
Speaker 4: had run down the length of the vehicles, so they
Speaker 4: were having trouble opening the doors. They're trying to roll
Speaker 4: down windows and jump out the windows, and it was
Speaker 4: it turned into a kind of a comical scene. But
Speaker 4: the uh about that time, the bed of the truck
Speaker 4: burst into flames and it spread very very quickly. I
Speaker 4: mean it was it was switch which led to people
Speaker 4: that were still in the bed of the or in
Speaker 4: the cab of the truck to really try to get
Speaker 4: the hell out. So so now they're they're climbing out
Speaker 4: and we're popping them. They're falling in the constantina wire
Speaker 4: and it's just turned into a kind of a ship show.
Speaker 4: But uh, some start popping off and at the time
Speaker 4: I thought they were, you know, being fired. I didn't
Speaker 4: realize that they were cooking off that quickly. So we
Speaker 4: start bounding back and then uh, you know, RPGs rockets
Speaker 4: start like sailing, you know, filling the night sky. They're
Speaker 4: not armed, and they you know, they weren't launched. Uh
Speaker 4: they were you know, they were they were cooking off.
Speaker 4: So they're like spiraling, you know, through the air. So
Speaker 4: he got a little a little uh spicy, I guess,
Speaker 4: uh for a little bit, but uh, you know, we
Speaker 4: pulled back, you know, make sure we had uh you know,
Speaker 4: got our main weapons and equipment kind of check and
Speaker 4: and that was that was really it. We brought in
Speaker 4: fast movers on the other two vehicles that were sitting
Speaker 4: out in the desert, and really that kind of uh
Speaker 4: you know, other than the fifth group guys, they were
Speaker 4: up in the mountains. That was the first kind of
Speaker 4: engagement of Afghanistan.
Speaker 2: So as you get back to the United States after
Speaker 2: that deployment, tell us about how this bold new experiment
Speaker 2: called Detachment one comes about.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, So we started, I mean by what we didn't
Speaker 4: know is by that time, by you know, the middle
Speaker 4: of December, the Secretary of Defense had already made the
Speaker 4: decision that there needed to be more special operations. Special
Speaker 4: Operations Command was going to kind of take the lead
Speaker 4: for the war on terror. So you know, the Army
Speaker 4: was told, you know, make more green berets and you know, rangers,
Speaker 4: the Navy, more seals, Air Force, more CCT guys and pjs,
Speaker 4: and he said, hey, Marine Corps, this time, you guys
Speaker 4: are going to participate. And still the Marine Corps was like, nah, man,
Speaker 4: we're rummy, We're good. We don't don't want to do that.
Speaker 4: And it took some doing eventually, and to be honest,
Speaker 4: SOCOM wasn't too eager to have Marines on board either,
Speaker 4: from you know, everything I gathered. So there was there
Speaker 4: was actually about a year time kind of gap between
Speaker 4: the time I got back in two thousand and two
Speaker 4: and the time that one stood up, So there was
Speaker 4: there was a lot going on kind of behind the
Speaker 4: scenes that I didn't know about. But ultimately the decision
Speaker 4: was that the Marine Corps would provide a small unit.
Speaker 4: They would serve as a proof of concept for a
Speaker 4: couple of years. So they would train, deploy with a
Speaker 4: Special Operations architecture over top of them, and then be
Speaker 4: evaluated on how well they did. So when I got
Speaker 4: back from that deployment, I was told that, hey, you've
Speaker 4: really been here now too long. You've got to go somewhere.
Speaker 4: So luckily I just just went down the street to
Speaker 4: the Special Operations Training group and ran the took over
Speaker 4: the Urban Sniper of course, which was was great to
Speaker 4: get get back behind the gun seriously and got re
Speaker 4: uh you know, definitely bust the rust off on my
Speaker 4: shoot skills. So but that job only lasted for about
Speaker 4: a year because you know, I got kind of tapped
Speaker 4: on the shoulder at a meeting and Colonel Coates, who
Speaker 4: was was selected to be our boss. It was like, hey,
Speaker 4: you know, Ranger, do you uh, you know, I've got
Speaker 4: tapped for this thing? Do you want to in? And
Speaker 4: of course you know it's you know, not a hard
Speaker 4: question to answer. Hell yeah, I went in and uh,
Speaker 4: you know, he asked me to be a team leader.
Speaker 4: So they were going to be initially four teams. We
Speaker 4: were the charter was for seventy eight men that eventually
Speaker 4: grew closer to one hundred, but of that one hundred men,
Speaker 4: there was roughly a third were forced reconnaissance Marines, about
Speaker 4: a third were intel. And that's really what kind of
Speaker 4: set us apart, was the huge intel support that we had,
Speaker 4: and then the other third ran the gamut from you know,
Speaker 4: communicators and fires guys and administrative guys and mechanics and
Speaker 4: everything else that should mean to to run in a unit.
Speaker 2: So that that's small an element, I mean one, then
Speaker 2: we're talking about like thirty five forty, like a platoon
Speaker 2: sized element of operators, and then the rest of the
Speaker 2: unit is enablers.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and we were I think about thirty so, you know,
Speaker 4: and that was with our Navy corman that are you know,
Speaker 4: each each team had a corman. So initially I think
Speaker 4: I had a a seven yeah, seven man team. I had,
Speaker 4: uh me, five guys, five marines had a corman. You know,
Speaker 4: one communicator was in there, and uh, you know, I
Speaker 4: was the the your guy. I was an E seven,
Speaker 4: you know, I put on got promoted to gunny right
Speaker 4: before nine to eleven. And but the other guys, we
Speaker 4: were guys that I had kind of looked up to
Speaker 4: as being like the you know, uh, like the next
Speaker 4: senior class or whatever, you know, guys who had had
Speaker 4: a couple of years on me. And so I was
Speaker 4: and I don't know if it was anybody else felt
Speaker 4: that way, but I've you know, and I talk a
Speaker 4: lot of in the book about the idea of imposture syndrome,
Speaker 4: all right, not quite thinking that you're you deserve to
Speaker 4: be where you are, and you know, people bitch and
Speaker 4: moan about it a lot. I mean, I'm thankful every
Speaker 4: day for it. You know, I think it push pushed
Speaker 4: me to you know kind of uh, you know, always
Speaker 4: strive to be better, but to prove myself. But so
Speaker 4: I told my team very early on, like, hey, guys,
Speaker 4: we're going to do whatever mission you know, ship mission
Speaker 4: needs to be done, you know, will be the ones
Speaker 4: to do it. So, you know, particularly as we started,
Speaker 4: I mean, because I was coming from uh that role
Speaker 4: as a sniper instructor, you know, I got put in
Speaker 4: charge of all kind of sniping overseeing our sniping program,
Speaker 4: which led you know, came in handy later on. I
Speaker 4: had picked a couple of the guys that I picked
Speaker 4: had worked for me in that in that role, so
Speaker 4: we had a very robust, you know, sniper capability that
Speaker 4: wasn't as terribly common, and uh so then particularly once
Speaker 4: we started doing direct action missions. You know, everybody wants
Speaker 4: to be the you know, the guys blowing the door
Speaker 4: off and clearing the house. I was like, hey man,
Speaker 4: we'll do the you know, we'll do the RNs on
Speaker 4: the objective. We'll uh you know, which my guys would
Speaker 4: bitch and moan about sometimes, but uh, you know, be
Speaker 4: the the guys who uh you know, went in a
Speaker 4: few days before, laid in the snow or the mud
Speaker 4: or whatever, and took pictures and reported back. And that ultimately,
Speaker 4: uh kind of just led to my team, our team
Speaker 4: being the go to guys for anything that was you know,
Speaker 4: more challenging or you're kind of out of the ordinary.
Speaker 2: And at this time period, I mean, it's very interesting
Speaker 2: what you write about, you know, the whole process of
Speaker 2: standing up that one you were also involved in like
Speaker 2: some R and D and like going down to uh
Speaker 2: what you went down somewhere and we're working with with
Speaker 2: an R and D guy developing new gear and stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So I had one of the great things about
Speaker 4: First Force Freecon during that time when Colonel Coachs was
Speaker 4: the senior was that He was always pushing us to
Speaker 4: you know, go out and you know, find new stuff,
Speaker 4: all right, new gear. We were, uh, within the Marine Corps.
Speaker 4: We were the you know, the I'm pretty sure the
Speaker 4: first guys to start running a points on our uh
Speaker 4: first on our MP fives and then uh, you know
Speaker 4: when we got in force, throwing them on on in force.
Speaker 1: There was just a lot of first and a lot
Speaker 1: of it, Why can't you just use iron sights?
Speaker 2: John's what's wrong with iron sights?
Speaker 4: You could do that, and it's uh, you got you
Speaker 4: gotta be able to shoot with iron sights. But uh,
Speaker 4: you know, I'm always a big fan of anything that
Speaker 4: makes makes the job easier. The uh So, so we
Speaker 4: had a pretty we were accustomed to doing that, to
Speaker 4: going to like seeking out vendors and things like that,
Speaker 4: and and uh we had had a really bad helicopter
Speaker 4: accident a couple of years before when I was at
Speaker 4: First Force ninety nine, and uh, helicopter was a bunch
Speaker 4: of our guys were going to do a ship takedown
Speaker 4: and so they were going to fast robe onto the
Speaker 4: deck of a ship. The pilot came in and misjudged
Speaker 4: the height and caught his skid on a net the
Speaker 4: like big steel in that flipped the helo over and
Speaker 4: they sunk. So we had a bunch of our guys died,
Speaker 4: a crew chief and the helicopter died. And one of
Speaker 4: the things that came out of that was that the
Speaker 4: equipment that we were wearing was crazy heavy. Our bullet
Speaker 4: bouncers and everything were very very early generation stuff. So
Speaker 4: when that happened, I got grabbed to go and work
Speaker 4: with the Marine Corps to build a better suite of
Speaker 4: kind of amphibious, capable, more survivable gear. Yeah, and and
Speaker 4: that definitely kind of put me, you know in that
Speaker 4: world with so Natic laboratories is the the Army Research
Speaker 4: Center where they make m R. E's and boots and
Speaker 4: everything in between. Uh, I got you know to go
Speaker 4: up there and got to make a lot of contacts
Speaker 4: and friends. So they came in handy, you know when
Speaker 4: we came time to start kitting ourselves out for because
Speaker 4: even in ninety nine, when we started building that equipment suite,
Speaker 4: it was you know, green green camouflage, you know, that
Speaker 4: was that's what everything was. We still assumed that we're
Speaker 4: going to be in the jungle somewhere, you know, even
Speaker 4: though we'd had you know, the previous war had been
Speaker 4: as short as it was in the desert. But so
Speaker 4: that was you know, you know, making you know, building
Speaker 4: out a flat earth or tan you know, sweety gear
Speaker 4: and taking a look at it. After some time we
Speaker 4: had in the inn and we developed a cutaway process
Speaker 4: for the for body armor that that hadn't existed before that,
Speaker 4: you know, the use of spare their bottles and kind
Speaker 4: of a litany of you know, one of the marines
Speaker 4: that in the old days we used to back when
Speaker 4: telephones had cords on them, we would uh going off
Speaker 4: and steal their phone cords and use the phone card
Speaker 4: to make a lanyard for our pistol. Right, a couple
Speaker 4: of fisient leaders, you know the flexcuff with little Tonys
Speaker 4: flex guft and that was that was how you secured
Speaker 4: your because if you're fast roping, you know, onto the
Speaker 4: deck of a ship, your pistol comes out. You know,
Speaker 4: it could be disastrous. So you know, one of the
Speaker 4: marines was very fortunate that he was able to break
Speaker 4: that the telephone cord or the connection on the telephone cord.
Speaker 4: So you know, we got people to make breakaway lanyards
Speaker 4: and the kind of the list went on of innovations
Speaker 4: that came out of that.
Speaker 2: And so tell us then about you know, the first
Speaker 2: and really only deployment that Detachment one did to Iraq.
Speaker 2: Where did you guys deploy to and sort of what
Speaker 2: was like this the idea of what this deployment would
Speaker 2: be versus what it was when you know, you guys
Speaker 2: land on the ground and things start to change.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we stood up in I should know the date,
Speaker 4: March two thousand and three, and for like you said,
Speaker 4: we had no equipment and things for a while. But
Speaker 4: as we started getting outfitted and started prepping, we really
Speaker 4: believed and I don't know if we just it was
Speaker 4: our own what we wanted to believe, but thought that
Speaker 4: we were going to going to Afghanistan, and it kind
Speaker 4: of assumed, I think, because we were you know, reconnaissance
Speaker 4: was you know, one of our missions, that that's what
Speaker 4: we would do. So we started doing a lot of
Speaker 4: preparation for that, you know, a lot pretty heavily in sniping,
Speaker 4: heavily in deep ground reconnaissance, vehicle mounted reconnaissance. And about
Speaker 4: halfway through the time that we had to train, the
Speaker 4: decision was finally made that we would be going to
Speaker 4: Iraq much more kinetically focused deployment. We were going to
Speaker 4: serve essentially as a SEAL or NSW task in it,
Speaker 4: so we would be a task in it underneath a
Speaker 4: Naval Special Warfare Task Group that's who we would report to.
Speaker 4: So we get on the grounds in early two thousand
Speaker 4: and four and are assigned to hang out kind of
Speaker 4: in an area around Baghdad. So we were near one
Speaker 4: of Saddam's kind of near the by app the compound,
Speaker 4: the airport, and near in Baghdad. That's where we lived,
Speaker 4: and we're you know, we got on the ground to
Speaker 4: find out. Normally, you know, when you do a turnover,
Speaker 4: you know, you get in country, you do a turnover
Speaker 4: with another unit, right REPTOA do a relief in place,
Speaker 4: and they're like, hey, here's all of the information that
Speaker 4: we have. Here's all the bad guys that we haven't
Speaker 4: gone after. So we didn't have that. There had not
Speaker 4: been a seal a platoon in place there, so we
Speaker 4: were really kind of put in a position where we
Speaker 4: had to make our own luck. Right we had and
Speaker 4: we we weren't. You know, it's a weird situation. We
Speaker 4: and the seals wound up being great. The commander that
Speaker 4: we worked for was very supportive and and you know,
Speaker 4: a straight shooter, but we also didn't quite know who
Speaker 4: you could trust, you know, you know, who is had
Speaker 4: your best interest at Harton, who was hoping that you
Speaker 4: wouldn't be successful. Yeah, So so we had you know,
Speaker 4: one of our and it's really where those big crew
Speaker 4: of Intel guys came to play. A Couple of things
Speaker 4: happened that seemed to be uh, you know, unfortunate initially,
Speaker 4: but we wound up being the best thing that could
Speaker 4: have happened. So the seal commander that was owned us
Speaker 4: was like like, hey, you guys have got like thirty
Speaker 4: Intel dudes. You know I don't have that many, you know,
Speaker 4: in my whole task in it. So he was as
Speaker 4: was his right. He was like, Hey, I'm going to
Speaker 4: take some of these guys and send them over to
Speaker 4: to work with one of my seal platoons over here.
Speaker 4: And these guys over here, of course we're pissed because
Speaker 4: with my team I had I had my own human guy,
Speaker 4: my own second guy, my own geo spatial guy. So
Speaker 4: that changed the way that we operated. But what we
Speaker 4: quickly came to realize was that now we had our
Speaker 4: eyes and ears, you know, attached to everybody all over
Speaker 4: the country. So it wasn't long before you know, these
Speaker 4: guys are just talking and you know realize that, hey,
Speaker 4: we've got probably a better kind of overall picture of
Speaker 4: intel of what's going on in the country than anybody does.
Speaker 4: And one of our Intel analysts was bored, you know,
Speaker 4: just kind of digging through Intel reports and found a
Speaker 4: report that about Iraqi interpreter who was working for the
Speaker 4: US that had been executed, and he started here, He's
Speaker 4: thought he had read something else. So we started digging
Speaker 4: back through these Intel reports and realized that over the
Speaker 4: span of the past six months there had been like
Speaker 4: twenty of these interpreters who had been killed. And being
Speaker 4: a you know, an Intel guy, he started, you know,
Speaker 4: trying to connect dots, and you know, it's like stringing
Speaker 4: the yarn across the wall or whatever with pictures and things.
Speaker 4: I don't know how he did it, but ultimately he
Speaker 4: came up and was was like, hey, here's this this
Speaker 4: one interpreter that's like connected, you know, to all of
Speaker 4: these dead interpreters. So, uh, it was the interpreter was
Speaker 4: a woman. You know, the only way to that we
Speaker 4: knew to get her was to go to the place
Speaker 4: where she was working, you know, during the day, which
Speaker 4: which meant, uh, you know, low profile, you know, being
Speaker 4: vehicles kind of go going in low profile. So that's
Speaker 4: when all of the you know, the taking, the taking
Speaker 4: the missions nobody else wanted to kind of paid off. So,
Speaker 4: you know, the all of us team leaders gather around
Speaker 4: and of course it's the first mission that we're doing,
Speaker 4: so everybody wants it, and uh, the decision was like, hey, Daily,
Speaker 4: you know you're the you're the guy for this one
Speaker 4: because you've you've done all, You've done all the the
Speaker 4: odd you know, one off type of things. So I
Speaker 4: was I had because there was a female we were
Speaker 4: going after. I had to take a female to searcher
Speaker 4: and the only female we had available to us was
Speaker 4: a Polish brom operator. She was the only female operator
Speaker 4: that they had, and she was, uh phenomenal or she
Speaker 4: was you know, would put you know, any you know,
Speaker 4: I always think of her when people talk about what
Speaker 4: women are capable of. Right, she had Uh it was
Speaker 4: was I think their most you know, lethal sniper that
Speaker 4: they had. She was incredibly talented, but so she came
Speaker 4: with me another marine and we had to take a
Speaker 4: seal kind of a human guy with us, and you know,
Speaker 4: one of our intel guys, Sibby's in a vehicle driving
Speaker 4: around bag dead, and it just so happened that we
Speaker 4: kept like we were like five minutes behind her, you know,
Speaker 4: everywhere we stopped or we missed her by like a
Speaker 4: day or two. And so we finally get to a
Speaker 4: place where where she had most recently been and were
Speaker 4: able to get her to come in, you know, under
Speaker 4: the like the guys and picking up a paycheck or whatever,
Speaker 4: and grabbed her and grabbed the man that was driving her,
Speaker 4: and then we get her back. And at this point,
Speaker 4: this is before the Abu Gray Grave thing, just just
Speaker 4: like weeks before, but we were able to have our own,
Speaker 4: uh interrogation facility and brought her in and once they
Speaker 4: started talking to her, pretty quickly realized that she was
Speaker 4: she was the one. She was responsible for all these deaths,
Speaker 4: but she was unwittingly responsible. She had uh, a hot
Speaker 4: looking Iraqi dude had you know, approached her and you know,
Speaker 4: they hit it off, and she was she was not
Speaker 4: deserving of a hot looking Iraqi. Dude, she was an
Speaker 4: elderly not elderly, but an older uh you know, an
Speaker 4: older lady. Uh so should have been some red flags,
Speaker 4: but uh you know, and he, however, got her to
Speaker 4: hand over uh you know, phone lists and information for
Speaker 4: other contracted uh interpreters. So when she found out, she
Speaker 4: was you know, there's a saying that, hell hath no
Speaker 4: fury like a woman scorn she was. She was fucking pissed,
Speaker 4: uh like like a really fucking pissed. So she was like, hey,
Speaker 4: here's his address, here's his friend's address, there's this other guy.
Speaker 4: And so that night, you know, we went out, uh
Speaker 4: hit hit his house, his place of business, and his
Speaker 4: place of business. The business that he was in was
Speaker 4: apparently making bombs because it was just a bomb making factory.
Speaker 4: And then from there, you know, you grab computers, you
Speaker 4: grab explosives, you grab paperwork, and then assess there's leading
Speaker 4: mission to mission. And after that we were like, you know,
Speaker 4: just every night we were out about John out.
Speaker 6: Of curiosity was one of the reasons where you guys
Speaker 6: kind of had to pick you know, whatever mission you
Speaker 6: get is because because you were late to the party
Speaker 6: when it came to so calm and that people like
Speaker 6: I think some people think you guys are interchangeable with seals, right,
Speaker 6: and if Seals already had this mission, why are we going.
Speaker 5: To give it to this new group of guys.
Speaker 6: I'm not saying you guys are interchangeable with Seals. I'm
Speaker 6: just saying that sometimes I think that's the.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't well, I think like I was willing
Speaker 4: to take any mission that uh, you know, in training
Speaker 4: because I wanted to be the guy that they relied on,
Speaker 4: you know, when it wasn't in this case. You know,
Speaker 4: I think we were we just we wanted to prove ourselves,
Speaker 4: you know, we were so we were going to take
Speaker 4: anything that they came down, and we really we knew
Speaker 4: that it was going to have to you know, Intel
Speaker 4: was going to have to drive OPS and then ops Intel,
Speaker 4: so we were going to have to make our own luck,
Speaker 4: build our own target packages. And really once we got that,
Speaker 4: that got the first one knocked out. It was we were,
Speaker 4: you know, as busy as as we could be. We
Speaker 4: were turning uh uh stuff away, and then I think
Speaker 4: we pretty quickly established a reputation as being a unit
Speaker 4: that would you do a good job, not step on
Speaker 4: other people's toes. There was a lot of especially at
Speaker 4: that time kind of it was a little wild West
Speaker 4: in in Baghdad. At that point, there were you know,
Speaker 4: we started, you know, working with Oda's that had you know,
Speaker 4: tons of of you know, sources and tons of targets,
Speaker 4: but you know, because of the way they were split up,
Speaker 4: didn't have the ass to action them, right, so you know,
Speaker 4: they you know, they would say, hey, we've got to
Speaker 4: hit this guy's house, but it's he's one of our sources,
Speaker 4: so you know, please don't blow his door off, you know,
Speaker 4: or please don't. And so we're like, hey, man, yeah
Speaker 4: we can, you know, don't fuck his house up too bad.
Speaker 4: Yeah we can. Uh, we can do that. And so
Speaker 4: we pretty quickly got a reputation of being somebody that
Speaker 4: other people wanted to work with. And then it, like
Speaker 4: I said, it just became the point where we were
Speaker 4: incredibly busy.
Speaker 6: But I don't know, I'm sorry, I was just gonna
Speaker 6: ask who were you guys using us, like your blocking
Speaker 6: positions and and security and stuff like that.
Speaker 5: Was it other marines or were there like army units
Speaker 5: that you guys should.
Speaker 4: Use Most of the time, it was it was the
Speaker 4: other sixty guys in the in the unit. So we
Speaker 4: had one of the things that one of the things
Speaker 4: that absolutely made the unit as special as it was
Speaker 4: was that Colonel Coates's philosophy was that you know, everybody,
Speaker 4: everybody fights, so we would you know, run you know,
Speaker 4: he would have us put on shooting packages for the
Speaker 4: all the support guys, you know, all the enablers, all
Speaker 4: the intel dudes were everybody was kidded out the same, right,
Speaker 4: So there was there were times when things got got
Speaker 4: a little bit icy. You aren't quite sure about the
Speaker 4: reservists that that had been attached to us as an
Speaker 4: armor who was man in the fifty count but h
Speaker 4: it h. We would always keep one of our teams
Speaker 4: uh kind of in reserve and with with the vehicles.
Speaker 4: So usually we'd have like one operator with with each
Speaker 4: vehicle to kind of just control the fight in and
Speaker 4: around that that vehicle. But there were occasions where we
Speaker 4: were able to bring us army units or even some
Speaker 4: Iraqis once let's say got up and running, or other
Speaker 4: marine units. The push, it was kind of a big
Speaker 4: push to keep us away from working with other marines
Speaker 4: because it was kind of the proof of concept was
Speaker 4: supposed to determine if we could work outside of the
Speaker 4: Marine Corps. That was when Fallujah kicked off, and you
Speaker 4: know about that time, you know, we were you know
Speaker 4: a lot of our buddies were there in forgery compleatoons
Speaker 4: and we really wanted to go in and they were,
Speaker 4: you know, because of that, they kept us out of
Speaker 4: that fight.
Speaker 2: I was really impressed with the myriad of different missions
Speaker 2: that DEBT one did during this single deployment, from intelligence gathering,
Speaker 2: sniper operations, personal security detachment work, high value targets, going
Speaker 2: after h VT's pretty wild.
Speaker 1: If you tell us about the hunt for as you
Speaker 1: call them X and z In in your.
Speaker 4: Book, Yeah, that was the one piece of information that
Speaker 4: we were given when we got on the ground was
Speaker 4: that there were these two guys, both DECA card guys
Speaker 4: that were for whatever reason, we weren't given their names.
Speaker 4: We were just exy and they were nobody knew, you know,
Speaker 4: anything about them. They were just guys who were always
Speaker 4: on the move, but they were really kind of the
Speaker 4: shadow guys running the show. And Zu was the kind
Speaker 4: of the senior guy. X was was one of his boys.
Speaker 4: But you know, everybody had been after these guys. So
Speaker 4: we first started getting some info on X, and our
Speaker 4: intel guys were you know, just churning on him. We
Speaker 4: were getting able to get some sources pretty close to him,
Speaker 4: but you know, when we would, you know, that guy
Speaker 4: and his family would be dead. So it was it
Speaker 4: was challenging. We wound up getting pulled off for a while,
Speaker 4: as you mentioned, to do this security detail. And I
Speaker 4: say that only because the guy that we were guarding
Speaker 4: was occurred the Kurdish vice president of Iraq, and then
Speaker 4: you know, the threat was becoming you know, significant enough
Speaker 4: that as they started progressing towards the election that they
Speaker 4: wanted us back on going after bombmakers. So eventually we
Speaker 4: roll up this guy that we believed to be X.
Speaker 4: He you know, a couple of days in interrogation and
Speaker 4: he won't admit it. We bring in family members and
Speaker 4: they're like, yeah, that's him, that's him and the but
Speaker 4: the guy, there's no way this guy was going to talk.
Speaker 4: You know, when we'd gotten to a point with the
Speaker 4: Iraqi interim government having taken control that anybody that we
Speaker 4: were rolling up, if if we wanted them to, you know,
Speaker 4: do any serious time or be put in prison, you
Speaker 4: know they were going to have to go through the
Speaker 4: Iraqi court system, and we had already. I didn't do it,
Speaker 4: but a couple of our guys had to go and
Speaker 4: testify right against these people. And here's what we found
Speaker 4: or inside exploitation, here's where it was. Here's so this
Speaker 4: guy had been, you know, once we started kind of
Speaker 4: getting his backstory, responsible for the deaths of a lot
Speaker 4: of Kords me as part of the Saddam's regime. And
Speaker 4: so we're like, how can we get this guy to talk?
Speaker 4: We're going to have to let him go if we didn't,
Speaker 4: And somebody came up with the idea, let's, you know,
Speaker 4: hit up our new pal that we've been protecting for
Speaker 4: these these weeks, the vice president who's occurred, and ask
Speaker 4: him if will join us on a little trip out
Speaker 4: to uh, you know, his kind of hometown territory. You know,
Speaker 4: they're like, what would happen, right if we turned this
Speaker 4: guy over to the Kurds. So I know, I didn't
Speaker 4: go on this particular mission. I wish I would have,
Speaker 4: but fly out and uh, you know, with the vice
Speaker 4: President of Iraq, this dude with the bag on his
Speaker 4: head named X and then a bunch of our guys.
Speaker 4: We get him to a location where we turn them
Speaker 4: over to some Kurdish uh militia guys and you know,
Speaker 4: they pull off the bag. He recognizes the kind of
Speaker 4: the ship show that he's in and uh and we
Speaker 4: were not. The point had been made very clear. He
Speaker 4: was safe, all right, No one was going to do
Speaker 4: anything to him because we were you know, our guys
Speaker 4: were hanging out in the bank. But uh, you know,
Speaker 4: once they started making their displeasure with him, you know,
Speaker 4: known he started off and up. Uh you know, plenty
Speaker 4: of infos so more than enough to kind of seal
Speaker 4: to make sure that he was going to be trapped
Speaker 4: for a while. So and then once getting him kind
Speaker 4: of helped lead to this this next guy, uh z
Speaker 4: And he had been someone that all of the uh
Speaker 4: OGA organizations had been. Everybody had been after this guy.
Speaker 2: He was he was a former regime guy, bath party
Speaker 2: dude that's on the tracket cards.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and he absolutely had like incredible trade craft, right,
Speaker 4: he just he was never in the same place. But
Speaker 4: we one of again, one of our our human intelligence guys,
Speaker 4: was able to get a and it took like a
Speaker 4: source to get another source closer to get another source
Speaker 4: closer and eventually worked this young guy that we just
Speaker 4: we called the kid in as this guy's kind of gopher,
Speaker 4: and the kid eventually kind of worked his way up
Speaker 4: to the point where he was driving you know, Z
Speaker 4: around and uh, you know, we found out I didn't
Speaker 4: know it at the time, but Z had been responsible
Speaker 4: for killing this kid's family, right he was. He wasn't
Speaker 4: a kid. He was probably twenty years old, So which
Speaker 4: was you know, why he was It wasn't about money
Speaker 4: for him. So we get, uh, you know, a text
Speaker 4: or some communication that that the you know, the following
Speaker 4: days he is going to be having lunch with some
Speaker 4: other big wigs in this very very busy restaurant and
Speaker 4: a very very bad part of bag Dad. So it
Speaker 4: was it was a place where he could kind of
Speaker 4: walk down the street, you know, with with without fear,
Speaker 4: and we knew that they were going to have you know,
Speaker 4: lookouts on all the corners and across the street there
Speaker 4: were a couple of mosques that were kind of known
Speaker 4: to just just be full of fighters. So it was
Speaker 4: it was dicey, you know, especially you know, we made
Speaker 4: had all of our success by trying to hit a
Speaker 4: guy's house at two in the morning, all right, you know,
Speaker 4: and doesn't you know, you you get sleepy. So this
Speaker 4: was kind of the middle of the day thing. Somebody
Speaker 4: came up with the the idea of, you know, instead
Speaker 4: of trying to there's no way really to come through
Speaker 4: and come into Helo's you you're going to be heard,
Speaker 4: you know, you come in and in uh military vehicles,
Speaker 4: you know, you're going to be seen identified far enough out.
Speaker 4: So we got a bunch of fans, you know, just
Speaker 4: used a bunch of vans, you know, no armor, so
Speaker 4: it was it was a little dicey, but h took
Speaker 4: the you know, the darker skins, the dark haired guys
Speaker 4: through them and and you know headdresses and everything and
Speaker 4: had them behind the wheels and uh. The when the
Speaker 4: kid arrived, you know, he gave us the code word
Speaker 4: that they were heading to the restaurant. And then when
Speaker 4: they got to the restaurant, he went into the to
Speaker 4: the bathroom and sent a text. And we were about
Speaker 4: five minutes out, so we were able to roll in
Speaker 4: and we brought in some of the Polish drom with
Speaker 4: us for external security on that uh and and rolled
Speaker 4: into a restaurant where pretty much everybody there was an
Speaker 4: anti coalition. Pretty much everybody there had a gun, you know,
Speaker 4: and then we had to figure out you know, you know,
Speaker 4: obviously we we found the the driver you know, or
Speaker 4: the kid. We knew who he was. And then as
Speaker 4: we at this point we didn't even know what have
Speaker 4: a good photo of the but you know, we come in,
Speaker 4: roll him up. You know, we're able to you know,
Speaker 4: move quickly kind of get everybody out before any any
Speaker 4: shit kicked off. And uh, you know, by the time
Speaker 4: we got him back to you, back to our our
Speaker 4: base by the airport, we were told that you know,
Speaker 4: he was being taken away from us, right right.
Speaker 2: He was such a big, a big name that the
Speaker 2: big eye in the sky wanted him. Yeah, you also
Speaker 2: had this experience that I think is worth like looking
Speaker 2: back on as you were doing this HVT targeting. You
Speaker 2: relate in your book about bringing one guy into the
Speaker 2: interrogation room and you know you wanted to choke this
Speaker 2: guy out and kill him, but didn't because you know,
Speaker 2: you knew it was the wrong thing to do.
Speaker 1: But it was sort of like this moment like.
Speaker 2: You had this sort of like realization about you know
Speaker 2: who you are, but also who we are as people, right, yeah.
Speaker 4: I so the whole story kind of goes back ways.
Speaker 4: But there was an American contractor who was working He
Speaker 4: was like a cell phone contractor. His story is sketchy, right,
Speaker 4: There's some some strangeness in his story, so I'm not
Speaker 4: really clear on it. But he was in Iraq supposedly,
Speaker 4: you know, work working on cell phone towers. He gets
Speaker 4: and this was right as the Abu Gharibe scandal broke, right.
Speaker 4: We we were, you know, we were we had the
Speaker 4: ability to interrogate our prisoners for a couple of days,
Speaker 4: and when we were done with them, we would take
Speaker 4: him and drop him off at Abu g which it
Speaker 4: wasn't far away. So after the story broke of all
Speaker 4: of the kind of bullshit that was going on there,
Speaker 4: this kid was found with his head chopped off on
Speaker 4: the side of the road. And then shortly thereafter, a
Speaker 4: video of you know, him getting his head chopped off,
Speaker 4: you know, surfaced, So we, uh this was happening. I
Speaker 4: think I think it happened like right as we were
Speaker 4: arriving in country. Uh when he when he when he
Speaker 4: went missing, and then it was you know, we were
Speaker 4: up and running by the time they found his body,
Speaker 4: and then the video was released, so there was I
Speaker 4: think it was Solder that was chopped his head off,
Speaker 4: but you know, you're right, I'm sorry. Yeah. So any rate,
Speaker 4: we uh wind up getting a lead on the guy
Speaker 4: who's who was or oh guy who was involved in this,
Speaker 4: So we wind up, you know, rolling up. He lived
Speaker 4: in an apartment building, hid his house in the middle
Speaker 4: of the night like we did, and you know, we
Speaker 4: found a bunch of bloody clothing and bags and just CDs,
Speaker 4: you know, stacks of CDs of the betting right, so
Speaker 4: kind of kind.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we we bring him back and uh, you know,
Speaker 4: we had the National Guard soldiers that were used for
Speaker 4: security in the interrogations facility, but uh that you know,
Speaker 4: that's time. I just I was really fucking curious, right,
Speaker 4: I was like, hey, man, can I like just be
Speaker 4: your security guy? Uh one of our interrogators was going
Speaker 4: to go in with him, and he's like yeah, yeah, man,
Speaker 4: and I don't I don't know. I had Yeah, I
Speaker 4: had seen years before a video of a chechen cutting
Speaker 4: off ahead and I mean the amount of of uh,
Speaker 4: I mean, fuck, that's you got to really want to
Speaker 4: fucking take a guy's head off, all right to do that,
Speaker 4: So there's got to be some fucking hate involved in that.
Speaker 4: And I didn't get it. I was like, man, I
Speaker 4: just I kind of want to get it. I want
Speaker 4: to see this guy and see what he has to say.
Speaker 4: And so I'm standing in the back of the room
Speaker 4: just really my job is kind of be intimidating. And uh,
Speaker 4: the guy gets just brought in a down He's got
Speaker 4: a bag on his head, you know, they pull his
Speaker 4: pulled bag off, and you know, looking at him, you know,
Speaker 4: he's you know, truck and this guy looks like a
Speaker 4: normal fucking dude. You know, you know, what the hell
Speaker 4: is he doing? You have involved in this? In this bullshit?
Speaker 4: So you know, they's interrogating him and he's innocent, of course,
Speaker 4: you know, he didn't do anything. He doesn't know how
Speaker 4: the all the bloody clothes got there, how the CDs
Speaker 4: got there. But the interrogator sets a laptop down on
Speaker 4: the table and pushes the button. And I had I
Speaker 4: had been standing in the back of the room, and
Speaker 4: at that point I kind of got like pulled forward, right,
Speaker 4: and I don't want to sit there and watch this
Speaker 4: video again. But uh, you know, I find myself got
Speaker 4: with my hands on the chair. It's just and I
Speaker 4: talked about there and then there are a lot about
Speaker 4: it because it was kind of a moment that, uh,
Speaker 4: I mean I would have paid money to you know,
Speaker 4: paycheck to have been allowed to just choke that fucker
Speaker 4: to death. I didn't, and you know, obviously you know
Speaker 4: I didn't want to go to jail either. Uh but uh,
Speaker 4: you know, it just it made me realize that, you know,
Speaker 4: everybody's capable of killing people. You know, sometimes we think
Speaker 4: because we're you know, marines or were special operations or
Speaker 4: or this or that, but I think anybody is capable
Speaker 4: of of uh, you know, killing somebody if you know,
Speaker 4: you push the right buttons.
Speaker 2: Well, speaking of which, the sort of last hurrah for you,
Speaker 2: and with that one at least was uh you got
Speaker 2: called up to do some sniper operations.
Speaker 1: Was it up in the jaff Yes, yeah, yeah, And
Speaker 1: that was that was a blast.
Speaker 4: That was you know, when a job had uh it
Speaker 4: kicked off a couple of times, right, I think two
Speaker 4: thousand and seven there was another big battle, but two
Speaker 4: thousand and four the so the chaff Is is one
Speaker 4: of the oldest cities in Iraq and within it as
Speaker 4: the so the it has the like on the outskirts
Speaker 4: of the town. Is the largest cemetery in the world.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's like a city this place and there's
Speaker 4: underground tombs, there's uh you know, above ground, there's just
Speaker 4: it's like a massive city made up Wadi Salam I think, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: And that's called the Valley of Piece is what it means.
Speaker 4: Which was funny because we had the Marine Expeditionary Unit
Speaker 4: getting ready to go head to head with the Mahdi
Speaker 4: Army in the in the Valley of Peace and the
Speaker 4: value of Piece. But so we got called up and
Speaker 4: it wasn't just us, so there were seal sniper teams
Speaker 4: went up. The Poles sent a team and we wound
Speaker 4: up running into an s F team that was was
Speaker 4: running around. But when we got up there at the
Speaker 4: center of Najaf is the Ali a mam Ali Mosque
Speaker 4: and it's the I think it's the second or third
Speaker 4: holiest site for Shia Muslims, right, so it's uh, you know,
Speaker 4: no matter what you do, you can't fuck up this mosque,
Speaker 4: all right, It's got the dome is actual gold they're
Speaker 4: like golden tiles on top of this, and it's it's
Speaker 4: you know, nobody was willing to do anything that might
Speaker 4: risk damaging the mosque, and consequently, the mosque complex was
Speaker 4: where there were you know, a couple of thousand dicades.
Speaker 4: So the only people that were able to move beyond
Speaker 4: a perimeter that had been set were snipers. And so
Speaker 4: we got up there, wound up connecting with the two
Speaker 4: six Cavalry and in their sector, and they were, you
Speaker 4: know like, hey, well, you know, we can't, we can't
Speaker 4: go beyond this this line, but we'll we'll throw you
Speaker 4: in the back of the vehicles, We'll get you up
Speaker 4: as far as we can, and then we'll provide a
Speaker 4: q RF in case, you know, ship really goes to ship.
Speaker 4: So we were able to move in as special Operations
Speaker 4: sniper teams, and for the first couple of days it
Speaker 4: was because we all got in a position kind of
Speaker 4: surrounding the city about the same time the seals on
Speaker 4: the far side, the poles were over here, and the
Speaker 4: they the insurgents assumed that they knew that nobody could
Speaker 4: come beyond this line because that had been the way
Speaker 4: that it had been. So you know, sun comes up
Speaker 4: the first morning and it's just like fish in a barrel, right,
Speaker 4: I mean we were just crushing, you know, you just
Speaker 4: hear sniper shots boom, you know, all kind of ring
Speaker 4: in the city.
Speaker 1: You had the Shy Tack, right, which was a new
Speaker 1: new thing at that time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was we we took it. We we shot
Speaker 4: it a couple of times. It was really too much
Speaker 4: gun for for what we needed. There are a few
Speaker 4: times where we needed the the Barrett at the cow
Speaker 4: you know, to punch through things, but the Shy Attack
Speaker 4: wasn't quite you know, enough ass to really punch through things.
Speaker 4: And they didn't know the rofice ammo. Yeah, that that
Speaker 4: we had for the for the baron. But primarily we
Speaker 4: were carrying, ah it, some six to two gas guns
Speaker 4: the market mark elevans, and we had some men forty
Speaker 4: boat guns we kind of had. I took about seven
Speaker 4: I think it was seven snipers with me and Ja Tack,
Speaker 4: and then later we we brought in some more guys.
Speaker 4: But for the first couple of days, it was like
Speaker 4: I said, just uh, just shooting nearly as fast as
Speaker 4: you could you could reload. After that, you know, they
Speaker 4: started pulling know, some some pretty talented snipers. So we
Speaker 4: wound up with you know, a couple of occasions you know,
Speaker 4: really uh call, you know, thinking back to the things
Speaker 4: I've read about Leningrad and you know, the sniper battles
Speaker 4: in World War Two, and there was a lot of
Speaker 4: you know, a little you know, putting our hats up
Speaker 4: on sticks and trying to get a hold of periscopes
Speaker 4: to use. So a lot of things that are in
Speaker 4: use now. You know, every sniper runs around with periscope
Speaker 4: like that was not something in the in the arsenal,
Speaker 4: you know, back in back and forth.
Speaker 1: What what were about the average engagement distances?
Speaker 4: A lot of them were one hundred and I don't
Speaker 4: think anything much more than three hundred.
Speaker 1: So you were right on top of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and so you had like using a
Speaker 2: lot of deception techniques as they got got wise to
Speaker 2: you guys being out there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean we would move every you know, move
Speaker 4: every night, move to another building, and uh yeah, try
Speaker 4: to you know, have the army do things to Yeah,
Speaker 4: got to make it seem like we were, you know,
Speaker 4: somewhere else. It's just whatever we could think of to
Speaker 4: got to keep them, keep them on their toes. But
Speaker 4: we worked our way up and kind of started, you know,
Speaker 4: with all the other sniper teams moved into where we were,
Speaker 4: you know, looking into the mosque compound. And it was
Speaker 4: at that point that and I think somebody I'm not
Speaker 4: you know, I don't quote me on it, but I
Speaker 4: got a report that the total the you know snipers,
Speaker 4: we had been responsible for three hundred, killing three hundred
Speaker 4: all of the soft snipers, and and like thirty or
Speaker 4: forty of their snipers.
Speaker 1: So it's turning the handle ones.
Speaker 4: Or at least you know guys. And some of them,
Speaker 4: like I said, some of them were were pretty talented.
Speaker 4: There was a guy that, uh, you know, every time
Speaker 4: we poke our head up, you know, a shot not
Speaker 4: not terribly accurate, but you know, a shot would uh
Speaker 4: would get you know, come come close. So we got
Speaker 4: down and we're finally able to pinpoint him to a building,
Speaker 4: and uh, what we discovered he was doing was, which
Speaker 4: was a World War two tactic, was he had chipped
Speaker 4: out bricks and a couple of different rooms and he
Speaker 4: would pull the brick out, you know, take a shot,
Speaker 4: put the brick back in, moved to another room. And
Speaker 4: so we brought in. That's the time when the two
Speaker 4: sassers uh came in handy, So we brought into fifty
Speaker 4: cows and just dropped the wall on him.
Speaker 1: Oh ship, that's awesome. And so uh, after this one,
Speaker 1: you guys get returned back to your home station. And
Speaker 1: and then and then we redeployed back home.
Speaker 4: Mm hmm. Yeah. So we we get back in uh
Speaker 4: it's late two thousand and four, I think it was
Speaker 4: two thousand four. And then we're we're kind of twiddling
Speaker 4: our thumbs.
Speaker 2: All right, it was sort of like, good job that one.
Speaker 2: You guys are awesome. Also, we don't need you anymore.
Speaker 5: We'll call you.
Speaker 4: Well, we didn't know, you know, we didn't know what
Speaker 4: was what was coming, so there was there was a
Speaker 4: new rumor almost every day. So we get back and
Speaker 4: we just we assumed that, you know, we're probably going
Speaker 4: to deploy again. So we start training and the smart
Speaker 4: money this time was on you know, hey, they sent
Speaker 4: us to Iraq, this time, they'll send us to Afghanistan.
Speaker 4: So we we start getting back into in the reconnaissance training,
Speaker 4: you know, spending a lot of time up in Bridgeport, California,
Speaker 4: in the mountains and trying to you know, what we
Speaker 4: saw is the the issue with reconnaissance missions in Afghanistan
Speaker 4: at that time, especially where that you know, you can't
Speaker 4: stay out more than like twenty four hours without compromise,
Speaker 4: right right, It's just you know, you couldn't do it. So,
Speaker 4: you know, so we'd come up with the idea of
Speaker 4: being able to go out do your own reconnaissance and
Speaker 4: then you know, be light enough, but you know, you
Speaker 4: have enough that you could go do a direct action mission,
Speaker 4: you know from your observation post, you know, and just
Speaker 4: cut down that time. So you know, we started really
Speaker 4: and it's really a really cool time experimenting a lot
Speaker 4: of time up in the mountains, just seeing like how
Speaker 4: light we could go, how uh you know, how much
Speaker 4: ammo can you carry? Different ways of cash and ammo
Speaker 4: and things, how you know, experimenting with with like we're
Speaker 4: you know, eating sticks of butter and just calorie food
Speaker 4: to keep you going. It's just really like nothing was
Speaker 4: off the table. So it was this kind of cool
Speaker 4: think tank of of you know, hey, let's find ways
Speaker 4: to get lighter and lighter and be able to sustain
Speaker 4: ourselves for for a long period of time. So while
Speaker 4: this is going on. Kind of unbeknownst to us, there
Speaker 4: had been a couple of organizations that had done The
Speaker 4: Center for Naval Analysis had done one, and somebody else
Speaker 4: had done an evaluation of our deployment, and it was,
Speaker 4: you know, all glowing, Hey that one did great, you know,
Speaker 4: And so armed with that, the commandant of the Marine
Speaker 4: Corps and the commander of SOCOM go into Rumsfeld, the
Speaker 4: Secretary of Defense, and say, hey, yeah, great, everybody had
Speaker 4: a great, great experiment, but we don't want to continue it.
Speaker 4: And you know, Rumsfeld was, you know, to his credit
Speaker 4: was he's like, well, you know you're going to do
Speaker 4: this thing. I keep telling you, and they're like, now
Speaker 4: now we're we're good. We tried it, you know, I
Speaker 4: didn't like it. And so he eventually said, hey, you're
Speaker 4: going to know, instead of kind of letting you grow
Speaker 4: this small unit into a little bit bigger unit, you're
Speaker 4: going to form a two star level component to SOCOM.
Speaker 4: So instead of being one hundred dudes, it's going to
Speaker 4: be a couple of thousand dudes. You know that the
Speaker 4: mank dorps would have to take out a hide. So
Speaker 4: it took it took about a year for that word
Speaker 4: to finally get out of us. So in the interim,
Speaker 4: like I said, we're just experimenting with stuff training. You know,
Speaker 4: some of our guys were at retirement age and said
Speaker 4: screw it them out. You know, we had some guys
Speaker 4: that had moved on to other units, and so there
Speaker 4: was there was a little bit of attrition, but for
Speaker 4: the most part, you know, we were just kind of
Speaker 4: sitting there with their fingers crossed, hoping that we're going
Speaker 4: to get get called to go out again. And that
Speaker 4: when it became clear that that wasn't going to happen,
Speaker 4: they told us that we were going to be disbanded
Speaker 4: about the same time that MARSAK was activated, and so
Speaker 4: I started, you know, looking for a way to and
Speaker 4: MARSK was going to be primarily headquartered on the East Coast.
Speaker 4: You know, I had spent you know, Debt one and
Speaker 4: most of my life had been out in California.
Speaker 2: That that first interaction with MARSK where you show up
Speaker 2: and they throw the newspaper on the desk that says
Speaker 2: disfrontled debt one.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was uh, yeah, it was. I had not
Speaker 4: There's there's a different mentality on the East Coast Force
Speaker 4: free Con than there was on the West coast. You know,
Speaker 4: we kind of while there's some guys that would cross over,
Speaker 4: you know, a lot of us kind of stayed in
Speaker 4: our lane and so you might go to school with
Speaker 4: an East Coast guy, but we just didn't mesh a
Speaker 4: whole lot. And Debt one had been mostly West Coast
Speaker 4: guys just by virtue of that's where the unit was,
Speaker 4: although we did have a few guys from the East Coast.
Speaker 4: But yeah, so I check in. You know, everybody I
Speaker 4: meet is great. You know, they're heavy hitters. I'm you know,
Speaker 4: excited to be working with them. And then this captain
Speaker 4: comes and it's like, hey, I need you to get
Speaker 4: in the car drives me to the base headquarters and
Speaker 4: Marstok was using some office space in there because we
Speaker 4: didn't have any of our own. And I get drug
Speaker 4: into to what was I think the deputy commander of
Speaker 4: Marstok's office, and uh, yeah, there's a this Marine Corps
Speaker 4: newspaper that says, you know, the articles Disgruntled that one
Speaker 4: and it you know, somebody or more than one person
Speaker 4: that talked to him and kind of said, hey, this
Speaker 4: is you know, this is bullshit. You know, we we yeah,
Speaker 4: did a great job, and then we kind of get
Speaker 4: you know, unceremoniously disbanded, and and uh and I I
Speaker 4: hadn't personally felt that way, you know, I you know,
Speaker 4: we were going from one hundred dudes to a couple
Speaker 4: of thousand dudes. I saw that as a win, right,
Speaker 4: and that was based on all the work that we did.
Speaker 4: So but I was, you know, not terribly thrilled when
Speaker 4: when I get drugged you know, from uh the range,
Speaker 4: you know, when we're out we're out on the range,
Speaker 4: out to this colonel's office so that he can like
Speaker 4: yell at me, you know, and slapped this paper down.
Speaker 4: So he was like, you know, are you disgruntled? And
Speaker 4: I'm like, I wasn't two minutes ago, you know when
Speaker 4: I walked in here. But it's it's changing pretty fine.
Speaker 4: And the conversation deteriorated thereafter. I wound up, you know,
Speaker 4: a wound to becoming good friends with the guy. And
Speaker 4: he's a good guy. I don't know he felt he
Speaker 4: needed to put his foot down or make a statement,
Speaker 4: I guess, but yeah, yeah, the early days, there were
Speaker 4: a lot of I mean definitely, you know, any starting
Speaker 4: any organization of any sort, but especially you know, start
Speaker 4: a special operations organization within the Marine Corps. Was was challenging,
Speaker 4: you know, because there were still there were a lot
Speaker 4: of marines that were opposed to it, and a lot
Speaker 4: of very senior marines that were opposed to the whole
Speaker 4: idea that didn't think it would last. And that and
Speaker 4: now we just just celebrated our seventeenth anniversary at marsoch
Speaker 4: So I think we're I think we're doing okay.
Speaker 2: And so you have this very interesting experience of you know,
Speaker 2: force that one helping the stand up marsok the last
Speaker 2: couple of years of your career, and now continuing to
Speaker 2: this day to work as a civilian employee there helping
Speaker 2: the train you know, the next.
Speaker 1: Generation of raiders.
Speaker 2: I would really love to hear any insights you have
Speaker 2: about that experience, you know, from standing up Marsock, from
Speaker 2: you know, from almost nothing to today, any insights about
Speaker 2: that progression and evolution of a unit and what it
Speaker 2: takes to stand up a unit and create a capability.
Speaker 4: Absolutely. Yeah. I was primarily responsible for standing up to school.
Speaker 4: So when I came out from from debt one to here,
Speaker 4: it was initially to be the to run the CQB training.
Speaker 4: I got here and I had been promoted to Master sergeant,
Speaker 4: and I quickly kind of got rolled into the position
Speaker 4: that's at the time it was called chief instructor, So
Speaker 4: I was kind of in charge of all of the
Speaker 4: courses that we ran, which was great because you know,
Speaker 4: I had absolutely you know, we'd kind of innovated some
Speaker 4: some things with CQB. We brought in people to help
Speaker 4: us innovate, so we had a lot of ideas about,
Speaker 4: you know, ways to do things better than we had
Speaker 4: been doing them. I brought or I didn't bring them
Speaker 4: with me. Another one of the Marines who had been
Speaker 4: in my team and had been my sniper partner and
Speaker 4: my team came with me as well and was assigned
Speaker 4: to the school. So, you know, between the two of us,
Speaker 4: we we had like a big checklist like, hey, you know,
Speaker 4: here's all of the shift that we're going to you know,
Speaker 4: stop doing. Here are the things that we're going to
Speaker 4: start doing. And it's a little bit of a rocky road,
Speaker 4: but I mean we were really building from a cadre
Speaker 4: of probably you know, twenty instructors. If we were lucky
Speaker 4: to you know, today, we're probably have two hundred and fifty.
Speaker 4: So it uh, it's it's grown exponentially, and obviously we've
Speaker 4: added you know in the in the when we started,
Speaker 4: we taught CQB and sniping and urban reconnaissance. You know,
Speaker 4: that's that's grown now to tell language courses and intel
Speaker 4: courses and you know kind of what have you along
Speaker 4: with our assessment selection program and our operator the individual
Speaker 4: training course the trained raiders. So I think to answer
Speaker 4: your question, it was, uh, you know, the opportunity on
Speaker 4: a small scale to kind of start up that one.
Speaker 4: You know, those lessons definitely paid benefit, you know when
Speaker 4: it came time to start up something on a bigger scale.
Speaker 4: But it's it's a whole different beast, I said, when
Speaker 4: you're you're trying to develop the you know, a training
Speaker 4: program that's gonna take take marines from any military occupational
Speaker 4: specialty and tournament raiders. And it was it was a
Speaker 4: unique opportunity, you know, and I got to travel down
Speaker 4: to to Q course and out the buds and you know,
Speaker 4: talk with guys out there and see the way other
Speaker 4: people are doing it, and so it was a really
Speaker 4: cool time.
Speaker 2: How do you see and have you seen over the
Speaker 2: years you know, I know, the Marine Corps has this
Speaker 2: uh storied history being very regimented and rigid, but also
Speaker 2: throughout Marine Corps history there is a lot of irregular
Speaker 2: warfare there. I'm curious to ask you, you know, how
Speaker 2: you saw these Marines kind of slotting into a special
Speaker 2: operations role and sort of grow into a more unconventional role.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's the Marine Corps is an odd beast right
Speaker 4: in the book, I call it a cult, but a
Speaker 4: good cult. But it's you know, like I said, the
Speaker 4: Marine Corps considers itself, you know, a special operations organization,
Speaker 4: but you know, hates it if someone else in the
Speaker 4: Marine Corps is considered more special. Yeah, but the Marine
Speaker 4: Corps is a long history of yeah, you know, irregular warfare.
Speaker 4: Like you said, I mean, we wrote the Small Wars Manual,
Speaker 4: the uh you know, we're we stood up the World
Speaker 4: War Two Raiders, the first you know organa, the first
Speaker 4: special operations unit in in the US history. We're heavily
Speaker 4: involved in the O. S S. You know when that
Speaker 4: was stood up and they were you know, the O.
Speaker 4: S S was almost the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps
Speaker 4: was also almost given that mission, and they fought it. Off,
Speaker 4: and that's how they kind of got saddled with with
Speaker 4: forming the Raiders. It's a fascinating history. If you read
Speaker 4: the President Roosevelt wanted to to bring Bill Donovan into
Speaker 4: the Marine Corps and make him in general. And there's
Speaker 4: there's I have copies of these letters, you know, typed
Speaker 4: up by generals in the Marine Corps, like you know,
Speaker 4: pitching and moaning to each other about it, that I
Speaker 4: was able to find in an archive. But uh so, Yeah,
Speaker 4: the Marine Corps is during the Banana Wars and you know,
Speaker 4: in and around World War One, they were you know,
Speaker 4: Chesty Puller was the military governor of Nicaragua. You know,
Speaker 4: so we had guys who were, you know, operating at
Speaker 4: incredibly high levels, you know, thinking way outside the box,
Speaker 4: you know, doing things that seem to kind of be
Speaker 4: unmarrine like in some ways. But you know, Vietnam, the
Speaker 4: Force Rykun guys were you know, on par with anybody,
Speaker 4: you know, uh, you know, it was, it was working.
Speaker 4: So it's been it's been odd. I mean, early in
Speaker 4: the early days, we were getting a lot of especially
Speaker 4: infantry officers, they would try out and just could not
Speaker 4: wrap their head around the idea that I'm a great
Speaker 4: Empfstry officer, but I'm not making it here, right because
Speaker 4: I'm not able to think you know, differently, right, not
Speaker 4: able to look at uh at situation you know, through
Speaker 4: other lenses.
Speaker 2: Basically, What about the younger enlisted guys, Do you think
Speaker 2: they had an easier time like adapt thing because they're
Speaker 2: more malleable?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think so. I think, uh, you know, especially
Speaker 4: you know, people always say that, you know, the younger
Speaker 4: generations this, or that, you know, the the guys that
Speaker 4: we have coming in are you know, a hell of
Speaker 4: less smarter than I am. Uh, you know, fit, really fit,
Speaker 4: and and definitely able and you know, obviously much more
Speaker 4: computer savvy, but able to to think, you know, latterly,
Speaker 4: you know, outside the box whatever you want to call it,
Speaker 4: you know, critically and creatively more more than kind of
Speaker 4: was the case, you know, ten years ago. So I
Speaker 4: think the one thing that they don't and it's it's
Speaker 4: not their fault, it's just kind of a product of
Speaker 4: the world that we live in, is uh just sheer
Speaker 4: mental toughness, you know, like they had in most cases,
Speaker 4: they haven't had situations where they were were training, you know,
Speaker 4: in their the marine corps careers that was quite as
Speaker 4: as austere as as you know, it was was common,
Speaker 4: you know, twenty years ago before the war.
Speaker 2: And how do you see back to the sort of
Speaker 2: issue of the evolution of Mars SOK like capabilities wise,
Speaker 2: how have you seen it go from you know, working
Speaker 2: out of a couple of connects containers to today it's
Speaker 2: an institution, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I think, I mean we've we've had our
Speaker 4: own you know, command of sotifs. You know, we've had
Speaker 4: uh yeah, Tisak commanders. We've pretty much I think we're
Speaker 4: we're pretty well inculcated, you know, across the board within SOCOM,
Speaker 4: and there was you know, early on, there was definitely
Speaker 4: some some pushback in the early days, and most of
Speaker 4: it came from the Army. The Seals were were always
Speaker 4: I think they realized pretty quickly that hey, if we
Speaker 4: can you know, get these guys on our side, you know,
Speaker 4: we're sister naval service guys, we can at least have
Speaker 4: a little more asked to fight back. Because there's a
Speaker 4: joke goes that SOCOM is spelled a r M y.
Speaker 4: I think the Army makes up like seven or sixty percent. Yeah, yeah, Well,
Speaker 4: or three percent.
Speaker 2: And uh, you know, before we move on to some
Speaker 2: questions that that the viewers have for you, last one
Speaker 2: for me at least, Oh my god, it just escaped
Speaker 2: my mind. I wanted to ask you, Oh, I want
Speaker 2: to ask you about rules and capabilities, Like, I know
Speaker 2: there's maybe some OPSEC issues, but maybe at a more
Speaker 2: general level, how do you see more sock like slotting
Speaker 2: into the ward or special Operations community over I know
Speaker 2: they're already there, but also in the next like ten years,
Speaker 2: I mean, what like unique role do you see them
Speaker 2: filling that maybe the other units aren't.
Speaker 4: Good question. That's a part of a really long, an
Speaker 4: ongoing uh process within Marsan to you know, kind of
Speaker 4: figure out what is the the way for both, you know,
Speaker 4: making sure that we kind of tie into the Marine
Speaker 4: Corps force design that you know, the way they're looking
Speaker 4: at the at the future. I think there's absolutely a
Speaker 4: it's not a secret that we're shifting focus back into
Speaker 4: our kind of background and reconnaissance litorals you know, in
Speaker 4: the in the waters up to the you know, onto
Speaker 4: the beach and inland. So I think, yeah, more focus
Speaker 4: on that reconnaissance. You know, technology is growing by leaps
Speaker 4: and bounds. So you know, watching what's going on in Ukraine,
Speaker 4: you know there's there's obviously a lot of lessons learning
Speaker 4: there that we're taking to heart.
Speaker 6: I would, uh, before we get your questions, I wanted
Speaker 6: to ask because the Marine Corps got rid of their
Speaker 6: Scout sniper platoons, which almost feels blasphemous, right, because I
Speaker 6: mean the Marine Corps, one of the things they were
Speaker 6: known for was their scout snipers. Now and now we
Speaker 6: have MARSOK which fills this very vital role, but you
Speaker 6: still have Battalion Recon I think right, and still have
Speaker 6: still have Force Recon and Force Recon hasn't to my knowledge,
Speaker 6: and you correct me if I'm wrong, but they haven't
Speaker 6: been brought into the socom umbrella.
Speaker 5: So where does that leave these sort of in between units?
Speaker 5: And what do you think of the stay platoons going away?
Speaker 4: So, yeah, yesterday I was I was trying to rep
Speaker 4: my REP Scout Sniper Association by wearing my shirt. Today, yeah,
Speaker 4: I had the opportunity to go to the final UH
Speaker 4: Scout Snipers graduation last last year and as I said,
Speaker 4: sad day. But so there are still the we have
Speaker 4: a sniper course, the Marsk Advanced Sniper Course, and Recon
Speaker 4: has a sniper course the called the Recon Sniper Course.
Speaker 4: So there's there's still snipers in the Marine Corps, but
Speaker 4: in Reconnaissance and in Marsk the state platoons of the
Speaker 4: sniper platoons within the infantry battalions or are being converted
Speaker 4: into scout platoons. So they it's I don't fully understand it.
Speaker 4: They're they're not there's not a sniper school and they're
Speaker 4: not going to train snipers, but they still have scope
Speaker 4: weapons and they still have a really similar role. They're
Speaker 4: beating them up, so they're they're growing a little bit.
Speaker 4: I think that the snipers school has been you know,
Speaker 4: and it's the same reason you know, the Marine Corps
Speaker 4: just banded it post World War One, post World War Two,
Speaker 4: post they didn't even have really have a mutch of
Speaker 4: the way of snipers in Korea and then post Vietnam again,
Speaker 4: so I think, you know, I think they'll make their
Speaker 4: way back and then hopefully they will. But at present,
Speaker 4: Recon Battalion is still filling the same role that they
Speaker 4: always have. Force recon is is is smaller than it
Speaker 4: was it used to be a company of anywhere from
Speaker 4: five to eight platoons, and now it's it's a much
Speaker 4: smaller foot brand, but they still will continue to be
Speaker 4: heavily involved in the force design twenty thirty and then
Speaker 4: heavily involved in uh, you know, providing commanders. You know
Speaker 4: this commander's eyes and ears.
Speaker 2: So we got a bunch of Patreon questions for you
Speaker 2: and for people who are watching. There's a link down
Speaker 2: the description if you want to subscribe to our Patreon
Speaker 2: and ask our guests questions.
Speaker 1: We also get access to all of these episodes ad free.
Speaker 2: Brian asks when standing up a force during active conflict,
Speaker 2: how did you balance existing needs versus future requirements?
Speaker 4: That's a good question. I think we were only able
Speaker 4: to see so far in front of us, for for
Speaker 4: future requirements with debt one anyway, I mean we were
Speaker 4: we knew that we were going to have a life cycle,
Speaker 4: and then we were willing to be over I think,
Speaker 4: you know, possibly talking to it from the perspective of
Speaker 4: marsk is uh it's a little more apropos but there,
Speaker 4: you know, I think we didn't do a great job
Speaker 4: of that of really looking towards future requirements, just because
Speaker 4: we really didn't. I mean, a lot of people didn't
Speaker 4: know how long we were going to exist. You know,
Speaker 4: there was always kind of the threat that you know,
Speaker 4: we cost too much money and the you know, SOCOM
Speaker 4: doesn't want us in the Marine Corps is getting get
Speaker 4: rid of us. So a lot of a lot of
Speaker 4: you know, when you're being built in the middle of
Speaker 4: a fight, you know, you've got to focus on what
Speaker 4: you need for that fight. I think as we've you know, things,
Speaker 4: you know, the situation changed, both in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria,
Speaker 4: everywhere we started, you know, adjusting with that. But over
Speaker 4: the last ten years, I think we've had enough time
Speaker 4: to to set back a little bit and start looking at, hey,
Speaker 4: how do we make sure that we're building the unit,
Speaker 4: the organization, you know, for the missions of the future.
Speaker 2: Uh Norm has a great question that reminds me of
Speaker 2: a funny story in your book. He says, does meditation
Speaker 2: really work or is it all in my mind?
Speaker 4: I don't know. I think it does. The story though,
Speaker 4: is it is pretty funny. I've always been a I mean,
Speaker 4: I'll try anything, all right, and I've always kind of
Speaker 4: felt that there's there's got to be more to it
Speaker 4: than just the ability to shoot, move and communicate. You know,
Speaker 4: from the that gunfight in Afghanistan, I realized that, you know,
Speaker 4: there's you know, I need to get a lot smarter
Speaker 4: right about you know, the psychological effects and the physiological
Speaker 4: impacts of a gunfight. But you know, look for ways,
Speaker 4: you know, I always wanted to look for ways to
Speaker 4: make myself and my guys more capable. So you know,
Speaker 4: for a while, I was really hell bent on speed
Speaker 4: reading software because I thought that would help, you know,
Speaker 4: just speed up our ability to see, speed up your
Speaker 4: ability to identify it hardget to shoot. You know, we
Speaker 4: if there's something kind of new, you know, I was
Speaker 4: going through. I was in a phase where I would
Speaker 4: try anything, and uh, you know, meditation became became one
Speaker 4: of those. So I started getting into it, and uh
Speaker 4: and I wish I was into it a little bit more,
Speaker 4: but uh, you know, I still believe in it. But
Speaker 4: I were like the first group of guys who are
Speaker 4: going to be more socks instructors brought them into a room,
Speaker 4: and I brought this lady, a really nice lady who
Speaker 4: had volunteered meditation instructor, you know, her time to come
Speaker 4: and teach. So she talked for a little while, and
Speaker 4: all the instructors are kind of sitting there nodding their heads,
Speaker 4: and then she was like, hey, so we're going to
Speaker 4: all sit down and do like twenty minutes of meditation.
Speaker 4: Close your eyes. And so I'm I'm sitting there in
Speaker 4: the front, you know, with my eyes closed, and like
Speaker 4: I hear the door and then I hear the door again,
Speaker 4: and I'm like, all right, know, focus on my breathing
Speaker 4: or whatever. And by the time the twenty minutes is up,
Speaker 4: I opened my eyes, and I mean me and her
Speaker 4: everybody else had left.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, you win some, you lose some.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Jefferson asks, did you serve with now Lieutenant General Donovan?
Speaker 2: If so, what was he like back then and in
Speaker 2: such a new unit?
Speaker 4: So yeah, oh, Frank Donovan. I served with him first
Speaker 4: at first Force. We're not not in the same platoon together,
Speaker 4: but he was. He was a platoon commander there, and
Speaker 4: then with Debt one. He he arrived after our deployment,
Speaker 4: so he when we thought that we were going to
Speaker 4: to recock and deploy again, he got there and he
Speaker 4: was the one who came up with this I of
Speaker 4: of patrolling a deep reconnaissance mission into an assault. He
Speaker 4: was his term for it was pursuit operations. So and then, yeah,
Speaker 4: he's done pretty well for himself. I just had the
Speaker 4: opportunity to see him and have dinner with him a
Speaker 4: couple of months ago. He was he was incredibly driven
Speaker 4: as a as a young captain and major. I remember
Speaker 4: he used to at First Force. He used to set
Speaker 4: up these orienteering days where it was and it was
Speaker 4: usually there'd be a helicopter. You'd, you know, he looked
Speaker 4: cast in swim into the beach and then you and
Speaker 4: your teammate would you know, have to you know, move
Speaker 4: around and navigate like a twenty thirty mile movement over
Speaker 4: the course of a day, find points at each point.
Speaker 4: There would also be like some questions you had to
Speaker 4: answer or like a Kim's Game thing that you had
Speaker 4: to remember, and U you know, if you if you want,
Speaker 4: you got bragging rights. But he's he's still pretty damn fit.
Speaker 4: I asked. I saw him, and you know, he was
Speaker 4: always a excellent reconnaissance marine and a good leader and
Speaker 4: somebody that you knew was was going places.
Speaker 1: That's all we got for people.
Speaker 6: Okay, So real quick, I saw a couple of people.
Speaker 6: Daniel Kirby says, hey, ranger. D My cousin Grasshopper says,
Speaker 6: what's up?
Speaker 5: Enjoyed your book?
Speaker 4: Excellent?
Speaker 5: And then uh Andy also said hello Andy Milbourne.
Speaker 4: Oh how toy? Andy?
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks Andy for chiming in.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Joe, thank you very much. Uh do you foresee
Speaker 6: MARSK getting their own Tier one unit? What is holding
Speaker 6: back so Calm from forming a CAG Seal Team six
Speaker 6: type marine unit?
Speaker 1: Spicy?
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, it's been I've heard talk about it, you know,
Speaker 4: and that talk is extended back a couple of years.
Speaker 4: I don't know if it'll happen. I mean, I know
Speaker 4: there are a lot of Marines that would be thrilled
Speaker 4: if it did. That's I would not think it's something
Speaker 4: that's that's going to happen too terribly soon. I mean
Speaker 4: we're small, all right, you know, we're like I said,
Speaker 4: we're three percent of SO command power, although according to
Speaker 4: last check, I think we do ten percent of the missions.
Speaker 4: So you know, it's the thing that the Marines kind
Speaker 4: of always done, punchbuber or weight class. But yeah, I
Speaker 4: don't I wouldn't hold your breath too long for that one.
Speaker 4: But I would like to love to see it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and also jo, thank you very much. Where do
Speaker 5: you see the raiders going in the future? Ideally?
Speaker 6: Ideally would you want to see the program unit? Oh,
Speaker 6: ideally where would you want to see the program unit going?
Speaker 4: Why?
Speaker 5: What changed? As would you like to see?
Speaker 4: Good question. The one thing I should have said earlier
Speaker 4: is that, obviously, in all of anything I'm saying, in
Speaker 4: my opinion right it doesn't represent mars Ox or so Comms.
Speaker 4: I am a big believer in and I always have
Speaker 4: been in us getting back to the roots of reconnaissance
Speaker 4: and and really becoming, you know, being the best at
Speaker 4: at that the and I think the definition of reconnaissance
Speaker 4: has expanded hugely over over the the past decade with
Speaker 4: the avenues that have been opened up through technology. So
Speaker 4: I think that's the direction. If I were, you know,
Speaker 4: the commanding general for a day, that's the direction I
Speaker 4: would like to see.
Speaker 6: And the last question is the spiciest high ready high
Speaker 6: ready or low ready for for standard position moving through
Speaker 6: a complex.
Speaker 4: Low always low the right answer, the right answer.
Speaker 2: So Tough, Rugged Bastards is the book. I hope you
Speaker 2: guys will go and check it out. I finished reading
Speaker 2: it last night. There's a link down in the description.
Speaker 2: It's a terrific piece of history and a really well written,
Speaker 2: insightful memoir. I hope you guys will go check it out. John,
Speaker 2: is there anything else you want to tell people or
Speaker 2: anything you want to plug? You want to tell folks
Speaker 2: where they can find out more about the Scout Sniper Association.
Speaker 4: Definitely. What we're pushing right now is actually the Scout
Speaker 4: Sniper Heritage Organization, which I think it's just Scoutsnaper Heritage
Speaker 4: dot org. One of the projects that we're working on
Speaker 4: is trying to get a Scout Sniper memorial built at
Speaker 4: the Marine Corps Museum in Guantico, Virginia. So Scout Sniper
Speaker 4: Heritage dot org. You can check that out. You can
Speaker 4: buy a brick to commemorate a sniper list that you
Speaker 4: know and make donations. Say my website is Jdaily dot
Speaker 4: com and there there's there's info about the book, obviously,
Speaker 4: but I also write a couple of weekly emails that
Speaker 4: go out. You know, one's just called Walking Point. It's
Speaker 4: it's kind of translates some military things into ways to
Speaker 4: make yourself better, and the others called rock the Fuck
Speaker 4: Up and it's it strangely enough about rucking mostly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because you've become a ultra marathon runner in your
Speaker 2: quote unquote retirement.
Speaker 4: I have. I've kind of stopped becoming an ultra marathon
Speaker 4: runner recently, but yeah, who knows. Pick it up again
Speaker 4: and real quick.
Speaker 2: I want to tell people out there, please go and
Speaker 2: check out my book, We Defy the Lost Chapters of
Speaker 2: Special Forces History. It's up for pre order now, be
Speaker 2: released on December ninth, and next actually this Friday, this
Speaker 2: coming Friday, Joe Mussia is going to be on the show.
Speaker 1: He is also a former Marine and the author of
Speaker 1: cry Havoc, which is about the Rangers that jumped into
Speaker 1: Grenada in nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 2: I'm super excited to talk to him about that kind
Speaker 2: of an untold story, another untold chapter of Special Ops history. John,
Speaker 2: thank you for joining us tonight, man, really.
Speaker 4: Man, thanks for having me. I had a blanche fantastic.
Speaker 1: All right, we'll see all you guys on Friday. Take
Speaker 1: care out there.