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Speaker 2: Special Operations, coverts spionage, The Teamhouse with your hosts Jack
Speaker 2: Murphy and David Bark.
Speaker 3: Hey, everybody, welcome to episode three three nine of The Teamhouse.
Speaker 4: I'm Dave Park here with Jack Murphy.
Speaker 3: Today tonight we're welcoming a good friend of ours, Eric Lawrence.
Speaker 3: Eric is former Special Forces and security contractor Extraordinary, and
Speaker 3: we're also going to talk a bit about his book,
Speaker 3: Fire Support, a Veteran's Guide to Health, healing and Life
Speaker 3: Beyond Service, which is a phenomenal reference guide for all
Speaker 3: things mental, physical, and kind of spiritual health. You know,
Speaker 3: So anyway or thanks and welcome to the show.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I appreciate it, guys.
Speaker 6: It's always weird to be on here where most of
Speaker 6: my buddies have already been on your couch in one
Speaker 6: way or another.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, well you're kind of they set the stage
Speaker 3: for you.
Speaker 1: Oh right, and your joy us from the beautiful Where
Speaker 1: are you right now?
Speaker 5: I'm out in the middle of nowhere Arizona?
Speaker 1: Okay, looks nice.
Speaker 6: Yeah, water fasting like a super genius in Arizona.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah?
Speaker 1: How many?
Speaker 4: How many days have you been on this water fast?
Speaker 5: I'm on day eight right now?
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 5: Well, I'll do it once a year and.
Speaker 4: We will and how long will it last for you?
Speaker 6: I'll probably get hungrier because I'm bored around day ten. Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 6: you lose all your hunger, so it's not a bad deal.
Speaker 6: But you just missed flavor.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, Well we'll get into that because I know
Speaker 3: that that's kind of part of the detox and everything
Speaker 3: else that you know, you champion, Let's talk a bit
Speaker 3: about you. To start out with, what's your origin story?
Speaker 3: How did you grow up and what led you to
Speaker 3: the military?
Speaker 6: Well, my favorite line from a Steve Martin movie, you know,
Speaker 6: I was born a poor black child, but I was
Speaker 6: born in West Virginia, you know, seventies, good rough time
Speaker 6: to grow up there, and he grew up hard and quick.
Speaker 6: So as soon as I could, I joined what we
Speaker 6: called the army and ran away from there. So, you know,
Speaker 6: it's a great place to learn all your outdoor skills
Speaker 6: and makes a Q course fairly simple at that point
Speaker 6: in time because we know what other selection courses are
Speaker 6: run right there in my backyard.
Speaker 5: So it was a good place to grow up.
Speaker 3: And when you went into the army, did you know
Speaker 3: about special forces or was it just you wanted to
Speaker 3: go to the army?
Speaker 6: Well that's where I had a smart neighbor who was
Speaker 6: in the nineteenth group, and I went straight in, so
Speaker 6: I had actually never been in another unit. Was in
Speaker 6: nineteenth when I was seventeen years old, got tabbed at
Speaker 6: twenty one. He's six at twenty one, and then said
Speaker 6: I'm going.
Speaker 5: To first group.
Speaker 1: What year did you join?
Speaker 5: An ecstatic about that? So again, what.
Speaker 1: Year did you join the army? Yeah, I'm sorry, what
Speaker 1: what year was that?
Speaker 5: Nineteen eighty seven? Oh?
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, interesting?
Speaker 3: So you started you went through SFAs and the QS
Speaker 3: part of second and nineteenth correct.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it was like selection number four. There were like
Speaker 6: ham sandwiches and it was atrocious. I mean, they really
Speaker 6: hadn't figured out what they were doing yet.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so as soon as you got your long
Speaker 3: tab you pretty much bailed on the guard or and
Speaker 3: went to act and went to first group.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: All the old guys, I mean, my whole team almost
Speaker 6: was Vietnam guys.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they're like, get out of here. You know, this
Speaker 5: is fine, you can come back.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you know, and you're a twenty one year old
Speaker 6: six in nineteenth group back.
Speaker 5: In the nineties, there's nothing to do.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So yeah, I immediately rolled into first group there.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And then what was that like for you going to
Speaker 3: first group, going out to Washington State?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I went. I loved Washington.
Speaker 6: I was on a mountain team, which is the best
Speaker 6: spot in the world to be on a mountain team.
Speaker 6: You know, we had no money, we had no budget,
Speaker 6: but the climbing team, if they said, hey, just come
Speaker 6: back in a month or two, we would. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 6: we run out of beer money. But we we got
Speaker 6: a lot of training, in a lot of hiking, in
Speaker 6: a lot of really good mountain ops.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because you have the whole West Coast there to
Speaker 5: work on.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And then I rolled over to Soot team. It's always
Speaker 6: like CQB. It really likes blowing things up. Hence why
Speaker 6: all my TBIs are helping me right now? Did that
Speaker 6: for quite all awesome? You know, great teammates obviously, And
Speaker 6: then we got tired of going to Korea every trip
Speaker 6: because second battalion in first group was the Korea battalian.
Speaker 5: I transferred over to first in Okinawa.
Speaker 6: Then my luck and everybody else's second battalion's luck that
Speaker 6: showed up in first battalion they changed a mission to Korea,
Speaker 6: So our first trips we're.
Speaker 5: All just looking at each other with a glock in
Speaker 5: our mouth or a baretta in our.
Speaker 6: Mouth, going really mind of curb here, you know, and
Speaker 6: hopefully run into it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was just fucking bad karma. Man.
Speaker 1: In first group, there was like one battalion that was
Speaker 1: like Korea and Alaska, right, and then the other was
Speaker 1: like Thailand.
Speaker 5: Every trip that was us.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they had all of Asia and we had Korea, Highland, Malaysia, Indonesia,
Speaker 6: you know the nice places, right. You know, I got
Speaker 6: frost fight in first group.
Speaker 5: It's like, how do you do that?
Speaker 6: But yeah, and then I was on the siff there
Speaker 6: in Okinawa, which was obviously a good time. I really
Speaker 6: really did well there like that did a lot of
Speaker 6: a lot of the breaching and uh man, we really
Speaker 6: got to get smarter about breaching, which I hope they
Speaker 6: are because I spent half my times at TBI doctors.
Speaker 5: Now, yeah, breaching is just no joke.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, So.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll definitely talk about about that because I think
Speaker 3: that's a big thing. You know, we we've talked about it,
Speaker 3: ah with uh Chuck O'Connor. Yeah, Chuck O'Connor, uh and
Speaker 3: Wining like uh, you know, the over pressure that none
Speaker 3: of us knew, like we we idea, we've.
Speaker 4: All eaten like hundreds.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we see how close we could get.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, super.
Speaker 3: So was you know you you mentioned being on a
Speaker 3: on an S O T team and then going to
Speaker 3: sit That was pretty much a natural progression, right that
Speaker 3: so he became the SIFF.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean SOT is kind of like Sephardic Light.
Speaker 6: It's the same course, just longer.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And obviously you got to you know, command directed mission,
Speaker 6: which was good.
Speaker 5: I mean you know, and all your budget from there it.
Speaker 6: All went elsewhere, you know, to progress. So it's part
Speaker 6: of you know election.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so what was you know from that time
Speaker 3: that you were in from UH eighty seven eighty eight,
Speaker 3: you know, through your time and you know, up in
Speaker 3: Korea and then out in oat Canallen and everything. What
Speaker 3: were aside from Korea? What were the missions? What was
Speaker 3: the mission set for first group at that time?
Speaker 1: Was were there a real world?
Speaker 5: A lot of FID, A lot of FID. No, we
Speaker 5: even in a SI if we'd get spun up for something. Yeah,
Speaker 5: but they had cold feet back then. They were scared
Speaker 5: to get committed.
Speaker 6: They would make up excuses, you know, if there was
Speaker 6: a coup somewhere, we'd show up a week later.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like okay, the team's.
Speaker 6: Been here a week, you know, but what they're going
Speaker 6: to do? But yeah, it was just really risk averse.
Speaker 6: It was very annoying and pretty much why I wanted
Speaker 6: to get out.
Speaker 1: And so around what year was I that you started
Speaker 1: looking at it? Now?
Speaker 5: It was seven?
Speaker 6: Yeah, eighty seven or no, sorry, God Blessed America ninety eight.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: We had big mo as our battalion commander Mulholland, and
Speaker 6: I taught him some army regulations he didn't know, and
Speaker 6: he wasn't.
Speaker 5: Too happy about it.
Speaker 6: I found out you could if you were not going
Speaker 6: to re enlist, you could request a new ETS date.
Speaker 6: So I did that and he was not polite about that.
Speaker 6: But in a week later he signed it and he goes,
Speaker 6: you'll be back. I said, sir, I won't be back.
Speaker 6: And then after nine to eleven, I saw.
Speaker 5: Him up in.
Speaker 6: Uh oh, what the hell's that airfield? The big one
Speaker 6: there in Afghanistan. David, Yeah, there's told you I wouldn't
Speaker 6: come back, and he was he was giggling about it.
Speaker 1: Before we go into like post nine to eleven. Like
Speaker 1: before nine to eleven, you spent some time in West Africa.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah.
Speaker 6: I left first group summer of ninety eight and within
Speaker 6: two weeks I was.
Speaker 5: In Sara Leone.
Speaker 6: Oh okay, back then, there wasn't very many, uh special
Speaker 6: contracts like that going around, and you kind of knew
Speaker 6: everybody that was doing.
Speaker 5: Something, you know.
Speaker 6: After nine to eleven, every brainder brothers a pro, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 6: but uh, pre nine eleven, I bet there wasn't a
Speaker 6: hundred guys really doing work.
Speaker 5: And I got hired on.
Speaker 6: To help with the State Department contract where we we
Speaker 6: advised Ecamogue, which is the West African like NATO or
Speaker 6: UN who was doing the peacekeeping and fighting in Sara
Speaker 6: Leone and Liberia. So me and two other Americans we
Speaker 6: entertained ourselves there for a couple of months, you know,
Speaker 6: fighting the RF and very interesting.
Speaker 5: A lot of lessons learned. I mean learned more there
Speaker 5: in a couple of months.
Speaker 6: Than I did in group the whole time, because the
Speaker 6: guys we were hanging out with were executive outcomes. I mean,
Speaker 6: these guys have been fighting since the seventies and we'd
Speaker 6: be like, hey, let's do it this way, and they're like, no,
Speaker 6: we lost like twelve guys and wherever doing that fifteen
Speaker 6: years ago. Like okay, well we won't do that. I'll
Speaker 6: just shut up and sit here. And very professional. I
Speaker 6: mean I saw some of them twenty years later.
Speaker 5: Still in wars.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So just great people, really great people. I'll still talk
Speaker 6: to some of them. I mean Kobs Klaus and they're
Speaker 6: in South Africa's he's he's the mur of Africa right now.
Speaker 6: But a great friend of mine. Well did that did Liberia?
Speaker 6: I mean quite a bit of work over there.
Speaker 1: What was I have to like ask like, what was
Speaker 1: that interface like for you as a state department contractor
Speaker 1: with ostensibly or they were a South African private military contractor,
Speaker 1: because I mean officially, our government's like, no, we don't
Speaker 1: approve that, we don't like that.
Speaker 6: But well, there was no state department in seraly On.
Speaker 6: There was probably one case officer and the three of us.
Speaker 6: That was it. One time I answered the phone and
Speaker 6: it was Madeline Albright.
Speaker 5: I'm like, can I help you? She goes, what's going
Speaker 5: on over there?
Speaker 6: I'm like, I handed the phone off immediately to somebody else,
Speaker 6: like I'm not explaining the War of Sara ly owned
Speaker 6: to Madeline Albright.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there was no one there.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 5: It was the best war I've ever been in.
Speaker 1: Yah, it was.
Speaker 5: You know, there was no amateurs. One time when we.
Speaker 6: Had to go, you know, go rescue the the folks
Speaker 6: from the librarian embassy, we just showed up at the
Speaker 6: casino the night before and said who wants to make
Speaker 6: some extra money tomorrow? And uh we had French, South African, British,
Speaker 6: you name it.
Speaker 5: It was who's who in the zoo?
Speaker 6: The next morning at the helipad and we took a rock,
Speaker 6: drew it out on the on the hard deck and
Speaker 6: went and did it. That's the kind of guys you
Speaker 6: had back then.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how how did you.
Speaker 4: Guard against war tourism?
Speaker 3: And you know guys claiming that they had been French
Speaker 3: foreign legion or this, or.
Speaker 5: That we saw them. They wouldn't last a day or two.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they would be gone in no time.
Speaker 5: There were some always and they were typically French.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So but that was a great time. I mean it
Speaker 6: was a nine to five ward too, so that was
Speaker 6: very polite.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 5: We had Russian cruise with them.
Speaker 6: I am I sevens and uh they only fluid in
Speaker 6: the daytime.
Speaker 1: And I got to ask you then to like finish
Speaker 1: the story, like how did the Liberian embassy rescue go down?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 6: You've seen the typical State Department employees sometimes. I remember
Speaker 6: one come running across the hard deck to you know
Speaker 6: how them I seven or in my eightes have those
Speaker 6: little steps on it. When she hit that step, I
Speaker 6: thought we were going to spark rotors. And it was
Speaker 6: just like God bless America, you know it was it
Speaker 6: was entertainment man, and we had it all secured and
Speaker 6: take care of. But uh, just she can't make some
Speaker 6: of this ship up. And uh we left the Marines,
Speaker 6: but we had to come back and get them. And
Speaker 6: now I wish we'd had videos back then. Probably shouldn't have,
Speaker 6: but if we would have, that would just been a
Speaker 6: real you would have played and had done beer shots.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And so.
Speaker 3: We roll into nine to eleven and are you still
Speaker 3: kind of working under the same umbrella, the same you know,
Speaker 3: security style contract and whatnot.
Speaker 6: Yeah. At the time, I had a security company and
Speaker 6: I had the Blackheart International Logistics Company, so I would
Speaker 6: do different Iraq in Afghanistan contracts, you know, with varying roles,
Speaker 6: a lot of protection, a lot of advising, and tons
Speaker 6: of logistical support.
Speaker 5: That was the main, the main avenue there.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we did that for years, did rifle manufacturing. We
Speaker 6: got into way too many things, but that's kind of
Speaker 6: you were chasing the dollar at the time because that
Speaker 6: was the heyday of contracting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3: And so were you involved with like Afghanistan as soon
Speaker 3: he's that kicked off and then Iraq as soon as
Speaker 3: that kicked off where you kind of focused on one theater.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I did a quick stint training up the Air Marshals.
Speaker 6: They got a whole bunch of US pistol guys to
Speaker 6: immediately go out to Arteesia and start tuning up the
Speaker 6: air marshals. So I did that for a couple of
Speaker 6: months while clearances were getting stood up. As soon as
Speaker 6: that happened, I was. I was in Afghanistan probably summer
Speaker 6: of O two and starting to do work there for
Speaker 6: a couple of years before the Iraq War kicked off.
Speaker 6: But that was the time to be there before it
Speaker 6: got too crazy. Yeah, yeah, that was the pleasant time
Speaker 6: or to you know, after Iraq kind of time in Afghanistan.
Speaker 3: When you say do you mean uh to laden with
Speaker 3: bureaucracy or do you what do you mean by taking
Speaker 3: When you say too crazy, do you mean too like
Speaker 3: laden with bureaucracy or correct?
Speaker 6: And you could you could get away with anything at
Speaker 6: that time, you know, if you needed a badge, you
Speaker 6: made the badge next slight. You know, you just you
Speaker 6: got you got ship.
Speaker 5: Done, you know. And then years later I'm like, we
Speaker 5: need a new war.
Speaker 6: This is just obnoxious, you know, And you just couldn't
Speaker 6: get anything accomplished.
Speaker 5: And I won't participate in that.
Speaker 6: And oh hell, speaking of that, I forgot I did
Speaker 6: seven months in Haiti before that, we talk about not
Speaker 6: getting anything done.
Speaker 5: It was groundhog day every day.
Speaker 6: Watching the charities fleece their pockets. You know, it's just
Speaker 6: bureaucracy and corruption is to disgusting and we both all
Speaker 6: of us have seen that too many times.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it's it was wild.
Speaker 3: You know you mentioned like bogram and it's wild, you
Speaker 3: know seeing.
Speaker 1: You know, Disney.
Speaker 3: Drive for instance, go from kind of the wild West
Speaker 3: right to to people getting shoot out for not wearing
Speaker 3: safety belts and you know.
Speaker 1: It took the entire garrison overseas.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, you know first startiants out there writing
Speaker 3: speeding tickets for people on their little gators.
Speaker 4: Like it's it's like, is this is this war?
Speaker 1: Is what's going on here?
Speaker 6: Well, Dave, I think that's how we want it, right right?
Speaker 6: Oh wait right, No I don't think so, right, Yeah, No,
Speaker 6: everybody just waits us out because they know our bureaucracy
Speaker 6: and bullshit we'll do or do their battle for them. Yeah,
Speaker 6: you know, never destroying it or never interrupt an enemy
Speaker 6: that's busy destroying himself.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they just wait us out. And you and I
Speaker 5: knew that. You knew they were going to do that. Yeah,
Speaker 5: we're not good at.
Speaker 1: U W No, we don't, we don't.
Speaker 4: It doesn't brief well like it doesn't.
Speaker 5: It doesn't.
Speaker 4: The power points just don't. Uh you know, if you
Speaker 4: can't talk about how many bodies you stacked or this
Speaker 4: or that?
Speaker 1: Who want?
Speaker 4: Who cares about it? What village was stabilized? Are the metrics?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 6: No, That's why I love SEF because we can go
Speaker 6: in there and fix all that and people not know
Speaker 6: we did it. Yeah, you know, because we'll trick them
Speaker 6: into it. I don't care how trick them, pay them
Speaker 6: whatever I need to do. But we don't have to
Speaker 6: heavy hammer them all the time. You know, all we
Speaker 6: did was make rebels. I used to stop the guys
Speaker 6: all the time for making more rebels, and we constantly
Speaker 6: would do it.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So, uh so you spent you know, you did Haiti, you.
Speaker 3: Did Afghanistan, and then I'm assuming it with phi Iraq
Speaker 3: kicks off and you guys are involved in that too.
Speaker 6: Then Yeah, almost as soon as it had kicked off,
Speaker 6: I was over there organizing that, trying to you know,
Speaker 6: work with the Brimmer administration doing all that because they
Speaker 6: were new to everything. Also, it's like we hadn't been
Speaker 6: in a war in a while.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Right, And I'm a big sop guy.
Speaker 6: I love so ops So I was over there pimping
Speaker 6: how to set stuff up quick, and we already had
Speaker 6: all the logistical you know, trail figured out, so it
Speaker 6: was pretty easy.
Speaker 5: So I scored a couple of details over there, you know,
Speaker 5: to run those, and you know, helped out with some
Speaker 5: other details and just you know, great guys.
Speaker 6: I mean, you find any kind of work to stay
Speaker 6: with the bunch, you know, the guys you grew up
Speaker 6: with in the military, and if you're going to get
Speaker 6: paid to drive around with machine guns with them, it's like, sure,
Speaker 6: let's go.
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Speaker 5: And I mean some legends, you know.
Speaker 6: Now, it's funny to see the folks on your on
Speaker 6: your podcast once in a while. I'm like their heroes, yeah,
Speaker 6: you know, and folks have no idea what they've really done.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's interesting because I think that, you know,
Speaker 3: when I went out to the second Italian fiftieth anniversary,
Speaker 3: like one of the young Rangers there, because we've been
Speaker 3: going like five years now, right, So a young ranger
Speaker 3: is like, yeah, I watched your show all through high.
Speaker 4: School, which is greatly to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's like that's why I went in like
Speaker 3: listening to all these rangers and all these so you know,
Speaker 3: soft guys and their stories, and it's the way we
Speaker 3: would have eaten up, you know, the mac view sog
Speaker 3: and and you know, and the Green Beret and you know.
Speaker 3: And then he's like and I'm like, oh, that's awesome,
Speaker 3: and he goes, yeah, we haven't.
Speaker 4: Done a single combat appointment.
Speaker 3: I'm like, oh, dude, I'm sorry.
Speaker 6: Sorry, man, that's hard to walk around batty in that way.
Speaker 3: Yeah right, but but yeah, you know it, it is fascinating.
Speaker 4: I think a lot of times.
Speaker 6: You know, I just saw greg Burg took over. I
Speaker 6: just saw that little note.
Speaker 5: Remember him.
Speaker 1: He was my command sergeant major at three seven five.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I think he just took the regiment. So
Speaker 5: what great guy.
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean he did become the regimental sergeant major,
Speaker 1: but that was like two thousand and six or seven
Speaker 1: or something.
Speaker 5: Oh, I might be dating. I might have hit something wrong.
Speaker 5: You know, I've been fasting, so okay, yeah for bbis.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Sergeant Major Birch is an amazing guy, though, but
Speaker 1: he's out there. He's retired now.
Speaker 5: Yeah good. Yeah, yeah, well yeah, it's probably true. Years
Speaker 5: I get all those years mixed up, I really do,
Speaker 5: because I still think I'm like twenty nine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the same, same, Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I think another part of that is, you know,
Speaker 3: I admire people have like solid memories and remember.
Speaker 1: A lot of very specific things.
Speaker 4: But for me, it's like kind of like one big
Speaker 4: green blur, you.
Speaker 6: Know, Yeah, I have to have somebody else mentioned something
Speaker 6: and then it'll spark me, you know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, But a lot of that I tried to forget.
Speaker 5: People like you remember this guy, I'm like, nope, not
Speaker 5: at all. Yeah, damn sure, not their last names, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So what what did you like?
Speaker 3: You know, you when you were in Afghanistan, you thought
Speaker 3: we need a new war, and then you got a
Speaker 3: new war, you got Iraq.
Speaker 4: What was your overall impression of the.
Speaker 3: Efforts in Afghanistan in Iraq as time progressed and as
Speaker 3: you were not only a witness but a participant in
Speaker 3: these wars.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's the problem.
Speaker 6: I was going between them, and I used to always
Speaker 6: call it the Bill of two Wars because incredibly different tactics.
Speaker 5: Right, I mean, there's things you could.
Speaker 6: Get away with in Afghanistan you wouldn't even dare in Iraq, right,
Speaker 6: you know, you'd get a double stacked at.
Speaker 5: Mine under you. So it was just so hard to
Speaker 5: go back.
Speaker 6: And forth and shift gears because I considered Afghanistan as
Speaker 6: fairly civilized compared to Iraq and Syria.
Speaker 5: So yeah, it was just we weren't we.
Speaker 6: Weren't ready for prime time on a lot of it,
Speaker 6: you know, and uh two risk averse and there's a
Speaker 6: time and a place for that.
Speaker 5: But when when something's got to get done, you got
Speaker 5: to hit them hard, you know.
Speaker 6: And those were just two distinctly different wars, and they
Speaker 6: would send us back and forth between them like they were,
Speaker 6: you know, a national Guard weekends. You know, I'm like,
Speaker 6: this is not cool. And then we still didn't learn,
Speaker 6: I don't think.
Speaker 1: And then what did you.
Speaker 3: What was your impression And if you had one of
Speaker 3: the ro O s as they started, as they changed,
Speaker 3: as they changed, as they changed.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well try to try to deal that with your
Speaker 6: host nation, you know. So you know, if you got
Speaker 6: your your host guys helping your on your detail, what's
Speaker 6: their idea of an r OE?
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, so you're you're totally.
Speaker 6: Put in a position that I don't think is attainable
Speaker 6: or winnable. And truthfully, we just kind of ignored it,
Speaker 6: and you know, if the tree fell in the woods.
Speaker 6: I learned that in Africa.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know you mentioned that, like Africa was.
Speaker 3: An interesting wake up call for you where you tried
Speaker 3: to take you know, the the s F you know,
Speaker 3: sort of SOPs into a war with warriors who had
Speaker 3: been fighting for a long period of time and they're like, no,
Speaker 3: like we tried that fifteen years ago or whatever.
Speaker 4: How was that?
Speaker 3: Then taking what you had learned in Africa into Afghanistan
Speaker 3: in Iraq with you know, with US service members or
Speaker 3: former US service members who were also going on you know,
Speaker 3: not r os, but SOPs developed during Vietnam and afterwards.
Speaker 6: I think it greatly helped. I mean I was light
Speaker 6: years ahead of the guys.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I always used to tease them like, don't worry. I
Speaker 5: remember my first war too.
Speaker 6: But I was boogered up in Sara Leone, you know,
Speaker 6: because I thought I knew my shit.
Speaker 5: I was just two weeks out of group.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And now here's the funny part. When I was flying
Speaker 6: into Sara Leone.
Speaker 5: I didn't know anything about it. It was two weeks.
Speaker 5: I didn't have time to do an area study or
Speaker 5: even read a book.
Speaker 6: So I'm in ivory coast at a hotel staying to
Speaker 6: fly the next day, and I'm in a bar eating
Speaker 6: steak and I look across and I see a team
Speaker 6: over there getting littered, drinking out of the OP fund.
Speaker 6: I'm like, okay, you know, they got the little bag
Speaker 6: everybody carries the OP fund in, you know, So I
Speaker 6: see them drinking out of it. And I finished my
Speaker 6: meal and I walk over there. I'm like, where are
Speaker 6: you jackasses from? I'm like, oh, we're third group. We
Speaker 6: just left Sara Leone. I'm like, oh really, oh, And
Speaker 6: they sat down and gave me my intel brief, you know,
Speaker 6: half littered. But they actually the only time in my
Speaker 6: life I've heard of such an issue. They were ordered
Speaker 6: to show up at the airfield at like oh dark thirty.
Speaker 5: And just leave.
Speaker 6: They were on a FID there, and they left their
Speaker 6: weapons and como were ordered to And when I got
Speaker 6: there the next day, I got their weapons and como
Speaker 6: and I got in a helicopter.
Speaker 5: I flew out to the ocean and I threw it out.
Speaker 6: So it's the last thing I wanted there, but they left.
Speaker 6: I'm never in my life heard of such an orders. Yeah,
Speaker 6: I mean, you're you're saying that they didn't like leave
Speaker 6: it at the embassy. They left that like a teamhouse
Speaker 6: somewhere there was no embassy. Yeah, they left them with
Speaker 6: my cutout, you know. Yeah, I had won thirty sevens.
Speaker 6: I'm like, dude, I know I know how to run
Speaker 6: one thirty seven, but I know you're not allowed to
Speaker 6: leave one unattended.
Speaker 1: So it was like it was like the gardener was
Speaker 1: maintaining positive control over the weapons and como a case officer,
Speaker 1: that's better better than I was going to say, better
Speaker 1: than nothing.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I couldn't believe it. I'm like, that's PK's.
Speaker 5: And MAG fifty eight.
Speaker 6: I don't need American weapons in Africa, right, how are
Speaker 6: you going to feed that?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 6: R I dumped them in the ocean. I didn't want
Speaker 6: to have anything to do with it.
Speaker 1: Right, Wow? I mean did they did? They fly that
Speaker 1: team out commercial and that's why they couldn't travel.
Speaker 6: Yeah, okay, well no, they see one thirty. Sorry, they
Speaker 6: see one thirty. Show them up like in the middle
Speaker 6: of the night, left their host nation.
Speaker 5: Dude, very irritated.
Speaker 6: Wow, And they showed up the every coast and started drinking.
Speaker 1: As one does.
Speaker 5: The team back in the day.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it makes you wonder.
Speaker 1: I mean it makes you wonder.
Speaker 3: It makes you wonder, like because that was the State
Speaker 3: Department decision, right, that's not Yeah, nobody, nobody at the
Speaker 3: group level is saying, hey, leave your sensitive items behind.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I've ever heard of it in my life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're right, that's that's something that like the State
Speaker 1: Department decided without like considering all of the ramifications of
Speaker 1: like no, get them out right now. Yeah, yeah, you're
Speaker 1: you're probably right.
Speaker 5: Yeah. No. It was strange every day over there. I
Speaker 5: can write a book about.
Speaker 6: Yeah, every day. We know the best one. This is
Speaker 6: the best one on the whole trip. We're Me and
Speaker 6: my buddy were gassing up the helicopters one day over
Speaker 6: the main international airport. You know, they offload on the
Speaker 6: little stairs because they don't have the terminals. And here
Speaker 6: comes E one Marine or E two Marine walking off
Speaker 6: there with his duffel bag and his greens. I'm like, John,
Speaker 6: I think he's in the wrong place, and we go
Speaker 6: over there and get him. He thought he was.
Speaker 5: Going to Liberia.
Speaker 6: I'm like, well, you're in Sarah Leone actually, and you
Speaker 6: can't get there from here.
Speaker 5: So we kept him for a week, and we made
Speaker 5: him work with us.
Speaker 6: And I would love to meet that young marine and
Speaker 6: get his story because.
Speaker 5: It would be epic. That's why I didn't want to leave.
Speaker 5: I bet we had.
Speaker 6: Him in civilian clothes, carrying him bag fifty eight, partying.
Speaker 5: Every night, flying every day. I would I don't even
Speaker 5: know his name. I don't even remember his name.
Speaker 3: He can't called me anytime, did I How did you
Speaker 3: guys manage I mean did he manage to? Obviously, like
Speaker 3: whoever was waiting for him in Liberia thought he was
Speaker 3: a wall.
Speaker 5: We called the embassy, so you got you hooked him up.
Speaker 5: He took him later.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we weren't going there all the time. Yeah, it
Speaker 6: was like a week, week and a half later. We
Speaker 6: made a special trip and took him to the embassy
Speaker 6: down there.
Speaker 5: Before we evacuated it. Yeah so yeah, yeah, we we
Speaker 5: let him know.
Speaker 6: Yeah, because we talked to the embassy all the time
Speaker 6: down there because they were scared.
Speaker 1: That's wild.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I love all that kid's story. I mean, he's obviously
Speaker 1: not a.
Speaker 4: Kid now, yeah you know no, Yeah, he's.
Speaker 6: Forty fifty, twenty five years later, but yeah he's I
Speaker 6: bet he's a legend in the core.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you're right. Nobody though, No, that's the thing.
Speaker 4: Nobody's going to believe that ship at all.
Speaker 1: That's the kind of thing people lie about all the time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and he's a real deal.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's funny. Yeah, that's great that that would make
Speaker 1: like a great movie or something.
Speaker 5: Oh. I can still see him getting off the plane
Speaker 5: right now. I mean he's comical. Both our jaws dropped.
Speaker 5: We like, what the fuck is that? It's a marine flueless?
Speaker 1: Who to uh put a little bit of like a
Speaker 1: finger on it. I mean we had this conversation about
Speaker 1: how you learned so much from that conflict and working
Speaker 1: over there, Like what were like some specific like lessons
Speaker 1: learned that you kind of carried over into subsequent deployments.
Speaker 1: Put whether it's like operational planning or reconnaissance or tactics.
Speaker 6: Tactics I mean helicopter use. I mean we were getting
Speaker 6: shot at all the time, and you know, we'll do
Speaker 6: a speedball.
Speaker 5: They're like, don't you dare do a speedball?
Speaker 6: You land, You land as quick as you can, unload
Speaker 6: debt burd and get the hell out of there, you know,
Speaker 6: And yeah, just helicopter operations under fire different than when
Speaker 6: you're not under fire.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you need to be very competent. You need to
Speaker 5: know how the doors work, everything works, You need to
Speaker 5: know your load plan. You don't have time to sit there.
Speaker 6: And figure it out. And that's the choppers we were
Speaker 6: using in Afghanistan too, and some in the Iraq. So
Speaker 6: I was I was a pro at the MS, Yeah,
Speaker 6: because then things can lift anything if you get a
Speaker 6: little bit of runway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Dmitri, our producer is asking us to talk about
Speaker 1: what a speedball is. Do you want to answer that, Eric.
Speaker 6: Or do you want me to Well, I mean that
Speaker 6: was our resupply, a prepackage of a resupply of ammo,
Speaker 6: food and water and essentially throw it out of the helicopter.
Speaker 1: It's usually like MRIs and water and ammunition stuffed into
Speaker 1: a Duffel bag, right, and the bird just comes down,
Speaker 1: hovers ten feet off the deck, They push it out
Speaker 1: and then they fly away.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah, which makes a very good target.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 6: They're like safer to land, drop it off and then
Speaker 6: take off again.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because we had a lot of Essay seven.
Speaker 6: Problems over there, and you know, they weren't competent, which
Speaker 6: was gold But there's always lucky.
Speaker 4: Right, you know, right Golden beb you know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 6: I mean that it was comical two or three of
Speaker 6: us could make three or four hundred of them run away,
Speaker 6: and that makes you feel good.
Speaker 5: But you're like, wow, what if they actually knew what
Speaker 5: they were doing? Yeah, yeah, they would annihilate us.
Speaker 6: But they were pretty much all on drugs and just savages,
Speaker 6: a lot of savagery.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they were doing some nasty stuff at that time.
Speaker 1: You guys in the executive outcomes, guys did the world
Speaker 1: of favor by beating them back.
Speaker 5: Unheard of. I mean, you just don't even want to
Speaker 5: know what they were going over there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what you know? You mentioned the m I being
Speaker 3: an airframe used in both in Africa and then in
Speaker 3: Iraq and Afghanistan. Do you do you feel as though
Speaker 3: the US should have given that a harder look, especially
Speaker 3: like especially like in Afghanistan with the elevation is shoes,
Speaker 3: you know, and a lot of our birds having issues
Speaker 3: with the maintenance whatnot.
Speaker 5: Yeah, maintenance, we had no down days, but those.
Speaker 6: One time we needed a new engine, so they found
Speaker 6: one in a warehouse that had been in a warehouse
Speaker 6: for like ten years put it in.
Speaker 5: One day we needed a windshield.
Speaker 6: They flew out to a shot down helicopter, pulled the
Speaker 6: windshield off, put a new one on, and we flew off.
Speaker 6: I mean we had zero down hours. Yeah, everything's hydraulic
Speaker 6: or not hydraul cable. And they were beast. I think
Speaker 6: we should have them one hundred percent. Yeah, They're a
Speaker 6: beast and they cost.
Speaker 5: Nothing compared to anything we have.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and if you could fill it up and you
Speaker 6: had a little bit of runway you could take off.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, great helicopter.
Speaker 3: So you know, was there anything in particular that happened
Speaker 3: in either Afghanistan or Iraq that that you know, you
Speaker 3: want to talk about, any cool stories, funny stories, anything
Speaker 3: that kind of like triggers you at times.
Speaker 6: Well what triggered me was that pull out. Yeah, wow,
Speaker 6: that was astonishing. Yeah, you couldn't have done that any worse.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, and I know some.
Speaker 6: Of the people that were involved with that, you know,
Speaker 6: and I'm like, you made that decision astonishing. While we
Speaker 6: still don't have boggroom, which I hear they're going to
Speaker 6: give it back.
Speaker 5: Who knows what.
Speaker 6: That deal is, right, you know, just incredibly bad and
Speaker 6: I've been talking to some of the young kids that
Speaker 6: were over there during that and they're having problems, Yeah,
Speaker 6: because what they saw was atrocious. And our boys and
Speaker 6: the Tiger Stripes are the only ones that kept that
Speaker 6: airfield from falling. Yeah, and without those guys that host
Speaker 6: Nation unit there, it would have been really bad, even
Speaker 6: though it.
Speaker 5: Was pretty horrendous.
Speaker 6: So I try to pigeonhole all that stuff. I mean,
Speaker 6: we had great guys, but I think we lost them
Speaker 6: for no reason. You know, I've been to too many
Speaker 6: of the Arlington funerals there. I'm like, this was bullshit.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 6: I wanted to leave Afghanistan and five because I'm like,
Speaker 6: we're done. You're not taking Afghanistan. Come on, You're an
Speaker 6: asshole to think you are. And you know I'm in
Speaker 6: to get in and get out, you know, and then
Speaker 6: just have the grids just keep sending jay dams later.
Speaker 5: I don't care. But a lot of this stuff I
Speaker 5: think we've perpetrated.
Speaker 6: So I'm kind of against the whole Ukraine angle and
Speaker 6: the Yemen angle and all that. I'm like, we're making
Speaker 6: messes out of the place. Yeah, I'll take their arguments
Speaker 6: on that. I'll take them to task.
Speaker 1: I think the.
Speaker 3: You know, the it wasn't until we had Froedzec's wife.
Speaker 3: That was the first time I think I ever heard
Speaker 3: the term moral injury.
Speaker 1: She's going to be back to the end of the month,
Speaker 1: fantastic with a bunch of people who got the TBI
Speaker 1: legislation written into the NDAA this last year. She'll be here,
Speaker 1: unlike the like I think the twenty sixth I'll check
Speaker 1: it out. But yeah, later this month.
Speaker 3: But and and but that was the first time I
Speaker 3: had ever heard the term moral injury. And I think
Speaker 3: that that is a very good term, or very precise
Speaker 3: term for what a lot of veterans and people involved
Speaker 3: with Afghanistan felt with that pull out.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, it's just I know you're going to have
Speaker 6: to do it, but do it like you actually are
Speaker 6: adults and you plan something.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 6: It was just obnoxiously embarrassing and gave everybody also green light,
Speaker 6: you know, like you can't even leave a place, you
Speaker 6: can't invade it, right right.
Speaker 1: H D says it's April twenty fourth, is when Kate
Speaker 1: Rockline can some of the other folks who are involved
Speaker 1: in that legislation.
Speaker 3: Will be in here and I'm sorry, Kate, like for
Speaker 3: you know, you're not you're somebody more than Rhodes ex wife.
Speaker 1: That's just yeah, no, I get it. We couldn't recall.
Speaker 3: Your last name, and I'm sorry for that, but but yeah,
Speaker 3: it's so.
Speaker 4: What was so barring?
Speaker 1: What triggers you?
Speaker 3: I shouldn't said that, But are there any light other
Speaker 3: memories that you'd care to share that maybe aren't you.
Speaker 4: Know, as traumatic? You know, I'm sure there were good
Speaker 4: times too.
Speaker 5: Right, Oh, yeah, it's great times.
Speaker 6: I mean, you know, when you get to work with
Speaker 6: the guys that are solid, I mean, that's what everybody missed.
Speaker 6: Is more than any of this PTSD stuff, I think
Speaker 6: is just working with competent guys under pressure, with real
Speaker 6: world issues. You know, we're not used to just sitting
Speaker 6: around on a park bench in a park, you know,
Speaker 6: and I think that causes more of us issues than anything.
Speaker 6: But no, there was great stuff over there, but a
Speaker 6: lot of it was, you know, bookmarked by being limited
Speaker 6: by their either risk aversion, or incompetence or pretty much ignorance.
Speaker 6: They didn't know how this kind of warfare was and
Speaker 6: that makes people scared, and that means, you know, the
Speaker 6: best times was is when the boss would say, hey,
Speaker 6: come back in a week or two, Roger, that I'll
Speaker 6: find something to do, you know, And you go around
Speaker 6: and you sort things out, drop off all the phones
Speaker 6: to a local oda, and do it again.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you know it's just big boy rules. Early.
Speaker 6: Nowadays, I don't think the boys are having that much fun.
Speaker 6: I think there's there's too many people watching in your ears,
Speaker 6: too limited. But back early, you could actually, you know,
Speaker 6: be a professional and look at a situation and go,
Speaker 6: this is how we should handle this. To other people agree,
Speaker 6: you go and do it, and you know, there's there's
Speaker 6: nothing wrong with that. But that's that's a lot of freedom.
Speaker 6: And they trust you for your judgment. I always said
Speaker 6: that you're not you're not paying me to do the job,
Speaker 6: you're paying me to have good judgment. Yeah, and uh,
Speaker 6: you know, I think we've always did a good job there.
Speaker 6: I mean, you've had plenty of the other guys on here.
Speaker 6: I'm sure they'll say or have said the same thing,
Speaker 6: and that that's what I remember. You know, there's good,
Speaker 6: good jobs, bad jobs, but being trusted with that is
Speaker 6: always impressive.
Speaker 5: Yeah, nobody knows.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, when did when did things start winding down
Speaker 3: for you personally, and was there a reason.
Speaker 1: That they did?
Speaker 5: That was its own special nightmare.
Speaker 6: So while I was doing all those trips, I was
Speaker 6: still running those other companies. So you talk about overtasking
Speaker 6: to deal with your own anxiety or traumas. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 6: I was working myself into the grave. And today's my
Speaker 6: son's birthday. But I remember that little jack ass one day.
Speaker 6: I sold the company in twenty thirteen, and two days
Speaker 6: later I got divorce papers and I'm like, what.
Speaker 5: The fuck's going on here?
Speaker 6: My son walks by, he goes, Dad, you didn't see
Speaker 6: that coming. I'm like, no, obviously, you know I supposed
Speaker 6: to hook a brother up here. Been a little busy,
Speaker 6: and yeah, it just you know, you know, it doesn't
Speaker 6: come in threes, it comes in piles sometimes. So I
Speaker 6: got out of the contracting, sold that company, and just
Speaker 6: had to had to rebuild everything.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 6: I was a bitter man for a while. Hence you'll
Speaker 6: notice that in the book.
Speaker 5: I admit it. But you know, there's just we didn't
Speaker 5: understand any of this. Uh I don't. I don't even
Speaker 5: like the term PTSD.
Speaker 6: It's just when you get disappointed, you know, you don't
Speaker 6: need to know the reason you're disappointed.
Speaker 5: But when you work like a.
Speaker 6: Slave and then everything crumbles down, you're like how and
Speaker 6: why did that happen?
Speaker 5: You know, But that's just the life lesson. You got
Speaker 5: to roll with it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and years later it makes total sense Now I
Speaker 6: have no problem with it.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 6: It was a very hard lesson, but I learned a
Speaker 6: whole lot to help a lot of other people with.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: For the time, I was like fucking neer ambush and
Speaker 6: just kept running from ambush to ambush.
Speaker 4: So let's let's talk about the book a little bit.
Speaker 3: I mean, let's if we can, let's start with your
Speaker 3: journey when you know whether, because we're talking about so
Speaker 3: many different things, right, We're talking about post amount of stress.
Speaker 3: We're talking about operator center, We're talking about not being
Speaker 3: around the guys living on the edge.
Speaker 4: With this pure mission anymore.
Speaker 3: We're talking about TBIs, Like there's such a morass, a
Speaker 3: stew of stuff that's combined.
Speaker 4: How do you pull it apart?
Speaker 3: And it's also insidious that sometimes like we don't even
Speaker 3: realize we're going through it right until somebody else, until
Speaker 3: somebody else goes hey, like that's not normal.
Speaker 6: Yeah, these days, I can an idea guy by just
Speaker 6: looking at him.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I'll sity down.
Speaker 6: I'm like, hey, talk to me and I'll get them
Speaker 6: into treatment immediately. And people I have no I don't
Speaker 6: know them from Adam, but I can I can see
Speaker 6: it like reading.
Speaker 5: A book, just like.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's intuition or something.
Speaker 5: I don't know, but I can see it in.
Speaker 6: A guy's eyes. You know, they're just they're just dead, yeah,
Speaker 6: you know, and I can turn them around pretty quick.
Speaker 6: I mean I think again, I'm you know, tooting my
Speaker 6: own horn. But you know, I've always wrote books because
Speaker 6: I hate relearning something. So in all units I was in,
Speaker 6: I would write so ops that I wouldn't ask to write.
Speaker 5: I'm like, I don't care.
Speaker 6: You know, we're going to write the breaching sop or
Speaker 6: the I wrote a JSOP for first Battalion and the
Speaker 6: three fifty third, you know, the MG fifty threes, because
Speaker 6: I'm like, we're a joint unit. No one knows how
Speaker 6: to do repelling ops or resupply ops or jump off.
Speaker 5: You know, we just didn't have a menu on it.
Speaker 5: I'm like, we have to have an SOP on everything.
Speaker 5: You know, and I've done tons of.
Speaker 6: The weapons manuals because I despise the old fms with
Speaker 6: pencil drawn guns, you know, So I redid all that
Speaker 6: for a lot of the different organizations. But with this one,
Speaker 6: these were I took my notes because I don't want
Speaker 6: to recross bridges, and I just kept writing my own
Speaker 6: notes and I kept I think it kept my busy
Speaker 6: mind good to go too. But I want to be
Speaker 6: able to always hand something to somebody else if I
Speaker 6: don't have time to explain it. And this thing turned
Speaker 6: into a beast. I mean, it's five hundred freaking pages
Speaker 6: without one picture.
Speaker 5: So I just want.
Speaker 6: Guys to have a place as a reference book to
Speaker 6: get the quick on it and then detailed search on
Speaker 6: their own.
Speaker 5: You know, they don't have to read the whole book.
Speaker 5: They can read a couple of paragraphs.
Speaker 1: Well, And that's I mean.
Speaker 3: And that's the thing is that the book it's not
Speaker 3: it's not laid out like a self help book. It's
Speaker 3: it's laid out so I can go, you know, in
Speaker 3: alphabetical order, like buy, and I can go, uh, post
Speaker 3: my extress, let me look.
Speaker 4: It up, and then a list of you know, and
Speaker 4: all all the different things.
Speaker 1: But that's the book they should give guys when they're etsing.
Speaker 5: I know it's a transition book.
Speaker 6: Because in the back, I I have all the reference
Speaker 6: books I read for this. I mean I read I
Speaker 6: don't even know how many freaking books to steal this
Speaker 6: information from. So I want them to look in the back,
Speaker 6: find the book, and then go for it. But you know,
Speaker 6: I remember a marine combatant long time ago said put
Speaker 6: your TMS and fms by the bathroom, and more education
Speaker 6: through more defecation. I was like, that's moronically simple, but true.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 6: So they're just like a one bathroom trip vignette of
Speaker 6: each subject, and you know, and that's too much.
Speaker 5: I can't help.
Speaker 3: You well, and honestly that that's a good point. Not
Speaker 3: to minimize this book in any way. But this book
Speaker 3: is great bathroom reading because that's because you don't there's
Speaker 3: no like, there's no where was I last time? Like
Speaker 3: whether you can just open it up and go, oh,
Speaker 3: Niasin and just start reading about Niosin and oh fuck,
Speaker 3: like this might be something I want to look in.
Speaker 3: You know, it's it's it's great for that, you know,
Speaker 3: it's a great reference.
Speaker 6: Our guys are smart, but they still have short attention spans. Sure,
Speaker 6: you know, it was just a way of the times
Speaker 6: are right now with these damn telephones.
Speaker 5: Sure, so yeah, I wrote it that way, you know.
Speaker 5: And I really wanted to write the real self help book, but.
Speaker 6: I ran into so many of these that I would
Speaker 6: need to explain so much that book would have been deluded.
Speaker 6: So I wanted to write this one first and writing
Speaker 6: the other one that I actually wanted to write years ago,
Speaker 6: you know, on how I'm doing it and what I
Speaker 6: do today, what I do this week, what I do
Speaker 6: that month, you know, like sit out here and be thirsty.
Speaker 3: So Eric, let's let's if you don't mind, let's like
Speaker 3: let's talk about like your journey.
Speaker 4: Did you know, at what point did it come.
Speaker 3: To your awareness that whether it was post traumatic stress,
Speaker 3: whether it was tbi's, whether it was you know, moral injury,
Speaker 3: that that something was off kilter.
Speaker 5: Well, it was an example I saw I was like maybe.
Speaker 6: A nineteen year old, you know, in the guard there,
Speaker 6: and one of the old Vietnam guys took me hunting
Speaker 6: one day. So we're out there hunting and I come
Speaker 6: around and I see him sitting over there on a log,
Speaker 6: just crying his eyes out.
Speaker 5: I didn't know what the fuck was going on, so
Speaker 5: I didn't know what to do. I just pulled back,
Speaker 5: waited until he.
Speaker 6: Settled down, you know, half an hour later, and I
Speaker 6: walked over like nothing happened.
Speaker 5: I had no idea. I never seen anything in my life.
Speaker 6: And he was over one hundred and first and s
Speaker 6: F guy, you know, hard, hard fighting guy, Hamburger hill guy.
Speaker 6: And I never saw it again. And then one day
Speaker 6: I took my son hunting. He was the one or two,
Speaker 6: and he fell asleep and I broke down like a bitch,
Speaker 6: like what is going on here? And that's when I
Speaker 6: started to talk to the old guys, so, hey, what
Speaker 6: the hell is going on here?
Speaker 5: Man?
Speaker 6: And I didn't believe him for a long time, you know,
Speaker 6: but it's just there's no there's no easy way, you know.
Speaker 1: You're what did the old timers tell you?
Speaker 6: Like?
Speaker 1: How was? I think it's very interesting because of their generation,
Speaker 1: and they didn't have access to all the treatments we have.
Speaker 1: Right the way they looked at it or dealt with
Speaker 1: it and lived with it is maybe a little bit
Speaker 1: different than us. I'm just curious to hear what you
Speaker 1: learned from them.
Speaker 6: It wasn't anything I would give his advice, stuck it up,
Speaker 6: it'll get better, drink ignore it.
Speaker 5: That was horrible.
Speaker 6: I mean they had no way to deal with it, right,
Speaker 6: you know here they had a VFW where you had
Speaker 6: cheap beers.
Speaker 5: Well, that's a great idea.
Speaker 6: Let's all have issues and then go drink until we're
Speaker 6: littered and not spend much.
Speaker 3: And you know, and you know, we talk about the
Speaker 3: moral injury of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but regardless of that,
Speaker 3: we lived in an age or we live in an
Speaker 3: age where, probably because of the shame of the way
Speaker 3: Vietnam veterans were treated, everybody, regardless of whether they believe
Speaker 3: it or not, everybody is very quick to say thank
Speaker 3: you for your service. Right, So when you when you
Speaker 3: talk about when you talk about Vietnam veterans, you're talking
Speaker 3: about that wasn't a thing and they and you want
Speaker 3: you want to talk about moral injury. You're talking about
Speaker 3: coming back to a culture that that was very against
Speaker 3: what you were doing there. And even if people were
Speaker 3: against what we were doing in Iraq or Afghanistan, they
Speaker 3: still want to They don't want to. It's not personal
Speaker 3: it's like, no, thank you, I appreciate what you did.
Speaker 4: I just don't agree.
Speaker 3: But they didn't even have that right, Yeah, no.
Speaker 5: It had to be the worst. Yeah, I had to
Speaker 5: be the worst. But I don't like the superficial stuff.
Speaker 6: I mean, I've had a lot of people go, Eric,
Speaker 6: what do you need?
Speaker 5: How can I help?
Speaker 6: Those are the supporters you need, you know, And I've
Speaker 6: been amazed by that, you know, And I've gotten a
Speaker 6: lot of my buddy's help that way.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 6: I'll call those same people up and go, hey, I
Speaker 6: got a buddy he this has to be done, and
Speaker 6: they won't even flinch.
Speaker 5: They just was he need?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 5: You know. So it's so much better now.
Speaker 6: And part of the pisser is, I mean there's forty
Speaker 6: five thousand veterans organizations now, so it's like where does
Speaker 6: a guy even go?
Speaker 5: So that's the part I have to write a little
Speaker 5: better in the book. I'm going to do an annex
Speaker 5: on it. Yeah, because where does the guy start? You know?
Speaker 6: And most of these foundations only do one thing, right,
Speaker 6: so I don't need that one thing.
Speaker 5: They don't help you. I'm like, well that's the wrong answer.
Speaker 6: You know. And in the front of the new edition
Speaker 6: of this I put in there like, Hey, if you're
Speaker 6: going to help guys, this is how you have to
Speaker 6: trioge it.
Speaker 5: You know, just don't do it to feel good.
Speaker 3: Right, So let's talk about if you you're okay talking
Speaker 3: about it, let's talk about your journey and the trioge
Speaker 3: because again we are talking about post traumatic stress and
Speaker 3: TBIs and opera like, there are so many different things
Speaker 3: going on, right, and how you know, we talked about
Speaker 3: you know, how many door breaches we've all eaten on
Speaker 3: these direct actions, uh hundreds just and and and the
Speaker 3: effect of that TBI And where does the TBI end
Speaker 3: and the post traumatic star.
Speaker 1: And and and.
Speaker 4: How do you pull it apart?
Speaker 3: And how do you treat this multi not only multi symptomatic,
Speaker 3: but multi origin, right, there's multi.
Speaker 5: Cause was complex. It was very complex. Yeah, And that's
Speaker 5: where there was no path, you know, right.
Speaker 6: And that's where I've kind of guinea pigged myself on
Speaker 6: so many of these different modalities as kind of a
Speaker 6: reason to keep kicking, you know, because you get war
Speaker 6: out because some of these modalities, if you get them
Speaker 6: out of order, it actually is worse.
Speaker 5: Than if you didn't do them because it gives you hope,
Speaker 5: and then it doesn't work right.
Speaker 6: So now you're like, holy shit, I just wasted forty
Speaker 6: five days and mirk thirty minutes a day, five days
Speaker 6: a week, and I don't feel any right.
Speaker 5: It really makes you go, who the hell's running this?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 6: So I think what I've been trying to do is
Speaker 6: to figure out a triage message method to teach guys.
Speaker 5: I've still got my speech impediment.
Speaker 6: But I'm going to a different brain treatment center next
Speaker 6: month for an actual whole month, So I'm still rating
Speaker 6: the trioge protocol.
Speaker 5: But what I've learned recently, and it's it's hard to
Speaker 5: nail that, Dave.
Speaker 6: Well, what I've discovered recently is you have to realize
Speaker 6: your consciousness, and that in my suspect, in my view
Speaker 6: of what happened is we're just put into this meat suit.
Speaker 5: For this trip.
Speaker 6: And I think that helped me a lot, going Okay, well,
Speaker 6: I'll get to do this again somewhere else. I hope
Speaker 6: I don't show up in Haiti or somewhere and it
Speaker 6: lets you go, Okay, I understand. Then I got to
Speaker 6: fix my reality. How do I change what's good and
Speaker 6: bad in my reality that I get to choose. And
Speaker 6: then now, how do I fix the body because we've
Speaker 6: damaged it so much reaches and SPG ninees and mortars
Speaker 6: and i eds, there's no way around it. You know,
Speaker 6: you're you're not tough enough, tough and out over pressure, right,
Speaker 6: And I'm finding some of these modalities work, but I
Speaker 6: think we're doing them in the wrong orders. So that's
Speaker 6: why I want to finish these last couple and then
Speaker 6: really be hard digged about forcing these organizations to do
Speaker 6: it in a triage manner, because these guys have to
Speaker 6: know that there's there's light at the end of the tunnel.
Speaker 6: It's not just we're sending you to one you know,
Speaker 6: it's like some of these they'll send you to fishing
Speaker 6: for a weekend.
Speaker 5: It doesn't fix a.
Speaker 1: TV I in right, you know, what do you what
Speaker 1: do you see as the triage order? Because like I
Speaker 1: remember talking to one person at one point who told
Speaker 1: me that they found with veterans, the first thing they
Speaker 1: have to treat is the substance abuse because that that
Speaker 1: will kill them right off. That's the thing that's going
Speaker 1: to kill you first, right, Yeah, and then you're getting lucky.
Speaker 5: I don't smoke, drink, I don't do any of that.
Speaker 5: You know, I'm pretty boring, but yeah, if you don't
Speaker 5: do that, you're boogered.
Speaker 6: You can't get a guy to because you constant inflammation.
Speaker 6: And I called it daily detox. You know, we we
Speaker 6: have so many chemicals in US, or heavy metals in US,
Speaker 6: or or just shitty food. You can't get the brain
Speaker 6: to work right if it's constantly inflamed. And uh, I
Speaker 6: mean they think how many times you sucked up an
Speaker 6: RPG exhaust?
Speaker 5: None of that's good for you, you know.
Speaker 6: I remember a breach in Okuanaga one time where we
Speaker 6: used FLSC, which is a shape charge, but it's lead
Speaker 6: encased and it's it's vapor rises into lead. And I'm like,
Speaker 6: shouldn't we put a mask on?
Speaker 5: And they're like, hey, shut up, new guy, just run
Speaker 5: through the breach. It's like freaking lead, it's yellow.
Speaker 1: Right, And how many.
Speaker 6: Two years the detox heavy metals and chemical Yeah yeah.
Speaker 4: How many times to shoot houses?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 3: And and like the like it's not the fumes in
Speaker 3: the toxin is aren't going anywhere.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you bang any house, you imagine what you're gonna
Speaker 6: smell in there.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, it's astonishing. But I think detox is critical.
Speaker 5: But that is not cheap.
Speaker 6: I mean, you have to do a blood teatox. You
Speaker 6: got to do uh, you know, your your muscle tissues,
Speaker 6: your lymphatic system. And that's where I harp in this book,
Speaker 6: the lymph system. If we can clean up the lymph system,
Speaker 6: we won't get sick, We'll be able to detox quickly people.
Speaker 6: I mean, I argue with doctors who don't even understand
Speaker 6: the links lymph system and I'm just like, whatever, you know,
Speaker 6: But that's where I start. If you can't do that,
Speaker 6: the rest really doesn't work. Because if you're in constant
Speaker 6: inflammation the brain, you know, you'll create a side of
Speaker 6: kind storm and you'll just be overwhelmed by emotions that
Speaker 6: your olympic system is just crushing.
Speaker 5: You know, you can't function.
Speaker 6: So how can you make a good decision on who
Speaker 6: you need to call for help when your olympic system
Speaker 6: is so out of balance you have to have somebody
Speaker 6: walk by and go, hey, stop.
Speaker 5: Let me help you. And we're bad about that, you
Speaker 5: know that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, I mean it's and I think that.
Speaker 3: For a lot of people, that all the all of
Speaker 3: the things that that is effective are also the things
Speaker 3: that keep they keep them from like, you know, getting
Speaker 3: help right that that you might have resources, so you
Speaker 3: might have people to reach out to, but they won't.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I've had to intervene too many times because I
Speaker 6: wish somebody would have intervened with me and grab me
Speaker 6: by the hair. Yeah you don't, because I had tons
Speaker 6: of my buddies and your buddies to day that that
Speaker 6: we work together for years and nobody said anything. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: we knew something was wrong, but we all just let
Speaker 6: everybody go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because we're tough guys.
Speaker 6: And uh, I don't do that anymore. I'll set somebody
Speaker 6: down and say, hey, this is what I think. And
Speaker 6: if you blow me off, you blow me off.
Speaker 5: If not, we start working on it. Yeah, I'll find
Speaker 5: you help.
Speaker 4: So what was it for you? What was there a moment?
Speaker 3: Was there a thing like like did somebody grab you?
Speaker 1: Were you?
Speaker 4: How did you act? What happened?
Speaker 1: If you don't mind, I was.
Speaker 6: I was training a great client out in Montana every summer.
Speaker 5: I would teach shooting out there. She's like a Katherine
Speaker 5: Hepburn tight.
Speaker 6: You know, you don't mess with her, and she come
Speaker 6: down the range one day and I was gonna do
Speaker 6: some shooting and she goes, you're not You're not okay.
Speaker 6: I said, oh, I'm fine, man.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 6: She goes there, shut up, You're going to go see
Speaker 6: my doctor in San Francisco figured it out, and I
Speaker 6: went down there and uh.
Speaker 5: Pull boat. You know. Whatever he needed was the order.
Speaker 6: And it took me weeks to just start the detox
Speaker 6: program on the heavy metals and doing.
Speaker 5: The brain evaluations and doing the you know.
Speaker 6: My balance was boogered up, you know, the center of
Speaker 6: gravity was off. Just so many things we ignore and
Speaker 6: we we uh make up the difference and don't know
Speaker 6: that it's bad.
Speaker 5: And it was just very realistic.
Speaker 6: And one day he gave me this little little gel
Speaker 6: pill to put under my tongue. He goes, come back
Speaker 6: in tomorrow morning. Put that in your tongue tonight. I said, okay,
Speaker 6: I come back next day.
Speaker 5: He goes, how you feel.
Speaker 6: I'm like, dude, I feel really weird, and I go
Speaker 6: down through these symptoms.
Speaker 5: And he goes, Eric, I hate to break it to you,
Speaker 5: but that's what normal feels like. I'm like, oh, okay,
Speaker 5: because when's.
Speaker 6: The last time that happened, I'm like, I can't remember.
Speaker 6: He goes, Okay, well it's going to take a little longer, and.
Speaker 5: Uh yeah it was really yeah yeah yeah, so that
Speaker 5: was that was about as uh just jarring.
Speaker 3: As you can get, just just the natural bonding chemical
Speaker 3: of the brain.
Speaker 5: Correct.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, So that that got me on it.
Speaker 6: I mean as doctor Azolino, he's I mentioned him right
Speaker 6: up front of the book, you know, thanking him for
Speaker 6: teaching me all this stuff and putting up with me
Speaker 6: because I was a bear back then.
Speaker 5: I mean I was rough and uh he has.
Speaker 6: Some great modalities, but you know, he's only one man,
Speaker 6: but he has a great clinic out in San Francisco,
Speaker 6: and uh he'll tune you up quick. I mean, I
Speaker 6: just sent one of my buds out there that you
Speaker 6: know has some Dame Bramage. You don't remember the old
Speaker 6: Stay Night lab with that one, but Dame Bramage and uh,
Speaker 6: miraculous change in two weeks, just incredible improvements.
Speaker 1: And so how did the book come about? Like you
Speaker 1: must have reached a point in your own treatment that
Speaker 1: you felt like you wanted to share some of these
Speaker 1: experiences with others, right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Yeah, as I said, I always write everything down,
Speaker 6: whether I publish it or not, who knows. I've got
Speaker 6: tons of books I've never published. You know, they're for me,
Speaker 6: and if I have a friend that needs that information,
Speaker 6: I'll give it to them personally. But this one I
Speaker 6: just wanted. There's so much out there, but I don't
Speaker 6: see it in one place, and I think that's annoying.
Speaker 6: So you know, I've always had a book team to
Speaker 6: back me up. You know, I contract them so they
Speaker 6: know when I hand them a pile of something, they're
Speaker 6: going to come out with a book. And I said,
Speaker 6: we're doing this one, and I would love to illustrate it,
Speaker 6: but I just keep writing more subjects. I think the
Speaker 6: subjects are more important than an illustration. So you know,
Speaker 6: I just want you can grab one book and hopefully
Speaker 6: as a veteran or some one of that type can
Speaker 6: see the subject they need to learn about and then
Speaker 6: start peeling the onion.
Speaker 1: That's awesome. Where can people go to find it?
Speaker 5: Oh? It's on Amazon. Amazon.
Speaker 3: The book again, for those of you who may not
Speaker 3: have caught it as fire Support, A Veteran's Guide to Health,
Speaker 3: Healing and Life Beyond Service.
Speaker 4: Uh looks like an FM.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's you know, it's it's very familiar territory.
Speaker 5: For a minute, we.
Speaker 1: Have linked right, yeah, the link will be in the description.
Speaker 8: So of so you know, you talk about I know
Speaker 8: you you you know, I don't know if you want
Speaker 8: to talk about what we did before the show, like
Speaker 8: the thing that you felt helped you the most. But
Speaker 8: how do people pull apart or where where do they
Speaker 8: start when it comes to is this.
Speaker 4: Post traumatic stress?
Speaker 1: Is this TBIs?
Speaker 3: Is this like I'm feeling like this, you know, whether
Speaker 3: it's you know, I can't get out of bed or
Speaker 3: I'm going to pull this dude out of his car, uh,
Speaker 3: you know for honking at me, like it comes in
Speaker 3: a lot of different ways, right, yeah, all that, yeah,
Speaker 3: but but mhm, where would you say people.
Speaker 1: Start?
Speaker 4: Men and women you know who were and.
Speaker 3: You know civilians go through a lot of this too,
Speaker 3: maybe maybe maybe not, you know, you know, obviously they
Speaker 3: probably don't have a lot of over pressure injuries, you know, uh,
Speaker 3: you know, mixing in with that post traumatic stress.
Speaker 4: But where do people start, like when they.
Speaker 6: I think relationships, I mean those closest to you see it, Yeah,
Speaker 6: but they don't know what to do about it, right.
Speaker 5: I mean I used to all the time.
Speaker 6: I mean when I was coming back from those trips,
Speaker 6: I would always force the office to let me stay
Speaker 6: in like Romania a week or Germany for a week,
Speaker 6: so I wouldn't go straight home. Yeah, because I couldn't
Speaker 6: do it. We were going home far too quickly world
Speaker 6: War two. You know, they take a ship back, they
Speaker 6: see you in a couple of months. But nowadays, hindsight,
Speaker 6: I saw it all back then, and the folks that
Speaker 6: worked with me saw it too.
Speaker 5: Once again.
Speaker 6: It was it was like that Vietnam mentality of it'll workout,
Speaker 6: or you know, it's just cranky, you know, And that's
Speaker 6: not it at all, you know, it's it's it's the.
Speaker 5: Beginning of it.
Speaker 6: And you have to identify that and go, okay, hey,
Speaker 6: what's causing that. But if you're doing that and it's
Speaker 6: a malfunctioning Olympic system, you're not consciously doing it, right,
Speaker 6: you know. And that's why I don't fall guys for that.
Speaker 6: You know, I'm like, they're not doing that on purpose.
Speaker 5: Who the hell would do that on purpose?
Speaker 6: And and that's the harmful part that you know, it
Speaker 6: takes a long time to rebuild those relationships once you
Speaker 6: get better, but they have to realize you didn't wake
Speaker 6: up saying hey I'm going to be a cranky asshole
Speaker 6: today and piss everybody off.
Speaker 5: That's just not normal. Hate to break it to you.
Speaker 6: You know, I perfected it, but you know it wasn't
Speaker 6: on purpose.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 6: Held the name of the company was black Heart International.
Speaker 6: You don't pick your own call signs, you know, So.
Speaker 5: Figure that one out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, aren't these black Heart International?
Speaker 5: Yeah? That's my books right there? Man? Where'd you get them?
Speaker 5: Those are old ones?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 5: Those are ancs. That's like Model one. Yeah, that's that's
Speaker 5: the old models. Man.
Speaker 1: Sorry, Eric, I had to plug myself back in. I
Speaker 1: love these manuals, man, Yeah, A long time ago these
Speaker 1: were like for now are there really?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I did all the way that you've done.
Speaker 1: I got the RPG, the p k UH, the AK,
Speaker 1: the macarov and UH and the Dishka. These are like
Speaker 1: the best manuals out there. Man, I didn't know this
Speaker 1: was you.
Speaker 6: They those are the ones Texas maybe right in six
Speaker 6: fucking weeks.
Speaker 1: These are great and people can people can still find
Speaker 1: these out there?
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, yeah, Jack, I probably got.
Speaker 5: Forty of those now. I mean I'm down to all
Speaker 5: kinds of little.
Speaker 6: Handbooks pan Noona and I did a bunch of the
Speaker 6: little flip hand books for like four block and all that.
Speaker 5: Dude you used to sell the bushel.
Speaker 1: I'm going to go look for him Texas.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they do. You know how many copies they bought.
Speaker 6: One set seriously takes in the same set.
Speaker 1: Still good for folks. For folks out there, like I've
Speaker 1: been through all the fms and everything myself, and including
Speaker 1: the ones that the newer ones from Special Warfare Center,
Speaker 1: which are not bad, but those ones, the Blackhart International
Speaker 1: ones are the best, like legit full color photographs, easy
Speaker 1: to understand instructions and diagrams. That they're the best ones made.
Speaker 1: That's no bullshit.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I just got tired of all the bad ones
Speaker 6: out there. Yeah yeah, and I'm like, you know, I
Speaker 6: have a camera watch this, and I owned all the
Speaker 6: guns because we used to teach a lot of the
Speaker 6: foreign weapons courses and uh yeah, there's great books, man,
Speaker 6: I like them. But we did a full NATO set
Speaker 6: and a full com Block set.
Speaker 1: Yeah awesome. Yeah, I'm gonna go we get out of those.
Speaker 1: Super cool.
Speaker 5: I'll send you some more.
Speaker 1: Okay, what else do we want to get into?
Speaker 4: No, so you know you're on an eight day water fast?
Speaker 1: Tell us?
Speaker 3: Or yeah, yeah, no, uh no, but you're on day
Speaker 3: seven or eight of a water fast. It'll last, however long?
Speaker 3: Tell like, tell us about that? Tell us, Like, in
Speaker 3: terms of what you've learned, what do you think that
Speaker 3: the top priorities are. Because you've talked about detox and
Speaker 3: you've talked about you know, all this ship and our
Speaker 3: lymphatic system and our bodies that we've been exposed to.
Speaker 3: And again like this is we're talking about veterans and
Speaker 3: and and vet adjacent people right now. But this is
Speaker 3: good for the general population, I'm sure.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So yeah, I'm going to turn that book into a
Speaker 6: general pop book too.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I just you know, want to focus on the guys first.
Speaker 6: But all the cities are like, hey, I want this.
Speaker 6: I'm like a human is a veteran too? Sure you
Speaker 6: can use it. But my daughter had cancer when she
Speaker 6: was one. She had eye cancer. So that's when I
Speaker 6: really went down the cancer rabbit hole. So that that
Speaker 6: taught the detox and all this and that.
Speaker 5: But fasting is the ultimate detox.
Speaker 6: I mean your body when it's when it's not eating
Speaker 6: bullshit or any food.
Speaker 5: It will eat up anything it doesn't need, and that's
Speaker 5: I'm hoping. Damaged parts of my brain. That's my newest
Speaker 5: guinea pig.
Speaker 6: That's why I'm on this one because I did a
Speaker 6: spec scan, which scans and shows the active and non
Speaker 6: active parts of your brain. And I'm, like the doctor
Speaker 6: had explained it to me. If there's damaged parts are
Speaker 6: still up there and you get some type of trigger,
Speaker 6: it'll cause a cytokind storm up there to once again
Speaker 6: take over your limbic and you're kind of out of
Speaker 6: control to a point.
Speaker 5: That's where these people have these super issues.
Speaker 6: But I'm thinking, well, through autophagy, if we can eat
Speaker 6: those up, they.
Speaker 1: Won't be there, right.
Speaker 6: So I'm kind of sucking this up to see if
Speaker 6: I can make some of that go away on my
Speaker 6: next brain scan, right because I'm getting one next month.
Speaker 5: So that's as I said, I guinea pig myself all
Speaker 5: the time.
Speaker 3: And particularly what I mean if we're talking about other
Speaker 3: parts of the body, you know, autophogy is one thing.
Speaker 3: When we're talking about the brain though, in neuroplasticity and
Speaker 3: the idea of the brain can totally create new pathways
Speaker 3: than the brain, Like autophogy in the brain potentially is great,
Speaker 3: potentially has a greater result than anywhere in the body.
Speaker 6: Right correct, Yeah, yeah, And I mean we all have
Speaker 6: fat we don't need, but we all have scar tissue,
Speaker 6: we all have any everybody has some kind of cancer
Speaker 6: tumors in They may be microscopic, but you know you can.
Speaker 5: Eat those upright, what do your mind? Had breast cancer
Speaker 5: and I put him on a pretty rigid.
Speaker 6: Two month thing and by the time he got to
Speaker 6: the surgery, the tumors were gone. Yeah, they still butchered him.
Speaker 6: I'm like, okay, good job. But no, I've got some
Speaker 6: modalities that people were like crazy about. You know, the
Speaker 6: radio frequency stuff. Totally believe in it. I've seen it work.
Speaker 6: The royal rife machines totally works. You can kill most
Speaker 6: diseases and cancers with the frequency. That's a Havana syndrome
Speaker 6: and all this. They're like, oh, we don't know what
Speaker 6: it is. And I'm like, you liars.
Speaker 5: We invented this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we invented all that.
Speaker 6: But detox, man, I mean, fasting is I mean, it
Speaker 6: clears your mind. I mean my mind gets hyperactive when
Speaker 6: after day three or four.
Speaker 5: It kills all the parasites in you. It was like,
Speaker 5: what parasites?
Speaker 6: I'm like your dog and cats get parasite medicine, right, yeah?
Speaker 6: Or why are you special? So no, I feel light
Speaker 6: years better after a fast. Yeah, it's just good to
Speaker 6: do as a maintenance.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 1: Someone told me, and I was pretty skeptical of what
Speaker 1: he told me, But now I'm listening to you. Maybe
Speaker 1: he was onto something that fasting is actually a way
Speaker 1: to head off Alzheimer's disease.
Speaker 5: Of course I think so.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I think it's because you have a detoxed enough and
Speaker 6: you've got black up in there.
Speaker 5: What you know? I totally think so. It's people who's
Speaker 5: never deailed. Why does it happened later in life?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 5: Accumulation? We are a filter.
Speaker 6: Our whole body is a host a system of filters.
Speaker 6: If you never clean a filter and your car's seventy
Speaker 6: five years old, how's it going to run on.
Speaker 5: A racky gas? It's no brainer. I totally believe it,
Speaker 5: especially considering that.
Speaker 3: For many of us, half the food that we eat
Speaker 3: isn't even food, it's not.
Speaker 1: Even real record.
Speaker 5: You have to change that you got to eat a
Speaker 5: whole food man. Yeah, yeah, I I you know, we
Speaker 5: all love it, but it's not good for us. We
Speaker 5: have to eat the whole foods.
Speaker 6: Don't go to the inside of the grocery store, stick
Speaker 6: to the edges, call to day. Treat it like fuel, man,
Speaker 6: don't treat it like entertainment. Yeah, and uh there go
Speaker 6: straight Korean. You can't be Dead's about as keto as
Speaker 6: you can get. But just think of yourselves as filters.
Speaker 6: You know, you do a liver flush, you do you
Speaker 6: know this and that when you see the results, you
Speaker 6: got to go. Man, that's something's got to be there.
Speaker 6: You know, there's just no way that's good for me
Speaker 6: if I don't clean it out, you know.
Speaker 5: I mean, we can get great grotesque into this. I
Speaker 5: have many examples. But you know you've got to do
Speaker 5: that spiritually too. With some of these plant meds. You know,
Speaker 5: I was I've never done any opened my life, and
Speaker 5: then I went straight to ayahuasca, like holy shit.
Speaker 6: You know, jumping right in. Yeah, and that got rid
Speaker 6: of a lot of stuff. You have no idea what
Speaker 6: it is, you know, past traumas and this and that,
Speaker 6: And I saw things that broaden the horizon, you know,
Speaker 6: and then when you get into d MT, that's.
Speaker 5: Where you're going to learn your consciousness.
Speaker 6: I mean, I wouldn't believe people of what I discovered
Speaker 6: doing that, and it helped immensely, immensely, But you got
Speaker 6: to go to the proper practitioners.
Speaker 5: You know. You can't be just making this ship up and.
Speaker 4: It can't just be out a rave somewhere.
Speaker 5: Yeah, pretty sure.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's fascinating stuff.
Speaker 1: I mean.
Speaker 3: So, in addition to the book, is there are you
Speaker 3: on social media? Is there any place people can follow
Speaker 3: you follow your work?
Speaker 6: Not really, I mean I'm on Instagram, but just to
Speaker 6: pimp the book.
Speaker 5: I loathe all that stuff. No, I don't keep up
Speaker 5: on any of that stuff, but I'm on there per se.
Speaker 6: But I still have the websites, you know, for the books.
Speaker 6: And somebody does.
Speaker 5: Want something done that they want to pay enough to
Speaker 5: do it, I'll do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Just working on healing and helping other people right now.
Speaker 6: I've started a foundation. Really haven't got it running too
Speaker 6: hard yet, but I kind of get tired of some
Speaker 6: of these foundations that will only do certain things for
Speaker 6: guys when they need five other things, right.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 6: So when I get money in there and a guy
Speaker 6: needs five things, I get him five things.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, not just well we only do this one.
Speaker 6: I'm like, well, that's not going to work. So that's
Speaker 6: kind of like what I'm up to right now. And
Speaker 6: it's I haven't really had time because I've been dealing
Speaker 6: with a bunch of my TVI stuff. And but as
Speaker 6: I get time, I'll do a lot more of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the book is on Amazon and there'll be
Speaker 1: a linked down the description h for anyone wants to
Speaker 1: check that out. Anything else we want to jump into.
Speaker 4: No, Eric, it's been awesome.
Speaker 5: Man, It's it's you know, Yeah, I appreciate it. No,
Speaker 5: we we do in New York one day. I'm not
Speaker 5: a fan of New York, but I'd like to see
Speaker 5: you guys.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, please do. We'd love to have you. I'm
Speaker 1: not a fan of New York either. Soon.
Speaker 5: I remember.
Speaker 1: I got a couple of right, Yeah, we've had a
Speaker 1: couple of youwer questions for you, Eric.
Speaker 7: Ohn't not that bad from Matt What is your proudest
Speaker 7: moment in your life?
Speaker 1: And thanks for coming on today?
Speaker 6: He said, Oh man, there's a couple of them. But
Speaker 6: obviously can't bring them up here. But I learned they're like, hey,
Speaker 6: we we just briefed the Poters on what you guys did,
Speaker 6: And I'm like, what's a Poters? And that's how he'll
Speaker 6: Billy I was back in the day. So I mean,
Speaker 6: there's some great ones, but you know, not for this podcast,
Speaker 6: but one day maybe.
Speaker 1: All right, one more question.
Speaker 7: What's it like building and selling a government contracting company.
Speaker 5: Well, I would have done it a lot differently.
Speaker 6: I would have had a board of advisors, and I
Speaker 6: would have cashed out ten times more. But back then
Speaker 6: I was so hardheaded and so correct that I didn't
Speaker 6: listen to a lot of smart people. I did, okay,
Speaker 6: but you know I could have done ten times, you know.
Speaker 6: I mean just look at Mike Nolder at Blackwater or Blackhawk.
Speaker 6: Mike had a great team. I mean, he was always
Speaker 6: one to answer the phone if he called, and he'd
Speaker 6: tell you anything.
Speaker 5: You need to hear.
Speaker 6: But he cashed out at one hundred and eighty, you know,
Speaker 6: and a great guy doing it. He didn't have to
Speaker 6: cut throats, he didn't have to, you know, be corrupt,
Speaker 6: ran a good business. But he had really good advisors,
Speaker 6: so you know, hindsight crystal clear. I didn't have enough
Speaker 6: smart guys going. Eric stopped doing that.
Speaker 1: Well, that's that's it all done on questions. I hope
Speaker 1: people will go and check out the book. I have
Speaker 1: to go and start like searching for your manuals again
Speaker 1: now that I know that they're all out there.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Eric, really appreciate this interview.
Speaker 6: Yeah, no, thanks for dragging me out to do it,
Speaker 6: because I was kind of dragging my.
Speaker 5: Feet a little bit on me.
Speaker 1: Well you come through New York, we'd love to have you.
Speaker 1: You come on in here and we shoot the shit
Speaker 1: a bit.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I got to see if I got any warrants
Speaker 5: up there first, but yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you might want to check that out.
Speaker 3: I know some people, well we'll probably maybe we can
Speaker 3: fix those.
Speaker 6: Yeah, please, thanks for having me guys.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you brother. We deeply appreciate you, man, And
Speaker 1: thanks everyone who joined us tonight. And we'll see all
Speaker 1: of you guys next time. We got two episodes coming
Speaker 1: up on Wednesday. I don't know how they're going to
Speaker 1: be released do. We'll have to work on that, but
Speaker 1: we got more coming for you working hard over here,
Speaker 1: so like and subscribe. Hey, guys, it's Jack. I just
Speaker 1: want to talk to you for a moment about how
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