Speaker 1: So we mounted up, did a quick scan. We're like,
Speaker 1: all right, let's go. Came up with our soul plan
Speaker 1: and my support by fire position that was being provided
Speaker 1: by the infantry. Never underestimate the enemy. They pumped two
Speaker 1: mortar rounds onto that to knock them out as they
Speaker 1: saw us driving in, so they had to displace and
Speaker 1: now I had no support by fire. We had no
Speaker 1: air support. At the time. There was stumb pulling in
Speaker 1: on the overhead. It was just like a confluence and stuff.
Speaker 1: So now we drive down at this compound and as
Speaker 1: soon as we get there, we are in the base.
Speaker 1: Murk Murphy's loss. As if your attack is going well
Speaker 1: through an ambush, Well, my attack went swimmingly because I
Speaker 1: was at the base of a U shape ambush and
Speaker 1: they were hammering us inside of one hundred yards. The
Speaker 1: RPG round bounced off the hood of my truck. I
Speaker 1: don't know what it just and it blew up behind us.
Speaker 1: My guys dismounted and started doing fire re maneuver bounds
Speaker 1: to these guys in trench lines and they're throwing grenades
Speaker 1: on the age. Oh my god. Well, I think it
Speaker 1: scared the shit out of the enemy because they're like,
Speaker 1: these guys are crazy. Yeah.
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Speaker 1: Special Operations. Cobert Spi and The Team House with your hostess,
Speaker 1: Jack Murphy and David Park.
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, this is episode three hundred and forty two
Speaker 2: of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with our
Speaker 2: guest in studio today, Ivan Ingram. I'ven't had a career
Speaker 2: in the Marine Corps, served in recon Force recon MARSK
Speaker 2: and then some Jaysock assignments.
Speaker 1: There's a lot to talk about here.
Speaker 2: You're also an author, written a series of books, The Patrol,
Speaker 2: Dream Job. What are some of the others, twenty two
Speaker 2: and Athena. Okay, those are the ones that are out now.
Speaker 2: He has more in the works.
Speaker 1: Evan, thanks for joining us, coming in studio today, pleasure.
Speaker 2: So you know the question I ask everyone about their
Speaker 2: origin story, If you can tell us a little bit
Speaker 2: about you know, how you grew up and how that
Speaker 2: took you towards the Marine.
Speaker 1: Corps kind of by accident. I'm from Maryland. My father
Speaker 1: was a colonel in the Army as an army psychologist,
Speaker 1: and he wrote a book called The Boys in the Barracks,
Speaker 1: which is a study of the Army's morale and a
Speaker 1: lot of the leadership issues that the organists that the
Speaker 1: Army is an organization, encountered after Vietnam. And while while
Speaker 1: what he found was a bit frustrating for the Army
Speaker 1: to read writ large because of the racism, drug problems,
Speaker 1: lots of insubordination, many issues that were plaguing you know,
Speaker 1: a unit or a force that had come out of
Speaker 1: protracted combat and just was really bad morale. He and
Speaker 1: his research team looked at Special Forces units, Army green
Speaker 1: berets to kind of understand why they didn't face the
Speaker 1: same issues. They might have had them same, you know,
Speaker 1: in some areas, but not nearly across the force the
Speaker 1: way that the Army did. And so they were looking
Speaker 1: at ways to harness that which functioning units with good
Speaker 1: morale and good leadership were working so that they could
Speaker 1: actually try and export that to the larger United States Army. So,
Speaker 1: as I was growing up, that was the world in
Speaker 1: which I was living, and I got to meet a
Speaker 1: lot of Special Forces veterans because of the people he
Speaker 1: was interviewing or people who were helping with some of
Speaker 1: the projects he was working with or working on, and
Speaker 1: the people he was working with. And then on the
Speaker 1: other side of that, my mother was a professor of
Speaker 1: English expository writer expository writing teacher at Howard University. So
Speaker 1: I grew up in a house We're writing. That was
Speaker 1: something that both of my parents did, and I kind
Speaker 1: of eschewed the military lifestyle, even though I was very
Speaker 1: into military history and I loved going to museums and
Speaker 1: things like that. I grew up in Europe for a time.
Speaker 1: I got to travel all around and go to different
Speaker 1: battlefields and young kid, that was just a great way
Speaker 1: to grow up. So then when I went to college,
Speaker 1: I played lacrosse in college, and when I was getting
Speaker 1: out or finished that and decided, Okay, I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: into the civilian workforce, I just kind of had this
Speaker 1: nagging desire to serve or do something more adventurous, and
Speaker 1: so I really wanted to be a law enforce, major
Speaker 1: federal law enforcement agent. So I looked at the marshals,
Speaker 1: I looked at diplomatic security. FBI can proudly say I
Speaker 1: was turned down by all of them, and I kind
Speaker 1: of I asked, like, why, what's going on? What do
Speaker 1: I need? And they just say, this is the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: You need experience and you need a little more seasoning.
Speaker 1: So their recommendation, some of the law enforcement agents I
Speaker 1: was talking to, just joined the military and get some experience,
Speaker 1: get your resume built, and then reapply. You're young enough
Speaker 1: that you can do that. So I did join the
Speaker 1: Marine Corps. And what year is this. I was in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety seven, and my father being an army officer,
Speaker 1: after I signed the paperwork, I don't know if you
Speaker 1: think I thought I was gonna do it, because I
Speaker 1: came to his house in December of ninety seven and
Speaker 1: my father was recovered alcoholic. He hadn't had a drink
Speaker 1: of whiskey in years. As a bourbon guys, I could
Speaker 1: drink a Bourbon tonight, so that's that's only fitting. And
Speaker 1: he had this bottle of jim Beam that he that
Speaker 1: he kept with the cork still in it from his
Speaker 1: last drink, and he kept that on his desk for
Speaker 1: like just a reminder like, I don't do this. And
Speaker 1: so I showed up to his house and I said, Dad,
Speaker 1: you know I did it. I joined the Marine Corps.
Speaker 1: He had this passion look on us. So he's like,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, like you really okay again, you said
Speaker 1: you're gonna do it, you did it. I guess this
Speaker 1: calls for a drink, and I said, Dad, you don't,
Speaker 1: you know, don't drink. He goes, it's not for me.
Speaker 1: So I probably had a drink from the last sip
Speaker 1: of the bottle that he had, and I guess he
Speaker 1: passed on that legacy. But he wasn't lying when he
Speaker 1: said that, so passed on the torch he did. I mean,
Speaker 1: he's like, you're gonna, you're gonna this, and so, yeah,
Speaker 1: I had I was lucky to have him as a
Speaker 1: as a resource for learning about leadership, about officership, about followership,
Speaker 1: about just the dynamics of what it is to be
Speaker 1: inside of a military organization. Of course, they have to
Speaker 1: do it yourself.
Speaker 2: And I'm a military psychologist at that well, that had
Speaker 2: its own, like its own own challenges, but of course, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean I was at that point.
Speaker 1: I was just as the Marine Corps said, you know,
Speaker 1: he's working together with Gung Ho. I was, I was.
Speaker 1: I was into it. I wanted to be part of this.
Speaker 1: I thought, this is going to be great. I'll do
Speaker 1: my four years and uh, inside that four years, I'm
Speaker 1: going to try and do as much as I can
Speaker 1: in then or five years. And then So you came
Speaker 1: in as an officer I did. I went to OCSH.
Speaker 1: I was. I was probably recruiters like absolute dream because
Speaker 1: I didn't ask a whole lot of questions and I
Speaker 1: was just like, all right, when when do I get
Speaker 1: set up? And they, oh, well, we don't get guns
Speaker 1: too too quick, just hang on, just hang on, buddy.
Speaker 1: Am I going to jump school soon? Or like an
Speaker 1: easy guy? So a lot of things I had to
Speaker 1: learn about the process, but ultimately I was, I was
Speaker 1: you know, motivated. Motivation will get you through a lot,
Speaker 1: as we know. So I hope that at least gives
Speaker 1: you know, the beginning of the context we can expand
Speaker 1: on that everything.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, so you come in as an officer, go
Speaker 2: to o CS. I. I mean what I don't In
Speaker 2: the Army they call it a branch. I don't know
Speaker 2: if they call it the same thing in the Marine Corps.
Speaker 2: What did you kind of branch into what was your
Speaker 2: basic course?
Speaker 1: So marine marine officers will generally be sourced from either
Speaker 1: r OTC slash what's called me SEP Marine Enlisted Commissioning Program,
Speaker 1: so that sort of people can come up through Frank
Speaker 1: Gold that kind of thing exactly. But again that's tied
Speaker 1: to some sort of established ROTZI naval Rozzi program, you know,
Speaker 1: with the university or o c S. And then of
Speaker 1: course the Naval Academy is its own, its own provider
Speaker 1: and everyone once you're commissioned, regardless of your source. So
Speaker 1: I just did OCS ten straight weeks over the winter
Speaker 1: with some very caring staff. I mean they were they
Speaker 1: were wonderful, They were very attentive, made sure that I
Speaker 1: understood how to be a marine right right off the bat.
Speaker 1: You never forget your drill instructors. And if anyone says
Speaker 1: they were a marine and can't name their drill instructors
Speaker 1: right away, no matter how long ago it was, they weren't,
Speaker 1: they didn't do it. So Gunnytown staff Start and Carpenter
Speaker 1: and Sergeant Torres wherever you are, left an impression on
Speaker 1: your young mind. Yeah, I would say we're probably the
Speaker 1: three of the most interesting men I've ever met in
Speaker 1: my life. So, but yeah, so you go through OCS
Speaker 1: and then after that you go what's called to the
Speaker 1: basic School, which in the army equivalent would be kind
Speaker 1: of like Bullock, but you're not you're not getting actual
Speaker 1: branch training. So in my case, everyone goes to the
Speaker 1: basics school for six months, whether you're an aviator or you're.
Speaker 2: Sort of teaching you like Marine Corps mission planning and
Speaker 2: that kind of thing, just the basics of being in
Speaker 2: a rifle squad and carrying a machine gun and got you.
Speaker 1: It's it's not it's not easy training. I mean, you're
Speaker 1: you're doing all kinds of life fire arranges and they
Speaker 1: just teach you, they say every marine or riflemen, but
Speaker 1: they want every officer to be able to lead troops.
Speaker 1: And you may never touch this again. You could go
Speaker 1: to supply or you know, controller or what have you
Speaker 1: and not putting down anybody's mos. But so when you
Speaker 1: talk about your the military occupational specialty is what you
Speaker 1: get assigned. And when I joined I sat and took
Speaker 1: the naval aviator test and the results were such that
Speaker 1: they said I could fill one up with gas. But
Speaker 1: I wasn't going to fly one, so I had to
Speaker 1: do something else. And they were like, well, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of loud, hot jobs in the Marine Corps ivan
Speaker 1: and maybe you'd be an infantryman because you're big and
Speaker 1: you can carry a lot of shit, so maybe that's
Speaker 1: for you. And I was like, oh, yes, I was
Speaker 1: good carry guns and like went run through the trees.
Speaker 1: And then when I was there, I met guys who
Speaker 1: had been in the me set program, who had been
Speaker 1: in Force Reecun and they started telling me, like, I
Speaker 1: really didn't know that much about that side of it,
Speaker 1: and they started telling me about Force week On and
Speaker 1: their time in it, and all of a sudden, I
Speaker 1: was like, that's where I want to go. And you
Speaker 1: had to be an infantry officer at the time, or
Speaker 1: a ground intelligence officer, scott sniper, poteam commander to really
Speaker 1: be considered for those jobs, and that rubbed off on
Speaker 1: you fast. Oh yeah. And these guys were also they
Speaker 1: were fit that they carried themselves a little bit differently.
Speaker 1: They like, there's a lot of bullshit in the military,
Speaker 1: and they just seemed to be able to transcend it,
Speaker 1: Like it just seemed like they had it a better.
Speaker 1: You know, one of my very good friends that I
Speaker 1: served with him he just retired, was just a little
Speaker 1: behind me. Of course, he made it a colonel. I
Speaker 1: didn't quite catch him, but he you know, he was
Speaker 1: the first guy that I really met who had done that,
Speaker 1: and I was I thought, okay, like, this is this
Speaker 1: is a culture, this is what kind of a thing
Speaker 1: I'd like to be a part of. And I really
Speaker 1: didn't know that much about it. But you first had
Speaker 1: to get to the fleet, and you first had to
Speaker 1: be an infantry officer. So after I finished the basic school,
Speaker 1: I then went to ten weeks of Infantry Officer course,
Speaker 1: which I haven't been to rangers, but it is very
Speaker 1: much like ranger school and that you're just doing lots
Speaker 1: of mission dynamic planning and it's all officer based. You're
Speaker 1: leading your peers and learning how to do it. The
Speaker 1: Infantry Officer course, it produces a very good light infantry leader.
Speaker 1: Now it's even I think even better because they do
Speaker 1: a lot more call for fire. They talk about combined
Speaker 1: arms and ways that were evolved as a result of
Speaker 1: the GWATT and just the experiences they had. So it's
Speaker 1: as far as the Marine Corps writ large hat in
Speaker 1: combat in both Afghanistan and Iraq, so they've improved that incrementally.
Speaker 1: But back then it was very still, very tough, very
Speaker 1: dynamic training.
Speaker 2: And back in these days in the nineteen nineties, the
Speaker 2: Marine Corps wasn't a part of Special Operations Command and
Speaker 2: they didn't have a presence there. And I mean, I'm
Speaker 2: going to like trigger some people when I say this,
Speaker 2: but like Force Recon and Recon really kind of was
Speaker 2: like the Special Ops of the Marine Corps, even if
Speaker 2: it wasn't technically on paper. And those guys were I mean,
Speaker 2: I think they were on par with Seals, Rangers, green Berets.
Speaker 2: I mean, they were highly trained, motivated dudes.
Speaker 1: I agree. I mean the pipeline. Once I I went
Speaker 1: to I was assigned the first Marine Division, first Marine Regiment,
Speaker 1: first Battalion, fourth Marines in Camp Pendlen, California. By far,
Speaker 1: one of the best assignments I've had, even still of
Speaker 1: all the pictures and stuff I have on the wall
Speaker 1: my the one of my my first inverts of Patoon
Speaker 1: just it. I had a great time across my career
Speaker 1: and I got to be part of some really strependous units.
Speaker 1: But like you never forget your first and these guys.
Speaker 2: Take us, take us into that your your first p
Speaker 2: L assignment with the infantry.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was really well, you know, my first day
Speaker 1: I showed up. We didn't have even the fire watch metal.
Speaker 1: We didn't even have the eggs and I mean the
Speaker 1: ketchup and mustard metal back then, because there was no war,
Speaker 1: there was no service. So I literally the only thing
Speaker 1: I had going into going for me on my uniform
Speaker 1: was the fact that was a double expert. I could
Speaker 1: had the expert rifle and expert pistol. And there's the
Speaker 1: only two badges hanging on my my my service aufhas
Speaker 1: and that's what you checked into the regiment in And
Speaker 1: I went down to one four and as I was
Speaker 1: coming in, a staff sergeant was coming out and he's liked, whoa,
Speaker 1: so where are you going? I said, oh, I'm going
Speaker 1: in to check in. He goes, now like that you're not.
Speaker 1: He reached up and he fixed my tie, which I
Speaker 1: guess had come, you know, a skew while I was
Speaker 1: sitting in the car, So that already I've got it.
Speaker 1: Steffencio's you know, helping me out. And this really green lieutenant.
Speaker 1: So I walk up the stairs and I go to
Speaker 1: see the executive officer and he's the major and he's
Speaker 1: his grim face like angry dude. He's sitting there liking
Speaker 1: like this. I don't know whether it knock on the
Speaker 1: hatch or whatever. So he looks up and he goes,
Speaker 1: who are you? I said, my name's a Tenor Ingram,
Speaker 1: and he goes, I get in here, and he reaches
Speaker 1: out like this with his hand. So I walk over
Speaker 1: to say. He said, goes, I do't want to shake
Speaker 1: your fucking hand. Give me your o QR. It was
Speaker 1: off for qualification right the jack. And I'm like, oh, yes, sir,
Speaker 1: I guess this is how you know welcome. So I
Speaker 1: haven't even been in this building for ten minutes. I
Speaker 1: already had that fixed and now he's given me the business.
Speaker 1: He goes, you haven't done shit. You don't no shit.
Speaker 1: You're going to Charlie Company. Get downstairs, and that was it.
Speaker 1: So I was like, where's Gunny Highway? Like this this
Speaker 1: is nuts? Since I walked back downstairs and as I'm
Speaker 1: coming down the passageway that's what we called you guys
Speaker 1: call it a hallway, coming down the passageway, I see
Speaker 1: the Charlie Company offices and out comes my first platoon
Speaker 1: Sergeant Pat Reddick, and he's like, we heard you were coming.
Speaker 1: Thank god you're here. And I said, why, this is great,
Speaker 1: what a welcome man. I've had a rough rough morning already.
Speaker 1: He goes, well, we got five marines right now who
Speaker 1: are under investigation for a congruine and here's their defense packages.
Speaker 1: And by the way, we got to go see the
Speaker 1: Battian commander tomorrow afternoon. So I was taking care of it.
Speaker 1: But now that you're here, you've got it. So that
Speaker 1: was my first day in the infantry. I had five
Speaker 1: you know, guys under charges and one dude who requested
Speaker 1: court martial. And I was I was standing for the
Speaker 1: hazing l that a whole went to thing going on,
Speaker 1: and I was like, wait a minute, the basicsool. They
Speaker 1: didn't talk about any of the stuff, like we were
Speaker 1: talking about two up and one back, infantry attacks and
Speaker 1: all this other stuff. I was like in a helo company,
Speaker 1: cocktor company. So I was like, we're gonna go faster oping,
Speaker 1: We're gonna do all this up. Sure. Platoon had like
Speaker 1: some Jack Nicholson, you can't handle the truth. Yeah kind
Speaker 1: of like that. Yeah. Yeah, they just got back from
Speaker 1: deployment and got a new new shipment of boots from
Speaker 1: from uh MC frams Sy School of Infantry and the
Speaker 1: Yellow The old guys decided they want to tell the
Speaker 1: young guys what's up, and so then there was a problem.
Speaker 1: So that's how I was introduced to the Fleet Marine
Speaker 1: Force and uh, from that point forward, I was like, okay,
Speaker 1: the I'm in a different world. So had your court
Speaker 1: martials get uh the one guy, Oh, let'saly not yours,
Speaker 1: because I wasn't court martial that was there to observe.
Speaker 1: The one guy beat it, uh and actually hitded up
Speaker 1: going to First Force recon Company. Now that I think
Speaker 1: about it, the other guys all requested, you know, they
Speaker 1: they took their n JP and UH and moved on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we went, we went through it, and I still talk
Speaker 1: to my battalion can entered this day. John Holden was
Speaker 1: his name. In fact, he had a great command climate
Speaker 1: and it was it was a great unit to be
Speaker 1: a part of. I kind of regret that that he
Speaker 1: didn't get to take that unit to war because see,
Speaker 1: just a bad timing of of of of everything.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: But he was a dynamic leader. He really cared for
Speaker 1: his people, and he was a good good mentor. And
Speaker 1: uh and he told me years later, he was like,
Speaker 1: that was a tough way to come into the sure,
Speaker 1: you know, to join h to join us.
Speaker 2: And so otherwise, I mean, how did like, from a
Speaker 2: leadership perspective, how did you push your platoon past that?
Speaker 2: I mean, you walked in big bag of shit. You
Speaker 2: get handed, Well, you have to.
Speaker 1: I've always said this regardless of unit, because believe me,
Speaker 1: I got in us, Like you want this guy he's
Speaker 1: a ship back or hey, you know, this guy's got problems.
Speaker 1: And I try to give everybody the benefit of the doubt.
Speaker 1: And by nature I am kind of a judgmental person.
Speaker 1: I am a judgmental person for someone right now is
Speaker 1: like kind of like I can be. And so I
Speaker 1: was like, everybody gets a clean, clean slate, And whatever
Speaker 1: adjudication happened, it was not mine decided, and it didn't
Speaker 1: happen while I was here, even though I inherited it. So, yes,
Speaker 1: you're responsible. But on the other side, now we can grow,
Speaker 1: We're gonna have to. And some of these guys again
Speaker 1: actually found that they were pretty creative and some of
Speaker 1: these guys. You know, My father, being a psychologist at
Speaker 1: one time, asked him like, hey, Dad, you know, how
Speaker 1: do I get to know my guys? Like what should
Speaker 1: I find a way to get some sort of personality
Speaker 1: tests for them? And he's like, well, you don't how
Speaker 1: to review any of that shit anyway, Like this is
Speaker 1: all clinical. He's like, just get a keg up here
Speaker 1: and lock the door. About two hours later, you're gona
Speaker 1: figure out who everybody is. And he was right. So
Speaker 1: I went in and I was like, all right, because
Speaker 1: I had a bunch of I had hoodlums, I had
Speaker 1: gang bangers. I had guys who were on work release
Speaker 1: who are a tough group of guys. They're from all
Speaker 1: over the country. And I was like, all right, I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna turn anybody in, but you know who knows
Speaker 1: how to boost a car? And these guys are all
Speaker 1: looking at her like I said, come on, who knows
Speaker 1: how to you know who knows how wire stuff? Who
Speaker 1: knows how to drive drive stuff? And starts these hands
Speaker 1: going up. It's like the reason I'm asking is because
Speaker 1: if we go to a really shitty place, I needed
Speaker 1: people who can get things, and they're like, oh wow,
Speaker 1: he's a bank robber. This is gonna be great, like
Speaker 1: I've you know, But I mean that was the mindset
Speaker 1: you had to have because you didn't know where you're
Speaker 1: going to serve or anything, and you had to figure
Speaker 1: out ways to capitalize upon strengths and also build a
Speaker 1: little bit of trust.
Speaker 2: And it was the nineteen nineties in Marine Corps. You
Speaker 2: guys weren't getting funding, you weren't getting new.
Speaker 1: Kit, and a lot of people we weren't getting a
Speaker 1: lot of action either. We had like three guys in
Speaker 1: the entire battalion had a Combat Action Room, which is
Speaker 1: the cib S Combat Action Magic equivalent, like the old
Speaker 1: sergeant majors and stuff. Well, the regimental sergeant major had
Speaker 1: been in Vietnam. He's one of the last serving Vietnam
Speaker 1: veterans at that point in time. But we're talking like
Speaker 1: guys from Bosnia, gotcha, Our company gunny had been in Somali.
Speaker 1: Our company commander actually had been in Somali in the
Speaker 1: later or the early stages of it before you know,
Speaker 1: the Marine Corps was there before kind of black Hawk
Speaker 1: down took over. So the initial push these so these
Speaker 1: there are people who had some experience, but you did
Speaker 1: not have this this large population, this baseline of people
Speaker 1: that you could rely upon, in fact, combat veterans, you know,
Speaker 1: seeing what my platoon was doing with hazeing would just
Speaker 1: think that was a joke at this point. So you're right,
Speaker 1: there was nothing else to do.
Speaker 2: And so I want to take a minute today to
Speaker 2: tell you guys about the Perfect Gene. I've been wearing
Speaker 2: them for a few weeks now and really enjoy them,
Speaker 2: and I just want to share it with our audience.
Speaker 2: You know, sometimes jeans have this problem where you know,
Speaker 2: you guys all have seen these skinny jeans that they
Speaker 2: like crush your balls and you know it's just not
Speaker 2: comfortable to wear or the other way around. Jeans are
Speaker 2: like too baggy. You know, you have this sort of
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Speaker 2: are these problems that you know, different fits of different
Speaker 2: types of genses have and the Perfect Gene strives to
Speaker 2: fix that, both the fit but also the mobility, the maneuverability.
Speaker 2: It has a stretchy fabric, like they say it's like
Speaker 2: yoga ready, but you know I would say it's athletics ready,
Speaker 2: you know, moving furniture, doing things around the house. You're
Speaker 2: not going to have that like super tight, like constricted
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Speaker 2: And there are over four hundred thousand people out there
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Speaker 2: so fuck your kakis and get the perfect gene. Did
Speaker 2: you guys get you know, not combat deployment probably at
Speaker 2: that point, but did you guys get deployed? They like
Speaker 2: to go out with the fleet and all that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we did. We were assigned to what's called a
Speaker 1: Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is about a regiment slash brigade
Speaker 1: sized organization. I say brigade because it's it's slightly bigger
Speaker 1: than a regiment. It's fully supporting a board amphibious shipping
Speaker 1: with I mean at the time, it deployed with tanks,
Speaker 1: it has its own air support, it has its own artillery.
Speaker 1: It's an organic fighting organization. And so when a MEW
Speaker 1: and I was on fifteenth W, you know, you could
Speaker 1: go ashore and do all kinds of stuff, anything from
Speaker 1: humanitarian ops to full scale combat, and it's all launched
Speaker 1: from shipping. So it was on the fifteenth MW we did.
Speaker 1: It was called a westpac Western Pacific, and back then
Speaker 1: it was like there were liberty crewises. Honestly, we were
Speaker 1: pulling into these great ports in Australia. Australia. Yes, we
Speaker 1: went to Hong Kong, we went to Singapore. We did
Speaker 1: do some time during part of operations Southern Watch as
Speaker 1: far as just border security in Kuwait, but you're not
Speaker 1: doing active combat ops. I did combat operations in East
Speaker 1: Timore that we were not. Yeah, that had just started
Speaker 1: to simmer down. But we went to board or went
Speaker 1: ashore there helping to establish really get the country back
Speaker 1: on its feet because it had been in a huge
Speaker 1: civil war at that point.
Speaker 2: I mean, I know the Ausis were all over that,
Speaker 2: but I have to admit I'm pretty naive about the
Speaker 2: United States military being over there.
Speaker 1: Well, by the time we got there, the Aussies had
Speaker 1: really already the team more and Tigers as they called them.
Speaker 1: They'd gone up on the border. And in fact I
Speaker 1: met Dave Coling years later that's where he had been
Speaker 1: his he had got his combat time. I always sadaficle
Speaker 1: cul and stole my combat because he got there first
Speaker 1: as a NAUSI. But it was still an active combat
Speaker 1: zone and we were flying missions in there. But we're
Speaker 1: doing a lot of humanitarian aid trying to get infrastructure
Speaker 1: back up and running case in point for the infantry.
Speaker 1: They come to me and they say, hey, Ivan, there's
Speaker 1: this road that hasn't been cleared to this village in
Speaker 1: this one part part of the highlands in East Timoor,
Speaker 1: and we need your guys to go in there and
Speaker 1: pull security until we can get heavy equipment mechanics in
Speaker 1: there to fix the bulldozer and like, so you go
Speaker 1: in there and do that, And I was like, well,
Speaker 1: why would I do that. I got squad leaders. So
Speaker 1: I grabbed a squad leader in the staff's are and
Speaker 1: I say, hey, man, you're going to go in there.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: This this through shock waves through the mew. They were like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, he's I was not leading these guys
Speaker 1: on the ground Like what I got. This is what
Speaker 1: we're supposed to do, Like this is how this You
Speaker 1: have to delegate, but this is what it's meant to do.
Speaker 1: It's not that it's beneath me or I'm above it.
Speaker 1: It's that I have very quality staff in cdios and
Speaker 1: the right people. So remember what I asked about, you know,
Speaker 1: guys learn how to bullshit. We task organized the squad
Speaker 1: to go in there for very specific purposes. Rapport all
Speaker 1: this stuff, and they fly in and originally they were
Speaker 1: gonna come have a H fifty three to giant helicopter
Speaker 1: come and like pick this bulldozer up that had stopped
Speaker 1: in clearing this road and then move it to a
Speaker 1: spot that they equipment mechanics could could work on it
Speaker 1: because it was in this really kind of precipitous area.
Speaker 1: I meanwhile, the Marines were going to hold security so
Speaker 1: that these guys didn't get messed with. But if by
Speaker 1: perhaps if these the tamories, you know, tigers came back,
Speaker 1: which they probably weren't going to do because the Ausies
Speaker 1: were all up in the highlands taking care of them anyway.
Speaker 1: And so my guys go in in like day one.
Speaker 1: They're just tinkering with the bulldozer and they get it
Speaker 1: fired up and then they just clear the road all
Speaker 1: the way up. Like the missions done, you can come
Speaker 1: get us. And when we showed up, so I flew
Speaker 1: in to watch this, and as we show up, they're
Speaker 1: playing soccer with the kids, and like, I'm like, this
Speaker 1: is exactly the building rapport. We got the mission done
Speaker 1: at all? Yeah, it's all it's like, so you just
Speaker 1: let the Marines be creative and they'll figure it out
Speaker 1: and the huge lessons learn huge leadership lesson learning there
Speaker 1: those Rabbronis knew how to bulldozer. Yeah, Twente was a
Speaker 1: gang banger for San Antonio. And he used to carry
Speaker 1: this picture in his pocket of him in a hairnet
Speaker 1: and like he was like literally out of central casting
Speaker 1: with uh his flannel shirt and a shotgun under his arm.
Speaker 1: I'm like now, and you know now he's a marine sergeant,
Speaker 1: squad leader of the ionsight, So yeah, I mean, you
Speaker 1: don't forget guys like that. Yeah, well, and so we did.
Speaker 1: So we did do that. We did that. Deployment was
Speaker 1: six months and then we came back after.
Speaker 2: And they say being an officer as your job to
Speaker 2: identify the talent in your platoon and figure out how
Speaker 2: to use them.
Speaker 1: Right and and have have faith. And that's I think
Speaker 1: that's a critical part we'll probably get into a little later.
Speaker 1: It's just kind of it's not so much risk aversion,
Speaker 1: because you know, commanders will risk you to do whatever
Speaker 1: they need to do, but it's about confidence and whether
Speaker 1: they you'll get it done. And it's in many ways,
Speaker 1: as we get deeper into the discussion, it's about branding.
Speaker 2: So what comes after fleet? What's the next step for you?
Speaker 2: You have Ricon already rattling around in the back of
Speaker 2: your mind somewhere.
Speaker 1: And my battalion Commander John Holden had been a recon guy,
Speaker 1: and in fact, he had been the Marine Detachment oh
Speaker 1: SE at Fort Benning. So any recon person who came
Speaker 1: through there, who went to jump school, we didn't have
Speaker 1: a lot of exchange with Army USUFIC, the Army SF Command,
Speaker 1: but with Big Army i e. The Rangers and the
Speaker 1: Ranger School. He would just basically help the Marines get
Speaker 1: to there and through there, so he ranger qualified. He'd
Speaker 1: been in recon. And I took the recon selection test
Speaker 1: before I went on deployment.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I could come back like tests you mean,
Speaker 2: like a written exam or it was a physical oh okay,
Speaker 2: physical test and like an actual selection yeah.
Speaker 1: And my actual selection got yeah and a board interview
Speaker 1: and they were like, yeah, okay, you can come on,
Speaker 1: but you could get through your deployment. And then when
Speaker 1: I was on deployment, Holden came to meeting just say, hey,
Speaker 1: we're doing the slate for officers and stuff, and you
Speaker 1: still want to go to recon, right, that's what you
Speaker 1: want to do. I said, yeah, it goes okay. And
Speaker 1: so when I got home, I had orders to first
Speaker 1: recon and so yeah, I kind of leaned into setting
Speaker 1: myself up I wanted at the time, I was like,
Speaker 1: I want, I'd rather be in First Force because First
Speaker 1: Force had the direct action mission I had deployed on
Speaker 1: our me. You was the mew that that forced recon.
Speaker 1: Pultoon unfortunately had that tragic action on the uss P
Speaker 1: coost or the forty seven that you may have seen
Speaker 1: this this footage years ago of a forty six going
Speaker 1: over on it's back and seven seven marines uh and
Speaker 1: sailors were killed on that. So that that was a
Speaker 1: very tragic situation, particularly you know, small unit like force
Speaker 1: recon that that hits really hard. They had to reconstitute
Speaker 1: that unit, rebuild it. I learned a lot watching that
Speaker 1: happen as well. Uh. Bob Coates was the was the
Speaker 1: leader years ago Debt CEO who one Debt one CEO.
Speaker 1: John Daily good friend of mine work with and you've
Speaker 1: interviewed him. And then Eric Kapatulik was the was the
Speaker 1: platoon commander and that was sort of the larger than
Speaker 1: life guy. So you know in that in that world
Speaker 1: on the mew, that's who I was gravitating towards. But
Speaker 1: Forced at the time only had five plultuons and they
Speaker 1: didn't have any room. So I went to recon because
Speaker 1: I just wanted to get behind the water, get in
Speaker 1: there any way you can. So it wasn't like an
Speaker 1: also ran. I just it was a different mission, different unit.
Speaker 1: When I got home, I had orders and recon.
Speaker 2: As I've people have described it to me, Recon is
Speaker 2: the green side. They do the sol like long range
Speaker 2: for connaissance patrols and the Force and Force recon of
Speaker 2: course is the DA mission that you alluded to, right.
Speaker 1: That's probably the biggest differentiator. Yeah. Force also was able
Speaker 1: to lean further into deep penetration reconnaissance stuff, so they
Speaker 1: did a lot more of military freefall. There were guys
Speaker 1: who had been to free fall school and we were
Speaker 1: all airborne qualified or for the most part, you know,
Speaker 1: the three twenty one, the badged. You're going to see
Speaker 1: a trend here that I'm always correlate to stuff. So
Speaker 1: but back to to recon. The training pipeline is largely
Speaker 1: the largely the same as you go to different places
Speaker 1: or different schools and different different things throughout the pipeline,
Speaker 1: but it all starts at the base of Reconnaissance Course,
Speaker 1: which is ten weeks long. That is your your your
Speaker 1: entry level school officers and enlisted to go there together.
Speaker 1: It's not like airborne school. You're just an alpha, an
Speaker 1: echo or just a number, but you serving a team.
Speaker 1: As a team, you carry a radio. As an officer,
Speaker 1: you're not you don't have separate training that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: So you go to BRC. After that you become You
Speaker 1: then go into a schools pipeline which is a jump
Speaker 1: dive seer branger if you can get it. But it's
Speaker 1: about two years if you put it all together. But
Speaker 1: if you match up all that training and there will
Speaker 1: be seals will just roll their eyes at this. If
Speaker 1: you went through the entire pipeline, you've gotten all the
Speaker 1: same training that the seals get in BUDS And that's
Speaker 1: BUDDS is much more efficient because it's just pushing everything
Speaker 1: except the underwater demolition side. Right. Yeah, you don't touch
Speaker 1: demo till later. And that's what I mean is that
Speaker 1: BUDDS is very comprehensive in the way that they do.
Speaker 1: The training SQT is also very comprehensive. And that's the
Speaker 1: problem in the recom pipeline, at least at the time
Speaker 1: when I was in there, is that you kind of
Speaker 1: did this incrementally, like hopefully you could have everything lined
Speaker 1: up and you go, you would pass it all. But
Speaker 1: if there was a deployment, right if you were going
Speaker 1: to go, if something happened, you know, anything, anything could
Speaker 1: throw you off. So I leave one four, I check
Speaker 1: into first Recon again. In my office. Now I have
Speaker 1: a couple more, a little more ribbons just from deployment.
Speaker 1: They call it the meuse stack.
Speaker 2: It's just you know, you got out there and I
Speaker 2: was on a boat.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was on a boat. Armed Forces. We got
Speaker 1: their armed Forces expeditionary metal because we went to a
Speaker 1: combat zone. We were not you know, you know, so
Speaker 1: I got at that point I could join the Veterans
Speaker 1: of Foreign Wars, but I was you know, we're not
Speaker 1: combat marines. And so then you go into check in
Speaker 1: a ricon and it's like, oh shit, like memorabilia on
Speaker 1: the wall, like it's very tight. And you know, again
Speaker 1: what they called you if you were before you went there,
Speaker 1: they called you a roper because you would wear this
Speaker 1: static cremantle rope that you would could use for repelling
Speaker 1: but turning, you know, and that that was you wore.
Speaker 1: You wore that over your shoulder, sort of this mark
Speaker 1: of shame that you were.
Speaker 2: Not that like thick nylon green rope or black.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they didn't quibble. But I wasn't there long enough
Speaker 1: to become a roper because I got there just after
Speaker 1: my deployment and I walked in and Mike Politic, who
Speaker 1: is the they called him Iron Mike Politic because the
Speaker 1: fittest could be served the Royal Marines Exchange. He was
Speaker 1: just just a badass. And he too, is sitting over
Speaker 1: the desk like this, and I'm like, here we fucking
Speaker 1: go again, knocking the hats. Who are you? Mike was
Speaker 1: not nearly as gruff as as as my EXO at
Speaker 1: you know, in and one for and who are you
Speaker 1: was so attending and reporting his order. Oh yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: ingram Um, after this, you're gonna go oversee the XO.
Speaker 1: But right now we've got you slated for about a
Speaker 1: year's worth of schools. And in the event that you
Speaker 1: should not pass, you don't have to be honor man.
Speaker 1: But if you shouldn't pass or you quit your advert,
Speaker 1: fitness support will be waiting for you and I'll and
Speaker 1: then you'll be in the parking lot. Is there anything
Speaker 1: about what I've just told you don't understand? Like Crystal
Speaker 1: clear sor he goes go to the XO. So go
Speaker 1: to the XO checking with him. It's your BRC class
Speaker 1: starts in like nine days. You can go down and join,
Speaker 1: you know some of the swim stuff, but I hope
Speaker 1: you're ready. And I was like, Basic Reconnaissance Courses is
Speaker 1: gonna be whatever. I'm fine. I just came off a boat.
Speaker 1: I'm lifting all day in shape. I was quickly disavowed
Speaker 1: of that day one of the the entry test, which
Speaker 1: was just brutal. And then from that point forward you
Speaker 1: have just ten weeks of just thrashing and hazing in
Speaker 1: it's five phases. You've got land navigation, You've got patrolling,
Speaker 1: you have get the zodiacs and the zodiacs, you're carrying
Speaker 1: stuff on your head all running the oak course and
Speaker 1: it's run out of coront Auto and yeah, you're you're
Speaker 1: training like literally side by side with with BUD students,
Speaker 1: just port and starboards. The stuff you're doing. You're doing
Speaker 1: surf checks, fins, all kinds of stuff, and you know,
Speaker 1: so you've got a communications package. You have to learn
Speaker 1: how to work all the radios and you know, then
Speaker 1: after that you do full mission pro files and it's
Speaker 1: all green side patrolling and sketching and taking pictures and reporting,
Speaker 1: and then you have to move to extract LZ's And
Speaker 1: they were like, literally, if you don't make it to
Speaker 1: extract by the time you're supposed to, you're going to
Speaker 1: walk home. And they're not lying like the fact that
Speaker 1: the instructors almost took like this sick, you know, pleasure
Speaker 1: if somebody jacked it up, like well, but I guess
Speaker 1: we're walking all night, and they would and we would.
Speaker 2: And did the Marine Corps run their own dive school
Speaker 2: or did you go down to Key West for they
Speaker 2: do run their own dive school, Marine Combat and Divers
Speaker 2: run out of Panama City, Florida.
Speaker 1: That must have been a lot of fun. I went
Speaker 1: there after BRC. That was the next That was my
Speaker 1: second stop, and I was in phenomenal condition by all
Speaker 1: the time I got done with BRC. And then I
Speaker 1: went through a scout swimmer course and then I went
Speaker 1: to tor Or to MCD and that was another like
Speaker 1: I feel like I got hazed, like for the entire
Speaker 1: first part any time I got to airborne school was
Speaker 1: a break two and a half minutes of fun crammed
Speaker 1: into three weeks. So dive school is that all on
Speaker 1: the rebreathers. You start off in scuba, okay phase of scuba.
Speaker 1: It's a lot like Safuo And I actually later uh
Speaker 1: went to Safuo to participate in diver qualification and dive
Speaker 1: supervisor course with them, which is a lot more gentlemanly
Speaker 1: than you know, being a student. So I've been to
Speaker 1: Key West as well and Flaming Key there. But yeah,
Speaker 1: dive school is your first phase is scuba and then
Speaker 1: after that you go into under just a rebreather and
Speaker 1: there's a lot of a lot of night navigation, a
Speaker 1: lot of underwater navigation.
Speaker 2: And so they like to describe for folks out there
Speaker 2: who maybe aren't familiar, I mean, the the concept here
Speaker 2: as you guys being marine recoll marine recon, You're going
Speaker 2: to go and be the scouts for the main marine element.
Speaker 2: You're gonna swim up to the shore and do the
Speaker 2: hydrographical surveys and all that other kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: Yep, you could do that by surface if you if
Speaker 1: you wanted to, you know, as one of the options
Speaker 1: could be to do it subsurface clandestine. Certainly rebreather allows
Speaker 1: you to do that. Honestly, the Seals have a pretty
Speaker 1: good with with their stvs and a lot of the
Speaker 1: profiles that they do. They're they're very capable. They can
Speaker 1: do harbor recons and things in ways that the Marine
Speaker 1: Corps can't. But you can't be good everywhere, and the
Speaker 1: Marine Corps was very good in applying the recon forces
Speaker 1: against or the recon units against their forces and force mission.
Speaker 1: And so a good example would be if you're doing
Speaker 1: an assault and it was going to be an amphibious assault,
Speaker 1: but you still needed to have depth force. Recon could
Speaker 1: jump in well behind and establish observation posts, maybe even
Speaker 1: me calling in artillery or naval naval gunfire or air
Speaker 1: on an approaching force, while at the simultaneous to them
Speaker 1: being inserted, you'd have amphibious amphibious reconnaissance going in and
Speaker 1: setting up clearing. The not so much clearing it makes
Speaker 1: it sound like you're using engineers or something like that,
Speaker 1: but just doing the surveys and making sure that you
Speaker 1: know you can actually land and establish a bridgehead. But
Speaker 1: you know, that's a that's a very complex mission. It's
Speaker 1: a war type mission, and we did we didn't do that,
Speaker 1: and certainly as we moved into the later you know,
Speaker 1: the early part of the g WATT and then as
Speaker 1: it progressed, I think we lost a lot of that
Speaker 1: reconnaissance cape of patrol. Yeah, that patrolling is, in my opinion,
Speaker 1: is one of the baselines that you know, if your
Speaker 1: unit can patrol well, then you can you can do
Speaker 1: any because of the principle applied.
Speaker 2: So when you're in your recompleatoon, this is now we're
Speaker 2: like late nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing I got there in August at two thousand,
Speaker 1: okay two thousand and I went through the training and
Speaker 1: we did a deployment. That's why I love my politic
Speaker 1: because like, we're going to do it Beatian deployment to Hawaii,
Speaker 1: because you can learn and get more out of training
Speaker 1: and good conditions than you will in bad because we
Speaker 1: expect you to be able to do it in bad conditions,
Speaker 1: which is a complete difference from when I was training
Speaker 1: with the British Sayes who were like, no, the weather
Speaker 1: needs worse. Can we get it worse than this? Like that,
Speaker 1: now we'll go do it be us the same way. Oh,
Speaker 1: it's not snowing in the North Sea, Well let's just
Speaker 1: wait for it to get really shitty and then we
Speaker 1: can get out there. I'm like, why do you guys
Speaker 1: do this to yourself? It's like, because when else, like
Speaker 1: this is when it's going to happen. Guy, And they
Speaker 1: were right, they were like, yeah, you know. I talked
Speaker 1: to a Falkland Islands veteran in parachute regimen who had
Speaker 1: been in the Sas and he said that his is
Speaker 1: fighting in the Falklands. While it was really as a
Speaker 1: light infantry wars were really really challenging. He's like, we
Speaker 1: trained so hard that when we got there it was
Speaker 1: just sort of like, all right, well we're just used
Speaker 1: to this and there's something to be said for hard training.
Speaker 1: And so I say, I'm talking about two sides of
Speaker 1: my mouth. Because we went to Ali. We had a
Speaker 1: great time, but at the same time, it was a
Speaker 1: focus on developing individual skills right right. It was really
Speaker 1: more like, hey, let's be good divers now, and then
Speaker 1: if you're good divers here we can take you into
Speaker 1: the shitty weather instead of let's just throw you into
Speaker 1: really bad conditions and then see what happens, because there
Speaker 1: are units who overstep that before and people get hurt. Sure,
Speaker 1: so he had he had a good idea for incremental training.
Speaker 1: And that's so that's March of two thousand and one,
Speaker 1: and nine to eleven is not even looming, Like we
Speaker 1: don't even know what's coming. And my platoon was wasn't
Speaker 1: even earmark yet to like be on another MEW. So
Speaker 1: I probably wasn't going to be able to take my
Speaker 1: platoon out on a deployment had nine to eleven not occurred.
Speaker 1: I was gonna just kind of do my time at
Speaker 1: my fleet time. And at that point in time, I
Speaker 1: was just like, well, I'm gonna start looking revisit the marshals,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go back to the fl This is my
Speaker 1: this has been my plan. This is what I'm gonna do.
Speaker 2: And so where were you and the guys at when
Speaker 2: nine to eleven happened.
Speaker 1: I had come up with this. I'd come up with
Speaker 1: this plan to take my platoon to Switzerland to participate
Speaker 1: in Swiss Raid Commando, which is the Special Operations competition
Speaker 1: around Burn, Switzerland, and like I said, there's nothing going on.
Speaker 1: So we were like, we we're gonna jump into Lake Burn
Speaker 1: water jump into Lake Burn, and then we're gonna do this.
Speaker 1: We're gonna you know, we got invitations, we had country clearances,
Speaker 1: I had transportation that put together.
Speaker 2: And it is kind of rare for the Swiss to
Speaker 2: do that kind of cross training because of neutrality, you know,
Speaker 2: it does it is a sensitive issue.
Speaker 1: Well, other Marines had done it, and so we were like, well,
Speaker 1: I was like, well, when's the last time we sent
Speaker 1: a team there, Like, oh, it's been a few years. Like, well,
Speaker 1: let's do it. I mean got so I went. I
Speaker 1: went briefed the guy named James Conway, who was the
Speaker 1: first Marine Division commander later became the commandant, and I said, hey,
Speaker 1: so this is what I'm gonna do, and he said, right, okay,
Speaker 1: you're approved. I hope you represent and have a great time.
Speaker 1: That was September the ninth, So we're like literally lining
Speaker 1: up and getting everything going. And then uh my wife
Speaker 1: woke me up and said you need to come you
Speaker 1: come see this, and uh get a little motional because
Speaker 1: I I went. I went to World Trade Center today
Speaker 1: to visit, to visit a friend or to see a
Speaker 1: friend of mine. Put my my my mother in law's
Speaker 1: cousin was killed. Oh I'm not sorry. Well and there
Speaker 1: are family members who are working there who got out,
Speaker 1: so we you know, John Crow, his name is there.
Speaker 1: So I went and went and saw his name and went,
Speaker 1: you know, just it was a huge you know I
Speaker 1: did people forget how absolutely terrifying and confusing that time. Yes,
Speaker 1: and it's not just a big hole in the ground
Speaker 1: right when you go there, it's not. I mean World
Speaker 1: one World Trade Center still looks amazing as you as
Speaker 1: you walk by it. But the cost today today going
Speaker 1: down there was like visiting a battlefield. I mean, it
Speaker 1: really is hollow ground, right, And so I I come
Speaker 1: in and I'm watching this everything like we all did,
Speaker 1: unfold on TV. And at that point in time, I
Speaker 1: was like, yeah, well, just we're not going to Switzerland,
Speaker 1: like nobody knew what was going to happen. But then
Speaker 1: the phones were ringing, like hey, you need to come in.
Speaker 1: We're we're in def kond. We're drawing what we're drawing weapons.
Speaker 1: We don't know what, you know it was, it was
Speaker 1: it was a hairy time, it's.
Speaker 2: You know, I yeah, I hate to sound like an
Speaker 2: old man or something like that, but you're absolutely right
Speaker 2: that people young people today they don't understand what that was.
Speaker 1: Like.
Speaker 2: I was a senior in high school when it happened,
Speaker 2: and I mean people were fucking afraid.
Speaker 1: There was like a palpable fear in the air. And
Speaker 1: this is the this is the thing is that everyone
Speaker 1: looked to our nation's leadership and said, what are we
Speaker 1: gonna do into our military? And that's who the next
Speaker 1: look was like. And and you know, Iraq wasn't actually
Speaker 1: on the docket at that point in time. It was
Speaker 1: all Afghanistan. We had MEWS, they were out and and
Speaker 1: the next thing we know, one of our recomplatoons is
Speaker 1: on the ground in Afghanistan. There's raids happening, like there's
Speaker 1: all kinds of shit, and everybody's like, it is on,
Speaker 1: it is on. Yeah. My buddy Nate Fick, who wrote
Speaker 1: One Bull a little way, I've known him, you know, twenty
Speaker 1: so odd years. He was over there as an infantry
Speaker 1: guy and just the stuff that he was involved in,
Speaker 1: just as an infantry platoon commander, you know, as these
Speaker 1: guys start remember, but I said, we didn't have any combat,
Speaker 1: he said in his book, and we made combat. We
Speaker 1: became combat vets overnight, and all of a sudden we
Speaker 1: had a lot of combat vets and they just kept
Speaker 1: growing from there. But yeah, sitting back in the States,
Speaker 1: we didn't know what was gonna happen, et cetera.
Speaker 2: So and I mean speaking to the fear that you're
Speaker 2: like your unit's strong weapons and they're probably putting demo
Speaker 2: together and everything. Like the units did that, as I understand,
Speaker 2: a lot of it was on their own volition. Yes,
Speaker 2: they didn't get ordered. They were like just preparing, like
Speaker 2: they knew something was gonna come.
Speaker 1: The intel shop all of a sudden had a lot
Speaker 1: of work and we're like, you know, having zipper and
Speaker 1: like you know, as you know high side stuff. There
Speaker 1: weren't a lot of act not like it is now
Speaker 1: where you would get screened and you did just sort
Speaker 1: of the way you work, never mind top secret. So
Speaker 1: it was sort of like, hey, you guys need to
Speaker 1: get to work and start mining things. You need to
Speaker 1: make what networks do We had, like we didn't have
Speaker 1: the relationships that we have now between agencies, particularly at
Speaker 1: the national level. All this stuff was was brand new.
Speaker 1: We literally were just grabbing maps of Afghanistan and putting
Speaker 1: them up on the wall and me like, okay, but
Speaker 1: we got a little tax in them. You had the
Speaker 1: bear went over the mountain, you know, Dave Grawl is
Speaker 1: his name. We had a few guys come in and
Speaker 1: give PMS on their time, having you know, worked in
Speaker 1: Afghanistan in the eighties. It was the only end. It
Speaker 1: was the only information we had, and so we just
Speaker 1: didn't know. And so then from there we just went
Speaker 1: into this crazy training cycle. We were out in the
Speaker 1: desert and honing our skills with thehtory of the patrolling
Speaker 1: foot patrolling, how do you get teams in and out,
Speaker 1: you know, immediate actions drills. The training then became very
Speaker 1: very real. We're no longer doing this, you're vacation. You're
Speaker 1: getting ready for a real real world issue. Absolutely. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so I was there for all of two thousand
Speaker 1: and one. As we went in two thousand and two,
Speaker 1: I was looking to try and stay and they don't
Speaker 1: have what's called stop loss, which would keep you in
Speaker 1: your unit, and I missed the push to Iraqa's I
Speaker 1: got orders to go to the in Fabius reconnaissance school
Speaker 1: to become the EXO, which I did want to stay
Speaker 1: in Recon. I did want to be a part of it.
Speaker 1: It beat going on recruiting or something like that. But
Speaker 1: I was really frustrated, so I missed the Generation Killed deployment.
Speaker 1: I've known many of the guys who were in Generation Killed.
Speaker 1: Rudi Reez dat Fake was a platoon commander, the guy
Speaker 1: they called the iceman, all the Bride Colvert, all these
Speaker 1: guys were people I knew. And you know, I remember
Speaker 1: the Patun commander coming in and took over my platoon.
Speaker 2: I just like.
Speaker 1: I told you, it was late Jack, late to a lot.
Speaker 1: So they went and they deployed. And I remember we
Speaker 1: were training in Key West in March of three and uh,
Speaker 1: we're out for a couple of beers and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, CNN fleshed on and we're in the invasion
Speaker 1: and all of us we're like, can we have like
Speaker 1: twenty beers please, because like, yeah, yeah, we're a bunch
Speaker 1: of Recon guys and we're not.
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Speaker 2: So, yeah, you it's three and you haven't gotten to
Speaker 2: Afghanistan or racket yet.
Speaker 1: I didn't do anything yet. Nope, Man, it would be
Speaker 1: it would be a while. Yeah, that's amazingly because I
Speaker 1: was at ARS, which is the west the East coast
Speaker 1: version of VRC on the West coast. Now they can
Speaker 1: sol it ad it all out in the West Coast
Speaker 1: at sl Y, which is better. I mean, they've got
Speaker 1: better access, better through through put. You did two schools
Speaker 1: at the time, was meant to feed like small requirements
Speaker 1: on each coast. But did you have a fear like that,
Speaker 1: like a real fear that you were going to miss
Speaker 1: the war? Of course? Yeah, I mean I now was
Speaker 1: no longer looking to become a federal law enforcement officer,
Speaker 1: like I'm going to stay in. Yeah, this is this
Speaker 1: is an opportunity you want, you want to be able
Speaker 1: to make some ass. But I was in this training
Speaker 1: command and we're training guys, and you know, the irony
Speaker 1: is that we've got a cadre of dudes who have
Speaker 1: operational experience and maybe one or two had done some
Speaker 1: combat Sierra Leone or Bosnia doing like Neo's Neo type stuff,
Speaker 1: protective stuff. The guys in Bosnia did some actual reconnaissance
Speaker 1: missions and and you know had it was real world
Speaker 1: kind of hairiness that they were doing. Not talking direct action,
Speaker 1: but they were involved in some things. And uh, I
Speaker 1: I had. I had taken over from from a guy
Speaker 1: named Doug Zambec. Yes, yes, so he's his own he's
Speaker 1: his own legend. We can talk about that. He was
Speaker 1: a very good friend of mine, was a very good
Speaker 1: friend of mine. So I'd taken over from him, and
Speaker 1: he was like, hey, man, you're entrusted with training these marines.
Speaker 1: I know that because because he was going to go
Speaker 1: to he'd got orders to what's called the now the
Speaker 1: Expedition of Warfare School at the time Amphibius Warfare School,
Speaker 1: which is a captain's level career course for the Marine
Speaker 1: Corps and then from there he was going to take
Speaker 1: an infantry company. He was like, look, I know that
Speaker 1: this is frustrating for you, but you're in charge of
Speaker 1: something very important and you need to do that job
Speaker 1: the best that you can, which is a huge leadership.
Speaker 1: And he was right. But we're cadre of guys who
Speaker 1: don't have a lot of experience. And then we start
Speaker 1: getting dudes who were in infantry in nazarea. We get
Speaker 1: guys who are part of like really legitimate ground combat
Speaker 1: operations in both Afghanistan and irakas in richment, and now
Speaker 1: they're coming in and we're teaching them how it's gonna be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that doesn't go over. Yeah, we have a lot of credibility.
Speaker 1: So eventually we started getting some cadre that actually did
Speaker 1: have combat experience. A couple of guys, you've been shot, like,
Speaker 1: so they started I started lending it.
Speaker 2: The entire military kind of had that problem around that
Speaker 2: time frame, like three oh four, you know, ranger school,
Speaker 2: whatever it was that you had instructors who nothing wrong
Speaker 2: or against them at all, but they're suddenly having like
Speaker 2: range of battalion privates with like three combat deployments showing.
Speaker 1: Up at their school when I I went to I
Speaker 1: went to Airborne School in December of two thousand and two,
Speaker 1: and there were ranger privates walking around with mustards. Yes,
Speaker 1: because they jumped into Rhino yep with with with Kagea
Speaker 1: and so you know, I haven't even got a jump
Speaker 1: yet and these guys are you know, get out of
Speaker 1: the way.
Speaker 2: I knew a couple of guys that had two mustard stains. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Speaker 1: It's wild. Well, I remember asking when it was Back
Speaker 1: when I was joining the military. I went to maps
Speaker 1: and they put you through the you know, the screening,
Speaker 1: and one of the medicals mean, there was an Army
Speaker 1: medic and he he had he had jumped in Panama
Speaker 1: Ranger to combat Ranger scroll and then he had a
Speaker 1: you know, muster stained on his and I just handedly asked,
Speaker 1: how many jumps do you have? And he goes one
Speaker 1: that matters fair. Oh yeah. So you know that just
Speaker 1: being in that environment because you're in this tough guy club,
Speaker 1: but you you're not really a tough guy, and you're
Speaker 1: you're you you want that and it was it was
Speaker 1: a little bit of a self consciousness, a little bit
Speaker 1: of stuma, and so yeah, I did that from three
Speaker 1: to five, and then I very much wanted to I
Speaker 1: wanted to lead recon marines. I could have gone and
Speaker 1: become a company commander, because that's what I was an
Speaker 1: infantry officer. Doug was doing that and very successful with that.
Speaker 1: Uh they don't call him a lion of Falsiah for
Speaker 1: no reason. And uh, I said, you know what, I'm
Speaker 1: going to ask to go to Second Force and become
Speaker 1: a platun commander there and and.
Speaker 2: So that that would be your third platoon at that point. Right,
Speaker 2: is that normal or abnormal?
Speaker 1: No, that would be very abnormal. In fact, taking a
Speaker 1: platoon as a captain was to career suicide. And my
Speaker 1: my monitor, to my my detailer even told me I
Speaker 1: had to sign a He said, I'll cut your orders
Speaker 1: there if that's you want to go. I got plenty
Speaker 1: of people that need company command time. So if that's
Speaker 1: what you want to do, and they've got a job
Speaker 1: for you. I drove down there and interviewed with the
Speaker 1: commander and got a stamp, and then I came back
Speaker 1: that day. I was like, right, so you got to
Speaker 1: make your own luck, right, you got to chase it down.
Speaker 1: But if they didn't give it to me, I don't
Speaker 1: know what, Like, that's the direction I want to go,
Speaker 1: that's what you want to do. Yeah yeah, but that
Speaker 1: is that them allowing me to do that, And that
Speaker 1: decision is what set the rest of my career because
Speaker 1: I was told, like your careers over well, they didn't
Speaker 1: know what things were going to look like. So you
Speaker 1: go to force as a captain, take a platoon. Now,
Speaker 1: I've trained guys at airs who've now been to combat
Speaker 1: and come back and now they're like, oh, great, asshole,
Speaker 1: you know, welcome.
Speaker 2: Now we're into like five six all right, So what's
Speaker 2: it like landing at force?
Speaker 1: It is like the best way I could equate it
Speaker 1: is if you saw a band of brothers. It would
Speaker 1: be like checking into the one hundred and first after
Speaker 1: they got back from Normandy Salty deal. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: platoon sergeant, everybody, I couldn't well, I had. You know,
Speaker 1: you still have to be a leader, you still have
Speaker 1: to be there, but you yeah, you get this. It's
Speaker 1: not even a chip on your shoulder. You just have
Speaker 1: to try and figure out how to navigate, and you
Speaker 1: have to earn the respect. You have to earn and
Speaker 1: so go on all the way back to my first
Speaker 1: infantry unit. I kind of was like, well, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: start just like that. They all get a fair shake.
Speaker 1: Hopefully they'll give me one two. I already had a
Speaker 1: reputation within the recon community for good or for ill,
Speaker 1: and so I had to kind of almost I had
Speaker 1: to humble myself. My friend, my friend Roger Sparks, who
Speaker 1: does some really good veterans work. He's out of Alaska.
Speaker 1: He was a recon guy and then went to pj's
Speaker 1: and a Silver Star recipient, a really really great guy. Uh.
Speaker 1: When I was the first recon, he's one of my
Speaker 1: team leaders, and he's like there's a time in everyone's
Speaker 1: career where you come legit where everybody's just like okay,
Speaker 1: you've you've got what it takes, and uh, never forget that,
Speaker 1: Like when you get to these units, you've got to
Speaker 1: figure out how did how did you go about that?
Speaker 2: How did you build rapport with these guys and kind
Speaker 2: of like get that nod or handshake that like yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: this sky will work well.
Speaker 1: I had a lot of talented n CEOs. Obviously, their
Speaker 1: combat their combat experience was quite significant by that point,
Speaker 1: because they've done Afghanistan, some of them been Afghanistan and Iraq,
Speaker 1: and they were seasoned, and so I just said, all right.
Speaker 1: I sat down with the petting commander and or as
Speaker 1: as their platon commander, and I said, all right, how
Speaker 1: are we going to make this unit work? I'm here
Speaker 1: to lead it. I mean, you saw at their guidance, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I don't. But I don't have to take my
Speaker 1: shoes off and say I'm in charge, just like people
Speaker 1: already know that. But that's not what I'm here to do.
Speaker 1: And then I also went to other platoon commanders who
Speaker 1: had been involved in that for a while and said, hey, man,
Speaker 1: I'm having this is a challenge. I'm having. This is hard.
Speaker 1: What do I What do I do? You know? These people?
Speaker 1: What do I say? And it's not so much looking
Speaker 1: for validation and you're not looking for and would tell
Speaker 1: you what to do. It's just sort of like, hey,
Speaker 1: give me some GID And that's a hard thing to
Speaker 1: grab hold of. And it's hard to, like I said,
Speaker 1: to humble yourself. It's hard to kind of say, okay,
Speaker 1: this is what I don't know. And there was a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff I didn't know, and there was a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff that I could offer, and I said,
Speaker 1: all right, we'll go to figure out that blend. And
Speaker 1: so when I took them out on a patrolling exercise,
Speaker 1: they were like, what is he doing? But I did
Speaker 1: it for very specific reason to watch and see how
Speaker 1: these guys work and what do they do, and how
Speaker 1: do they move at night and what do they And
Speaker 1: then we got the kegaber and figured out the personality.
Speaker 1: My dad's legacy was right on what's going on? But no,
Speaker 1: that's interesting.
Speaker 2: I mean, you took them out on a training exercise,
Speaker 2: and it really is for you to observe them and
Speaker 2: to see how they operate so that you can kind
Speaker 2: of them mold yourself.
Speaker 1: Around them, knowing they were also watching me. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you can't be first in everything you get me. You
Speaker 1: wish you could, You wish you were great across all areas, and.
Speaker 2: You know, but these guys are hard chargers. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 2: and you can't. You can't fool the audience. You can't
Speaker 2: feel the audience.
Speaker 1: Like you got to give him credit right in the
Speaker 1: book and the movie or whatever, and so yeah, and
Speaker 1: then after a while we got to know each other
Speaker 1: and we were getting ready actually to deploy to Iraq
Speaker 1: as part of them, you, because that's what it was
Speaker 1: at the time. And then Donald Rumsfeld came down and said,
Speaker 1: we're standing at Marsak and Brincorps figured it out and
Speaker 1: I was in the right place at the right time
Speaker 1: to be a plane co owner of Marsac when.
Speaker 2: They wow tell us about how that came about. Because
Speaker 2: one of the funnest stories about this that I heard
Speaker 2: we had an enlisted guy and I'm sorry, I can't
Speaker 2: remember his name, He's an enlisted Marine, and he said
Speaker 2: that they came he was in ricon or Force, came
Speaker 2: back from a training exercise and like the supply guy
Speaker 2: or something, met them in the parking lot and was like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you guys aren't reconn anymore. You're something called uh mansock
Speaker 2: I think it is, does Pete Perry? And everyone was
Speaker 2: just like what.
Speaker 1: I So like, I said, I was supposed to go
Speaker 1: on this MEW in October, and I had already gone
Speaker 1: to meet with the new commander, and I'd also met
Speaker 1: with the with the Infantry Battalion commander. Even though we
Speaker 1: were forced, we knew that we were going to do
Speaker 1: a lot of reconnaissance linked up with second recon which
Speaker 1: is another you know, you have the same second force
Speaker 1: just like first force, and then you had recombatalions. So
Speaker 1: we were trying to come up with, like how do
Speaker 1: we consolidate all the reconnaissance forces, which they've now they've
Speaker 1: now done as part of the Marine Corps.
Speaker 2: Okay, so it's like under a Marine Corps Special warfare kind.
Speaker 1: Of yeah, and we can go into the back and
Speaker 1: forth of who got this banded win and then who
Speaker 1: got reactive. It is, you know, the Marine Corps, the
Speaker 1: relearning organization. We know, we we learn, and then we
Speaker 1: learn a lot more and then we you know, no
Speaker 1: one ever accused us over two hundred fifty years. It's
Speaker 1: two hundred fifty year anniversary, unimpeded by progress. No one
Speaker 1: ever accused us of being particularly bright, but we dan
Speaker 1: we're hard, right, Like, So I was actually up in
Speaker 1: Quantico at the UH Breacher's course. I got a I
Speaker 1: got a slot as an officer, a very rare one
Speaker 1: UH to go to the dynamic entry you know, explosive
Speaker 1: breaching course. So I am a preacher or was. Now
Speaker 1: their preachers are going to suck this guy, like, but
Speaker 1: it's true. I was up there at the course and
Speaker 1: I got a call and they were like, hey man,
Speaker 1: you're not going to be on the mew. We don't
Speaker 1: know what's going to happen, but we Marsocks just stood
Speaker 1: up and we're all now in marsok. And so when
Speaker 1: you get back, just stand by. So we didn't know
Speaker 1: what it was going to look like. We know that
Speaker 1: we were now falling under SOCOM. But they brought in
Speaker 1: auditors to our arms rooms, our supply and to your
Speaker 1: point of like, we didn't have any gear, We didn't
Speaker 1: have anything that this is where we're working on a
Speaker 1: shoe stream budget. SOCOM came in and looked at our
Speaker 1: weapons and looked at all of our stuff, and we're like,
Speaker 1: how have you guys been doing this? You're so poor.
Speaker 1: You actually don't know how poor you are, like, and.
Speaker 2: They were concerned about like interoperability and things like that.
Speaker 1: Commonality of gear, Like we didn't have PVS fifteen's, you know,
Speaker 1: the two barrels. We were still running around with a
Speaker 1: single Some guys had them as they were starting to
Speaker 1: come in. But I'm not saying we were using the
Speaker 1: car fifteen's, but you know, we basically am four is
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. And it was just like, okay,
Speaker 1: here's some money, like go get you go buy yourself
Speaker 1: some news like Walmart or yeah, going to five eleven
Speaker 1: and hook yourself up like whatever you want. Your prime
Speaker 1: precision was brand new, like get yourself one hundred pairs
Speaker 1: of Cavis for all your guys, like what and if
Speaker 1: you need more, come see us, Like it's no problem,
Speaker 1: Like we got this crazy g WoT money. And they
Speaker 1: were like all right, So we start getting more gear,
Speaker 1: we start getting better equipment, we start, you know, really
Speaker 1: you know, getting ourselves outfitted. And that's what we were
Speaker 1: able to do in those interim years. But when we
Speaker 1: weren't deploying was build our forces up. And the best
Speaker 1: part about that was the force recompleton that I had
Speaker 1: in here and now was part of We were together
Speaker 1: now for another two years after that, so we had
Speaker 1: incredible unit cohesion, a lot of time together, a lot
Speaker 1: of time together. My jump masters like they they knew
Speaker 1: exactly who was who. You know, we all knew what
Speaker 1: skills we had, we had, we had levels of training
Speaker 1: that we'd been to that that hadn't been done because
Speaker 1: we had this opportunity and That's kind of how I
Speaker 1: looked at it. I was like, well, we don't know
Speaker 1: what's going to happen, we can be ready, so let's
Speaker 1: just we're gonna train, and we're gonna train really hard.
Speaker 1: So yeah, talk to us through that a little bit.
Speaker 2: You know, after you guys went down and bought all
Speaker 2: of your oak lea's and beltrow and everything that you needed.
Speaker 1: Oh, to be fair, a lot of guys were already
Speaker 1: leaning into that. They already cleaned out the places in
Speaker 1: town and that was legal. Now it was legal.
Speaker 2: How did you begin, like standing up? I assume you
Speaker 2: know you mentioned auditors and so forth. There must have
Speaker 2: been people coming down and you had like some benchmarks
Speaker 2: you had to meet to be quote unquote qualifying soft.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that all came out of so common. In fact,
Speaker 1: the Army did a lot of evaluation on us, particularly
Speaker 1: we were direct action focused at that point in time. Particularly,
Speaker 1: so there were people from SIFT, there were people from
Speaker 1: from CAG and they were they were curious like what
Speaker 1: do these how do these guys train? What do they do?
Speaker 1: We invested in marksmanship training on a on a huge level.
Speaker 1: We invested in uh our tactics. We revitalized how we
Speaker 1: did stuff because Delta had found that five guys attacking
Speaker 1: the people that the paper people army was not really
Speaker 1: effective and dudes were getting shot and it was so
Speaker 1: we we had to relearn a bunch of things. Aggression
Speaker 1: helps in those fights, but you also have to be
Speaker 1: a thinker, and like the British, you know, the British say,
Speaker 1: you know, you take your time, but hurry, you know,
Speaker 1: be careful, but get it done. Be deliberate. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you know, if you're in, you're in. But like, just
Speaker 1: so we had to change things immensely in the way
Speaker 1: that we trained and the way that we approached stuff.
Speaker 1: And and uh, that was a lot of learning as well.
Speaker 1: I mean, you guys had come back from Iraq with
Speaker 1: hum v's that they had gotten the CBS to old
Speaker 1: armor plate on, and they're like, yeah, there's got to
Speaker 1: be a better way to fight than this. And so
Speaker 1: they designed the gm V, the ground Mobility vehicle that
Speaker 1: we all started. You know, they went to letter Kenny
Speaker 1: Arsenal and said, Okay, we want to design a vehicle
Speaker 1: that works. So from the ground up it was Taylor
Speaker 1: built for soft use. That's why they had the software GMV,
Speaker 1: the turret and all this thing.
Speaker 2: So we have to not preface this but at least
Speaker 2: explain to the viewers to kind of like dovetail this.
Speaker 2: We had Fred Galvin on the show a few years back.
Speaker 2: We have his book right, A Few Bad Men. Rather,
Speaker 2: you know, you guys can ken and should go back
Speaker 2: and watch his interview and you can that first MARSK
Speaker 2: deployment sounded pretty hillacious for those guys and what they
Speaker 2: went through. And to be fair, I was not there, right, Yes,
Speaker 2: That's what I'm leading up to here, is that generation kill.
Speaker 1: I was not there, so they makes for good TV
Speaker 1: in some ways. But I can just say who I know?
Speaker 2: And you were the follow on after foxtrot take us
Speaker 2: through that event?
Speaker 1: Yep, uh so I was. I was the direct Action
Speaker 1: platoon commander. We were paired up with a an infantry
Speaker 1: platoon they call a trailer platoon, which is really not
Speaker 1: a good name. They were. They were they were meant
Speaker 1: to be an augmented security force for US doing a
Speaker 1: direct action mission. So if we were isolating an objective
Speaker 1: and we the assault platoon we're attacking, we're going into
Speaker 1: the assault. The infantry would be an external security they'd
Speaker 1: also come in with heavier weapons, uh, machine guns, that
Speaker 1: kind of thing, and be able to lay down some
Speaker 1: exterior higher firepower. And they were also able. It also
Speaker 1: allowed us to put every assaulter on the objective and
Speaker 1: not have to have a driver like they could take
Speaker 1: care of all that for us. But so another thing
Speaker 1: we invested in with driver training. We went to BSR,
Speaker 1: we did day and night, we did off road, you know,
Speaker 1: old mobility. Yeah, it's a lot of fun to drive
Speaker 1: an old police Caprice Classic, you know, with a big
Speaker 1: block V eight four or five at one hundred miles
Speaker 1: an hour on night vision, goggles down a racetrack Crown
Speaker 1: vic Oh my god, yeah, and just just roll it
Speaker 1: like you got the cop suspense and you it was.
Speaker 1: It was great. So so we invested in that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff because we one of the biggest casualty producers
Speaker 1: was vehicle rollovers and accidents. So they're like, well, then
Speaker 1: shouldn't we learn how to drive? And you got to
Speaker 1: drive in your body armor and your gear, and you
Speaker 1: got to be able to feel the pedals in your boots.
Speaker 1: And so we tried to make his training as realistic
Speaker 1: as possible. And then so the Marsoc Company at that
Speaker 1: time was one hundred and twenty people in that had enablers, communicators,
Speaker 1: it had our company commander was a major, like Fred
Speaker 1: was the company commander for Fox Company. I was in
Speaker 1: Golf Company at that point. And then we were to
Speaker 1: succeed Fred and his guys, and then they got into
Speaker 1: they got into the encounter, the ambush that they were
Speaker 1: involved in, and you can beat about that. You can
Speaker 1: go see different things, and that was a really difficult
Speaker 1: time because people are quick to judge. The facts weren't there.
Speaker 2: I told Fred at the time, I mean we were
Speaker 2: hearing about it. I think I was in the Special
Speaker 2: Forces qualification course and I was hearing weird stories at
Speaker 2: Fort Bragg about this stuff that, as I now know,
Speaker 2: are highly exaggerated. And you know that's not how it
Speaker 2: went down.
Speaker 1: Everybody heard that, yeah, and it and it sat a
Speaker 1: shockwave across I mean, the Rine Corps has never liked
Speaker 1: Marsac and at that point in time.
Speaker 2: It was like a same really, see, this is what
Speaker 2: I told yourself, this is what you get, which is
Speaker 2: totally unfair.
Speaker 1: Because he had man if I had a good freaking group.
Speaker 1: He had a a team of dudes in that unit
Speaker 1: and its direct action.
Speaker 2: Ye it sounds like they have been It took a
Speaker 2: hell of a long time, but they have been vindicated.
Speaker 1: Been adjudicated, yeas, and and and but but but they inger, yes,
Speaker 1: we have some scars. It does. And and it also
Speaker 1: went through so calm the same way because it was like,
Speaker 1: what's going on here? And so there was even more
Speaker 1: scrutiny on us as we were ramping up, you talking
Speaker 1: about certification, where they're like, well, let's take a look
Speaker 1: at like we really need to look at these guys carefully,
Speaker 1: and we're just like, wait a second, you know what
Speaker 1: I do. We're training as hard as anybody else. We've
Speaker 1: already demonstrated week, we demonstrated our capabilities to do we
Speaker 1: need to do. And so coming in after them, you
Speaker 1: know that that was the environment and we just had
Speaker 1: to kind of figure it out.
Speaker 2: Another leadership challenge for you. Have we seen a trend here? Yes,
Speaker 2: we're only in two thousand and seven right now, Well,
Speaker 2: how did you overcome this particular leadership challenge that, like
Speaker 2: MARSK is under the microscope and in the eyes of
Speaker 2: many military leaders like you guys suck.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not fair, but there's a perception out
Speaker 1: there needed to be the best people we could be.
Speaker 1: And I said, we know who we are, we know
Speaker 1: what we can do, and it's up to us. Now,
Speaker 1: this doesn't mean they're a defect, but we don't have
Speaker 1: a lot of room for mistakes. In fact, we don't
Speaker 1: because we're playing with house money now, so we we
Speaker 1: we cannot have a bad bet. And unfortunately some people
Speaker 1: took that to mean really holding back and Fred Fred
Speaker 1: did tell me, He's like, you're going to enter a
Speaker 1: world where people approach things from the point of view
Speaker 1: of like I don't have to do anything right, so
Speaker 1: long as I don't do anything wrong, and they'll wait,
Speaker 1: they'll wait out stuff like that, right, And so that's
Speaker 1: a little metaphor for the entire war. Fred was right.
Speaker 1: I'm not given. I'll give him. Fred and I get along.
Speaker 1: We always have. I haven't talked to him in a while.
Speaker 1: So Fred, if you're watching, men love everybody. But he
Speaker 1: he he really he had to. He he had to
Speaker 1: fight his own fight for his unit's good name, for
Speaker 1: his men's good name, and he didn't give up, like
Speaker 1: he had his people's back. And I think that's what
Speaker 1: my own guys wanted to know as well, like, hey,
Speaker 1: if this goes down, this is if Ivan Gonda support
Speaker 1: your boys, stick with you. And but the answer was yes,
Speaker 1: but again you have to figure you had to figure
Speaker 1: this thing out. And so you're you know, we deployed
Speaker 1: Afghanistan and summer of two thousand and seven, and we
Speaker 1: were there until the early early part of two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight, and we saw a protracted amount of combat,
Speaker 1: hell of a lot of When I was in for Geoficer,
Speaker 1: of course, great a guy named black Jack Matthews, lieutenant colonel,
Speaker 1: the battalion commander and way in nineteen sixty eight, and
Speaker 1: he had given his marines the order to fix bannets
Speaker 1: fuck fuck is right. And what he said about that
Speaker 1: is that it was the most difficult order that he'd
Speaker 1: given anyone because he knew someone on the other end
Speaker 1: of that rifle was gonna die. And so while I
Speaker 1: never I of course never gave the order for expandits,
Speaker 1: I know people who have done it in combat. Really well, yeah,
Speaker 1: infantry unit, there's infantry guys whos need to way more
Speaker 1: combat than we have. I mean, seriously, let's call it
Speaker 1: with it. And and so but I thought to myself,
Speaker 1: and they talked about the combat that he was in
Speaker 1: and it's you know, just day overnight type of leadership
Speaker 1: and things that he had to be involved in. I
Speaker 1: was like, I'm never going to see something like that.
Speaker 1: I'll never say never, because man, oh man, I couldn't
Speaker 1: get deployed to Iraq. I couldn't get you know.
Speaker 2: I kept going to these Yeah, you fought for this
Speaker 2: everything I could.
Speaker 1: And now I was finally able to go to the
Speaker 1: game and I got all caught up.
Speaker 2: What area were you guys deployed to? We were in
Speaker 2: the home so at that time was really dangerous. I
Speaker 2: mean not that in place was great, but that was
Speaker 2: ship This timeframe is like during the surge too, isn't it.
Speaker 1: No, it's just prior to that, just prior so we
Speaker 1: were kind of the only Marine Union in this area,
Speaker 1: kind of alone and unafraid, and then we were lashed
Speaker 1: up with we were working with Special Forces units. So
Speaker 1: I've I have earned my Special Forces combat patch, which
Speaker 1: which is pretty cool. I actually take a lot of
Speaker 1: pride in that because I work with some phenomenal guys
Speaker 1: and to be you know, be fair, we were new
Speaker 1: to the environment there are guys who had been in Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: but earlier there were guys who'd been in Iraq. But
Speaker 1: this was not Iraq. It was different. You had to
Speaker 1: learn relearn things, and the enemy gets a huge vote.
Speaker 1: And we were working with SF guys who'd been there
Speaker 1: a while, and we're like, hey, we're going to show
Speaker 1: you some stuff, like different ways of packing your gear,
Speaker 1: different ways of patrolling, you know, or navigating and avoiding
Speaker 1: IDs and all this other stuff, and then they you know,
Speaker 1: we probably no, we definitely avoided more casualties than we took,
Speaker 1: even though we did take casualties because of their tutelage.
Speaker 1: And I would I would give them. But on the
Speaker 1: other side, it felt like we were being watched, like hey,
Speaker 1: you know big brother. Yeah, well, hey, you know, nobody
Speaker 1: really trust these Mars Socks guys too much, so let's
Speaker 1: just put some messf guys with them, because you know
Speaker 1: they're so trustworthy. Yeah. I was gonna say, like, well,
Speaker 1: it depends on how you look at it, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so we just came to find like after a while,
Speaker 1: I was like, hey, you guys are like us, Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we're trying to tell you that, like we're
Speaker 1: you know, we get it, you know, but but people
Speaker 1: did ask were like, what's your training course? Like did
Speaker 1: you get a bereat do you get in We didn't
Speaker 1: even have our badge in the marto. We weren't you
Speaker 1: weren't raiders yet, nopeah, And we were all forced recomp
Speaker 1: But I'll tell you what, like, as soon as you
Speaker 1: told me were former forced dudes, you said you got
Speaker 1: this credibility. Yeah, like okay, talking about it, like okay,
Speaker 1: these guys are yeah, yeah, right.
Speaker 2: Any missions that like stand out in your mind, I
Speaker 2: mean maybe like the first time you were in combat
Speaker 2: or any that particularly you know, stand out for you.
Speaker 1: So we were we were tasked, like we said, we
Speaker 1: were direct action unit, but we did a lot of
Speaker 1: infantry esque fighting. Infantry fighting, but we're small. One hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty guys is still not a lot of dudes,
Speaker 1: especially out in that bad guy country. And we often
Speaker 1: did a lot up patrols by platoons, So you've only
Speaker 1: got five six vehicles that you're out there by yourself,
Speaker 1: whether it's reconnaissance or you're actually doing active combat ops
Speaker 1: where you're searching for the enemy, or even a raid,
Speaker 1: which we did do a few of.
Speaker 2: You.
Speaker 1: We did a clearing operation and it makes it sound
Speaker 1: like it's an old Vietnam search and destroy, but that's
Speaker 1: not what it was.
Speaker 2: We're just kind of moving up this valley to kind
Speaker 2: of movement to contact.
Speaker 1: Movement to contact. We're really trying to figure out the
Speaker 1: enemy because the big the big push was going to
Speaker 1: be on a town, a city called Musa Kali, which
Speaker 1: is further to the north, and we were down south
Speaker 1: of the Kajaki so none of the six to ten
Speaker 1: route hadn't been made yet, any of that stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: those those things, those improvement projects hadn't been completed, and
Speaker 1: they're like, what's the enemy like up in this valley?
Speaker 1: We got to go figure it out. So they sent
Speaker 1: us into this valley that you know, in the Helman
Speaker 1: River to go and do that. And at first it
Speaker 1: was presence patrols. You know, you're going to meet meet
Speaker 1: with people, meet with villagers and things like that, and
Speaker 1: then it just started getting incrementally more hairy the further
Speaker 1: north we went, and so we did a clearing operation.
Speaker 1: As a company. We're in three different sections and mine
Speaker 1: was actually I was actually in reserve, so it was
Speaker 1: not so much wear security. But you know, we had
Speaker 1: to like move in a bubble, you know, cigar like
Speaker 1: cigar shape patrolling formation just with vehicles basically, so you
Speaker 1: got your flank security. And we were in the back
Speaker 1: and we got into a pretty good contact over on
Speaker 1: our left flank. One of my vehicles was hit. Luke
Speaker 1: Mylan was killed. He was a Special Forces medic h
Speaker 1: they called Sarks a Special Amphibious Reconnaissance Corman, which is
Speaker 1: a Navy eighteen delta Special Forces metic. He was. Luke
Speaker 1: was a great guy. I still speak with his family.
Speaker 1: He factors very heavily into my novel which will be
Speaker 1: coming out this year. He held the Army the Use
Speaker 1: of Soak Special Forces Medic of the Year Award and
Speaker 1: the Marsak Operator of the Year Award simultaneously. Okay, so he
Speaker 1: was an absolute warfighter. And when he was killed, we
Speaker 1: were like, oh my god, like this is this is
Speaker 1: our one of the best guys. Yeah, this was like
Speaker 1: holy shit like it was and five other guys were wounded,
Speaker 1: and it was really that was just a huge eye opener.
Speaker 1: And I think that day was when I really learned
Speaker 1: how to lead, because you had to somehow deal with
Speaker 1: the flood of emotions, and your marines are all busted up,
Speaker 1: and then you've got guys who want revenge and you've
Speaker 1: got dudes being evacuated, and it was just terrible. So
Speaker 1: the next day, as we're doing this, So at that time,
Speaker 1: I had not fired my rifle in combat yet. I
Speaker 1: you know, I'd heard this whole thing on the radio.
Speaker 1: I'd seen this entire thing unfold, but it was it
Speaker 1: was distant. I was an observer, but I wasn't in it.
Speaker 1: And I was like, I've now seen combat. I've been
Speaker 1: in combat, but I don't feel like I've been tested.
Speaker 1: And then later that evening the following day, my company
Speaker 1: commander came to me and said, we need to establish
Speaker 1: a foothold on this one part of this ridgeline. So
Speaker 1: I want you to take your platoon down into this,
Speaker 1: to this compound and take it over and fortify it,
Speaker 1: and then the rest of us will swing up past you.
Speaker 1: Because everyone else has been in a lot of contact,
Speaker 1: and we were fresh, fresh, relatively fresh, because we'd do
Speaker 1: it on the back, mounted up, did a quick scan.
Speaker 1: We're like, all right, let's go. Came up with our
Speaker 1: soul plan, and my support by fire position that was
Speaker 1: being provided by the infantry. Never underestimate the enemy. They
Speaker 1: pumped two mortar rounds onto that to knock them out
Speaker 1: as they saw us driving in, so they had to displace.
Speaker 1: And now I had no support by fire and we
Speaker 1: had no air support. At the time. There was stumb
Speaker 1: pulled in on the overhead. It was just like this
Speaker 1: confluence of stuff. So now we drive down at this
Speaker 1: compound and as soon as we get there, we are
Speaker 1: in the base. Murphy's loss says, if your attack is
Speaker 1: going well, you're in an ambush. Well, my attack went
Speaker 1: swimmingly because I was at the base of a U
Speaker 1: shape ambush and they were hammering us inside of one
Speaker 1: hundred yards. RPG round bounced off the hood of my truck.
Speaker 1: I don't know what it just and it blew up
Speaker 1: behind us. My guys dismounted and started doing fire and
Speaker 1: maneuver bounds through these guys and trench lines and they're
Speaker 1: throwing grenades and oh my god. Well, I think it
Speaker 1: scared the shit out of the enemy because they were like,
Speaker 1: these guys are crazy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's a reputation Marines had with
Speaker 2: the japanesetern the war.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is this is who you guys are.
Speaker 1: So I realized after the RBG hit the hit the
Speaker 1: hood and bounced off, I was like, okay, this is
Speaker 1: I don't want to be in this vehicle. I at
Speaker 1: least to get out of it. And I need to
Speaker 1: control this fight because that's the officer's job, is command
Speaker 1: and control. But we also teach the fighter leader concept.
Speaker 1: And I get out of the vehicle and the bullets
Speaker 1: are flying, and I start to run around the back
Speaker 1: of My driver yells his name is Coyle. He goes, hey, sir,
Speaker 1: can you shut the door? My dumbass. So I run
Speaker 1: back and I shut the door so he has some protection,
Speaker 1: and he's just sitting there my fifty caliber. My gunner
Speaker 1: up top is Blastmary of the fifty caliber. I run
Speaker 1: around the other side of the vehicle. I'm getting on
Speaker 1: my radio and uh, I mean, it is just chaos
Speaker 1: and calling in tack report and then I get the word, hey,
Speaker 1: get out of there at this place, like there's no
Speaker 1: point in trying to fight this out, So tell everybody, hey,
Speaker 1: we're withdrawing. You'll get back to the vehicles. And again,
Speaker 1: like I've seen these guys now running forward. I don't
Speaker 1: know if anybody's down on these trench lines now, like
Speaker 1: I've lost site. It's dusk, so you really can't see
Speaker 1: what There's a lot of dust and firepower, firepower coming
Speaker 1: in going out, and we are in a is just
Speaker 1: a severe firefight. And I owe Eden Pearl Massar and
Speaker 1: Eden Pearl, who's passed away unfortunately due to his wounds
Speaker 1: from here's back. I owe him everything for teaching me
Speaker 1: this technique. And he told me, if you run around
Speaker 1: a piece of cover, you need to reclear that piece
Speaker 1: of cover because you don't know what's now on the
Speaker 1: other side of it. And I took up the stance
Speaker 1: just like we were trained, and I leaned out around
Speaker 1: the edge of that truck and there's a three dudes
Speaker 1: running with a PK. Holy shit, and I zapped them
Speaker 1: all and that was the first people I'd ever seen
Speaker 1: in my sights or killed. And they all went right down.
Speaker 1: And then I started running and Jack, I can I
Speaker 1: can feel the bullets going by me. I can hear
Speaker 1: him smacking the armor plate behind me. My interpreter is
Speaker 1: laying on his back with his ak over the top
Speaker 1: of the armor plate, just going like this. Just trying,
Speaker 1: like like he's terrified and just trying to contribute. That's
Speaker 1: the technique, it is. And I'm ducking underneath like he
Speaker 1: has no idea that I'm there. So I'm like ducking underneath.
Speaker 1: And I jumped back in with Coil and I said
Speaker 1: we need to turn around. He goes Roger that sir, so,
Speaker 1: so now we got to get everybody back in the
Speaker 1: vehicles and we're trying to get accountability. I'm like, it's
Speaker 1: just kiss and we're trying to turn these vehicles.
Speaker 2: But the boys meanwhile secured like old school battle drills,
Speaker 2: like lobbing frags into those trenches.
Speaker 1: It is. They did it immediately, they did it. They
Speaker 1: went into an attack like that and they basically did
Speaker 1: an Australian people coming back. Fuck man, we're talking about
Speaker 1: guys firing, you know, saws in their shoulder, ain'ting while
Speaker 1: standing up, so they're just just laying it down. And
Speaker 1: I just remember looking at other guy's named Rodriguez, called
Speaker 1: him Big Rod, and he's just standing there just leaning
Speaker 1: into his saw, just doing controlled eight to ten round burths,
Speaker 1: doing God's work. I was like, awesome this, I mean,
Speaker 1: I was just like mesmerized at that point in time.
Speaker 1: So we started turning around and my my Jtach had
Speaker 1: the wherewithal because he's smart to go out the other
Speaker 1: side of the vehicle instead of running because you're like
Speaker 1: told you remember, I couldn't fly a plane. This guy
Speaker 1: was he could. He jumped into this low covered ditch
Speaker 1: and was now like calling in air support and he's
Speaker 1: got eight tens on the run. He's like, hey, we
Speaker 1: got eight tens coming when you get out of here.
Speaker 1: And he has the wherewithal to have a smoke grenade
Speaker 1: with him, so he's just he's doing like everything he's
Speaker 1: got all this time. He's laid out front of him.
Speaker 1: He's like, oh yeah, Roger, we ground call sign just
Speaker 1: a little combat. So you've got like road over here
Speaker 1: shooting like like you know, he's just having a field day,
Speaker 1: and you've got fruit bat just like he tends u
Speaker 1: sounds good. How many bombs he got? Okay, we can
Speaker 1: stock that up. And he's doing all the you know
Speaker 1: stuff in his head. So we we get back in
Speaker 1: and as we're getting we get everybody back in the vehicles,
Speaker 1: we get everybody rogered up, and this seems like it
Speaker 1: takes forever. But it's quick. And remember we did all
Speaker 1: this driver training, we did all this stuff like stuck
Speaker 1: vehicle training, and sure enough, as we're getting ready to
Speaker 1: pull out, here this's oh my god, we're stuck. And
Speaker 1: the way we had pulled in there was like this
Speaker 1: drop off and one of those gmvs and they wait
Speaker 1: like ten tons it has now dropped into the side
Speaker 1: of this freaking thing and is hanging by a wheel.
Speaker 1: So they've dropped the wheel into this thing, and I'm thinking,
Speaker 1: this is it. We're dead. They're gonna hit like they've
Speaker 1: got a stationary vehicle. They're gonna get those RPGs. Now
Speaker 1: that we've shocked them, they're gonna recover from that shock,
Speaker 1: and they're gonna they're gonna blow that vehicle up, and
Speaker 1: we're gonna have a real problem. You know. It's not like, well,
Speaker 1: maybe we should just fight our way into the compound
Speaker 1: and you know, just leave the vehicles and just do
Speaker 1: what we can. So I'm I'm trying to make all
Speaker 1: these decisions that I hear this and I turned the coil,
Speaker 1: so you gotta stop. He goes what like, we gotta
Speaker 1: stuck vehicle, gotta stop, and he's just like, but we're driving, like,
Speaker 1: we gotta get out of here, like I understand that.
Speaker 1: So now we're having this philosophical discussion about why we
Speaker 1: have to stop, and the hand of God, Jack or
Speaker 1: something reaches down and pulls this vehicle off of this
Speaker 1: freaking thing like that because people are jumping out with
Speaker 1: toastraps trying like now they're under fire doing this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff right like we I don't know how many
Speaker 1: Vour awards came out of this one action alone because
Speaker 1: of what people were doing. They had so they towed
Speaker 1: them out of it. Well, they hadn't even gotten hooked
Speaker 1: up yet, and somehow no ship they backed out of.
Speaker 1: The driver figured out whether he put it in four
Speaker 1: wheel drive and toggling what he could, but all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, when he jumps out of this freaking thing,
Speaker 1: they're like, we're free go going, So like we just
Speaker 1: start barreling out of there, and then we got back
Speaker 1: to the covered sealed. Then we all stopped and watched
Speaker 1: the eight tents come in. Yeah, we watched the eight
Speaker 1: ten's come in and they pulverized them, and then it
Speaker 1: got dark and then you know, the combat just ends
Speaker 1: after a while as you know, and then you just
Speaker 1: it's just really quiet. And I wasn't. I was. I
Speaker 1: was not a smoker, right, I love cigars, but I
Speaker 1: was not a cigarette smoker. But a lot of my
Speaker 1: guys were. And I was like, hey man, did anyone
Speaker 1: have a cigarette? Like I really I need I need
Speaker 1: this and the adrenaliness to like coursing through me. Eighte
Speaker 1: eight tents come in and pulverize when we get now
Speaker 1: an AC one thirty over the head just to consolidate
Speaker 1: all of us, and they we run fire missions off
Speaker 1: of that for a while and I'm sitting in the
Speaker 1: covered and shield we had. We did a few more.
Speaker 1: There was a few more combat actions after that as well,
Speaker 1: because we we had we still had to fight. Are
Speaker 1: we out of this little part of the valley. I
Speaker 1: carried an M seventy nine while those old school breakway
Speaker 1: the blooper yep. I carried one into my vehicle. I
Speaker 1: grabbed a bandlier of seventy nine. I just started like
Speaker 1: just lobbing them out to just put put rounds down
Speaker 1: to get because people were coming back. So probably one
Speaker 1: of the last marines of fire comeback. And uh and
Speaker 1: as I as I as I got done. I I
Speaker 1: had this cigarette, and Abdullah, my interpreter's listening to the
Speaker 1: icon and hear all the chatter, and he said, Sir, sir,
Speaker 1: it's very bad for them. We really, you know, we
Speaker 1: really gave him a good going over. It's like, is
Speaker 1: that right? He goes, he goes, yes, he uh. They
Speaker 1: said you were worse than the Russians, and I said,
Speaker 1: that's probably the best ye been paid in my life.
Speaker 1: So then the adrenaline wears office. I'm smoking the cigarette
Speaker 1: and I sit down against the humvee or the gmv's wheel.
Speaker 1: I put the helmet down and I start falling asleep.
Speaker 1: And I woke up and it had burned down to
Speaker 1: my fingers, and like that's what I probably would have
Speaker 1: slept there all night afterward. So I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: if anybody's like, yeah, no, at that point, you're patting
Speaker 1: chin strap, swinging, you know, I was exhaustible. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1: And then we got up and you know, and that
Speaker 1: that mission continued for another couple of days before we
Speaker 1: finally we can only go so far and we're just like, well,
Speaker 1: this is the enemy from line basically, and so pushing
Speaker 1: up into there, we still did more incursions to keep
Speaker 1: them on their heels as the MUSICAA thing was eventually
Speaker 1: going to unfold later that that that fall, later winter,
Speaker 1: our early winter, and it did. We were part of
Speaker 1: that on the outskirts, but the eighty second actually that
Speaker 1: entire mission with with Afghan partners. So wow, I didn't
Speaker 1: know I was going to go deep into a war story.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that was I mean, that was notable. It
Speaker 1: was well, yeah, it was. It was. It was memorable
Speaker 1: just because you know, that was the first like real
Speaker 1: action I've been in. And then after that, we we
Speaker 1: just we got into more and different stuff, and there
Speaker 1: were always named commanders that we were trying to go
Speaker 1: after HVT types, and I did some analysis, went analysis
Speaker 1: one time was one of the SF intelligence sergeants and uh,
Speaker 1: if an American unit had taken it as many casualties
Speaker 1: as we supposedly inflict on it on the talle Ban
Speaker 1: and their leadership, like we would be combat ineffective for
Speaker 1: all the shadow governors and all these other people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, we were after and killing, so I think
Speaker 1: we underestimated just how resilient and their resolve, Like we
Speaker 1: did have them on the ropes at one point as
Speaker 1: you know, probably more like a nine to ten timeframe.
Speaker 1: But at that point in time, they were absolutely for
Speaker 1: roachis and beautible and we could but we kind of
Speaker 1: Afghanistan was a distractor from Iraq and we were really
Speaker 1: stretch pretty thin, and when we get too big into
Speaker 1: the American political sphere at that point, but you know,
Speaker 1: it was so yeah, that was two thousand and when
Speaker 1: we finally finished came back in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: How long were you guys over there? I got there
Speaker 1: in August, so five months, okay, so relatively short, but
Speaker 1: it probably felt like a hell of a long time. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I aged we all did at that point in time.
Speaker 2: So coming back from that deployment, I mean you kind
Speaker 2: of got your wish in a sense, I mean everything
Speaker 2: you were looking for.
Speaker 1: And I never looked I never wanted it again, like
Speaker 1: not like that you got it out of your system. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean I think we all become sort of adrenaline
Speaker 1: junkies in that, you know, you and and and Fick
Speaker 1: talks about this in his book, where you're you become
Speaker 1: kind of addicted to it, you want, you want to hit,
Speaker 1: and then if you're going to be out deployed, then
Speaker 1: you're like, well, I hope we get into action. I
Speaker 1: want to do something. And then no matter how much
Speaker 1: action you've had, you're then like, well that wasn't so bad.
Speaker 1: Maybe we could do a little bit more. You know,
Speaker 1: I've been in this big ambising. I want to I
Speaker 1: want to seek you beefing. I want to push it
Speaker 1: a little. I want to get in a room and
Speaker 1: actually get in a gunfight with a guy. I know
Speaker 1: you don't like, there's a there's a reason we change
Speaker 1: our tactics on this, like it's you know, so you.
Speaker 2: Become a little bit more cautious in that sense. I
Speaker 2: kind of like, be careful what you wish for a
Speaker 2: sort of thing.
Speaker 1: I think more circumspect, definitely, more more uh or calculating
Speaker 1: or at least at least evaluative what is really worth
Speaker 1: way out?
Speaker 2: You know, because you know, if I lose five guys
Speaker 2: on this mission, is it worth it well?
Speaker 1: And that that played in later in my career is
Speaker 1: particularly when you're working at the national level where you
Speaker 1: were being called to do a job. When the phone rings,
Speaker 1: you know that the national command authority is out of
Speaker 1: options and you're gonna go in there and you get
Speaker 1: into a world of risk mitigation. You can never you're
Speaker 1: trying to buy down as much you can eliminate it.
Speaker 1: You're trying to buy it down as much as you can.
Speaker 1: And then are those risks worth it? Are the conditions
Speaker 1: right enough that we can go do this? And you
Speaker 1: want all those decisions made before you get into the helicopter,
Speaker 1: you go, do you open the ramp to jump someone
Speaker 1: out there or whatever? That That is what it comes
Speaker 1: down to, and I think that that's where people run
Speaker 1: into problems, part because you know senior level leaders is
Speaker 1: they may not have that kind of exposure. May I
Speaker 1: have that kind of experience. And this is not to
Speaker 1: say that the people who are leading or not where
Speaker 1: they should be for the right reasons. It's just a
Speaker 1: matter of I think we lose sight of that. And
Speaker 1: whereas we had a big population of combat veterans that
Speaker 1: has dwindled, particularly in the last five to eight years,
Speaker 1: So we're going to go back into that peacetime footing
Speaker 1: a little bit, though I hope the lessons are still maintained.
Speaker 2: So coming back from that deployment two thousand and eight ish,
Speaker 2: what did you say in Forta Rican Or I'm sorry
Speaker 2: you were Marsac at this point, so how much longer
Speaker 2: were you in marsk.
Speaker 1: For After that, I then became an executive officer in
Speaker 1: one of the Barsok battalions, and that battalion's mission was
Speaker 1: primarily like Jay said, and FID in Africa and yeah,
Speaker 1: so I got some exposure. You know, working are very different,
Speaker 1: you know, problems than just a red combat and for
Speaker 1: the people aren't familiar to Jason, your joint combined exercise
Speaker 1: for training, it's you Ford deployed. You're going to countries,
Speaker 1: you know, I think s f used to say you're
Speaker 1: training tomorrow's adversary today. But we did that in the
Speaker 1: Philippines and parts of the Pacific as well, So I
Speaker 1: had it was responsible for a whole bunch of teams
Speaker 1: and people deployed doing those types of missions. So it
Speaker 1: was also some of them in the in the Central
Speaker 1: Asian States. Cool, So I got a lot of exposure
Speaker 1: with that, and then from there I went to the
Speaker 1: Naval War College, I took a took a year sabbatical
Speaker 1: and got my master's degree in Rhode Island, and then
Speaker 1: I came back to Marsawk after that and took on
Speaker 1: company command after a stint in regimental training and regimental
Speaker 1: operations in twenty eleven, and I also did an augment
Speaker 1: in between then with the National Mission Force for in
Speaker 1: ten and eleven. So where as an operations officer for
Speaker 1: a strikeboard too.
Speaker 2: Before we move on too quickly, so working some of
Speaker 2: these like FID missions in Africa.
Speaker 1: Asia, Central Asia.
Speaker 2: The last guest we had on the on the show,
Speaker 2: Frank Sabchak, wrote this whole book, Training to Win, Training
Speaker 2: for Victory, and he examined five different partnership relationships that
Speaker 2: we have around the world El Salvador, Philippines, Columbia, Afghanistan, Iraq.
Speaker 1: It's pretty diverse.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so anyway, I would just like to kind
Speaker 2: of like probe your experience a little bit on that,
Speaker 2: Like what was your takeaway from some of the partnership
Speaker 2: relationships that Marsock.
Speaker 1: Formed in those years. Well, there many of them are
Speaker 1: enduring because now the Marsok battalions had regional focus. I mean,
Speaker 1: we very much like Marstock training. I think I think
Speaker 1: s F can kind of say the same thing. You know,
Speaker 1: whereas it didn't have a formal selection course, they developed
Speaker 1: that where there's you know, it used to be sort
Speaker 1: of SF didn't have an MS. They developed that, so
Speaker 1: you had, you know, longevity in your career path, languages,
Speaker 1: all that stuff. So MARSAK has embraced all of that stuff.
Speaker 1: And MARSAC had the valuable opportunity to be able to
Speaker 1: take all these different things that worked in different special
Speaker 1: operations and create one that could didn't have to learn
Speaker 1: as quickly. And I don't mean that not learning. It
Speaker 1: didn't have to develop those things because other units were
Speaker 1: already and they could say, okay, well we're going to
Speaker 1: adopt that. It just took a while to get it moving.
Speaker 1: So there's long standing partnerships that have been out there,
Speaker 1: and we've got there's teams that work all over the
Speaker 1: place in Africa, they work all over the place, in
Speaker 1: the Philippines, in Central Asian states.
Speaker 2: Like I said, I ran into MARSK guys in the Philippines.
Speaker 1: There are people who run in them all the time
Speaker 1: and they're like, what are these guys doing here? So
Speaker 1: I think when you look at the global War on
Speaker 1: Terror at that point in time and how we were
Speaker 1: trying to literally tamp everything down everywhere, and like I said,
Speaker 1: we kind of lost sight of what we were doing
Speaker 1: I think as a nation, when we kind of spread
Speaker 1: ourselves all over the place, we're going to defeat this ideology.
Speaker 1: And every ideology is bad. And so then you you
Speaker 1: swiftly find that the things are important in Western Africa
Speaker 1: are not the same. Like Africa is a content, not
Speaker 1: a country. The priorities are a little different and each
Speaker 1: place is different. So, you know, I think the French
Speaker 1: get a short shrift, but they do a lot of
Speaker 1: work in Western Africa, and they take a lot of casualties,
Speaker 1: you know, or did for some of these really aggressive
Speaker 1: mission profiles that they ran. And but you'd be surprised
Speaker 1: that Bogarama is not the biggest problem that some of
Speaker 1: these places are facing, even though it makes good headlines
Speaker 1: for us. Right, I'm not saying we're being overly exploitive.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying that are exploitative. But I'm saying that
Speaker 1: they're also dealing with extreme poverty, corruption of running water.
Speaker 1: I mean, our level of poor is very different than
Speaker 1: the rest of the world. And at that point in time,
Speaker 1: with us trying to remap the Middle East in you know,
Speaker 1: a method that we found the most acceptable without necessarily
Speaker 1: asking the people who lived there if that was the
Speaker 1: way that they should go. I mean, we had to
Speaker 1: keep a pulse on all of the things that were
Speaker 1: going on around the world, and our special operations were
Speaker 1: out there doing that. And then there was partnership, of
Speaker 1: course with national level organizations, state department, agency, et cetera,
Speaker 1: to see if all of that jobbed because you were
Speaker 1: really leaning into trying to find out what that next
Speaker 1: flashpoint might be or if it was going to be there.
Speaker 1: That again, it's containment, it's not right elimination, right, and
Speaker 1: so those MARSTOK teams were not necessarily involved in direct
Speaker 1: mission assistance and planning with units that were going out
Speaker 1: and doing them, or if they were, it was much
Speaker 1: more stand officer, you know, will help you develop this plan.
Speaker 1: But yes, and the Philippines is another good example on that.
Speaker 1: Although one of my teams on their way to a
Speaker 1: training range with the Philippine Marine Corps got into a
Speaker 1: big freakin' action. So next thing I know, I'm getting
Speaker 1: all kinds of simple reports of this firefight that they've
Speaker 1: been in, and they're you know, they're being awarded the
Speaker 1: Vietnamese or the Philippine Cross a Gallantry per man And
Speaker 1: now I'm going to the Marine Corps saying, hey, these
Speaker 1: guys made the combat action. We're not in combat in
Speaker 1: the Philippines, like well they were yesterday. Yeah, yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: not making this up like you know. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean and their medics, you know, treating wounded and all
Speaker 1: kinds of stuff, and so you never and and that
Speaker 1: was one thing though, that that they had talked to
Speaker 1: the their their Philippine counterparts. You know, you got to
Speaker 1: treat these things as a mission, like the enemy is everywhere,
Speaker 1: and you know, you never know. Now they're not going
Speaker 1: into take out absifs, you know, planning a headquarters cell
Speaker 1: that they were not involved in the hostage rescue that
Speaker 1: that happened over there as well. But there's a lot
Speaker 1: of special operations things that are happening around that to
Speaker 1: enable those types of missions. So they were actively involved
Speaker 1: in and so they you know that those units that
Speaker 1: are on the ground are your best collectors, they're your
Speaker 1: best pulse on on what's going on there. And I
Speaker 1: think you know, one of the in a historical area
Speaker 1: that we didn't learn from is that in Somalia in
Speaker 1: the nineties there were special forces, American Special Forces units,
Speaker 1: US Army Special Forces units in Somali already on the
Speaker 1: ground who had a pretty good handle on a deed
Speaker 1: in like what this dynamic was was really like in
Speaker 1: that place. And then when you know the National Command
Speaker 1: Authority and I know, I mean that like Washington got involved,
Speaker 1: then they were like, uh, we got the answers like,
Speaker 1: oh no, we're going to take care of seals. And
Speaker 1: so then you get into a mission creep that this overextends.
Speaker 1: And I'm not I'm not discounting anything that happened in
Speaker 1: Blackout Down or the bravery that people involved. And you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot to be learned as a feet of
Speaker 1: arms in the Battle of the Black Seat, for sure,
Speaker 1: but that kind of thing just it just snowballs way
Speaker 1: if you're ignoring the people on the ground, or at
Speaker 1: least discounting, right, you know, and that mission, when that
Speaker 1: mission focus changes, it's sort of a discounting. And I
Speaker 1: really don't think you can. I think there's a there's
Speaker 1: value in having just chase sets out there, even if
Speaker 1: people see them as boring and kind of unimportant, because
Speaker 1: training people to shoot, you know, do marksmanship, and do
Speaker 1: basic medical trainings. Yeah we're talking about earlier. They're never
Speaker 1: going to make a movie out of it, unless something
Speaker 1: goes bad.
Speaker 2: But sometimes those like the liaison relationships are where you're
Speaker 2: going to have the biggest impact on the battle space
Speaker 2: it is, and it also helps her your unit memory.
Speaker 1: Like that's the problem with the new the Marine Corps
Speaker 1: Marine Expeditionary Program is it rebuilds itself every thirty six
Speaker 1: months or so for a six month deployment, and because
Speaker 1: they're always reconstituting, that's that's what really makes particularly our
Speaker 1: our national mission forces very effective, is that they are standing.
Speaker 1: They have continuity of continuity, and they have a lot
Speaker 1: of lessons learned that they pay attention to and then
Speaker 1: when it's time to go into this next place or like, well,
Speaker 1: who do we know, who's in our network? What is
Speaker 1: our experience there? And mar Marzak has done a pretty
Speaker 1: good job of that as well.
Speaker 2: So after that, you go to grad school and you
Speaker 2: come back to the Marine Corps with a bunch of
Speaker 2: new vocabulary words to.
Speaker 1: Annoy your enlisted guys with, and annoyed they work. I actually,
Speaker 1: ironically we're talking about Fred Galvin. I took over Fox Company, okay,
Speaker 1: and that was my company command. Like I said, I
Speaker 1: did a tour with a strike force as an operations officer,
Speaker 1: which actually really did help me, not only post graduate
Speaker 1: school or work college.
Speaker 2: That was before your company command, before my company command. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: well let's get into that a little bit.
Speaker 4: Uh Okay, I I had there were Marines working specific
Speaker 4: unit and they said, hey, we need some assistance with.
Speaker 1: One of our opos fell through and we need a guy.
Speaker 1: And I know it's short notice, but is it possibly
Speaker 1: you could come fill this? And so Mars socks out
Speaker 1: as a great opportunity and commanders knew each other and
Speaker 1: calls were made, and so I jumped on an airplane
Speaker 1: and went over there. And that was in eastern Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: which is another part that I hadn't really served, and
Speaker 1: so I worked. I worked there for four months, pretty
Speaker 1: high end, a high operational tempo environment. But I learned
Speaker 1: a lot, not only through operational planning, but just watching
Speaker 1: how these units prepared and did things, so that I
Speaker 1: took all of that information and when I became a
Speaker 1: company commander was like, I really have a fair thorough
Speaker 1: understanding about it. How do you utilize ISR? How to
Speaker 1: you know, augment and accelerate the intelligence process and apply
Speaker 1: that in real time and make changes and explain why
Speaker 1: those changes are necessary and develop a unit that sees
Speaker 1: it that way. And so you should constantly be learning
Speaker 1: and involving and turn and trying new things. But if
Speaker 1: you don't have support, you're kind of hallucinating. So you
Speaker 1: can't just like run forward. So what they do it
Speaker 1: kind of right, it's a sale, it's a salesman, it's
Speaker 1: a sales pitch.
Speaker 2: So you mentioned that a little bit earlier about the
Speaker 2: importance of branding.
Speaker 1: Uh huh, and that's uh going back to that confidence thing.
Speaker 1: If at face value, they can say, oh gosh, these
Speaker 1: guys know what they're doing. We trust that they will
Speaker 1: be able to to do the things they say they can.
Speaker 1: And so once that trust is established, and that's that's
Speaker 1: really what happens in the Jaystock world. It's taking a
Speaker 1: face value.
Speaker 2: And you notice that with the special missions units that
Speaker 2: they're like, yeah, okay, these guys got it.
Speaker 1: They don't have to, they really don't. On the other side,
Speaker 1: they have to maintain that, right, there's very very little
Speaker 1: room for for fallibility.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you have an operation where a bunch of birds
Speaker 2: get shot out of the sky and the changes things
Speaker 2: it does.
Speaker 1: I mean just having one go down, and I mean
Speaker 1: those units have taken a lot of casualties. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: I'm not going to say unnecessarily, but you know, they
Speaker 1: lean into the mission and say this is what we're
Speaker 1: gonna we're gonna do. The risks are assessed and they
Speaker 1: once they say no, it's it's time.
Speaker 2: So you were in like a planning cell at that
Speaker 2: point mm hmm.
Speaker 1: I was the I was the operations officer for for
Speaker 1: that for that task force, for that organization, and so
Speaker 1: I literally was looking across the table at the targeteers
Speaker 1: and the drone operators and the air mission planners like
Speaker 1: just shout out to the one sixtieth. I mean the
Speaker 1: first time I work with them. We we we set
Speaker 1: up this in training, but we're doing a direct action
Speaker 1: rate on this on this combat village, and we set
Speaker 1: up that we're going to land in this field and
Speaker 1: you know, attack the building. And one officer looks at
Speaker 1: it and goes, well, why do you want to land there?
Speaker 1: That's like one hundred and fifty yards away from the
Speaker 1: from the building. We're like, yeah, well, I mean you
Speaker 1: got to be able to put the helicopter do in
Speaker 1: he goes my rear roador arc is thirty meters. Okay,
Speaker 1: I was over for twenty five. But if that's how
Speaker 1: close you can get us, fine, that's how he landed.
Speaker 1: The ramp went down. He's like, there's the and the
Speaker 1: guy that the ramp gunner is like, that's the billet building.
Speaker 1: There's the door. There it is, and we're just like, wow,
Speaker 1: curb side service, you know. So, I mean it was
Speaker 1: just a difference in training that we weren't even used
Speaker 1: to right once. Once you have capabilities that you can
Speaker 1: reach into and people that you can work with and
Speaker 1: you trust on that level, then you can have a
Speaker 1: discussion about who, you know, risk to air force, risk
Speaker 1: to aircraft commission, what's worth it At that point in time,
Speaker 1: you know, if you're going to do an offset, fine,
Speaker 1: we'll do an offset. But now we're going to land
Speaker 1: in such a way that it protects everything. It's audibly masked.
Speaker 1: You know, hopefully we fly in bad weather because most
Speaker 1: people aren't going to be outside. You know, you bind
Speaker 1: out all this risk and still going to be able
Speaker 1: to land us.
Speaker 2: It's cool to hear you talk about this stuff at
Speaker 2: the level you got to see the planning process because
Speaker 2: there is a sense with a lot of people out there.
Speaker 2: Sometimes even I had to say it with former operators
Speaker 2: when you listen to them talk like, I don't think
Speaker 2: they totally understand everything that goes in to putting one
Speaker 2: of these missions together. And running to the door and
Speaker 2: blowing it down and clearing some rooms is awesome, but
Speaker 2: there's all of these other pieces that have to come together.
Speaker 1: There is. And that's not to say that the operator
Speaker 1: at the operator level, they're not taking the risks and
Speaker 1: they really I've worked in very talented people and there
Speaker 1: were stuff like creatively talented people, so they just they
Speaker 1: talk about how they're going to do something and I'd
Speaker 1: be like, oh, I'm writing that one down, Like damn, dude,
Speaker 1: that's good, Like, you know, just things you hadn't really
Speaker 1: thought about. And then you you get out there with
Speaker 1: their true commanders and you start listening to how they
Speaker 1: run stuff and how they do command and control and
Speaker 1: actually manage their you know, the chaos. And I look
Speaker 1: back on that one firefight and how much better would
Speaker 1: I have been have had had an opportunity of that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: to be able to handle the amount of stuff that
Speaker 1: he has never mind the support network. So it incrementally
Speaker 1: made me better as I started looking at it. But
Speaker 1: you know, because we were going back to Afghanistan and
Speaker 1: my company, I realized that I could only take but
Speaker 1: so much back from them and say, Okay, here's how
Speaker 1: I'd like to do things. Because you're not resourced the
Speaker 1: same way, you're not equip the same way, you don't
Speaker 1: have the same permissions, So you can't just say why
Speaker 1: can't you be this? You just say this is who
Speaker 1: we are, So we got to be and we're going
Speaker 1: to work with in those parameters and we're also going
Speaker 1: to push them as hard as we can.
Speaker 2: What were some of those lessons that you were able
Speaker 2: to apply back in Marsk as far as like how
Speaker 2: you organize your special teams or I mean, how did
Speaker 2: that kind of come together and coalesce for you guys.
Speaker 1: Well, at that point in time, we were now running
Speaker 1: into what it's called VSO, which is value stability operations.
Speaker 1: So I was going to be the thing that I
Speaker 1: learned on that strikeforce rotation is they had multiple units
Speaker 1: out independently working and at that point in time, I
Speaker 1: had not done that, Like I was not experienced with
Speaker 1: that type of distributed operation operational area and distributed commanding control.
Speaker 1: And it's two parts. You're in command, but you've got
Speaker 1: to control all this stuff. But now you have to
Speaker 1: have a tremendous amount of trust in your subordinates, not
Speaker 1: just your officers, but especially your NCOs to get stuff
Speaker 1: done because they're operating in other areas that you may
Speaker 1: not see them for weeks, and they're entrusted with money,
Speaker 1: and they're entrusted with weapons, and there may be sensitive
Speaker 1: programs that they had to run that they're not looking
Speaker 1: for your permission on because you've already said I trust you.
Speaker 1: So I had to be very direct about what my
Speaker 1: expectations were. I had to follow up on that, but
Speaker 1: also had to give them room to work on it.
Speaker 1: And so as we're getting into the VSO piece, I
Speaker 1: looked at the way that these strike forces, you know,
Speaker 1: were managed from a central point and what they were
Speaker 1: allowed to do, and I mirrored that and said, as
Speaker 1: these guys are trained based upon where their operational areas,
Speaker 1: we need to help them to achieve the best you
Speaker 1: know outcomes.
Speaker 2: You speaking of the mobility stuff, if I recall, right,
Speaker 2: wasn't this around the time that Mars socks.
Speaker 1: Started using like dirt bikes, yep, started using dirt bikes.
Speaker 1: We used well that was one thing. Well when I
Speaker 1: was out the strike force, I mean they were loading
Speaker 1: those side by side razors into the back of I've
Speaker 1: never seen that done in the back of helicopters and
Speaker 1: landing in the middle of nowhere, and then you know,
Speaker 1: getting the job done. Motorbikes the same thing. It was
Speaker 1: like riding dirt bikes at night on night vision. I
Speaker 1: want to do that, like it sounds great. So we
Speaker 1: invested a lot in you know, mobility training. We sent
Speaker 1: guys to dirt bike courses, guys the mule packing courses
Speaker 1: in case you were going to go into the mountains
Speaker 1: with with animals. And but by the way, mules are
Speaker 1: not as easy to work with as you think that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. And we we we we could be creative,
Speaker 1: but we also you know, made it very mission focused.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just adventure training for adventure training. But then
Speaker 1: you kind of put the fast roping to the side
Speaker 1: because you know you're not going to be doing that much.
Speaker 1: But you do focus on your jump stuff because you
Speaker 1: think you know there might be an application there. But
Speaker 1: at the same time you really look at it all, right,
Speaker 1: are we good? Can can these units fight and thrive
Speaker 1: and sustain themselves? And can we sustain them? And you know,
Speaker 1: because they're in VSO, they have to be able to
Speaker 1: generate their own intelligence. So do they have the right
Speaker 1: amount of intelligent access to intelligence to the stuff they're
Speaker 1: reporting back? How are we packaging that? And you know,
Speaker 1: my unit got really good because of the way we
Speaker 1: were distributing, and I had Special Forces teams working with
Speaker 1: us as well in all these VSO sites of developing
Speaker 1: a really big battlefield picture of not only the Talib network,
Speaker 1: but who the who the movers were. And from there
Speaker 1: we would hand off the larger target packages to people
Speaker 1: who could go and execute. And whether it was a
Speaker 1: special Air Service or it was you know, our own people,
Speaker 1: our own SMUs and people would show. People would look
Speaker 1: at our intelligence packages and again, take it at face value.
Speaker 1: This came from this group. It's not gold, like, we're
Speaker 1: not just running in there. But it's pretty credible. Let's
Speaker 1: let's follow up. And they would send a two man
Speaker 1: team and they would come and talk or they would say, hey,
Speaker 1: come up here and let's have a conversation. And so
Speaker 1: they would put people on. You know, hey, you're gonna
Speaker 1: go on this raid. We want to get this guy.
Speaker 1: We're gonna come with you. Less risk to us. We
Speaker 1: can still do a job we need to. We have
Speaker 1: better permissions to roll a guy up and you don't
Speaker 1: have to worry about the tension problem. Like, dude, this
Speaker 1: is awesome. So what area were you doing vs? O
Speaker 1: INN in the west Western Afghanistan, farashin dan Harat. We
Speaker 1: had the whole the operating It was about the size
Speaker 1: of West Virginia down into nim Rouse. So this is
Speaker 1: kind of this arc around and then you've got of
Speaker 1: course I ran as your main main intruder.
Speaker 2: Was that That's something you guys had to account for
Speaker 2: or run up against.
Speaker 1: We did. I will say this, And all the time
Speaker 1: that was over there, I never saw some Chechenian fighter.
Speaker 1: We never got no IRGC. Yeah. The gold standar would
Speaker 1: have been to roll up a Quids Force guy like yeah, no,
Speaker 1: we never. I mean I'm sure they were there and collecting.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know the phones that they have over
Speaker 1: there are all Iranian made. You had to assume that
Speaker 1: you were being collected upon. It wasn't like we you know,
Speaker 1: but it was also where we're pretty overt. We're in
Speaker 1: the open of you know, you're living in these villages.
Speaker 1: You're now trying to you know, expand some of the
Speaker 1: security into these areas, even if they didn't necessarily want it.
Speaker 1: So I had to change the mindset of how we
Speaker 1: approached the mission. We had to. We got Dave col
Speaker 1: Collen to come in and give a three day very academic,
Speaker 1: but also because he was he had been a war fighter,
Speaker 1: you know, with with the Australian Army, and he had
Speaker 1: a long he did the actually on Grilla if nobody
Speaker 1: knows that that book, and so we had him come
Speaker 1: in and talk about not only the book. I read
Speaker 1: his book Bloodyear very smark I, and we're like, okay, well,
Speaker 1: if we need to understand, let's get people who've done
Speaker 1: this and can can actually put some stuff against the
Speaker 1: counterinsurgency because that's what it was, and it's hard to grab,
Speaker 1: you know, counter sertacy something that's baked into the Army
Speaker 1: Special Forces playbook. Marsak has now got it. But at
Speaker 1: that point in time, you coin another mistake that was made.
Speaker 1: My opinion is that we tried to make all of
Speaker 1: our armed forces have been able to do coin and say, well,
Speaker 1: it's just dismission, it's just different, anyone can do it.
Speaker 1: It's not true at all. We know that you need
Speaker 1: specialists to do specialists work. You wouldn't have somebody, you know,
Speaker 1: you two how to rebuild a turbo in your car.
Speaker 1: You would go to a specialist, you know, to do that.
Speaker 1: I hope anyway that that's how people would approach it.
Speaker 1: But because of that and you need specialists, we found
Speaker 1: that we had to become a specialist, and we had
Speaker 1: to admit that we didn't know certain things and we
Speaker 1: had to learn. And so I found that the most
Speaker 1: the best people with the best expertises I could, particularly
Speaker 1: when you're when you're talking about counters, curgaency, asymmetric threats,
Speaker 1: which is something different, but you know when you're in
Speaker 1: these environments where you've got this changing scale where you
Speaker 1: could be in full combat at any minute, and it
Speaker 1: did happen in some of these VSO sites. I also
Speaker 1: use the VSO sites as jumping off points for action
Speaker 1: if we do it, because I had now a Ford
Speaker 1: deployed node that could that knew the area and could
Speaker 1: do stuff. And when we talked to people that again,
Speaker 1: like we're talking about rolling someone up. We're like, we've
Speaker 1: already got as force years ready to go. You need
Speaker 1: to send a few people down and we can make
Speaker 1: it happen. So we got really good at having that
Speaker 1: kind of relationship. And because of the relationships I had
Speaker 1: on the strikeforce, these people were still working at Camp
Speaker 1: Alpha and I could just call them and just say, hey,
Speaker 1: we got something going well. Was that at all difficult
Speaker 1: to manage?
Speaker 2: Like sometimes where it's like hey, j sock, you don't
Speaker 2: actually need to be here, like we can handle this.
Speaker 1: You wish that you could invite people into your house.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it doesn't. Those are more interested and like, hey,
Speaker 1: maybe you guys could just take the night off. We
Speaker 1: got this and so you kind of kind of cross
Speaker 1: your arms and go. You get upset, but it it
Speaker 1: generally was complimentary. I didn't have anybody just out of
Speaker 1: the blue just fly into something. If they were gonna
Speaker 1: do something, we're very circumspect about, you know. There was
Speaker 1: there was a good liaison there. And then there will
Speaker 1: also be like, hey, look, if something happens, we need
Speaker 1: we're gonna need we might need help. So if you can,
Speaker 1: if you can put some guys who are if you
Speaker 1: guys can put some guys on standby, that would be
Speaker 1: that would be great. What kind of what kind of
Speaker 1: medical facilities do you have if we have to come here,
Speaker 1: you know, oh, you have special Forces medics. Also, you've
Speaker 1: got people, You've got a surgery you know, based upon
Speaker 1: this army mash unit that's co located with you. Fantastic.
Speaker 1: So those are the kinds of things. They don't know
Speaker 1: everything and everybody that they need to kind of build
Speaker 1: their own network as well as for our support capability.
Speaker 1: And they're if you can do the job and you
Speaker 1: offer something of value, they're gonna take take it. They're
Speaker 1: not gonna just do it ourselves. They're better than that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: team building. Yeah yeah. So I think that the the
Speaker 1: strength of VSO was that we really were trying. The
Speaker 1: difficulty was that we're trying to be good everywhere and
Speaker 1: to we just were running out of kind of patients.
Speaker 1: Even as it was heading into twenty eleven, twenty twelve,
Speaker 1: even though Afghanistan lasted another almost ten years, we were
Speaker 1: throwing things just like trying to make the stuff work,
Speaker 1: and we all served, we all served to make the
Speaker 1: best of that situation. But it was not the direct
Speaker 1: action kind of combat that I had been involved in
Speaker 1: five years earlier. So I think a lot of guys
Speaker 1: were kind of disappointed that we weren't doing that as frequently,
Speaker 1: even though we did get into some action out there.
Speaker 2: For sure, what was sort of your takeaway from the
Speaker 2: VSO experience, Because we've interviewed certainly SF guys, at least
Speaker 2: one seal probably we have had some Marsac guys on,
Speaker 2: but it sounds like or Scott Man we've had on the.
Speaker 1: We've developed it, so yea, yeah, he's I mean, it
Speaker 1: sounds like and he's a heck of a lot more
Speaker 1: versed on this than me. Yeah. Yeah, And I'd love
Speaker 1: to hear your take on it.
Speaker 2: But I mean it sounds like just as we were
Speaker 2: kind of like getting it up and running and starting
Speaker 2: to pay dividends, that they shut it down.
Speaker 1: Well that that's kind of what I was kind of
Speaker 1: alluding to. But that's that's a great way to sum
Speaker 1: it up. And so I kill Colin said, you know,
Speaker 1: counterinsurgency and the warfare that you're you're involved in, Yes,
Speaker 1: it is evolved. You don't want to create more insurgents,
Speaker 1: you want to try and develop more friendly networks than
Speaker 1: bad ones. But honestly, you still if you're not shooting
Speaker 1: people in the face, you're doing it wrong. You're like,
Speaker 1: you have to keep being aggressive.
Speaker 2: And keep the pressure on the bad guys while you're
Speaker 2: building up this sort of civilian infrastructure.
Speaker 1: So in two thousand and nine and ten under Obama,
Speaker 1: we had not only increased the drone warfare permissions, like
Speaker 1: he really opened that up big time. He also opened
Speaker 1: up special operations like being involved all over the place,
Speaker 1: and we you know, I don't want to say it
Speaker 1: was war on the cheap, but it was really like,
Speaker 1: let's just get you know, we're just gonna let the
Speaker 1: dogs loose and and try and put an end to
Speaker 1: this thing. And unfortunately, national level pressure pulled us back.
Speaker 1: Like we had the Taliban on the ropes and we
Speaker 1: were pulling out.
Speaker 2: Of or out of Iraq, And at that point in
Speaker 2: like two ten eleven.
Speaker 1: Yeah, nine, ten eleven, we really had the Taliban on
Speaker 1: the ropes and they were ready to come to negotiating
Speaker 1: table and we kind of get it let up and
Speaker 1: then we just like, okay, let's do vso. And this
Speaker 1: is not saying that that was a bad idea because
Speaker 1: the US Marine Corps had done that very effectively in
Speaker 1: Vietnam with the Hamlet program cap cap yeah, or a
Speaker 1: CAP yeah, the Combined Action program, thank you, and you
Speaker 1: know the Hamlet So you're going in the hamlets and
Speaker 1: then it was very successful, you know, in his thing.
Speaker 1: But this requires maintenance and it requires a long term investment.
Speaker 1: And the population in America was war weary because of Iraq.
Speaker 1: People were kind of well, still, what's going on in Afghanistan?
Speaker 1: Are there? What are we doing? And so yeah, in
Speaker 1: order for that to be effective, it was going to
Speaker 1: take a lot of time, and it was going to
Speaker 1: take you know, probably more investment. And we were just
Speaker 1: sort of looking at like, okay, well when are the
Speaker 1: Afghans going to get hold of this thing and do
Speaker 1: it themselves? And the quite fact that they weren't going
Speaker 1: to do it.
Speaker 2: And I mean the reality is like a VSO project
Speaker 2: that's like a decade long project. That's not that's not
Speaker 2: an election cycle project.
Speaker 1: And we because Americans want it quick, fasting, in a
Speaker 1: hurry and cheap, they picked two, right, can't we just
Speaker 1: use robots to do that? I love it, you know,
Speaker 1: but it just well, I mean, it was very you
Speaker 1: know with the drone program. Programming was sort of like, well,
Speaker 1: we'll just do standoffs and we'll just shoot these guys.
Speaker 1: Well that's that's not balanced with with on the ground
Speaker 1: you know work. And the other problem or challenge in
Speaker 1: VSO is that you're kind of, like the Jay said,
Speaker 1: you're turning over your teams every six to eight months
Speaker 1: and you're having to rebuild these rapports. And there were
Speaker 1: guys who had gone back. You're like, hey, we're now
Speaker 1: back in the Zuricho Valley, we're now back in Shindan.
Speaker 1: But we haven't been here for eighteen months. Things have changed,
Speaker 1: Things have changed, the way we are fighting this war
Speaker 1: have changed. You know. I was on a SIF and
Speaker 1: I was doing I was banging targets every night in Iraq. Well, dude,
Speaker 1: we don't do that here now. Well, got a bad
Speaker 1: guy outside your gate, probably go get him. Well let's
Speaker 1: hang on. We don't want to be too violent. Well
Speaker 1: that's that's what I mean is you got to be
Speaker 1: able to, you know, have that throttle. And I tried
Speaker 1: pretty hard to lean into being able to you know,
Speaker 1: get into the the pacification while also yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: building up the.
Speaker 2: Report another leadership challenge and grabbing them by the collar like, oh,
Speaker 2: hold on a second.
Speaker 1: Well that's when they started saying like, we can't want
Speaker 1: this more than the Afghans do. And I don't know
Speaker 1: if I've got in Afghan it want to do more
Speaker 1: than us? Yeah, you know what I mean? Fuck man? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And and so you know, we we finished that deployment
Speaker 1: UH in March of twenty twelve, nine months. Quite a
Speaker 1: number of guys wounded, nobody killed, thank god. And I
Speaker 1: came back from that and you know, you know, one
Speaker 1: day you're in charge and you're leading, and you're you're
Speaker 1: out there, and then next thing you know, you're sitting
Speaker 1: in a parking a lot and palms wondering why the
Speaker 1: band broke up. Lovely, I didn't even send the twenty
Speaker 1: nine palms. I actually actually ended up going to UH
Speaker 1: let's called Special Operations Training Group in Marine Corps Training,
Speaker 1: which is training mews and UH. I spent a couple
Speaker 1: of years doing training, mus take taking the stuff I'd
Speaker 1: learned in marshaking and helping mws get better both of
Speaker 1: their the way they train and they approach different things.
Speaker 1: And then you know, I also was involved quite a
Speaker 1: bit with with their called stability operations and also inter
Speaker 1: agency operations because my time with with MARSKA had spent
Speaker 1: plenty of time working with people from different NGOs, different
Speaker 1: parts of the United States government, all the most of
Speaker 1: the agencies within it, especially those who were you know,
Speaker 1: in Afghanistan and those who were supporting those j sets,
Speaker 1: because they're they're working all over the place working on
Speaker 1: country clearances, trying to you know, if you do that
Speaker 1: as a regular thing, you assume everyone knows how to
Speaker 1: do that. And then when the larger Marine Corps like, hey,
Speaker 1: we need to get some people in this place, they
Speaker 1: don't even know where to start with doing a country
Speaker 1: Who do we call? Who does the request? Do you
Speaker 1: all even have passports? Oh, that's a good one, and
Speaker 1: we should get those, Like you know, what else have
Speaker 1: you got for us? Like kind of important, like maybe
Speaker 1: would just pump the brakes for a minute on this
Speaker 1: invasion thing you.
Speaker 2: So, was that like a rewarding experience to kind of
Speaker 2: take all these experiences you've had and now you're in
Speaker 2: a training position and sort.
Speaker 1: Of pass some of that along. Yeah. I actually that
Speaker 1: was a part of my career. I really enjoyed. I like,
Speaker 1: I like training, I like teaching or trying to impart.
Speaker 1: And ultimately it's not just to help the unit get better,
Speaker 1: especially if you're getting into tactics, and I'm not, I
Speaker 1: was not. I did enjoy tactics. I did enjoy you know,
Speaker 1: shooting and that kind of thing. I don't mind being
Speaker 1: out of the range and helping people with bartmanship or
Speaker 1: even talk about the ambushment Nette or some others that
Speaker 1: the things I've been a part of to help them understand,
Speaker 1: you know, combat decision making and leadership. But on the
Speaker 1: other side, it's you know, there's there's a lot more
Speaker 1: that you can you can bring and offer people, and
Speaker 1: so I like, I really do like that. I think
Speaker 1: it's a very it's a payoff. And that's not to
Speaker 1: say like why just being on the podium and lecturing.
Speaker 1: You know, you want to you want people to get
Speaker 1: something out of it. But when you bring someone like
Speaker 1: Andrea dou who is a professor at the Nable War
Speaker 1: College who wrote Terrorists, Insurgents, and Militias, which is a
Speaker 1: great academic study of you know, why people are kind
Speaker 1: of the way they are. So before you ever go
Speaker 1: into some of these situations. You kind of look at
Speaker 1: Lashgarry Taiba and these terrorist organizations. Then you look at
Speaker 1: people not necessarily terrorists, and we've we've we've brought, we've
Speaker 1: broad brushed every organization that's bad out there as being terrorists.
Speaker 1: And they in many ways they may have things that
Speaker 1: are traits that kind of align to terrorism. But if
Speaker 1: they're an insurgent or if they're just a militia and
Speaker 1: a lawless land, they're just trying to get something dark.
Speaker 1: Absolutely well. I mean, I may deals with the Taliban
Speaker 1: UH or at least the guys I know who are
Speaker 1: associated with the Taliban UH to stop iding roads so
Speaker 1: we could get something done and they're only even was like, hey,
Speaker 1: you just keep people out of our valley. That was it? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Pretty much. I'm like, was that the problem? Because that's easy? Oh,
Speaker 1: by the way, what do you grow over here? Stuff?
Speaker 1: So who do you sell to? Oh, don't worry about it,
Speaker 1: good guys, dude, you would like, but there's just someugh
Speaker 1: question exactly right do you want to say ideas to
Speaker 1: stop or not? Like, but we've lost you're losing the
Speaker 1: plot here either, like where we're at. So I was
Speaker 1: just like all right, Well, you know you're gonna make
Speaker 1: a deal, and that's just it. And so you know,
Speaker 1: if you're really if you're really looking at in a
Speaker 1: in a straight moral ethical like I can't cross these
Speaker 1: boundaries line you have to be able to you're not
Speaker 1: subjugating your personal code. You're looking at it from the
Speaker 1: perspective like pragmatic pursuit, exactly.
Speaker 2: How do I get this done? And ultimately that's the result.
Speaker 2: You weren't hashing out a piece steel. You were just
Speaker 2: hashing out a little I just wanted piece here or
Speaker 2: at least reduction. So, I mean, Afghanistan was fine when
Speaker 2: I left. I don't know what happened somebody else, Well, no.
Speaker 1: I mean and that does not to castigate anybody who's
Speaker 1: served there or anything that you know has happened. It's
Speaker 1: just because of the rotations that you would have. You
Speaker 1: would just you know, come back and see another guy
Speaker 1: and be like, hey, man, didn't I see you at
Speaker 1: twenty ten? You're like what you been up to since then?
Speaker 1: You know? Jay said, did this that and the other thing?
Speaker 1: And you know we're back. Shouldn't we be done? Like
Speaker 1: shouldn't this be shouldn't we have progressed, so we we
Speaker 1: it's kind of like writing a book where you don't
Speaker 1: have the end in mind. Well, I know you've heard
Speaker 1: it before.
Speaker 2: You know, people say, we weren't in Afghanistan for twenty years.
Speaker 2: We were in Afghanistan for one year twenty times, right.
Speaker 1: But not the same year twenty times. That was the
Speaker 1: other problem is we were like, well and I have
Speaker 1: my Iraq veterans used to say the same thing. Well,
Speaker 1: we've been in combat. It's you know, it's no big deal.
Speaker 1: Like at the sharp end of battle. It is the
Speaker 1: r indeed correcthooting and shooting tactics. How you employed that,
Speaker 1: you know how you fight is definitely you know something
Speaker 1: you can you can overlay. I don't want to use
Speaker 1: the word template. But then after that the environment. You
Speaker 1: have to understand the invoperating environment you're in, in the
Speaker 1: way that that your enemy fights and the way that
Speaker 1: they approach things. And then people say, turn the map around.
Speaker 1: It's not just terrain, its mindset, it's how they look
Speaker 1: at stuff. And so in the VSO thing, we really
Speaker 1: wanted to get a little more deeper into the know
Speaker 1: the psychology and the psyche of what we're doing. Not
Speaker 1: only are we having an effect at the VSO level,
Speaker 1: but you know, who are we fighting against them? What
Speaker 1: are they? What is important to them? And then you
Speaker 1: know my opinion in Afghanistan, we probably should like let
Speaker 1: them be a kingdom and have a king and fiefdoms
Speaker 1: and just rule it medievally, because that's what they understood,
Speaker 1: what they wanted. Well it's and we said, well, no,
Speaker 1: you need Jeffersonian democracy. Yeah, you need a federal system
Speaker 1: and credit all out. Well a lot of people got
Speaker 1: rich off of that, and it wasn't the people, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, Like, yeah, I remember talking with
Speaker 1: the provincial governor in Harat, very well educated guy, impeccable English,
Speaker 1: and his bailout plan was go to Arkansas where hed
Speaker 1: already bought a house. Like he wasn't gonna stick around.
Speaker 1: And I mean he wanted to help his country, he
Speaker 1: really did, but he already knew what the what was coming,
Speaker 1: what was coming. And then you know, I was talking
Speaker 1: to provincial governor in Shindan. He's like, you all are
Speaker 1: lucky in America that you don't have people on two
Speaker 1: sides of you, countries, two sides of you, i e.
Speaker 1: The Pakistanis and the Iranians meddling in your affairs at
Speaker 1: all time. Yeah, right, never mind the international interest in
Speaker 1: our country, like like we got Russia and you u US, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Chinese, all these other you know we we're dealing
Speaker 1: with a heck of a lot more on a geopolitical
Speaker 1: scale than people are understanding. And for me, I was
Speaker 1: there like okay, this is way more complex. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: in a dangerous part of the world and we were
Speaker 1: living in it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So two years training the MEW and then what was
Speaker 2: the next stop for you?
Speaker 1: Back to Marsak uh where I went to the component
Speaker 1: level as the current operations officer, so I was managing
Speaker 1: with the ops team all of the Marsak operations follow
Speaker 1: So I went from the you know, the regiment. I
Speaker 1: went from battalion to a regiment and then up to that.
Speaker 1: So I did that for uh about only about five months,
Speaker 1: because then I got your mark to be what's called
Speaker 1: a Special Operations Liaison Element Team Leader on the twenty
Speaker 1: second U, which is a special operations cell that was
Speaker 1: attached to the MEW to help them with.
Speaker 2: SOFT like the Marsac integration, well more like MEW Big
Speaker 2: Marine Corps integration with SOFT not just Marscoch.
Speaker 1: You know, say National Mission Force needs to come in
Speaker 1: and land on the aircraft. I would a the carrier.
Speaker 1: I would go in and help manage, you know, the
Speaker 1: L and O stuff between those two. Or if we're
Speaker 1: going to go ashore somewhere and do some training and
Speaker 1: there was a special operations unit there, I would get
Speaker 1: the Marines and at the soft unit together and talk
Speaker 1: about what that training could look like. In our case,
Speaker 1: we got really lucky. I had a great uh new
Speaker 1: commander named Todd Simmons, and he he really gave me
Speaker 1: free reign. He made me member of his of his
Speaker 1: of his staff, and I took him all around the
Speaker 1: soft world, Tampa Bragg. We went overseas to sock your
Speaker 1: sock af uh talked sock sense, got him tied in
Speaker 1: with all of his six and above level people, said
Speaker 1: he could have those direct conversations. And I made sure
Speaker 1: that I shared every piece of information and intelligence that
Speaker 1: I had with him, you know, on an equal standing.
Speaker 1: And so he and I would fairly regular meetings. And
Speaker 1: when we got deployed, we were given the mission to
Speaker 1: support the Liberation of cert Libya, which is Operation Odyssey Lightning,
Speaker 1: which which which I managed and ran with new for
Speaker 1: four months.
Speaker 2: So SIRT we didn't have a the embassy. Of course
Speaker 2: in Tripoli. What were you guys evacuating out of.
Speaker 1: Cert No, the ISIS had taken it over. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: the g NA, the the the militia group that we
Speaker 1: were backing in Tripoli as the officially recognized half tars
Speaker 1: guys half Tars No no, half Tar was on the
Speaker 1: other side of Benghazi. This was like half Tar. We
Speaker 1: actually had to make it, pleaded him to like stay
Speaker 1: out of the fight, even though he was he was
Speaker 1: well ready to get into it. This was the the
Speaker 1: other the recognized government, but they had a group of
Speaker 1: militia guys that they wanted to get into cert and
Speaker 1: take take it back from ISIS. But they needed new
Speaker 1: air support and they needed a lot of different kinds
Speaker 1: of support, and so I helped got the opportunity to
Speaker 1: help manage an entire war plan by way of that.
Speaker 1: So what was that?
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I mean because now you're, you know, creating
Speaker 2: a warplan or air campaign to support a indigenous ground
Speaker 2: force that you don't really have any control over.
Speaker 1: And they are being managed by soft elements from different
Speaker 1: countries and yeah, so I it was challenging. It's different,
Speaker 1: very challenging, and you're dealing with malicious who do all
Speaker 1: of their operational planning on Twitter. And so that's what
Speaker 1: that's a technique. Hey man, want to get it? I'm
Speaker 1: sure what time? Firefight hashtag? Let's go. You know, like,
Speaker 1: holy I couldn't you couldn't make this stuff up, you know.
Speaker 2: But it's not bullshit either, like they that kind of
Speaker 2: stuff really happened.
Speaker 1: No, really, it really didn't. And I will say that
Speaker 1: the Libyans themselves were very aggressive. It took a while,
Speaker 1: but they they fought. Isis like literally to the last
Speaker 1: man and the new the new support to them is
Speaker 1: what what made it happen?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean Certa is a or is it like
Speaker 2: a traditional hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism in Libya?
Speaker 1: Yeah? And and and it's right up on the Med
Speaker 1: in the Bay of Uh you know Bay of Bengazi.
Speaker 1: There little area that marines have some experience at a
Speaker 1: little bit short of Tripoli all that good stuff. You know.
Speaker 1: I guess I it's going back to my roots. You know,
Speaker 1: President O'Bannon probably running the first marine special operations by
Speaker 1: crossing the desert to attack Libya with six six other
Speaker 1: jar heads. So yeah, I mean it, you know, like
Speaker 1: it just now you're working at the operational strategic level
Speaker 1: and taking all the stuff that I'd done to that point,
Speaker 1: not only working with MEWS and understanding of the inner agency,
Speaker 1: and now I'm applying that, you know, with a conventional
Speaker 1: marine force that actually had really creative people on it,
Speaker 1: and Simmons was just like, go get it done. And
Speaker 1: so the I mean, I.
Speaker 2: Your impressions of the air campaign because I'd had I've
Speaker 2: had people tell me there's some very interesting kind of
Speaker 2: takeaways at least from the drone war if they were
Speaker 2: to look at like Raka, Missule sert, Uh, they're all
Speaker 2: a little bit different mh.
Speaker 1: Kind of like they found in Bosnia. Air campaigns cannot
Speaker 1: win award there on their own. Well, the Air Force
Speaker 1: will absolutely tell you that I'm wrong on that, but
Speaker 1: it's I mean, well that's why they exist. It's throp
Speaker 1: bombs and help the US Army. They absolutely can turn
Speaker 1: the tide. Absolutely augment augment. They will augment and if
Speaker 1: if employed correctly, help the momentum and keep the tempo
Speaker 1: going on a ground offensive. And that was the one
Speaker 1: thing that the me you could do is the deck
Speaker 1: cycle was just all day, every day, ten hours straight day, night,
Speaker 1: fixed wing, rotary wing, you name it. And the only
Speaker 1: thing we didn't put was boots on the ground. So
Speaker 1: although God knows they were ready.
Speaker 2: Out of Tunisia or Malta or where were they both,
Speaker 2: we were based on a boat.
Speaker 1: Oh no, shit, yeah, okay, we were on the USSAH.
Speaker 1: We dropped more ordinance than has been dropped in like ages.
Speaker 1: I got a picture somewhere of all the bombs that
Speaker 1: are painted on the superstructure of the boat. We used
Speaker 1: up everything in the magazine and then we had to
Speaker 1: ask for more from Yucom and they were not prepared
Speaker 1: for as much as they were like how many did
Speaker 1: you drop? Like we don't even have that many. Like
Speaker 1: we were just like, send what you got, fin kits whatever.
Speaker 1: So then we were getting them from other theaters and
Speaker 1: I was you know, we're talking to our soft network
Speaker 1: to load stuff onto aircraft to fly at the different
Speaker 1: places for us to send V twenty twos that then
Speaker 1: fly onto them. Yeah, the different combatant commands. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: we're moving, We're we're working across different combatant commands to
Speaker 1: enable this this fight shit. And the other thing is,
Speaker 1: you know it is precision bombing, but you know five
Speaker 1: hundred bomb is not necessarily precise. So if you look
Speaker 1: at the and you don't have your J tax on
Speaker 1: the ground either, well there are J tax controlling from
Speaker 1: other countries, from other countries, and so you'll find that
Speaker 1: the British enthusiasm is a little bit different from ours.
Speaker 1: They're actually pretty aggressive and you know they they they
Speaker 1: they were just like, well, just bring what you got,
Speaker 1: we'll figure it out, you know, and can you make
Speaker 1: it it too? That sounds great like, but but bombing
Speaker 1: is obviously destructive and people are like no ship watching
Speaker 1: really but to your point of Raka of holms, of
Speaker 1: parts of like a Fallujah, like you're clearing operation and
Speaker 1: once you get done, like cert was leveled, like this
Speaker 1: used to be the the gem, the med in where
Speaker 1: people would go to vacation insert And I've been you know,
Speaker 1: I've been boots on the ground in Libya and I've
Speaker 1: looked out over this stuff. I'm like a man, these
Speaker 1: people can get their shit together. They have a great
Speaker 1: surf spot some days. Come on, guys, and so what
Speaker 1: did you really gain by I mean, yes, we beat Isis, hooray,
Speaker 1: but there's there's nothing left right, and there's a tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of casualties. I mean, the Libyans took a lot
Speaker 1: of casualties just because they were really untrainable. We're not
Speaker 1: talking about professional soldiers. Yeah, yeah, so never confused enthusiasm
Speaker 1: with capability, and they they got after it. But you know,
Speaker 1: you want to talk about a CQB technique, they're using
Speaker 1: freaking T sixty two tanks, main guns, just the clear buildings. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a method. Not a lot of HR possibility with that,
Speaker 1: but you know, but ultimately they you know, they're like,
Speaker 1: we're getting this thing done. And so you you just
Speaker 1: you look at what air support can can offer, and
Speaker 1: you look at how it's employed, and then you again
Speaker 1: you make those the risk calculations. And we knew exactly
Speaker 1: we had the permissions to drop the bombs we were,
Speaker 1: We knew what the what the pieces would be, and
Speaker 1: it was just sort of like a collateral damage i e.
Speaker 1: Civilians were making sure they're not there. That was that
Speaker 1: was huge in the r O. We there was you know,
Speaker 1: we had to ensure that we were able to employ
Speaker 1: things the right way, But would you know I proportionality, portionality,
Speaker 1: and I was a jay attack as well. You know
Speaker 1: back I was trained at by the army. As a
Speaker 1: matter of fact, it's so tack years ago, and I
Speaker 1: have live controls in combat with with aircraft and just
Speaker 1: the geometries and stuff that goes into calling them in
Speaker 1: a bomb. You know, there's very tragic stories of people
Speaker 1: who've had bombs dropped on ian. Don Parnell talks about that.
Speaker 1: You know, that was you talk about things that you
Speaker 1: know go through the command like, holy shit, this just happened,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, if it can happen, we got
Speaker 1: to figure out ways to mitigate that. So the way
Speaker 1: those things are employed and how you do it has
Speaker 1: to be measured, It has to be well planned. And
Speaker 1: like there's something called a type three engagement where literally
Speaker 1: everything forward of a line is a free fire zone.
Speaker 1: And we were able to do that in combat. But
Speaker 1: you've got to have a hell of a lot of
Speaker 1: trust in your people because now you're saying anything in
Speaker 1: here is engageable and you can do it. And so
Speaker 1: when when Cobra pilots hear that, they're like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: this is great. This is why I joined the Marine Corps.
Speaker 1: They're like, I wanted to fly.
Speaker 2: Those are like words you don't tell a cobra a
Speaker 2: pilot like now, but we did and they did, Like
Speaker 2: anything in this box yep, anything in this building is
Speaker 2: go ahead.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Ford line of Troops is right here, and they're like, okay,
Speaker 1: holy shit. So they're running toe toe and hell fire
Speaker 1: missiles or not toes because there's wire guided it. But
Speaker 1: they've got hell fire missiles off of off of the
Speaker 1: pods and the machine yea, and they're just putting them
Speaker 1: into windows. Holy shit that night being laized by somebody
Speaker 1: else that you're not talking to. It's a brave New
Speaker 1: world man. Yeah, it get gets sporty, right.
Speaker 2: So yeah, farm liaisons, soft international relationships yep.
Speaker 1: And you have to be able to maintain all of it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And if it goes bad, where's ivan? So I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just very I want to leave a lot of
Speaker 1: permissions and respond, but there's a lot of responsibility comes
Speaker 1: with that. And but but it was all on Simmons,
Speaker 1: like he owned the entire thing. Yeah, it's like get
Speaker 1: it done yep.
Speaker 2: And when did that job kind of end or wind
Speaker 2: down for you?
Speaker 1: All of twenty sixteen, and then I came back in
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, and then I was back at headquarters doing
Speaker 1: my ops job for another part of that year, and
Speaker 1: then I screamed to go to Jaseaber from seventeen.
Speaker 2: Before we go there, because you were at sort of
Speaker 2: this like high level component level at this point with
Speaker 2: your eyes on a lot of things as a plank
Speaker 2: owner of Marsak. You know, the regiment, the component like
Speaker 2: that stuff didn't just come out of nowhere. You must
Speaker 2: have seen all of it get built.
Speaker 1: I did, but remember that I was kind of toggling
Speaker 1: back and forth. So these things were happening concurrently right right.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of stuff I wasn't I was
Speaker 1: in the room for everything that no, no, I understand.
Speaker 2: But I mean, my question really is like how did
Speaker 2: Marsock evolve over the years, Like from where it began
Speaker 2: to where you were at that point. What were like
Speaker 2: the big changes and big evolutionary steps. You saw the
Speaker 2: organization make.
Speaker 1: Well, getting their own compound and building was huge, so
Speaker 1: having a headquarters that was dedicated was you know, and
Speaker 1: at the same time they were really developing the selection
Speaker 1: and training process and the operator course what they call
Speaker 1: it TC. So it was great at being a forced
Speaker 1: guy and being able to come into Marstock right out
Speaker 1: of the gate. But we didn't. We got grandfather did
Speaker 1: and that's what they call it, right, And we all
Speaker 1: actually asked like, hey, shouldn't we go to selection, like
Speaker 1: like everybody in Delta goes to the selection. Like, we
Speaker 1: were like, shouldn't we all do this? And they're like,
Speaker 1: we get it, but you're proven as forced guys and
Speaker 1: you're in. So we were like, but there's probably some
Speaker 1: dudes that shouldn't be here. And I probably could say
Speaker 1: that about myself, right, Like, you're just like that that
Speaker 1: process needed to be developed, and they did a good
Speaker 1: They've done a great job with that. And John Daily
Speaker 1: is well with that quite quite significantly. You know, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of people who do that, but he he
Speaker 1: definitely got the chops, not only from his time in
Speaker 1: the debt, but also you know in Marsock proper and
Speaker 1: John Daily taught me how to do commanded. I think
Speaker 1: he still works there. Actually he does, he does, and
Speaker 1: that's one of the reasons it works is because he
Speaker 1: he's a continuity. He's a long long standing member, right,
Speaker 1: So they that was a big one. Becoming regionally focused
Speaker 1: was a big one. So that you mean we weren't
Speaker 1: just all all in on Afghanistan. I still think we
Speaker 1: should have pursued our direct action side of stuff. I
Speaker 1: believe that we should have made it made him Marck
Speaker 1: got very involved in Somalia too, didn't that. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think we should have pushed a little harder to get
Speaker 1: into Jaysock with a with an operational arm That may
Speaker 1: be coming at some point, but it's been talked about
Speaker 1: and shelved many times.
Speaker 2: What do you think that would be? Would that be
Speaker 2: like an HR capability or what do you say?
Speaker 1: Well, you've already got to two two s m us
Speaker 1: that that that that run that, and they would just
Speaker 1: be more in the quiver. You know, it would be another,
Speaker 1: I mean a third force you need. If you're going
Speaker 1: to have rating forces, then you need to have flexibility
Speaker 1: to be in different places at the same time. And
Speaker 1: I mean not getting too deep into the TTPs, but
Speaker 1: there's a lot of horsepower that goes into spinning up
Speaker 1: that stuff, and it's taxing on the headquarters, it's taxing
Speaker 1: on the unit that goes and does it. And then
Speaker 1: you've got to have reserves to be able to you know,
Speaker 1: continually maintain and so I mean we all came from
Speaker 1: second force or Force recon. For the most part, we
Speaker 1: were all direct action guys. That's what we were trained
Speaker 1: to do. And then they were like, okay, we'll be
Speaker 1: fit guys. And it's sort of like that's a hard pivot.
Speaker 1: So Bartak got really good about doing that and diversifying
Speaker 1: the training and diversifying the way they did that. They
Speaker 1: got in They also developed a specific kind of eighteen
Speaker 1: alpha officer team leader training program. I think they should
Speaker 1: probably expand that a little bit more into the staffing
Speaker 1: area because I think that's what makes like USUSAK Warcom
Speaker 1: for that matter of Jaysock definitely is people as they
Speaker 1: complete commands, then they go into staff's professional development exactly
Speaker 1: and they can take kind of the thing that I
Speaker 1: was doing ad Hawk as I went through my career.
Speaker 1: They should be looking at building officers who were doing that.
Speaker 1: And that's not to say they are earmarked people that
Speaker 1: they're but we have yet to have in Marsak, even
Speaker 1: though it's been around for twenty years, a homegrown guy
Speaker 1: who went through selection and has now led the unit.
Speaker 1: That's going to take a while, right right, So in
Speaker 1: SF for the range of regement that would be unheard of.
Speaker 1: Now yeah, yeah, you just wouldn't have someone commanding the
Speaker 1: rage regiment. It was not starting as a arranger. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no way that's that's the same way. So we've
Speaker 1: got some growing still to do. But that diversification was big,
Speaker 1: and then MARSAC has really leaned to equipment, It really
Speaker 1: leaned into training is very adaptive. The training they have
Speaker 1: a no kidding G seven which is exercise and plant
Speaker 1: and exercise and training, not just selection and training over
Speaker 1: here at the schoolhouse, but also so like no kidding,
Speaker 1: how they train units to deploy and it's it is
Speaker 1: iterative and it's also something they evaluate and make changes
Speaker 1: too to make better. So they've done a really tremendous
Speaker 1: job with that as well. And the intelligent section of
Speaker 1: mars soaks is really quite good, and they've got special
Speaker 1: activities and they've got all kinds of imagery specialists. I
Speaker 1: would like to see that be less sort of hey
Speaker 1: you surf here, now you go somewhere else. I'd like
Speaker 1: them to keep them there. But the Marine Corps really
Speaker 1: more like, no, you can do some time here.
Speaker 2: In the world, like they should have their own Reki
Speaker 2: or Afo element exactly standing and it just does its
Speaker 2: own it does its own thing, and it's and it's
Speaker 2: so there's but but Marsac has has has really developed
Speaker 2: in that capacity.
Speaker 1: And the other thing that got really good at was
Speaker 1: they invested in psychology and having psychologists on hand for
Speaker 1: people coming back from war and and you know, you
Speaker 1: talked about it with with Nate from Valhalla. You know,
Speaker 1: the stigma of mental the burdens that you carry around.
Speaker 1: You know, we talked about it at dinner. There's only
Speaker 1: so much stuff you could put in the rucksack till
Speaker 1: you finally fall over. You can carry for a while.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty tough, but after a while it's just gonna
Speaker 1: get too much. And so they did a great, really
Speaker 1: good job of having that as an available thing and
Speaker 1: no stigma. You just wanted down and have a couch trip. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's that. You know.
Speaker 2: The word that gets used all the time is like resiliency.
Speaker 2: The thing is like these guys are resilient. They did
Speaker 2: like twelve deployments, Like they're super resilient people, Like.
Speaker 1: They need a different type of help. It's not just resiliency, right,
Speaker 1: and they they the person carrying that to bring someone
Speaker 1: home from a deployment and be like, Okay, we're sending
Speaker 1: you to the schoolhouse for a break. Being a selection
Speaker 1: and training is not a break, right. That's you're busy,
Speaker 1: and so now you're not at home all the time
Speaker 1: and you're doing you're running selection courses and you're an
Speaker 1: operator training courses nine months long. I mean, you're you're
Speaker 1: a lot of the CODs got to run that.
Speaker 2: A lot of the SF guys will tell you that
Speaker 2: they're away from their families more often when they're running
Speaker 2: those selection and training courses than when they're on a
Speaker 2: no DA.
Speaker 1: That was how I that. That was how it was
Speaker 1: for my family when I was at aaRSs, the is
Speaker 1: AOI s we were, you know, we were I was
Speaker 1: not in the fleet. Yeah, but you were busy. But
Speaker 1: I was training for reconnaissance courses a year and they're
Speaker 1: ten weeks long and in between. Now you've got to
Speaker 1: plan everything for each course to make sure that you
Speaker 1: got your air support and all your training areas and
Speaker 1: AMMO and everything else. I mean, it's it was a
Speaker 1: big lift working on Sundays and you're supposed to be
Speaker 1: away from the fleet. You know, you're not right, You're
Speaker 1: not operation. It's not a break. So so I hope
Speaker 1: that helped answer that. But I mean, you know, I
Speaker 1: think that the processes and you know, we maybe put
Speaker 1: a little too much marine stuff into it, but it worked. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So then tell us about this position that you screened for.
Speaker 1: I was. I was the deputy director of Operations for
Speaker 1: Naval Special Warfare Development Group, and they marsh Hawk, the
Speaker 1: Marine Corps and Navy Special Warfare really large, wanting to
Speaker 1: have more inter inter service cooperation, cooperation and work, and
Speaker 1: so they're looking for an end free assistant OPSO to
Speaker 1: work with the unit, and they wanted a Marine and
Speaker 1: me and some guys went up there and screened and
Speaker 1: they picked me. So I'm not sure.
Speaker 2: That's pretty cool. Yeah, so pretty cool opportunity to have.
Speaker 1: And I was there for almost five years. Wow, that's
Speaker 1: a long run too, it is.
Speaker 2: It was my last assignment in the Corps. Soon I
Speaker 2: did not get.
Speaker 1: The Talian command, so I pivoted as a lieutenant colonel too.
Speaker 2: So at this point you're pretty like intimately involved in
Speaker 2: mission planning for the national mission for US.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you're on standby and you're there for you know,
Speaker 1: not just working there, but also doing other projects within
Speaker 1: the you know, once you're behind the wire, you're you're
Speaker 1: kind of free help. Also to Jay Socker, if they
Speaker 1: need somebody, they can call you in and say, okay,
Speaker 1: we need this mission and someone to come help without
Speaker 1: with that, or need somebody to go to this country
Speaker 1: and have a conversation, right right. So I had a
Speaker 1: lot of flexibility too, and I worked. I worked. One
Speaker 1: of my portfolios was working with a lot of foreign
Speaker 1: soft equivalents British Canadians, French, Australians, so that that was
Speaker 1: all interesting Germans.
Speaker 2: Was that to coordinate like training or operational stuff both?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, depending on what we were doing, because some
Speaker 1: of those countries have different permissions and different relationships with
Speaker 1: countries that we might want to go work in, but
Speaker 1: we don't necessarily possess the same you know exactly relationship.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they have different access and sometimes radically different roes.
Speaker 1: Impressively, So.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I so from I mean, you were there
Speaker 2: for quite a while, I guess first off, like any
Speaker 2: anything that's like jumps out at you, any like memorable experiences.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean the whole. I equate it to working
Speaker 1: as an offensive coordinator for an NFL team, and so
Speaker 1: you're always practicing, you're always doing stuff. I can't get
Speaker 1: too deep into the actual details of operations for obvious reason. Sure,
Speaker 1: never mind the people who are there, but I will
Speaker 1: say the resourcing, the equipment, the access permissions second to none.
Speaker 1: Their ability to to adapt and change not only their
Speaker 1: tactics but the way they approach things is truly impressive,
Speaker 1: just based upon who they are. I mean, Vice President
Speaker 1: Pence came and visited, so we got to see him,
Speaker 1: and there was always dvs and people that we were,
Speaker 1: you know, doing they call him dogg and ponies, but capabilities, demonstrations,
Speaker 1: things like that, so that, you know, that was kind
Speaker 1: of interesting. Operationally, Yes, there were people deployed all over
Speaker 1: the place. I mean, certainly the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Everyone
Speaker 1: was integraly involved in that. By that time, I was
Speaker 1: actually starting my my glide slope out of the out
Speaker 1: of the Marine Corps. Although I was still still there,
Speaker 1: it was still plugged in. But like Scott Man's book
Speaker 1: Pineapple Express, like I was, I was involved in some
Speaker 1: periphery as part of that as well as what I
Speaker 1: was doing with you know, while I was still on
Speaker 1: active duty, and so I had to straddle this line
Speaker 1: of kind of you know, being able to see all
Speaker 1: of that unfold, you know, in real time was not
Speaker 1: only fascinating but also tragic. It's not like we could
Speaker 1: see Ibby Gate was gonna happen, but you just you
Speaker 1: just watching this chaos and just trying to We're all
Speaker 1: sifting through tons of information trying to figure out like,
Speaker 1: what's what this thing gonna look like and how it
Speaker 1: just it took. It took everyone by surprise. I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna lie. I mean, you should be no surprise that
Speaker 1: kind of the Afghanistan was gonna fall the way that
Speaker 1: they did. But the fact that we were just so
Speaker 1: on our heels, particularly from Washington down that was that
Speaker 1: was a difficult thing to work through. One of the
Speaker 1: things that I was there under two presidential administrations, so
Speaker 1: I got to got to work with very different sides
Speaker 1: of the National Security Council as well.
Speaker 2: One of the things that I heard, and I'd be
Speaker 2: interested to hear your thoughts, was that you know, the
Speaker 2: US military, including like the Jaysawk elements, at least for
Speaker 2: a time weren't really allowed to go outside the wire
Speaker 2: on these rescue missions, and it was really like the
Speaker 2: Germans and the Brits and others that were able to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was there was a little bit of hamstringing
Speaker 1: get after. Yeah there was. There was a little bit
Speaker 1: of hamstringing in that. I think everyone was frustrated with that.
Speaker 1: It makes me very frustrated right now to hear that
Speaker 1: Chris Donna, who was the last man out of Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: he was, you know, storied career, that he would even
Speaker 1: be smeared that somehow he didn't do enough or the
Speaker 1: right thing. You think he went above and beyond. I
Speaker 1: think every every experience I had with Christanna who working
Speaker 1: with him, especially when he was the DSO or the
Speaker 1: d O, the director of Special Operations in the Pentagon,
Speaker 1: and the work that I did, you know, with some
Speaker 1: of these missions that we had to run, and the
Speaker 1: experiences I've had with him, you know, prior to that,
Speaker 1: and watching what he was doing Underrundy. Absolutely, he's the
Speaker 1: tea is the kind of leader. There's a reason they
Speaker 1: gave me a second airport. Like people would jump out
Speaker 1: of airplanes for Chris Donnie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I think the military has to take
Speaker 2: its lump sometimes, but in this case they really did
Speaker 2: get handed like a big bag of shit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well it was more like it was a bag
Speaker 1: of shit with the bottom being a callander. So it
Speaker 1: was just like just everywhere.
Speaker 2: And the State Department was in charge of the whole
Speaker 2: damn thing, notionally if nothing else that had never gone well.
Speaker 1: It never was a knee Radioshimoto said the same thing
Speaker 1: when he's talking about Eagle Claw. Yeah, right, so it
Speaker 1: has never gone well. And I went to the high
Speaker 1: risk course at Foggy Bottom where the State Department sends
Speaker 1: their diplomats in case they're going into really difficult spots,
Speaker 1: and just their mindset is completely different. Are we not
Speaker 1: having the State dinner tonight? No, a fucking bomb just
Speaker 1: and off in the front yard. But I have so
Speaker 1: much wine, Like different world. It just but the mindset
Speaker 1: is completely different. And we we deliberately brought military people
Speaker 1: into that course so that they could get a flavor
Speaker 1: of like neo planning and Moli ship all that other stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And there was just moments like after, you know, at night,
Speaker 1: I go out with the rest of the you know,
Speaker 1: Jaysaw guys, and other dudes, and we said down and
Speaker 1: we're like, what where are we? Like? Is this this
Speaker 1: is how they do this?
Speaker 2: Well, as we were saying earlier, the priorities are drastically different.
Speaker 1: Yes, a fantastic book to read is The Ugly American.
Speaker 1: And if you know that that's true. It's a fictional,
Speaker 1: fictional account of basically the French and US relationship and
Speaker 1: involvement in Vietnam in the fifties, and all the tenants
Speaker 1: in there are absolutely true, just as the guy writes.
Speaker 1: And I'll just leave it at that. But you just
Speaker 1: read that and you're like, Okay, I want to understand
Speaker 1: how we got here, Like what's this? Is it? And
Speaker 1: it's and it's been in the mindset for I mean,
Speaker 1: even their diplomatic security officers who I would go and
Speaker 1: do work with and we would train with different, uh
Speaker 1: different things in case we had they do an embassy
Speaker 1: reinforcement not only has marines with the MEW, but also
Speaker 1: bringing in small teams is just part of whatever whatever
Speaker 1: the the mission happened to be. They'd be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: well we kind of got to deal with uh, the
Speaker 1: ambassador and we kind of got to you know, the stuff.
Speaker 2: Those DSS guys deal with is off the wall sometimes.
Speaker 1: And some of them have been in some incredibly dangerous
Speaker 1: situations and performed wonderfully. Like I'm not discounting anybody.
Speaker 2: They've like been in armed standoffs with the host nation
Speaker 2: in some cases and that shit never makes for the.
Speaker 1: News, of course. And they've been in gunfights. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're the only law enforcement officer who has jurisdiction in
Speaker 1: all over the world, not the embassy. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: And it's it's the stuff. I mean, I was looking
Speaker 1: at DS's pretty heavy to get, you know. I was like,
Speaker 1: it's like a pretty cool job.
Speaker 2: They have like investigative authorities over the embassy and the
Speaker 2: personnel there.
Speaker 1: And do a lot of passport uh fraud controlled Yeah yeah, yeah, No,
Speaker 1: that's a pretty diverse, pretty diverse portfolio.
Speaker 2: Those guys get worked, though, they do. They get worked.
Speaker 2: I you mentioned Pompeo. The DSS guys had to backfill
Speaker 2: his whole security detail after he was the VP.
Speaker 1: Or No, I'm not thinking I cannot Pence Pompeo. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but but but I I can only imagine. I can
Speaker 1: only imagine being on Hillary Clinton's detail. She's like, I'm
Speaker 1: going to get out here to hear square and go
Speaker 1: out for a walk. Yeah what no, ma'am, what did
Speaker 1: you say? And you gotta let it happen.
Speaker 2: But maybe she's just gonna get flowers on her sniper fire.
Speaker 2: That might happen, you know, I know, Hey, come on,
Speaker 2: we can.
Speaker 1: Deep dive a little more burbon, we can, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: but so but I digress. Well, but you know the
Speaker 1: other thing is that you're really tied into all these
Speaker 1: these these high level decisions, and you're and you you
Speaker 1: kind of do get to understand behind the scenes. And
Speaker 1: and I did work with you know, Scott Miller pretty
Speaker 1: pretty closely on on on a mission, and uh, you
Speaker 1: get to meet these these people. They say, no, don't
Speaker 1: meet your heroes, but I got to meet a lot
Speaker 1: of my heroes and and and and got to to
Speaker 1: go visit you know, the chowholl At Brag, which is
Speaker 1: pretty good. And and you know, and and experience, get
Speaker 1: that kind of experience and talk to people and and
Speaker 1: you just you know, they put me through a completely
Speaker 1: different jump course, which I had a fantastic time doing.
Speaker 1: I mean, I I got out of the military with
Speaker 1: with more jumps on I ever thought I would have.
Speaker 1: I enjoyed that. I really had. Well, it was the
Speaker 1: jump course. Uh well they have their own uh they
Speaker 1: have a they have their own course, but that they
Speaker 1: run outside of Yuma or or Coolie, Arizona. They have
Speaker 1: their own course and made the Advanced Tactical Infiltration. That's
Speaker 1: a tech and that's good. That's that is actually run
Speaker 1: by the Army. That that is a part, that is
Speaker 1: a part of the profile of training. But for me,
Speaker 1: because as a support guy, they were like, hey, if
Speaker 1: you're going to jump in with us, not that you're
Speaker 1: going on the X, but if you're going to jump
Speaker 1: in as part of a support you have to be
Speaker 1: able to jump our gear. You have to jump out profile.
Speaker 1: So they they basically sent me back to jump school
Speaker 1: for a week. And I'm like, this is awesome, Like
Speaker 1: you get to do you know, stuff like that. So
Speaker 1: I I enjoyed just the tempo. I enjoyed the amount
Speaker 1: of training I got to do and got, you know,
Speaker 1: and I enjoyed the missions they thought I was exposed to.
Speaker 1: I mean, I got to be I wanted to be
Speaker 1: involved in hostage rescue and I got to do hostage
Speaker 1: risky stuff and that that's something you don't get to get.
Speaker 2: To see or do very are you allowed to talk
Speaker 2: about that at all? Uh, you asked the question and
Speaker 2: we'll see what was the mission that So there's there's
Speaker 2: that's the pot. Yeah, Like we're not going to mention
Speaker 2: I'm not going to mention a country.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to mention a name.
Speaker 2: But like overall mission profile, what what had to get
Speaker 2: done here?
Speaker 1: So going back to State Department getting country clearances for us.
Speaker 1: So if you go into a country with military force
Speaker 1: that has not been permitted permission, you're giving given permissions
Speaker 1: called an invasion marine course. Really good at that kind
Speaker 1: of shit. R me two for that matter. I mean
Speaker 1: they got they got I racked twice, so why not
Speaker 1: so or parts of Iraq? It came back to wait.
Speaker 1: But so you got to coordinate with the State Department
Speaker 1: to get a country clearance, to be able to instip
Speaker 1: clearance to diplomatic clearance and permission to do what you
Speaker 1: want to do inside of that country. It's not like hey,
Speaker 1: we're showing up and can you give us some local talent,
Speaker 1: where like everyone needs to be out of the way.
Speaker 1: We need to do this thing. We need we need
Speaker 1: certain amounts of support, but ultimately what we what we
Speaker 1: require most is to not be impeded. So whether it's
Speaker 1: helicopters or you're doing a jump profile, or you're you're
Speaker 1: doing something that is going to give you the best
Speaker 1: chance of success. Yes, it's not there's this Jason Bourne.
Speaker 1: Shit doesn't well for some people that exist, but not
Speaker 1: not at this level. Right, Like, it's it's very you know,
Speaker 1: you're not telling you your entire operation plan, but you're
Speaker 1: just saying, look, this is what we've got to do
Speaker 1: the area. Yeah, and you you're the country is aware
Speaker 1: of what you're going in there to do. So in
Speaker 1: case of the hostage rescue, let's say you know the
Speaker 1: person is being held in a specific area and you've
Speaker 1: got the intelligence to go and get it, go and
Speaker 1: get them. You have a very short window to do that,
Speaker 1: and things have to happen very fast, and you have
Speaker 1: to get those permissions and and so that you can
Speaker 1: move because time is everything.
Speaker 2: But sometimes you're moving so fast that all the pieces
Speaker 2: aren't lining up here, or.
Speaker 1: You get moving with what you have in line and
Speaker 1: you you hope the rest of it will catch up.
Speaker 1: And in our case, in one mission, the ramp was
Speaker 1: open and they were ready to go the jumpers and
Speaker 1: they had not gotten the permission by way of the
Speaker 1: State Department.
Speaker 2: So yeah, so like people listening when they say the
Speaker 2: ramp is open, like these guys are like minutes, if
Speaker 2: not second second jumping.
Speaker 1: Dropped up full oxygen, rady to go. Yeah, one leaves,
Speaker 1: everyone's leaving. There's no like, oh well wait, hold up,
Speaker 1: so we didn't get ship and so they're literally like
Speaker 1: green green light is on jump or go. It's just
Speaker 1: we are weird, just waiting. Holy fuck. And so I'm
Speaker 1: on the phone with a lot of different people and
Speaker 1: as are other people. And it finally came from the
Speaker 1: front office, I e. Uh, the White House. So were
Speaker 1: they like running racetracks up there and they're holding pattern.
Speaker 1: Holy shit. So yeah, tension's really high. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: you've got you've got overwatch on the objective, you got
Speaker 1: overwatch on the people because you got to track, you
Speaker 1: got to track the jump. They're already over sovereign airspace
Speaker 1: at this point in another country from which they've launched,
Speaker 1: so now they're in the air. We're all waiting. Got
Speaker 1: a bunch of stuff lined up. Never mind your QRF
Speaker 1: and everybody else who are on standby and you're just
Speaker 1: waiting for go. And then the White House finally gets involved,
Speaker 1: and I mean the White House, and then it's all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, like everything's set go. Did it take
Speaker 1: the President picking up the phone? Yep, yeah, not to me,
Speaker 1: but to the host yeh yeah. It literally was like, hey,
Speaker 1: what are you doing on Saturday? Why don't you come
Speaker 1: golf with me?
Speaker 2: And we'll right, it's worth your while, Like yeah, exactly,
Speaker 2: let's talk.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but that's really what it came down to. And
Speaker 1: then oh, this sky's clear and we you know, so
Speaker 1: jumpers go, they're able to land offset and then they
Speaker 1: patrolled and basically had a movement to contact and did
Speaker 1: a hasty assault and rescued. They got it, and then
Speaker 1: we've we've pre planned like contingencies for beta, ACT for
Speaker 1: QRF and extract and nobody recognizes when shit goes right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it went right.
Speaker 2: I remember when this happened, again not mentioning any names,
Speaker 2: but I remember when it happened. If it happened, it
Speaker 2: was very Yeah, it was sort of like a blip
Speaker 2: on the radar, right, it was just sort of like, yeah,
Speaker 2: this thing happened, and it was acknowledged.
Speaker 1: In some like wire you know, reports on like Associated
Speaker 1: Press or whatever. It got on Fox News for a
Speaker 1: for a throw the news for something like a like
Speaker 1: you said, a blip, yeah, yeah, like oh that's interesting
Speaker 1: because it went down, right, But what do you want
Speaker 1: your market phone? You know what I mean? Like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I did, and.
Speaker 2: They smoke checked a bunch of bad guys and got
Speaker 2: the hostagetity.
Speaker 1: And that was That was very That was probably one
Speaker 1: of the most intense things I've been involved in, not
Speaker 1: because I was on the ground with them, but because
Speaker 1: I had been on another one. I had been in
Speaker 1: another HR that did not go well and people were
Speaker 1: wounded and we we eventually eventually these guys were recovered.
Speaker 1: But at that point in time, it got you know,
Speaker 1: you want to talk about if second guessing things that
Speaker 1: happened on the ground and tactics, If you've done this,
Speaker 1: why didn't they push harder? I mean, as Winston Churchill says,
Speaker 1: you know it said after Gallipoli, I'm not comparing this
Speaker 1: to Gallipoli because you know, now the terrible ifts will accumulate, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: And so that's what it comes down to. You like, well,
Speaker 1: how did this happen? And did he make the right
Speaker 1: decision to pull back? And in some cases, yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that it is. I think I know the one
Speaker 1: you're talking about and so so so then you're like,
Speaker 1: was it mission failure or did we succeed enough? And
Speaker 1: if it ended eventually and it did with the guys
Speaker 1: being recovered again through a different means, but we still
Speaker 1: we never we never lost hope, right, that was going
Speaker 1: to happen. You're like, well, well we get another swing
Speaker 1: at this, right, or did we did we let this
Speaker 1: guy down in their families because you're putting a lot
Speaker 1: of effort against one to two people, but anybody's like, oh,
Speaker 1: they don't have value American lives. Listen. When I was there,
Speaker 1: there's a scene in that movie Proof of Life where
Speaker 1: they've got all the names and everything all lined up
Speaker 1: on the board of like who who's involved in KNR
Speaker 1: and they're trying to figure out because this is a
Speaker 1: private firm, you know, in the movie. It's obviously a movie,
Speaker 1: but we actively tracked everybody who is you know, kidnapped
Speaker 1: or or you know, sometimes it could be just a
Speaker 1: KFR kidnapper ransom thing involved with an oil company, but
Speaker 1: other times it could be a political thing. But we
Speaker 1: track every They track everything if some if something happens
Speaker 1: and someone goes missing, and we there's constant evaluation like, Okay,
Speaker 1: do we have proof of life? Can we go get
Speaker 1: this person? Can we you know, we'll go talk to
Speaker 1: their families. The FBI will go and talk to them
Speaker 1: as well. We're trying to understand everything we can, and
Speaker 1: time is of the essence. It's all about time and
Speaker 1: doing it quickly and doing it and also being careful.
Speaker 2: It reminds me of We had a says guy that
Speaker 2: we interviewed on here one time, and he pointed out
Speaker 2: he was not a part of it, but he pointed
Speaker 2: out this sort of like a lesson learned, an aar
Speaker 2: kind of comment.
Speaker 1: During the Gulf War, there's.
Speaker 2: An SAS patrol that deployed. They were infilled into the
Speaker 2: desert for reconnaissance mission.
Speaker 1: Before that, before that, right before that, they got out there.
Speaker 2: And it was just flat desert out in every direction
Speaker 2: and the patrol leader was like, the train's totally different
Speaker 2: than what we anticipated, not what we saw on the map.
Speaker 2: It does not support the mission that we have planned.
Speaker 2: And he aborted and had the birds come in and
Speaker 2: take him out, and people there's tremendous pressure to do
Speaker 2: operations early on the Gulf War, but that happens everywhere,
Speaker 2: so you're right, yeah, and then the next patrol that
Speaker 2: went in, you know, people were cursing this guy out.
Speaker 1: The next patrol that went in was Provac zero. You know.
Speaker 1: And I've spent a lot of time with the Special
Speaker 1: Air Service that I have. I have friends who are
Speaker 1: still on active duty there. I work with former members
Speaker 1: who who were now out, but they were there at
Speaker 1: that time. They knew those guys, and they're also very
Speaker 1: good about the lessons learns that come after that. And
Speaker 1: so yeah, there there will always be that second guessing.
Speaker 1: And so, you know, did the commander and make the
Speaker 1: right decision to abort the mission? Did should they have
Speaker 1: continued pushing the fight to you know, get the hostage
Speaker 1: who we later found was literally within like fifty yards
Speaker 1: fifty meters of them if they if they pushed the fight.
Speaker 1: But now you've got two guys down, one who is
Speaker 1: literally shot perfectly like he was like the arranger in
Speaker 1: Blackhawk down Jamie, you know, who ended up dying obviously,
Speaker 1: But I'm sorry I can't remember if that's terrible ultimately,
Speaker 1: you know, but what comes of that we get quick
Speaker 1: clot we get ways that we can now do battlefield
Speaker 1: to survive. Your battle field survivability goes up. So then
Speaker 1: after that we start evaluating, Okay, well how did he
Speaker 1: get hit? Well, the guy fired through the doorway and
Speaker 1: he was getting ready to make entry. And this is
Speaker 1: what happens when you're gonna do you know, this a
Speaker 1: very dynamic and dangerous business. And when I so that
Speaker 1: guy went to the hospital and he ended up making
Speaker 1: a recovery, up full recovery, but he lived, he lived,
Speaker 1: and he was we're talking about many bordering on years
Speaker 1: of recovery.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for people who are like listening to this, like
Speaker 2: when you get shot in the pelvis, not that I
Speaker 2: know what the hell I'm talking about, but there's a
Speaker 2: bunch of obviously bones and arteries that run through that area,
Speaker 2: so you get shot there like it's a that's a
Speaker 2: very dangerous and quickly fatal loon.
Speaker 1: So the medics did a fantastic So remember there's this
Speaker 1: huge firefight going on, You're going in to rescue at
Speaker 1: you've got a guy down on the doorway. So you've
Speaker 1: got to pull him back. He's now a priority. The
Speaker 1: mission has not ended, and you got to get him evacuated.
Speaker 1: So now I'm juggling all this stuff back back on
Speaker 1: the rear, like making all this happen. So I'm on
Speaker 1: an airplane. I hadn't seen this guy in ages, and
Speaker 1: I'm on an airplane and I see him come on
Speaker 1: and he's walking on a cane, and I said, holy shit, dude,
Speaker 1: how are you? How are things? He's oh man, hanging
Speaker 1: in there. You know. I said, listen, I'm gonna buy
Speaker 1: you a drink. I've owed you a drink. In fact,
Speaker 1: I probably owe you a brewery, right, But I have
Speaker 1: carried around a long time that you got shot. And
Speaker 1: the reason why is I'm the guy that got the
Speaker 1: mission approved to put you in there. And he goes,
Speaker 1: I do it all over again. Yeah, of course, what
Speaker 1: are you gonna do it? Right? So he's like, how
Speaker 1: about fifty beers? Like, you know, you would have done
Speaker 1: the same shit if without a doubt. And so the
Speaker 1: junctaposition of those two missions is one is like really successful,
Speaker 1: and we were like jumping up and down and really excited.
Speaker 1: That's a really tough pill to swallow for the operators.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, well so you know, I they did come back,
Speaker 1: and there was some dejection and there was a lot
Speaker 1: of like the finger pointing is not the right word
Speaker 1: because they don't do that. They're professionals and they don't
Speaker 1: get into like, well he did this and he you
Speaker 1: know nobody, but we didn't.
Speaker 2: A bunch of like a type personalities. Mission failure does
Speaker 2: not go over mop and.
Speaker 1: But but it is part I hate to say that,
Speaker 1: it is part of the risk assessment. Yeah, and it is,
Speaker 1: you know, the evaluation of you're going to commit those
Speaker 1: resources and you're going to risk life, limb, eyesight machine
Speaker 1: and all these other things that are going to go
Speaker 1: in there. We're making that decision before we ever say go,
Speaker 1: and then when we go, we go, and you go
Speaker 1: as hard as you can.
Speaker 2: So I got to ask, how is that hostage ultimately
Speaker 2: pulled out of there?
Speaker 1: They negotiated it, gotcha.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Yeah, they negotiated it adroitly. I'd say that was
Speaker 5: actually and it was, and it was likely because of
Speaker 5: the effort that was put against them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they were like, ship man, we don't want to
Speaker 1: deal with this anymore. Yeah, they're not. You've you've you've, you've,
Speaker 1: you've outlived your value. Well then they whacked they whacked
Speaker 1: these guys on the freaking you know objective. But there
Speaker 1: were just more dudes there and they were just like, okay,
Speaker 1: we can't fighten this out. So you know, they made
Speaker 1: the right decision. Yeah. And when that, when that was
Speaker 1: unfolding in real time in front of you, is just like,
Speaker 1: you know, you have to react and know when you
Speaker 1: got to be calm, and you gotta even though you're
Speaker 1: in the ops center and you have to maintain the
Speaker 1: ability of managing chaos and still keeping everything in line,
Speaker 1: you still have to continue and and so I think
Speaker 1: that's that's one of the things that you know, they're
Speaker 1: the flexibility that it is given there is tremendous. And
Speaker 1: so yeah, I I was involved in three of them.
Speaker 1: I did three uh causes rescues all of them, all
Speaker 1: of them successful recoveries eventually. So yeah, I guess I
Speaker 1: could say, you know, I'm pretty what was number three, separate,
Speaker 1: separate guy in another place? Another place? Yeah, and how
Speaker 1: did that one turn out? That one was actually less dynamic?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 1: He actually wouldn't he like walked in was like go
Speaker 1: pick this guy out. Yeah, they're kind of like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, we we we found it. You still have
Speaker 1: to you know, you put put the infrastructure together to
Speaker 1: go make it happen. But that's actually, you know, while
Speaker 1: I was exciting on one level as you're getting you know,
Speaker 1: full Hollywood type shit, you know, for these other missions
Speaker 1: and the dynamics of being in combat, how much easier
Speaker 1: is it to just us like get them and and
Speaker 1: that you know, the results still the same, you just
Speaker 1: have What was really good about that one is, you know,
Speaker 1: there was a leveraging of local infrastructure to really kind
Speaker 1: of do that in a much more clandestine I would
Speaker 1: call a cerebral way. And they'd been looking for that
Speaker 1: guy for a really long time, or he'd he'd been
Speaker 1: he'd been in captivity for a really long time. And
Speaker 1: when they got him, I was like, I imagine, how
Speaker 1: do you how do you integrate your family right? How
Speaker 1: do you reintegrate with the world. You know, it's it's
Speaker 1: a very difficult, you know, And I wasn't on the
Speaker 1: receiving end of that, you know, I was never I
Speaker 1: didn't do the post your recovery interviews. Our psychologist did
Speaker 1: that in the USBI all kinds of people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a place down in Texas where they do that,
Speaker 2: don't they They do them like hostage rein agree.
Speaker 1: Well, they do it all. They do it all over
Speaker 1: the place. But it starts as soon as they grab him.
Speaker 1: As soon as they got him out, like you know,
Speaker 1: they give him something to drink or whatever, and talking
Speaker 1: to the cave bro. Well, I mean actually yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean what in the case where they where they walked
Speaker 1: in and and stitched up the bad guys in a
Speaker 1: pretty pretty good fight. The lead guy dove on the
Speaker 1: hostage because because I mean, there's a there's a crazy
Speaker 1: ass firefighting all around him. And when all the gunfire stopped,
Speaker 1: I was he apparently like it was like ear to
Speaker 1: your mouth to ear with him. Was like, hey man,
Speaker 1: we're Americans, you okay? And the guy was like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, and he was like, could you get off me?
Speaker 1: Because we're talking to dude about my size. He's wearing
Speaker 1: a full full body armor and everything, and his adrenaliness
Speaker 1: spike because he just jumped out of an airplane and
Speaker 1: walked across the desert, you know, for for two hours.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine the.
Speaker 2: Fire for what that feels like, you know, like the
Speaker 2: accounts of like the Kurt News rescue in Panama, where
Speaker 2: like you're being held in a fucking jail cell in
Speaker 2: a foreign country and all of a sudden, these commandos
Speaker 2: show up and they're like, we're American soldiers. We're here
Speaker 2: to bring you home. Absolutely like holy shit.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean there's a marine for Consistance unit that
Speaker 1: did did a uh uh I think it was an
Speaker 1: oil tanker recapture and the crew had barricaded themselves down
Speaker 1: inside of the ship's secondary steering, which is you know,
Speaker 1: so if something happens in the.
Speaker 2: What was this before the gew water after? This is
Speaker 2: during the GWAT. This is only a few years ago.
Speaker 2: Only we could look it up. I'm embarrassed that I
Speaker 2: don't have the full details. But they the ship had
Speaker 2: been had been hijacked.
Speaker 1: The forced platoon assaulted the ship and then they they
Speaker 1: cleared it and as they got down into the lower
Speaker 1: lower part of the sorry to the aft steering, they
Speaker 1: were banging on the door. They're like, hey, come out.
Speaker 1: They're like we were not coming out, like you you
Speaker 1: who are you? And the guy pulled his American flag
Speaker 1: off of his gear and he slid it under the door,
Speaker 1: oh ship, and the guy was like book and he
Speaker 1: opened it up. He was like, thank god. Yes, you
Speaker 1: know you don't think that has any currency. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: pretty impressive. That's awesome.
Speaker 2: So uh, I mean, I I just realized I've been talking.
Speaker 1: Your ear off for like three hours here. I've been
Speaker 1: talking your off Like.
Speaker 2: No, I mean, I love it though, and I'll keep
Speaker 2: you going all that. No, I'm not going to I
Speaker 2: got nothing else to do, Like this is great, so
Speaker 2: you know, and so like you mentioned that you're sort
Speaker 2: of like winding down in your Marine Corps career before
Speaker 2: we move on, like big takeaways from this Jaysock experience
Speaker 2: five years mission planning.
Speaker 1: Uh, well, I think it was the culmination of my
Speaker 1: obviously it's not just the culmination because it was my
Speaker 1: last assignment, but you know.
Speaker 2: You got to use all of your skills and experience
Speaker 2: and put it all together.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think that's really what it comes to is
Speaker 1: I I got the opportunity to put it all into practice.
Speaker 1: It's almost like studying a martial art for a really
Speaker 1: long time and then you're I'm not saying you went
Speaker 1: out on the street to get in a fight, or whatever.
Speaker 1: But somehow you just finally felt like you had pulled it,
Speaker 1: like you had learned it, and you not, you couldn't
Speaker 1: keep learning. And even the best martial arts will tell
Speaker 1: you that you're always learning, and you should be, whether
Speaker 1: you're writing or what have you. But for me, I
Speaker 1: was like, you know, this is going to be the
Speaker 1: end of my career probably, and just being able to
Speaker 1: be able to being able to look at my career
Speaker 1: to that point and say this is where I want
Speaker 1: to go and having achieved that was was huge.
Speaker 2: You went further than marines were a quote unquote supposed
Speaker 2: to go.
Speaker 1: Probably there are a lot of marines we are going
Speaker 1: to see this and be like, yes, yes he did.
Speaker 1: Whether what I.
Speaker 2: Mean by that was that you guys were literally like
Speaker 2: not allowed to be a part of the Special Operations
Speaker 2: community for so long.
Speaker 1: That's how it was when you first started.
Speaker 2: And for you to stand up Mars socer be a
Speaker 2: part of that and then go up and have this
Speaker 2: Jastock position is like you went further than people would
Speaker 2: have expected any marine to go.
Speaker 1: It was it was not ever in the plan either.
Speaker 1: Yeah what I mean yeah? Yeah, so yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it was, uh it was. It was tremendous, and people
Speaker 1: ask like, hey, if I joined the Marine Corps that
Speaker 1: you know, if you if you can map your career
Speaker 1: like I did, I tell you right now, go ahead
Speaker 1: do it. Yeah yeah, but there's no guarantees, right.
Speaker 2: No, So before we move on, I guess, like, I'm
Speaker 2: kind of curious about, like what it's like to sit
Speaker 2: in those options watching the ISR feed the thermal coming in,
Speaker 2: and you mentioned some like pretty tense moments. But then
Speaker 2: like the other like imagery that comes into my mind
Speaker 2: is from uh, what was it Patriot Games? Where the
Speaker 2: guys sitting there watching us, sipping on a coffee like
Speaker 2: that is a kill.
Speaker 1: That is straight Hollywood ship. I'll tell you it. I mean,
Speaker 1: you got to get sleep, especially if it starts to
Speaker 1: become a little more protracted. When you deploy, you don't
Speaker 1: know how long you're going to be gone for. Even
Speaker 1: if you stand up in the op center, you I
Speaker 1: would sleep in the office, sleep in the couch because
Speaker 1: you never know. Somebody had to wake you up. You
Speaker 1: didn't You couldn't drive, even though I lived close by,
Speaker 1: you'd lose time driving. So you just sleep there and
Speaker 1: people bring any food and you know, sometimes it'd be
Speaker 1: quite boring, but then it would ramp up. And I
Speaker 1: can tell you that, you know, when the tension is there,
Speaker 1: everyone is really legitimately focused. And then when it's when
Speaker 1: it's happening and you're watching the whole thing unfold. Aside
Speaker 1: from just people having short conversations with that's all mission
Speaker 1: oriented or picking up a phone, it is quiet. It
Speaker 1: is very quiet, and everyone gets professional. It's really professional.
Speaker 1: And I do remember like when when that guy got
Speaker 1: rescued and they were like, hey, positive recovery nine tangles
Speaker 1: down everything, you know, we're doing s s. We we
Speaker 1: were like erupted in cheers like it was.
Speaker 2: It was awesome because you guys have been a lot
Speaker 2: on Pinzanninah.
Speaker 1: Yeah for so long. Yeah No, that was like that
Speaker 1: was like a three day like day on Stay On.
Speaker 1: You know that I was getting a couple of hours
Speaker 1: here and there where I could and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: everybody wants to be that guy. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: bed like I got it, like he just can't attention
Speaker 1: is you have to figure out how to moderate it. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean you did in combat too, right, I mean
Speaker 1: you can't you can't go forever and then unless I
Speaker 1: for all the stuff and things I was exposed to
Speaker 1: and got to do. I was never in a Fallujah,
Speaker 1: you know, I wasn't in a in a Marsha protracted
Speaker 1: week two week campaigns where you're just living out of
Speaker 1: your gear. You know. A lot of it was commuter warfare.
Speaker 1: You're flying in, you're going out, you're having breakfast by,
Speaker 1: you know, before the sun comes up. I mean yeah,
Speaker 1: zero three hundred call. Yeah. I mean it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna say it's easy, but it's different. You
Speaker 1: you get you get used to a certain way of
Speaker 1: of of of serving. And my hats off to the infantry.
Speaker 1: My hat's off to those guys who who who have
Speaker 1: gone and done that stuff. And like I said, I
Speaker 1: had been my first interests between I would have loved
Speaker 1: to have had that opportunity with them. So, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a heck of a the heck of a run.
Speaker 1: Talk to us about retirement. In retirement, I am a writer.
Speaker 1: I also do a little bit of consulting on the side.
Speaker 1: I work with a company based out of Holland called
Speaker 1: AFG Advanced Forces Group, which I do a lot of
Speaker 1: advisement work with mostly retired guys.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 1: Some of them are SOAK guys, some of them are
Speaker 1: Special Air Service, some of them are Dutch Special Forces
Speaker 1: and train NATO SOFT. I call it board room mercenary.
Speaker 1: You do a lot of stuff, especially with planning, working,
Speaker 1: helping helping their planning process get better, and understanding special operations,
Speaker 1: employment and things like that. And we also do stuff
Speaker 1: with combat mindset and how you train your your teams
Speaker 1: or trained people as a team in organizational development. So
Speaker 1: I do that, and then I'm primarily a writer. I
Speaker 1: do all kinds of different writing. I do expository stuff.
Speaker 1: I do evaluate our commentary pieces. I have a substack, certainly.
Speaker 1: I've got my four books which you can find on Amazon,
Speaker 1: and you should.
Speaker 2: We can go into those as well. What's the substack?
Speaker 2: Where can people find that? That's Ivan f Ingram.
Speaker 1: It looks like I N G R A H A
Speaker 1: M dot substack dot com. What do you read about
Speaker 1: on there? That is? Actually I actually look at it
Speaker 1: writing as a craft. That's much like playing an instrument.
Speaker 1: You have to practice. And my substack is honestly a
Speaker 1: way to declutter my mind, whether it's current events or
Speaker 1: reflection pieces or just something that's coming up in my brain.
Speaker 1: It helps keep everything level so that I can actually
Speaker 1: focus on my other writing. So it's it's a weekly
Speaker 1: I do some stuff from my paid subscribers exclusively for them,
Speaker 1: but it's a weekly delivery of just stuff I talk about.
Speaker 1: So I've been doing it since January and I do
Speaker 1: about two articles a week. Damn it just okay, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: don't get lost up here. I mean, I got a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff bouncing around. But I like it because
Speaker 1: it helps me to honestly off gas and it also
Speaker 1: helps me right self edit and develop the way that
Speaker 1: I can deliver present the information, yeah, pros or what
Speaker 1: have you. And so I dabble little poetry sometimes, or
Speaker 1: I just some times I do some fiction stuff. It
Speaker 1: just really depends on kind of what my mood is.
Speaker 1: And this sometimes the stuff that pops up with current
Speaker 1: events and I'm like, oh, I'm gonna comment on that,
Speaker 1: and yeah, so's that's a really good thing. And then
Speaker 1: I've been I've got four books that I've self published,
Speaker 1: and I just signed with the Sega Group for my
Speaker 1: feature length novel, which is called Troops in Contact, and
Speaker 1: that will be out this year. Awesome just got the
Speaker 1: copy edit back, which means I got a lot more
Speaker 1: editing to do between you. But it's part of the problem.
Speaker 2: So let's start off with these ones, The Patrol Athena
Speaker 2: twenty two and Dream Job.
Speaker 1: I mean, what were these books?
Speaker 2: And these are all like kind of leading up to
Speaker 2: the novel you've been working.
Speaker 1: So I started writing while I was on deployment in
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen as a way to just capture what I
Speaker 1: had done, because I wanted my family to be able
Speaker 1: to just have a record, like, you know, what, what
Speaker 1: is what has he been doing?
Speaker 2: Which I highly recommend guys do because I get like
Speaker 2: Vietnam vet families of Vietnam veterans reach out to me
Speaker 2: all the time like how can I find out what
Speaker 2: my dad did?
Speaker 1: And it's like, man went out, I'll hook you up. Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I started that and I don't know if I
Speaker 1: thought of it as a memoir or is just a
Speaker 1: way of capturing things. And then I just started writing
Speaker 1: and I kept writing, and I kept and I would
Speaker 1: I would just fill in time as a way to
Speaker 1: kill time on deployments. It was a way to, as
Speaker 1: I talked about, to unpack a lot of stuff, and
Speaker 1: then I just said, you know what, maybe I could
Speaker 1: turn this into a book. And I thought about publishing
Speaker 1: a memoir once I got out, which I guess a
Speaker 1: lot of people do. And I talked to my friends
Speaker 1: that any any of us at this point and present
Speaker 1: company included I. But then I talked to my friend
Speaker 1: Scott Husing, who has also helped me within aociation for
Speaker 1: the novel, and he read part of the manuscript and said,
Speaker 1: you know, if you approach this from the fiction side,
Speaker 1: you might really be able to expand on this. And
Speaker 1: he wrote Echo in Ramadi, which a very successful bestseller
Speaker 1: book about his experience as an infantry company commander in Ramadi,
Speaker 1: which is a good, great book if people. I haven't
Speaker 1: read it, but he said, if you took this as
Speaker 1: a and made it into a fictional story, you can
Speaker 1: do a lot more with it as far as the characters. Whoops,
Speaker 1: as far as characters. Luckily it's not lit. And also
Speaker 1: I was very worried about authenticity and not being able
Speaker 1: to capture the things that I knew was true to me.
Speaker 1: And he's like, you can use all of that, you
Speaker 1: just weave it into the story. And I hadn't ever
Speaker 1: considered it. So I then started turning it into a
Speaker 1: novel that was really jam packed with all kinds of stuff,
Speaker 1: and he was like, okay, but this isn't this structure.
Speaker 1: You need some structure to this. At that point, I
Speaker 1: didn't even know about outlining. I didn't know anything of
Speaker 1: that stuff. If there are two types of writers, I'm
Speaker 1: a panther for sure, I'm like right by the seat
Speaker 1: of my pants. And I I started trimming things away.
Speaker 1: I don't throw anything out, I just put it somewhere else.
Speaker 1: And so those books all became excerpts or things in
Speaker 1: that the novel that didn't really fit okay. And then
Speaker 1: I said, okay, well maybe I'll just start developing stories
Speaker 1: off of that, because you need to develop as a storyteller.
Speaker 1: And so each of those books, you know, the Patrol
Speaker 1: was the first one I wrote, made a lot of
Speaker 1: mistakes with it. They're probably still in there. But it's
Speaker 1: about a patrol that I did in Afghanistan in twenty
Speaker 1: twelve as part of one of the vsos. And it's
Speaker 1: a pretty I think interesting account of leadership and kind
Speaker 1: of things that you face, you know, in dynamic and
Speaker 1: environments that change very quickly. Become very dynamic. What's the
Speaker 1: kind of like main thrust of the novel.
Speaker 2: Is it like an auto like fictionalized auto bi.
Speaker 1: Or where are you going with it? Well, it is.
Speaker 1: It's heavily influenced obviously by my career and my experiences,
Speaker 1: but the tenor of the novel is not so much
Speaker 1: a war book, although it obviously is military based. It
Speaker 1: is is meant to be sort of a retrospective for
Speaker 1: really reconciliation of a person's past. And the central character's
Speaker 1: named Steve Keller. He also runs in each of my
Speaker 1: books here, and he is haunted by the decisions he
Speaker 1: made on the battlefield, and he is visited by the
Speaker 1: ghost of his commanding officer who was killed in combat,
Speaker 1: and through a discussion with that ghost, he goes into
Speaker 1: his past to make sense of what he went through
Speaker 1: and learn something on the other side. Yeah. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's meant to be a journey, not so much an odyssey,
Speaker 1: but take the reader down into something and come back out.
Speaker 1: And yeah it's I think it's pretty good. I'm looking
Speaker 1: forward to reading it.
Speaker 2: But I feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't ask,
Speaker 2: And I mean, this is a part of all of.
Speaker 1: These stories that.
Speaker 2: You know, we don't like do entire interviews about this
Speaker 2: particular subject, but it's like a part of everyone's individual journey,
Speaker 2: like getting out of the military, dealing with the post
Speaker 2: traumatic stress, Like what was sort.
Speaker 1: Of like your personal journey like with that. Well, I
Speaker 1: think a lot of that is captured in not only
Speaker 1: the book twenty two, which refers to obviously the twenty
Speaker 1: two veterans a day, perhaps more that take their lives statistically.
Speaker 1: There are things in there that are definitely vignette from
Speaker 1: my own past. But I interviewed five people who had
Speaker 1: attempted or really seriously considered taking their own lives, and
Speaker 1: I wrote it in hopes if someone would read it
Speaker 1: and should be like, I don't need to do this.
Speaker 1: So but that was one way of coping. The other one,
Speaker 1: as I was transitioning, particularly as an officer, there was
Speaker 1: a lot of pressure I felt to fit a certain role, like, hey,
Speaker 1: you're getting out, you're an officer, this is the skills
Speaker 1: you have. You can go work for this company and
Speaker 1: you'll make all this money and you'll be working work.
Speaker 2: For this defense contract or go get your MBA bank.
Speaker 1: Whatever it happened, right, and I felt like, this is
Speaker 1: not where I want to be, this isn't this doesn't
Speaker 1: feel right to me, and we're retiring and being able
Speaker 1: to get out the way that I did allows me
Speaker 1: a great deal of flexibility. And I captured a lot
Speaker 1: of my transition challenges in the book Dream Job, and
Speaker 1: that is about a guy who's literally a job interview
Speaker 1: and trying to figure out what he wants to do.
Speaker 1: And it is very much based upon an interview that
Speaker 1: I had when I was getting out, and that was
Speaker 1: the one that sort of said, Okay, you know what
Speaker 1: I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't have to go and do this. I can
Speaker 2: be something. So it kind of like taught you what
Speaker 2: you didn't want to do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I got a lot of exploration on it. In fact,
Speaker 1: when I my transition program was the Honor Foundation and
Speaker 1: they're very very good. Oh yeah, they're awesome. I had
Speaker 1: a great transition coach. But even he said, I don't
Speaker 1: know what to do with you, because well he'd have
Speaker 1: been a corporate guy. He'd been an army artillery officer
Speaker 1: and he had a full career. And then he'd say, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, you can work for Barclays Bank. You can
Speaker 1: do all this great stuff. And we were working on
Speaker 1: my resume and I was sending out the cover letters
Speaker 1: and we're doing mock interviews and I was like, I
Speaker 1: just don't this is not me. That's not where I
Speaker 1: want to be. And he's like, well, what do you
Speaker 1: really want to do. I was like, I really think
Speaker 1: I want to be a writer. I want to be
Speaker 1: a creative. And he was like, oh my god, and
Speaker 1: he said he actually knew somebody, not a military person.
Speaker 1: He's like, I actually have a writer friend and he'll
Speaker 1: put you in touch with her. That's cool. So he
Speaker 1: did the best that he could. And then from there
Speaker 1: I started having more conversations. Then I got in with
Speaker 1: writing groups and different people and I had you know,
Speaker 1: stuff like that, and then I got into I started writing,
Speaker 1: started writing screenplays and doing some consulting work for Hollywood stuff,
Speaker 1: some of the military, some of it not. And I
Speaker 1: just was like, this is great. This is exactly the
Speaker 1: kind of stuff that I'd like to do. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, I like try to like impart that too
Speaker 2: on when I meet especially like younger military veterans, they
Speaker 2: often have that that same mentality or idea that like,
Speaker 2: you know, they have to fit inside this box, whatever
Speaker 2: it is, whatever people think you should be in. But
Speaker 2: just because you were in your mind a big dumb
Speaker 2: ranger doesn't mean you can't go to college and get.
Speaker 1: A PhD if that's what you want to do.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, And you know, I think we should really encourage
Speaker 2: veterans to go out there and go as far as
Speaker 2: they possibly can.
Speaker 1: Well. I think there's a big disconnect with between society
Speaker 1: and debts. I really do. And not just special ops guys,
Speaker 1: because I mean, we're we're interesting, right, We're you know,
Speaker 1: people love the books, it's true, But I talked about
Speaker 1: the like Scott's book about Ramadi, I mean his experience.
Speaker 1: When I was reading it, like I knew that he
Speaker 1: had been there, but I was like, oh, yeah, I
Speaker 1: haven't been involved in that kind of stuff. Like he
Speaker 1: really had some some serious challenges. And he even talks
Speaker 1: about his own PTS. I like to call it, you know,
Speaker 1: post traumatic stress by disorder, because you don't have a disorder.
Speaker 1: Something happened to you. It's a pretty normal thing and
Speaker 1: you have to unpack this, and you know, and there's
Speaker 1: a whole bunch, there's a whole a group of female
Speaker 1: marines or veterans who have been overlooked in all of this.
Speaker 1: And this is one of the why I wrote my
Speaker 1: book Athena, which is you know, really focusing on a
Speaker 1: group of CST Cultural Support Team women that worked with me.
Speaker 1: And I didn't base it on them particularly, but I've
Speaker 1: interviewed five women who were involved in FET teams and
Speaker 1: had been you know, whether they were in special ops
Speaker 1: or otherwise, and I tried to get a handle on
Speaker 1: like what it was like for them to be you know,
Speaker 1: I was like, you know, at least the least I
Speaker 1: could do is try and come up with something, and
Speaker 1: that is at least a recognition to sacrifice. And so
Speaker 1: the VET population is I mean, I was growing up
Speaker 1: Vietnam books were everywhere, and you always knew a Vietnam VET,
Speaker 1: and they always talked about it in our capacity with
Speaker 1: deal things like things ended in August twenty twenty one
Speaker 1: in Afghanistan and it was just over. And when the
Speaker 1: State Department is just like eh, and Joe Biden's like,
Speaker 1: I reject the study of Abvigat and what happened there,
Speaker 1: And then you've got Blincoln saying, what do I care
Speaker 1: about a bunch of vets? Just some vets being pissed
Speaker 1: off about the anniversary, Like what does that say to Like,
Speaker 1: we carried this man, We carried this for twenty years
Speaker 1: alone and we felt alone, and we felt alone in
Speaker 1: our own world and we were like, remember nine to eleven,
Speaker 1: what's gonna What are we gonna do?
Speaker 2: The military is gonna take care of it. Now all
Speaker 2: of those guys are really alone. I mean when they
Speaker 2: were in theater, they fought together as a team, but
Speaker 2: now they're out there by themselves, like really having to
Speaker 2: think about this off and consider like, well, what does
Speaker 2: it mean.
Speaker 1: It's it's very it's it's difficult, and people have a
Speaker 1: difficult time expressing that and they want you know, when
Speaker 1: I was talking with guys at twenty two, I did
Speaker 1: the interview with Chris Meyer on his Profiles and Havoc podcast,
Speaker 1: and he's like why, He asked me, why why do
Speaker 1: you think people are Why do they kill themselves? And
Speaker 1: I think it's shame they're they're there. They they have
Speaker 1: nothing to be ashamed of, but they feel so lost
Speaker 1: and they feel so un acknowledged.
Speaker 2: They feel like they've become invisible. It's not their shame
Speaker 2: to carry, but they do.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, well, right, but but it becomes really hard for
Speaker 1: someone to understand that. And when I was, you know,
Speaker 1: in dream job, as part of that interview, you know,
Speaker 1: the questions that people asked me, it was finally like
Speaker 1: are you serious? And then I realized, like they have
Speaker 1: absolutely no clue and I and so then they just said, well, okay,
Speaker 1: it's up to me, or at least I'm going to
Speaker 1: take this on and I'm going to try to bridge
Speaker 1: this gap a little bit. And I don't I I
Speaker 1: love I don't mind doing corporate I'm not I'm not
Speaker 1: going to go work in corporate environment, but I don't
Speaker 1: mind talking to corporations and people about how to be
Speaker 1: better leaders and be better in touch, and how to
Speaker 1: better understand and and and work with veterans. That's really important.
Speaker 1: So and writing is a great is my vehicle, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's the thing that they like doing. Where can
Speaker 1: people go to find the books Amazon dot com. You
Speaker 1: can also go to my website, which is Ivan f
Speaker 1: Ingram dot com. Not very original, but it's got all
Speaker 1: my stuff there, all my contact information.
Speaker 2: We'll have some links down the description for folks who
Speaker 2: are listening to this podcast on YouTube or wherever they
Speaker 2: listen to podcast.
Speaker 1: They've made it this far. They no, it'll be down
Speaker 1: there regardless.
Speaker 2: Actually, anything else you want to tell folks about that
Speaker 2: you're working on right now.
Speaker 1: Well, I've got a I've got a companion screenplay of
Speaker 1: Troops in Contact, which I've been negotiating in negotiations with
Speaker 1: a couple of different entities to see about getting produced.
Speaker 1: I don't have any any bites, but I would really
Speaker 1: like to push that at some point. And then I've
Speaker 1: been working on this rather interesting project for the last
Speaker 1: couple of years called Torchlight, and it is about the
Speaker 1: Japanese American experience in World War Two, and not just
Speaker 1: to focus on the four to forty second and one
Speaker 1: hundredth Infantry Regiment or four to forty second Infantry Regiment
Speaker 1: Regimental Combat Team, but also the Japanese American experience of
Speaker 1: incarceration as was laid out by our United States governments
Speaker 1: as a war policy. And then it goes from there
Speaker 1: into we're trying to plan it as an eight store
Speaker 1: or eight episode arc that really examines not only things
Speaker 1: that happened in World War Two, but post war as
Speaker 1: they were. Eventually there was a lot of repatriations, and
Speaker 1: you know, this is one of the most highly decorated
Speaker 1: combat units ever. I think I've got eighteen Medals of Honor,
Speaker 1: many of which were post war awarded, the last of
Speaker 1: which the last of which were given by President Obama.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about a huge legacy his story in
Speaker 1: the United States that has been overlooked. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff in there that is germane to things that
Speaker 1: are happening in this country, you know today, and it
Speaker 1: seems like we should be better than that. But I've
Speaker 1: been working on that for a while. Got a great
Speaker 1: pitch deck. Just the pilot is really tight. It's awesome. Look,
Speaker 1: we're looking for producers, directors, and you know actors. It's
Speaker 1: a diverse cast, not just for Japanese Americans but also
Speaker 1: you know actors in general. But we're really looking for
Speaker 1: for for backing. We're looking for people to get involved
Speaker 1: in it because it's a it's a heck of a
Speaker 1: story and it's it's one of the it's one of
Speaker 1: the things I'm I wouldn't keep writing on something that
Speaker 1: I don't enjoy, and I want to see this thing
Speaker 1: get made and want to see I'm working with a
Speaker 1: great team of people with this thing, and it's just
Speaker 1: really it's an important chapter. It's great and it needs
Speaker 1: it just needs to be told. Really really happy on that. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: I write a lot, and I try and keep keep everything.
Speaker 1: I try and keep everything aligned. But every once in
Speaker 1: a while, I'm like, you know, that'd be a neat project.
Speaker 1: I think I wrote a thriller as well that I'm
Speaker 1: in the process of trying to get cleaned up to
Speaker 1: move for publishing as well. But that's that's another another thing.
Speaker 2: Come to a thriller fest in June here in Manhattan
Speaker 2: or not. We're in Brooklyn, but it's a Manhattan really Okay, uh, fantastic. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm going to be there. Well, yeah, this would be great.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So it's I would not I would not do
Speaker 1: anything else. I really wouldn't. I mean, you know, the
Speaker 1: hours long and at least the pay socks and so.
Speaker 1: But I did that. You know, when people say you're
Speaker 1: in the military, you can do this, You'll just get
Speaker 1: paid more. I was like, you know what, I'll work
Speaker 1: at for long hours for myself and have a lot
Speaker 1: more fun. Dude.
Speaker 2: I've worked in journalism, I've written novels, written articles, been
Speaker 2: a podcaster, bro done all these different things. But yeah,
Speaker 2: it doesn't pay worth a shit. But I would be
Speaker 2: bored as fuck working in corporate America.
Speaker 1: Like there's no way I could do that. I couldn't
Speaker 1: do it either. And that was, like I said, they
Speaker 1: were just like, well, this is an easy transition for
Speaker 1: you because you'll you've already worked the long hours. We
Speaker 1: should just get rewarded for it appropriately. And I know
Speaker 1: guys who did that and they got out, they gained
Speaker 1: fifty pounds, are losing their hair. Not that I'm a
Speaker 1: spring chicken, but I mean just sitting there, you know,
Speaker 1: trying to look at looking at what they do. It
Speaker 1: just that isn't for me. Yeah, And I just I
Speaker 1: love the flexibility. And I you know, I had to
Speaker 1: ask my boss for a day off today and he
Speaker 1: said to go ahead. I E me so I I
Speaker 1: And that's that's great. That's great too. But the flexibility
Speaker 1: is unmatched and it's it's really a wonderful, uh way
Speaker 1: to spend retirement. And I've got I got a lot
Speaker 1: of I'm having a lot of fun with it, a
Speaker 1: lot of fun.
Speaker 2: Anything else you want to tell folks about before we
Speaker 2: get going? And do we have any questions stick oh
Speaker 2: boyd question okay.
Speaker 1: Uh from Corbyn.
Speaker 6: How do you see the core retooling, uh, the soft
Speaker 6: tool kit in the near future if they do it all.
Speaker 1: I guess it really depends on what we mean by
Speaker 1: soft toolkit, because if we're talking about equipment, the MARSOK
Speaker 1: is pretty adaptive. They they're innovative and go out and
Speaker 1: look for for stuff. I think probably though in a
Speaker 1: larger scale. Uh. The one thing that MARSAC has or
Speaker 1: the Marine Corps has done well that the other services
Speaker 1: have not with their special operations is kept MARSAC close.
Speaker 1: And there's disadvantages to that for sure, But I believe
Speaker 1: that the Marine Corps has come around to the idea
Speaker 1: that MARSAK is valuable and it's better to be interactive
Speaker 1: and interoperable than it is to have these two separate
Speaker 1: camps that don't really talk to each other, and that
Speaker 1: is something that needs to happen. In fact, that weighs
Speaker 1: down at the twenty six MEU and their command the
Speaker 1: Command group last or two weeks ago talking to him
Speaker 1: about this very thing, because the commander was actually the
Speaker 1: operations officer on that obviously lightning mission back in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: and now he's you know, he's running a mewe himself,
Speaker 1: and he has already seen the value and he's like, Okay,
Speaker 1: we need my people need to know this because they
Speaker 1: didn't get the exposure in the ability to run a
Speaker 1: mission like that. And he sees what's happening next. So
Speaker 1: I think that's a big, a big way that the
Speaker 1: Marine Corps and marsak can can can meet together and
Speaker 1: that that doesn't always happened. But like you get into
Speaker 1: the Army and USUS sockets its own entity and you
Speaker 1: don't really see a lot of interoperability, and rangers just
Speaker 1: wouldn't go out and work with another organization. I mean
Speaker 1: they barely work outside of Jaysok period. I mean I
Speaker 1: mean that's by design. I mean that's that's what he's
Speaker 1: worth there for.
Speaker 6: So cool, we got one more from Tomes Great stuff, Ivan.
Speaker 6: What are some of the story some other stories you
Speaker 6: want to get told about the Marines or the military
Speaker 6: in general.
Speaker 1: Wow, there's a lot of I mean, never run out
Speaker 1: of material, right, I mean you as we've done the
Speaker 1: research talking about tors Light, we first started out looking
Speaker 1: at just the four forty second because that had been
Speaker 1: seen before. You know, that had been seen before, and
Speaker 1: it was in certain people's It was in there. It
Speaker 1: was in there at least their wheelhouse as far as knowledge,
Speaker 1: because people have heard about the Japanese American combat unit.
Speaker 1: Daniel Annoy was a center to his metal money in
Speaker 1: the popular culture. In the Karate Hid Mister Miyagi is
Speaker 1: they make full reference to him being in the four
Speaker 1: to forty second there's a scene where he's drunk, you know,
Speaker 1: talking about his wife having passed away, and he's in
Speaker 1: his uniform and you know, he's he's got all of
Speaker 1: the letters laid out and his wife and he who
Speaker 1: in the letter. They talk about him her dying in
Speaker 1: the man's in our camp, and then he passes out
Speaker 1: and that's when Daniel, you know, finds the Medal of
Speaker 1: Honor and he's like, oh my gosh, I didn't really
Speaker 1: know about this. And so what's powerful about that scene
Speaker 1: is that nothing is really said. It's just like they've
Speaker 1: discovered this hero, which is which is how it goes down,
Speaker 1: all right. And so but as we were doing the research,
Speaker 1: we found that there were Japanese Americans who had served
Speaker 1: with Merrill's Marauders and there were guys in the oss,
Speaker 1: and there were there were women who had roles, and
Speaker 1: there was just so much more to the story. So
Speaker 1: unpacking and uncovering that kind of stuff led, you know,
Speaker 1: as we were writing it and have been coming up
Speaker 1: with the arc. It's just been like, we got to
Speaker 1: include this one and we got to add another episode
Speaker 1: on that, because so when you know the larger picture
Speaker 1: of the military stories, I mean you you could open
Speaker 1: it up, you know, in any in any direction. It
Speaker 1: blows my mind. A movie hasn't been made about Eagle Claw,
Speaker 1: movie hasn't been made about Sante, Like those were both
Speaker 1: gripping schools.
Speaker 2: We still have not gotten like a mac Vie Saga move.
Speaker 1: I mean there's a trepidation. I think to this day
Speaker 1: just a Striker Meyer movie would be enough. Deck Meto's
Speaker 1: biopic John John's awesome, you know what I mean, like
Speaker 1: that just the kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, I.
Speaker 2: Think there is a hesitation to this day about making
Speaker 2: a Vietnam war film that isn't explicitly anti war.
Speaker 1: Well, like we don't.
Speaker 2: Really know how to process that well, And that's what
Speaker 2: I think happens in You're I'm sorry, I cut you up.
Speaker 1: I think that's what that is one of the challenges.
Speaker 1: Like first, as we have found in the Red you know,
Speaker 1: as we've been pitching this and talking to people, you
Speaker 1: get people who are interested in the story, they like
Speaker 1: the overall tone, They're like okay, and then they're like,
Speaker 1: but historical stuff is hard to make and it becomes
Speaker 1: a niche thing, and I'm just like, well, then stop
Speaker 1: it from making Masters of the Air or Greyhound or
Speaker 1: any of these other movies.
Speaker 2: Not really, man, I mean, like World War two movies
Speaker 2: have a pretty prominent place.
Speaker 1: And you don't want to see a movie about eighteen
Speaker 1: Medal of honor like Unit that had eighteen Medals of
Speaker 1: Honor and liberated docou like this unit did all kinds
Speaker 1: of crazy stuff and actually very short period of time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I mean, you could do stuff on the Jedburgs.
Speaker 1: You could do stuff on Peter Ortiz. The Marine's a marine,
Speaker 1: you served, you too, Navy Crosses, he's sort of in
Speaker 1: the oss.
Speaker 2: It blows my mind that here we are in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five and there is still new information about World
Speaker 2: War Two like coming to light like I never would
Speaker 2: have thought I'd think, like the case is closed. We
Speaker 2: had a guy Jassic here a few months back who
Speaker 2: like found an oss memoir and like an archive somewhere
Speaker 2: that had like never been published, like like all this
Speaker 2: crazy stuff.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of this stuff gets overshadowed though
Speaker 1: by things like Lionis And I'm not cutting on you know,
Speaker 1: the success of another writer, but there's sensationalism there that
Speaker 1: people want to see. Yeah, and so you know, the
Speaker 1: challenge we had, particularly with towards Light, is that the
Speaker 1: history alone was interesting enough you don't need to hype
Speaker 1: it up. Well, and then that's where people are like, well,
Speaker 1: do we have a central antagonist here? We're like, well,
Speaker 1: we actually know we yeah, we do do. It's the
Speaker 1: US government, but but there's Nazi Germany, there's the job,
Speaker 1: there's all kinds of stuff. And they would but what
Speaker 1: they wanted was some of this Darth Vader character, like
Speaker 1: something that you do you know, it's just is hanging
Speaker 1: over them, and I'm like, that's not how this works.
Speaker 1: And We're and and we want to be true to
Speaker 1: the people and the families, I mean, because these you know,
Speaker 1: we were basing this on really unreal people, Unlike we're
Speaker 1: in the troops in contact. Yeah, parallels my book, but
Speaker 1: I I was able to take full liberties in areas
Speaker 1: with that, with with people who you know, in locations
Speaker 1: that I don't have to make those real.
Speaker 2: What did you think of Flags of Our Fathers and
Speaker 2: Letters from You Regima?
Speaker 1: I actually thought they were excellent, excellent films. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean Letters from You Regima is a really really incredible,
Speaker 1: incredible film. What I mean, You're gonna have very few,
Speaker 1: uh directors who have the horsepower like Eastwood, I mean,
Speaker 1: the balls well to do it, and some guys get
Speaker 1: away with it and some guys don't. And so like
Speaker 1: Kevin Coster tried with with Horizon because you know, he
Speaker 1: he put his own money against it and he's got
Speaker 1: a fantastic production company. But he was like, hey, I'm
Speaker 1: going to do this because I want to do this
Speaker 1: as a as a as a as a picture because
Speaker 1: it's something it's interesting to me. As far as the West,
Speaker 1: because he does like making Westerns, whereas Eastwood has got
Speaker 1: such a diverse thing and just to be able to
Speaker 1: be like, you know what, I'm going to take on
Speaker 1: a Japanese perspective of World War Two in e Regima
Speaker 1: when they're thinking when everyone thinks of regema, they're thinking
Speaker 1: John Wayne or you know basilone in the Pacific, you know,
Speaker 1: the series of the Pacific. So yeah, there's risk in everything,
Speaker 1: and there's really there was risk in in our in
Speaker 1: our military careers. There's risk in being a writer. And
Speaker 1: someone told me once like, don't read the comments. Someone's like,
Speaker 1: you know when you Rick Rubin is a very famous
Speaker 1: uh producer. He produced Run DMC and the Avitt Brothers.
Speaker 1: You want to talk about two different, you know, very
Speaker 1: different musical you know, He's just like, I hear stuff
Speaker 1: that I know is going to sell and I and
Speaker 1: I want to help you developed that. But he takes
Speaker 1: huge risk on that. And he wrote a great book
Speaker 1: which just popped out of my mind. But you know,
Speaker 1: he he's like, once you release the book, the record,
Speaker 1: the movie, it's out. There is a piece of art
Speaker 1: that you've created, and how people receive it is not
Speaker 1: up to you, right, and you wish that they would
Speaker 1: all love it. But there are dudes who passed on
Speaker 1: the Beatles. There's dudes who passed on the Rolling Stones.
Speaker 1: There are people who don't like you know, any number
Speaker 1: of paintings. There's people wh don't like George a 'keeffe,
Speaker 1: who doesn't like Georgia O'Keeffe. But there are people who
Speaker 1: are just you know, they're not into that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: I don't understand Salvador Dali. They don't like you know, Hemingway,
Speaker 1: which I think is an antithetical statement, but I mean
Speaker 1: those types of those types of risks need to be taken,
Speaker 1: and those stories.
Speaker 2: Need to be told, and stop focus grouping the shit
Speaker 2: out of everything.
Speaker 1: Take some risks. Well, it's what I told go back
Speaker 1: to seconds. I pulled all the guys together one time,
Speaker 1: one black platoon sargant and I said, guys, I recognize
Speaker 1: that you've got a ton of experience and I'm here
Speaker 1: to learn. I'm also here to lead, and I'm asking
Speaker 1: you to take a chance, take a chance on me,
Speaker 1: and if you do that, I'll make it worth your while.
Speaker 1: So anybody who wants to take a chance on my projects,
Speaker 1: and I hope they're out there, I'll absolutely make it
Speaker 1: worth your while.
Speaker 2: So yeah, anything else before we roll out?
Speaker 1: What do they say at the end of the ar
Speaker 1: covered Thank you everyone who joined us. We'll see you
Speaker 1: guys next time.
Speaker 2: Thank you Ivan for joining us in the studio or
Speaker 2: real appreciate it. Please go check out his books on Amazon,
Speaker 2: check out his substack. Like I said, we'll have some
Speaker 2: links down the description for those there's been a fun episode.
Speaker 1: It has been my absolute pleasures. Has been great. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much. I hope we can do it again sometime.
Speaker 1: Maybe soon. We'll see all of you guys again next time.
Speaker 1: Hey guys, it's Jack.
Speaker 2: I just want to talk to you for a moment
Speaker 2: about how you can support the show. If you've been
Speaker 2: watching it, enjoying it, but you'd like to get a
Speaker 2: little bit more involved and help us continue to do this,
Speaker 2: you can check out our Patreon. It is patreon dot
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Speaker 2: And you support the channel and the show, and we
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Speaker 2: helped this company, this small business survive, especially during our
Speaker 2: early years, and you are what continues to help this
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Speaker 2: There's going to be a link down in the description
Speaker 2: to that Patreon page, and there is also going to
Speaker 2: be a link to our new merch shop, so if
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Speaker 1: We really appreciate it, guys. Thank you.