Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Cleared Hot Episode 273 - Dallas Alexander

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

Dallas Alexander was a member of Joint Task Force 2 (JTF 2), an extremely high-readiness and precise special operations forces unit. JTF 2 exists to protect Canadian national interests and combat terrorism and threats to Canadians at home and abroad. Dallas was a member of a sniper team that was responsible for the world's farthest confirmed sniper shot while on a deployment in Iraq. Post-service, Dallas has pursued his music career, focusing on singing, songwriting, and live performances.

What's going on, everybody? It's Monday. Now, you know what that means, other than it's the beginning of the week. It's time for a new episode. In today's episode, should not shock anybody. It's brought to you by Black Rifle Coffee.

I'm looking at their website right now, and they actually have three new things on the rotating banner. For those of you that live in an area where there actually is a Black Rifle Coffee outpost, rejoice because they have a new app that allows you to order ahead. So that's super convenient, and it's something we're working on up here in the Calispell store. But if you don't live in Calispell store,

and you live somewhere else where there is a black rifle coffee store. You should definitely download that app. It's going to save you time. It's just super convenient. They're also doing coffee bundles. And that looks like they are doing the bundle of the cup itself or mug, I should say, and the bags of coffee, 15% off. You can't beat that.

And, of course, they have subscriptions, which is going to make it easy for you if you know exactly what you like in their roasted coffee, whether it be whole bean or grind, and you can have it delivered to your door on the frequency that you want to, and the volume that you want to. None of those things suck. And if you don't know which ones you like, go to blackcrafo coffee.com, scroll down a little bit, and it has their roast listed out from light to extra dark. And unfortunately, it has decaf on there too, if you're into that.

But that's it. Blackcrafelcoffee.com for all of your coffee needs. My guest today is a man named Dallas Alexander. And I don't know what he would prefer to be described as at this point. is he a artist, an artist, country music singer to be specific? Or is he a previous soldier? Or is he both? I know a lot of people who come from military service actually struggle with that definition

and how they want to be described. But I digress. Dallas is from the great north of Canada, specifically Alberta, which just happens to be north of where I actually live in Montana. He joined the military and eventually worked his way towards a unit that is, I would say, in the shadows-ish, JTF2. You can go on to the internet and do as much research as you want to on that for whatever that is worth. And he had a pretty interesting career. He went overseas, disappeared around any interesting places, and he did some things.

And now he's focusing on his music career. And I'm going to shut up and let Dallas explain himself who he is, where he comes from. and what he's up to now. Episode 273 with Dallas Alexander. Enjoy. I'm looking at danger close now. First question. How does a man born and raised in Canada get the name Dallas?

You might want to have... Pull that sucker close to your fit. Keep it like a fist away. There you go. Like this. One fist. You'll have to invite my parents now for that one. I have no idea.

Fair enough. Why? There's some like, as I grew up, I'm like, it's weird. I mean, I like my name. Don't get me wrong. Is there a city or town in Canada named Dallas? No. Okay.

Maybe there should be. Were they fans of Western movies? What's going on here? The show, the show that was popular back in the day is what I thought it was. And people had asked, and I'm like, I don't know. I'm going to ask my mom. She's like, no, we just like the name. So it's random.

It's unique in original. You're the first Canadian that I've met named Dallas. I don't know many. It's good now that I'm. I play country music. Yeah. It's helpful. How did you get into music?

How did I get in? I've always loved music. I think I haven't met anyone that doesn't. I love music also. Imagine that. I can't play it. Actually, not only can I not play it, I've never really had the desire to play it.

Okay. So I've always loved it. and it was a big part of like one of my friends growing up like one of my really good friends his family was extremely musical so I was always around like I'd go to his house and his dad would like put on a record and play steel guitar to it and he was really good and it would be like campfires singing and playing guitar and all this stuff so I was always it's very cool the talent that these people had so I was always just kind of I played around with it a little bit um I got a guitar probably when I was 18 or so.

I was trying to learn a couple chords and play a couple campfire songs. And then I didn't really do much with it. So it was only the last four years or so that I really started like really giving her. Learned enough songs to go to a couple open mics, which was the scariest thing I had ever done in my whole life. Yeah, how was that? Which is crazy to say. So it sounds like you have had zero traditional. education in music.

Like you didn't pursue a musical school. Okay, so you were kind of, I'm going to call it the YouTube generation. And by that, I mean teaching yourself. That's right, yeah. Which, I wish I had had that tool when I was younger. However, I think I would have used it for evil. At about the age of 16 or 70s, it would have been a really deep dossier of like titty searches.

On YouTube, would that be successful? I probably would have, just having the internet and the capacity that my kids have right now. I don't think I personally would be able to actually contain myself, looking back at myself, how they do it now. And I'm not saying they necessarily do it well. I'm glad that I didn't grow up in that. So you kind of taught yourself, open mic, very first time, anxiety level, one to 10, one is low. Holy fuck, 10. It was 10. And it's weird because it's a, it was an environment of like seven people in a bar. Four of them were also playing the open mic, and nobody cared. But I was like, oh my God, okay, just relax. You're going to play a couple songs that you know how to play already. Yeah, it was crazy.

It was nerve-wracking, for sure. How did it go? Like six people clapped, so it's like, all right. Is this the kind of setting where half the people in the room have their backs to you? They're just knee-deep in their cocktails and they're aware that music is playing? Oh, yeah. Well, that was like all the first 100 bar shows I played. I'd have to, like, signal the bar tender or whatever to, like, turn off the music because I was about to start and then, okay, I'm done my said, you can turn it back on. Was it what you thought it would be? Music or the open mic?

I guess kind of both, because that was your first performance in a public setting. Yeah, so I still don't even know what expectation I have for it. it's just I enjoy having something especially now that I'm out of the military having something that is like it's continually learning like I will never master the guitar you know like even the best guitar players have not mastered it so it's it's just the continual learning of something new and then it does continually push my comfort zone so like as there's more people and more people paying attention every time I go to play it's like a little bit of that okay Does it get harder to play with more people in the room, or is it kind of the same once you get over a certain threshold?

I don't know. Ask me if I ever played to, like, thousands of people. But at first I found it was almost worse, not worse, but more uncomfortable if I were to, like, take out my guitar and, like, sing to you to. You know what I mean? Actually, I feel like that would be. Versus 100 people or whatever. Well, it's way more intimate. Yeah.

Michael would have uncomfortable eye contact with you. he'd probably be licking his lips I mean he does weird shit I would gaze into his eyes the whole time so there's that it's like small crowds that pay attention so especially when I was starting

where I'm like I know that I'm not great at this song but I have to play it in order to play this three hour set and then like everything stops and people are actually listening now I'm like oh fuck just talk everybody talk but it turns into like you appreciate it a lot more when people are coming to the show and watching

the show. And it kind of changes based on venue and types of gigs obviously, but... How did it feel that first night, though, at that open mic when you obviously face that anxiety and adversity? Who gives a shit if somebody was actually even paying attention? How did you feel when you were done?

Oh, I felt incredible. I finished my... I think I played three songs. What were they? I played in color by Jamie Johnson. I played an original and I played... I think I played wagon wheel. Old Crow Medicine show version. Okay.

I think those were the three. And I was like, deep breath out, sat down, listened to everybody else play. And I was like, that was pretty cool. And then I just went and did as many open mics as I could find

until I could book like a bar show. Yeah, how does that work? So you go to an open mic, you perform, which is a hurdle for you to get over. Yeah. Yeah, how do you continue from there? You just keep going on that

until you can get enough attention to book a venue? Attention and content. Like when I started, I could play, you know, five or six songs, let's say. And I just went to open mics to practice those. And I was attempting to kind of write songs. And I spoke to a few bar managers and, like, booking people for the venues. And most bar shows require, like, three hours of music.

You take a few sets and you're playing. You're the guy in the corner playing. So I had nowhere near that. So step one, or 1.5, whatever, is after open mics, was learning enough songs to be able to play long enough at a bar. Three hours is a long time. I'm thinking about that in what you're saying. You hear it sometimes in the background of restaurants and you don't even realize what that person probably has to know or be capable of to just sit there and be in the background. Yeah, it's a ton of songs.

Do you actually memorize them? Because oftentimes I'll see like a tablet in these days in front of them. Yeah, I don't like the tablet. I don't like the phone on the mic stand. I understand why people do it. I was just in Nashville a few weeks ago to write songs. I went to a lot of different friendies and everyone had a phone and I don't like seeing it.

But then I realized why. What's on the phone? What are they looking at? So what they're looking at is the chord progression and lyrics of a song. So I understand why they did it after a little while. It's a very, like, Broadway is very, it's like request-centric. So people are there to party and hear the song. that they love so someone shouts out their requests and is going to tip the musician

they'll play it for them now you can't know every song there is so the musicians are very talented but they can bring up the chords and the lyrics and then they can play the song in real time yeah so I saw a lot of like damn obscure requests and then people crush a song and I'm like holy shit that's a skill in and of itself yeah yeah so that's why they have to do it because of the the the environment they're playing and I don't like it I want to practice practice songs and then play them. And if someone requests something that I know how to play, I'll play it.

And if I don't, then I won't. Or actually a few times, because I have a microphone when I'm playing, someone be like, can you play this? Yeah, yeah, I'll play Good Lord Lori by the term Pike Trubadors. Even though that's how they ask for it. We do not ask for that. By request. People have to understand the person with the microphone is in charge.

That's right. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm not, I don't like using a tablet or a phone playing. Yeah, I was always curious what they were actually looking at. You actually see it with large professional acts as well. And I suspected that that's because of, well, you don't see a phone or a tablet.

I guess there's a lyrical, the lyrics are up. When you see like behind the scene shots. Yeah, like on a prompter or whatever. But I mean, I guess when I've seen it, those are bands that have been around for like 20, 30 years. They probably just have such a volume of work that perhaps. the wires can get crossed at times. Oh, for sure. There's been times, like,

and I'm just starting and I'd be playing. I'm like, yeah, I don't remember the lyrics to this next part. Is that what you say or how do you handle it? Sometimes I'll just try and freestyle. Generally, if you're playing at a bar, there's not that many people paying attention anyway. So, you sing the first verse twice or whatever. But I'll call myself out after.

I'm like, if you were paying attention, you will notice that I sang the first verse twice. or I'll just ask and keep drumming like Does anyone know the words for the second verse of this song? Someone might shout it out or it'll come to me and then it'll play it. Yeah, I think being up front about it is probably the best. If you paid a couple hundred bucks to see like a really well-known established band and they forgot their own lyrics, which probably, I mean, I can't even imagine A,

being that creative or be performing in that many people. I think a little monitor just in case is probably not a bad idea. It gives you a nice little like, I don't know, warm and fuzzy. Well, I also feel like some of those artists and bands were really fucked up. And I mean, like, drugs and alcohol earlier on in their careers, they may not really remember the writing process of where that particular song came from. It's like me with all the concussions of that. Like, what was that song? Ooh, that actually probably wouldn't be very helpful for what it is you're trying to do now.

Yeah. So, okay, so you go and open mics. What was your first? And when you say bar gig, does that mean they? are at this point paying you? Yeah. Okay. The first couple were,

what was it? I played for mostly beer, beer and a meal. Okay. And then they donated money to like a charity that we were playing music for. So I was like,

all right, technically I got paid to play music. And I was pretty excited. And then, yeah, most bar shows, they'll pay you and you play for a few hours and you're the live music.

Do you ever think, obviously, who knows where you're, career will go from at this point. But did you ever think ever that you'd be getting paid as a musical performer? Oh, hell no. Like prior to, I don't know, three, four years ago, um, no, I, I was learning, I bought a guitar, I learned a couple of chords just to play at a campfire, really. Um, and then a few years ago I started, I was like, that's it. I'm taking it serious. Um, then when the first, you know, even though it was beer in wings, I was like, this could really be

something you're not out of pocket at that point that's right you know in the in the events before that i'm sure you were buying your own beer and paying for your own wings like a sucker everybody has to start somewhere oh yeah yeah you can't all be metallica ride the lightning you know that's right can you play that song hell no i'm still like like the guitar part of all of this it's crazy like seeing how good some people are it's good it's it's inspiring but like i am not not a good guitar player. Well, the guitar is only a portion of it. When did you start singing?

Because there's two very different skills, actually. For sure. And then combining them is interesting sometimes. I'd always loved singing along in the, like I would just sing everywhere where there's music playing. I would sing along and try and most of it was country where I grew up where my dad had listened to a lot of like CCR, that genre of stuff from Johnny Cash. Creed's Clearwater people who don't know what's

CCR means. If you don't know. It's worth a Google. Yeah, Google that one. And the R's Revival. So I would always sing along to me to anything. I always enjoyed it. I sing along to things too in the comfort and safety in my vehicle. You are ready. No, I'm not. Just because you sing along to some, let's not give people the wrong idea here. Just because you sing along in your car, it doesn't mean you should go get a microphone and a guitar and they'll perform. This is true. Because if I didn't tell you right now, I don't sound good in my car. But I sing along. Okay. I know a lot of Katie Perry lyrics because I have a 14-year-old daughter. I can belt that shit out.

And I do it when she's in the car because it sounds so bad and it drives her absolutely bad shit crazy. Okay. So does she confirm that you sound terrible? Oh, she's yelling at me to stop. And the more she tells me to stop, I increase the volume. And then she tries to be the big boss on the phone to DJ and I'll just take it over and song after song after song that I know she likes that I can just absolutely murder. She doesn't like them anymore. She loves them.

She hates it when I sing. Okay. So it was like that. But from a young age, singing along as loud as I could. Since now, like, when I really started to or wanted to start taking it seriously, I've done some, like, online, like, vocal courses.

Worked with a couple of, like, vocal instructors, I guess, coaches, which helps immensely. But also just, I just, I just, if you ask my wife she'll like I sing all fucking day long like I go around the house just strumming and singing

and practicing and singing so did you sing like that before you wanted to become an artist you just do probably I'm assuming you just do more of it now no I just yeah I do way more of it now yeah Glenn Cowan says you used to sing to him like just to him

yeah eye contact in the shower is how he described it yeah that was without a guitar though I remember that I'm just kidding he said hi by the way Yeah, he's, I met him as part of the jump stuff that he did. Jumping all over the place.

He was fantastic, man. He was such a good person to have on the trip. We laughed so hard. It's important. I hadn't laughed that hard and so long. I forgot that aspect of the super tight-knit community, how you can turn the absolute highs and the lowest of lows into just reasons to cry laughing. It's one of my favorite things.

Yeah, you leave that just like kind of refreshed in your life. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, he's a good dude. He said to say a live he as well. I was trying to get a maple syrup bottle to offer some like an exchange to our friends in the north, but I could, plus I figured the stuff down here would just be dog shit anyway. Yeah, we got all the real stuff and it's, we'd have to import it just so that we could take it back to Canada. I posted a story of Glenn, he posted it of a maple syrup bottle and I reposted it.

People were slide into my DMs like, hey man, don't post about that stuff. It's the good shit. I'm like, it's maple syrup, dude. How dare you? I was like, okay. Apparently it's a commodity up there. I didn't realize that you use it as a down payment on your house. You can, yeah.

Yeah. So I would bought my truck. If you had enough of it, it does taste different. Yeah. I don't know how the hell we got onto maple syrup. I don't know. Yeah, or Glenn. But, well, they're both good.

They're both awesome. Well, Canadian. So no real vocal lessons other than online. A couple in person? Even those were just kind of Zoom stuff, which I realized I didn't like that much. I don't know. Maybe you need to just have like pristine internet connection

because it would be a lag. And then I'm like, did you hear that? Yeah, I think I, okay, do it again. And it's like it's lost. Yeah, it's like your FaceTime singing to somebody, so it's not the same. Do you sound differently to yourself? Like when you hear a recording of yourself played back,

does your voice sound different? Oh, yeah. So when you're trying to hit a certain pit, do you have to deal with that as well too what you think it sounds like in your head versus what it's being projected as I found um the pitch let's say or the note you're trying to sing and I like real singers if they're going to hear this guy's an idiot but the note I'm trying to hit is there but the sound that I'm hearing like in my own ears is different than it if we're like we recorded and play it on speaker. I'm getting used to it now though a little bit and they're actually getting closer to what

they were if I don't know if that makes any sense at all. So before I would sing a song and I'm like, that was awesome. I killed that and I'd listen to it like that was dog shit. Well it still trips me out hearing my own voice on podcast episode like on these that we record or on other ones that I'm on my and it probably is only weird to me because everybody else has always heard the voice that way. I hear it and it sounds absolutely nothing like what it sounds like in my head. Well, I mean, it sounds similar, but the tone is different. The inflection is different. And so I just don't listen to myself anymore.

It's the only way I can get around. But I'm also not a musical performer. So that's why I'm curious. I wonder over time if they will align themselves and they'll sound the same. Because that's got to be an interesting challenge. You're trying to hit a note, but you have to teach yourself that it sounds different and then you're hearing it in your head. Yeah.

I just, I found it weird to listen to something that was recorded with my own voice on it. I'm getting used to it. Yeah. Reps, I would imagine. A lot of reps, yeah. Where'd you grow up in Canada? I grew up in a place called Fishing Lake Métis settlement. It's like a little indigenous community northeast of Edmonton.

Okay. Super close to the Alberta, Saskatchewan border. I'm trying to think. Edmonton is about eight from here. Yeah, about eight if you stop for coffee somewhere. I've done a few years of hunting in, God damn it, if I wasn't just about to talk about this, I'd be able to remember.

But I passed through Edmonton, and it's about another six to eight hours north. It is pretty far up there. I once it says like Deer Lodge, but that's not it. Red Willow Outfitters is the name of the... Beaver Lodge? Is that... It's very, very far north.

Okay. I don't even know if Beaver Lodge, BC, or Alberta. I should know that. I played hockey against them. But anyway, it's north. Okay. It's cold up there. Yeah, so.

And we're not really north. It's just like a little bit north and more east of Edmonton. How big population size? I think while I was there, we maxed out at around 400 people. Okay. So you had relatively small classes grown up? Oh, yeah, tiny. For most, like, my elementary school was there on the settlement,

And then for, like, junior high and high school, we had to, we bust to, like, the nearest big town of 2,000 people. When you say, what did you describe it as indigenous? Yeah, it's like an indigenous community. Is this similar to tribal land here in the United States? Yeah, sort of like a reservation a little bit. Okay. We actually neighbored the Frog Lake Reserve. There's just like a lake in between us, so we're kind of, it's, there's some differences, like, I don't know, in rules and policies.

season, whatever, but I don't know, sort of similar. Yeah. Okay, so you came up from a very, very small place. Yeah, tiny. Yeah, and then, I mean, I'm sure we'll get into the military side of the house, but I'm going to guess that neither, no military service on either side of your parents? Nope. I don't know.

Did you think about that when you were younger, or what were your aspirations growing up? No, I wanted to play hockey. Yeah, I feel like that's kind of a requirement. Yeah. From where you're at? Yeah. Glenn talked about hockey pretty much. every day in the expedition, mostly because Jericho loved hockey.

They were talking about, hey, we should meet up for this game. Let's go get tickets. I'm like, good God, guys. We're jumping out of a plane, boys. Yeah, hockey is huge. I would play every single day that I possibly could. So you were thinking pro hockey? Oh, yeah.

Like take it all the way? I wanted to go to the show. How far did you, were you able to take it? I finished playing junior hockey. So that ends at like 22. And then I had some opportunity to play, like, some semi-pro stuff, which is like some smaller pro leagues where you can kind of potentially grind out a living. But that's sort of where the path met with me discovering some military stuff that really interested me. What did you find?

I was working in the oil field for like one of the off seasons. And I was working with a guy who did just like a four-year, I think, contract as a comms guy or something. He joined at basic training and went into some comms unit. But like during our long days discussions, he told me about our unit, JTF2, being like a counterterrorism unit in Canada. And I had one, I was not tracking anything military, especially in Canada. Anything that wasn't on like an Arnold or a Rambo movie. I was like, was not tracking it. Which for clarity is not actually military related, even though many people confuse it for that.

Exactly. That's what the military was to me. It's hard to actually hate on those movies because it does, real or not, it entertains people, it gets their attention. And I know a ton of people to include myself. You know, I've watched the movie Navy Seals with Charlie Sheen. Yeah. I would say countless times, that's not a real term, hundreds at the very least. And I knew what I wanted to do since I was like 11, but I still watched the shit out of that movie and I knew it was fake.

And it still gets people to join. It gets them interested in it. It's actually kind of hard to truly hate on those movies. That would be even like my Black Hawk down. Fantastic movie. So, yeah, he told me about this unit. First, I didn't believe him, but then I was like, well, I don't know anything about our military, so I'll get back to you. What year was this?

This would have been 2005. Okay, so post-9-11 World. Yeah. So I had started hearing a little bit more in the news and stuff about, you know, Canadians deployed to Afghanistan, and started seeing just a little bit more about it. But I still was not tracking. I was just hockey-minded, and that's it. What led you to the oil fields? That is not an easy job.

It's Alberta, man. Limited options? Well, I'm sure there was other options, but it just, every oil company that I worked for, like, was really good with schedules of me, like, going to train in the off-season for hockey or whatever it was. So we'd be long and busy, and the pay was pretty good. So, like, you could work, take your time. I'm putting because I was just trying to prep for like the next season sort of thing but you have a job to get through.

Yeah, so that would that was it and it's opportunity like there's there's there's there at the time. There's just ton of work in the oil field. So what kind of stuff were you doing? Uh, with him I was a on a flush by truck. So we would like go to a well that was having an issue hook up this big pipe and like try and flush out what was ever what was happening down in the well. Sometimes it would take hours. Sometimes it'd be quick and just go to the, the next one going on just all day and this is with a guy who first introduced the idea of the uh jtf to you yeah yeah so he told me about it i i looked he attached to that unit or he had just heard about it because he was serving in the community enforces um but yeah i as soon as it was almost like instant as soon as i heard about it i was like we have that then i looked

into it a little bit there wasn't much on the internet i was going to ask you what were you able to defined. I found just a handful of pictures and they had like this weird, it was kind of like blurry recruiting video out. It just showed people going through selection, just doing pushups in the mud and a couple of- By its vagueness, if you will. Yeah. And there were just like these grainy pictures of some guys with like MP5s. And I'm like, well, I don't know what's going on here, but I like it. So that's what I found. I remember coming back. I'm like, you were telling me the truth. there is this unit in Canada. And from that point, I was like, that's what I want to do.

More than hockey. Yeah. That would have been like the deciding summer, essentially, because the next hockey season was starting, and I was going to have to decide if I was going to go try to play on one of these semi-pro teams because junior hockey was over, or just what I was going to do. And instead I went to the recruiting center.

Do you think he could have made it all the way playing hockey? No. Maybe as a fighter. but even that I wasn't that great on it. That's a part of the team too. What do they call those guys, bruisers? Yeah, the enforcers. Is it actually their job to go out there and just throw down?

It used to be more than it is now, which is. I still think there's a place for fighting in hockey, but it's better for the game, but it's not such a large role, in my opinion. And it's way better for guys' concussions. But that legitimately was a role in a team, right? Like, hey, you kind of suck with this stick, but if you throw the mitts off, it's game on. For sure. Star players to protect.

Is it true? And this shows you how much I know about hockey, which is nothing. But basically the enforcer wouldn't even be on the ice, but they would make eye contact with the other enforcer who is not on the ice. And they'd just be like, okay. Oh, yeah. And they would just come straight out, attempt to play zero hockey and beat the shit out of each other in the middle.

That's right. Get the crowd going, you get momentum. There's a whole bunch of pluses to scrabbing. Well, when would they use them? Is it like when somebody did something? something dirty and that was the payback tool or when does the enforcer get unchained? So it would be that for sure. Something does something dirty. Like a cheap shot on your star player.

There's a price to pay for that. Absolutely. It would also be a momentum swing. You know, like your team's down. A couple goals down. Like people are just, they're not a good fight. Everyone's amped up again. The crowd's amped up. And then you turn around ideally and score and win. I feel like the big fights on the ice end in big fights in the crowd, especially with the certain level of alcohol consumption. I've seen some fights in the crowd in my junior playing days. Absolutely. I think one of the things I appreciate the most about the enforcer in their role, one, I can't, like, if you put ice skates on me right now and there was,

I just immediately fall over. So the ability to fight on the ground is one thing. The ability to fight on the ice is another. But I love that the refs wait until it goes to the ground. until they get in there. They'll kind of like circle around them and like, come on, boys, like, get in there. Let's do this.

They're waiting to pounce if it goes to the ground. And half the team is just sitting there. And they're all just like, get it in, get it in, boys. And then they goes to the ground. It's kind of the agreement that it's going to end. And they go do their penalty time and they yell at each other and talk shit across. I love it. At least, I mean, it's everybody knows what the job is.

Everybody knows what's about to happen. That's right. And everybody's kind of cool with it. Yeah. I hope at least a little essence of that remains in hockey forever. Yeah, me too. I think it's good that it's not such a huge role in hockey. It has its place.

I don't think it should be the whole thing. That's right. Yeah. And I'm also glad that they require helmets now and face shields, even though I did used to like the goalpost teeth with just the total front missing goal. It's a good hockey look. All right. So you make that decision.

What did you change about your life to get ready? I watched Black Hawk down a lot more and I trained I actually started training way hard or just different actually I started training differently I was getting ready for what I thought

basic training was going to be so I was like I was given her training I would on the oil field like where we would go to a site hook up we have like sometimes those jobs take a couple hours It would be like pushups and pull-ups on the ring. And like just really training hard

because I thought basic training was going to be very, very hard. And that was it. It was just more of a focus thing because both of them are physical and I was training for hockey anyway. But it was more of a mindset shift in what the goal was. So your goal before you even joined was to end up at JTF2. Oh, yeah. Did you understand that you would have to go to duty state?

along the way to eventually get there? Yeah, so I read that you had to do a minimum of two years before you could apply, two years in the regular force. So that was just like one of the steps, I felt. How much information did the recruiters have when you were talking with them? Not much, other than what was already online with like a two-year minimum requirement. Now, was that an official website you were reading that on? Yeah, no, I think that was on, like I posted on the Canadian forces.

government site or whatever. There's two years minimum service time in Reg Force, and then there was like a psych test and a physical, like a PT test. And you had to have chain of command approval. So those are kind of like the four or five things, whatever it was. It's still very vague. For you to be able to go onto selection for the unit. How much information were you able to find about selection itself?

Nothing. Like other than those grainy kind of videos, it was like, okay, I think we're going to have to do push-ups, maybe in the mud. That was about it. Like, we are, so I grew up out west, and where I joined was in Edmonton, and I ended up going to 3-P-CLI in Edmonton, which is a light infantry unit. And JTF2 is out in Ottawa. So we're like, just in terms of distance, very disconnected. Ottawa is kind of like due north of New York?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, like northwest a little bit. All right. My topography of Canada isn't great. Of north. Sorry. So it's straight north. Yeah. Like New York, the state. Okay. Yeah. That's what I meant. Not city. Yeah. So we just, I didn't know anyone that had gone there. I didn't know anything about it. It was all a big mystery. And there wasn't really anything online. So yeah, I didn't know I knew what I was getting myself into. How long between doing that research, seeing that video, deciding that you wanted to join before you actually entered and went to boot camp? probably four months

okay so I at the end of that summer I went to the recruiting center I think that was probably in September and you do like they do like an aptitude test and a couple other things and then they say like here's some of the jobs that you could you know positions you could go into I just wanted to go to the infantry

and so well what they originally told me is the infantry's full. What do you think about these positions? Just call me when the infantry has a spot. And I got a call, like, I think two weeks later. And I did basic training. I started right at the end of October in 2005.

What's boot camp like for you guys? Annoying. I don't know. It's just like... It's the first time I've ever heard that description. Looking back in my own experience, I could describe it. It had a flavor of that for sure. Like I found physically, because I'd been training really hard.

Well, and you were a high-level athlete at that point. You know, like a medium-level athlete, but yeah. In comparison to most people, like sit-on-the-couch peers. Yeah, okay. Which I have found from sitting on the couch. Is unfortunately far too many people. Yeah, I agree with that. So I went there physically.

Physically I was definitely prepared. The annoying part was just learning to, like, get used to people yelling at you. for seemingly no reason and a bunch of people that you could probably whoop their eyes and just like always in your face is like that part's a little bit annoying um yeah it was just kind of i just knew it was something i had to get through in order to go where i wanted so i just try to suck it up and do my best how long is it for you guys oh god i don't know what it is now i think it was around i think the initial basic training was i think it was 12 weeks when i did it and there was two other courses right after that a soldier qualification and an infantry specific course

total i think it was like five or six months roughly i'll say end of october and i think i got to battalion in edmonton like in the summer of oh six so it was about six or seven months total of like that and moving in between the places that you do the courses and stuff did you start enjoying it more after boot camp and those two initial courses? Yeah, so even the two courses after it got better. Like the treatment didn't get better, but the content got better. Yeah. Whereas like basic training.

Yeah, basic training was like, you know, hospital corners on your bed and just like very boring briefs and all kinds of stuff. Once we got into like infantry training, there was more infantry tactics and field time and stuff like that. So that I enjoyed more. I don't know anybody who at a deep level enjoyed the boot camp experience. It was the same thing for the Navy boot camp was eight weeks long when I went through. And I can't think of a single thing we actually did that benefited me in my career later on. And you can look back at it and say, hey, that was a waste of my time.

But the bigger picture is it's an onboarding for people of, every possible background. Absolutely. Yeah. to figure out some way to orient them in the right direction. Yeah. Because I tell you what, I can make a bed with a hospital corner that'll cut your fucking finger. I'm talking. Ah! You're dangerous, man. Well, I mean, I was at one point. The amount of times we were in bunk beds. Do you still use hospital corners at home? I'm not going to lie and say that I haven't in the years past. And I don't know why, but like, I want a couple times a year, I'll bust out a solid hospital corner.

Nice. But the thing is, I hate, I hate getting in like a hotel room bed where you can't lift your toes up. Because I feel, I don't know what it is. I don't enjoy about that, but I fucking freak out and I kick my feet. I'm the same. Yeah, which is they have, we'll call that a hospitality corner instead of a hospital corner. But yeah, so we did, God, you can, I feel like I saw people bouncing coins off their bed to test it. Like, we're talking tension on the sheets.

again another knife cutting edge of like underwear t-shirts socks the stenciling parties that we did where we would just sit down for hours and so like I said it had nothing to do with my job but as far as bringing people together I grew up in a very physical job working for my dad he was a brick and stone mason and I look back on my life and I'm so grateful that I had that experience it was not a politically correct working environment I was not exposed to rounded edges on things. It was a full exposure to, hey, here's the real world. And you can either deal with it or fuck right off. At about 11. I'm like, okay.

I get to boot camp. I don't know if you had this experience. There were people, you know, the first few nights in boot camp, we didn't actually do much. And if I remember correctly, we were waiting, because people were coming in waves.

You know, they timed people to get to boot camp. I remember people crying themselves to sleep in Navy boot camp. And I've only experienced, experienced Navy boot camp, but in talking to, you know, Army and Marine Corps, like, that's, that's a ball kicker. Like, that's some real, God, what's a full metal jacket type stuff. There might be a reason to cry yourself to sleep at that. The Navy one, I was like, wow, there is a diverse group of individuals here who are experiencing what I would not even consider

to be stress, and for them it was catastrophic at that time. Yeah, we had some of that. I, like you said it's drawing from such a wide range of individual that like you know there's kids that just I'd finished junior hockey at this point so I was probably you know I was like 23 22 23 years old um so it's not old but there was like kids like just turned 18 like never had anything or that was me in boot camp different different levels of discipline coming in all kinds of stuff so yeah it it did that it got people like you're all on the same page you're all learning like the basics of living, you know, like how to take care of your space, how to housekeep, maybe do an extreme, but definitely to an extreme?

For some, it was, I was like, yeah, this is required for some people. Yeah. Yeah. I talked my came from a, I won't say it necessarily came from a military oriented family, but I had service on both sides, army on my mom's side, Navy, my dad's side. And it was generationally the same thing when my dad went through. He's like, I was in boot camp with people who got. their first pair of shoes when they arrived, which is just wild.

Wow. Wild to me. And again, they do a good job in the eight weeks that they have of kind of grinding people down into dust and reforming them into at least a Navy or military-focused machine. Yeah. But I certainly look back on that eight-week time period of my life and I would like to have it back. I'm not saying I didn't get anything out of it. I'm just saying I can't figure out yet what that is that I got out of it.

I'm leaving the options open. Yeah. Well, that was me with Basic Para also. Like, basic para, like skydiving? Or is that static line? It's static line. It's not, you're in the sky. Yeah. Sometimes diving. But it's not, there's no free fall involved. It was all static line. And I absolutely hated that course. Yeah, it was a, so we go to Fort Benning, Georgia for ours. Where'd you guys go? I went to a place called Trenton, Ontario. Airborne.

Yeah. How many jumps? on that course? Yeah, to graduate. So I had to go do the jump phase twice, which was awesome, because the first time I got like a massive concussion. The shoots, it's ridiculous. To me, it's ridiculous. Like the rate at which they fall, how you're expected to land,

and the fact that I'm using the same shoot as someone who's 110 pounds, like I rocked my brain. I was like put in a dark room for a few days after. Oh, that hard. Yeah, yeah, it was, it was, well, I did. one jump, big concussion. Just go feet head? And then like, yeah, like maybe just head.

I don't even remember that much. But I was massively, like I was vomiting in between. I went and did another jump because I was like, I need to finish these fuck. I didn't want to have done the whole course leading up to not finish it. I wanted it all to be over. So I'm like, go to the other jump.

And then that one, I hit my head again. It was just like, the medic was like, wait a minute. No, no, no. You were fucked up. And they put me in a room for like three days. And then I was allowed to fly after that, three or four days or something. Full concussion protocol, it sounds like. Yeah.

So then I had to go back and finish it the next year, I think. Yeah, it was the next fall. Was that before getting to the unit? Yeah, that was in, that was while I was in three PPCLI. Okay. Yeah. What was life like for you there when you checked in? Because it was 06.

It was obviously summer of 06. War going on, Iraq, Afghanistan. What was it like? Yeah, the, I liked it a lot. lot. The company I went to had just got back from Afghanistan. Um, and they had a bunch of people that kind of got out, um, just after that. So a bunch of us new guys went to this company. Um, and it was awesome. I, like, I really enjoyed it. I, what was your job? I was, we were, I can't remember if we were the jump company or we took it just after. And that's why I went so early on

to, uh, basic para. Um, so I was just like, uh, um, I was just like, uh, uh, Light infantry dude, no hook private. But it was there that I saw like, so across the hall in our like battalion lines is where Recky Platoon was, like reconnaissance dudes with the sniper debt that we had also. So I was like looking across the hall and no. Okay. Like literally across the hall?

It was like across the hall. So like the door of our company lines like look and they'd be always doing seemingly cooler things. So it's like I want to go there. Like if I'd spend two years in the calf before I can. can try out for the hill, that's where I want to go. So that was my new, my new plan. Were those opportunities open to you at that point, or did you have to have a certain amount of service? Well, they were just because of luck. So because I got to the, the company

I was in when they had a big kind of withdrawal of people, there was just more opportunity. So I kept bugging my warrants and sergeants about it, but it was just kind of luck that they didn't have the number. So I got to go, like, as soon as I got there, an exercise, That fall, I went and did like a machine gunner course, my basic para. Early in the new year in January, I did my reconnaissance course and sniper course right after that. It was all back to back to back. Damn, that's a really fast progression. Super fast.

But it was like you said, it was just they were running the courses. I made it clear that that's what I really wanted to do, but it was just kind of luck of of the numbers when I got there. What was your minimum enlistment when you joined? What was that? Time-wise. So like joining the Navy, I think the first contract that I was, I signed was four years. Oh, okay. Yeah, I believe my first one was four years also. Okay. And I asked that

question because you're saying when the, when the element came back, there was a large amount of people that detached from the military and went somewhere else. I was just, I didn't know if you guys structured it the same way or. Yeah, I think, I think it was four years is the first one. Three or four years and then the next one is three or four years. And I think the first two generally total around seven or eight. And then you can decide if it's for you in the long haul. Do they give you reenlistment bonuses? I don't recall getting that. I think they were,

there were some cycles of like, we have too many people in the CAF, get out, and then there was like paying people to come back, and then there was at one point, I think they were even paying people to leave. Like, we've gone back and forth a bunch of different times. Yeah. No, I don't think I ever got a bonus for it.

There was a time, and I don't know if it still exists, but there was one bonus. Guys called it the blood money, but it was 150 grand to stay in for five years. That was towards the tail end of the career, though. That was something that was offered to people, I think it was at their 15-year mark and beyond. So it was kind of an ability to retain that corporate knowledge

for people who had been in for a while. And that is a, I mean, that's a large number, but you've got to divide it by five. If you don't do that overseas, it's going to get tax. The number gets smaller pretty fast. Yeah, for sure. But even, I don't know what the bonuses are at right now, but there were times when I was in where $60,000, $30,000 for a couple of year reenlistment was on the table. Well, that's pretty good, especially if you can get deployed for that.

Tax-free purposes, yeah. It is good. I also don't know if I would want people to stay in that job just for the money, though, either. Yeah. But it, yeah, it's kind of a balance, right? Like, I've always said the same. It's not a job you should be doing for money because there's way better, easier jobs to do for more money. You can make a lot more money doing something that is potentially not going to mess you up to the degree that that job does.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So, I don't know. It's kind of nice if someone's, if they are thinking about it or wanting to or if at some point money becomes a factor, I guess. Yeah. It's kind of a balance. Like, you want to pay guys well enough that.

they're not having to sacrifice, you know, financial comfort in order to do a job that they are passionate about. I think there's a balance for sure. Why do you think so many guys got out when they got back from that first, or not their first deployment, but that deployment when you had checked in and they had just come back? Most of it, I think guys were at the tail end of their first or second kind of contract. And I think a lot of guys had a hard tour specifically from that one. So there was a lot of like, yeah, I don't want to do that again. Really?

Yeah. I mean, that's fair. So you went down the sniper rabbit hole early. Yeah. One of the things that, God, it took me four years to get to sniper school. I also, like, you know, saw movies with people in gilly suits. Yeah. And never wore one, for real, ever, except for in sniper school, which was one of the most miserable experiences ever,

because I was sweating to death inside of it. Because I had about 58 pounds of burlap on the outside. Didn't realize it glows when the sun hits it. Fuck. It spent so much time putting this stuff on and was just shearing it off. But it took time. One of the things that the community that I came into, the seniority of the people in the operational elements mattered a lot

when it came to the schools that were available. And at that time, free fall, which was almost impossible to get. And now it's part of the basic pipeline, the sons of bitches. Yeah. And sniper school was another one. Guys were waiting two, four, six, eight years to get that school. And I timed it pretty early, I would say. I got towards the tail end of my second deployment,

my workup towards my second deployment. But it was a coveted course for sure. And I look back and I think it's probably the course from a tactical perspective that had the most impact on my career, whether it be the understanding of terrain, cover and concealment, and of course the ballistic nature of shooting because it, you know, don't have to have a sniper rifle in your hands

to be effective once you understand the ballistics. Totally. What was sniper school like for you guys? How long is that course? Oh, God. So we, in three PPCLI, we did a mixed course, so another battalion with one VP or one PPCLI. And so we did it,

there was like a sniper course selection first that was like a mini sniper course, but without any knowledge. So we were doing like stocks, like the snipers would tell us, what a stock is, and then we would go do it. And they were just assessing kind of people's ability to learn fast and be really tired and do all these things. So we did that first, and that was, I think, two weeks.

But that was like daytime, you go home at night. Yeah. It was just kind of run at the battalion. And then the course, I think, was, geez, I want to say, like eight to ten weeks, roughly. And we went to another place to do that. And that was just inside Saskatchewan. and that was a mix. We had guys from our battalion

and then some guys from a new, at the time it was a new special operations unit called Seesore. And we had a few guys from that unit with us as well. And that was done like, yeah, it was kind of like a desert-ish terrain in Saskatchewan. It was hot as hell. So we're talking about sweating in the gilly suit. That's the worst.

Oh, my God. Yeah. I remember the first talk that I did, you know, drag bag, you know, looped around one of my feet. I'm just, you know, they set it up. I'm trying to figure out the best way to describe this for somebody who's never gone through this because you're going to laugh at all this because I know you've done it. They bust us out in a truck. And for us, they broke it up. And I'd be curious to see how the Canadian services do it.

We did only shooting and then we did stalking. And we would do a combination of blank rounds. And occasionally they'd give you a live one. They would never tell you when it's going to be just to test your line of sight to make sure that you weren't full of shit. But it was straight shooting for, God, it was a long time. We started iron sights like M14s and then switched to, I think it was 300 Wimags, SR 25s and 50 Cal. But that was all done at one location. And that, I would say we lost probably like 30% of the class, actually.

they just, you know, whether it was unknown distances or, and you know this as well as I do, you get somebody who can't call wind behind you very well or they can't see the impact, you're proper fucked behind the scope because it's the person behind the scope is only half the job for sure. But we finish that, we go stock. And, you know, there's the, they break out the rules. And I'll probably mess this up. But I think we had to get within like 170 to 220 yards. No range finder. So we were milling stuff. And we did a bunch of that. It's the same way we were shooting unknown. distance, like the normal size of a silhouette. I'm not even going to begin to try to describe milling something to people. But let's just say the best way to describe is, if you know the height that it is and you're looking through a reticle and the reticles have changed over time and there's a variety of ways to do this, the easiest one is with a laser rangefinder, beep. If you don't have that, you could technically measure it in your scope, do some math, and spit out an approximate distance. Yeah. So we would have to get, you know, 170 to 220, but they'd drop us off anywhere from like 1,500 to 2,000 yards.

And they would say, here's your lane. And they have like 45 degrees. And we did it. It was weird. Ours was in the desert as well. We did it. There's a desert training facility out in California, which is really hard to stock in when there's a couple shrub brushes.

And you don't look anything like that. And you have a gilly suit covered in green burlap. And they'd say, go. I remember the first one, I like, hit the ground and just started crawling. Like a dumbass. And I'd just dragging this bag and dragging this bag. And I was the first guy, oh, fuck. On our very first stock, I was the first guy to fire off a blank round.

And I think I was at like 250. So immediate fail right there. Yeah. But because I had done that, people just started firing off. I fucked everybody. Except for like three people who kept getting closer and actually got a 10. Yeah. I got a big old fat 10 minus the one.

for that particular stock. I woke up the next morning and could barely stand up. My abs were so sore from dragging that bag on my foot. It's taxing, yeah. It was like the worst ab workout I've ever had in my life. Like that's what sticks out with me more from sniper school, is how sore I was. Just inch at a time losing sight of the table that the instructors was,

it was the first one was a doozy, for sure. Our sounds very similar, like the one. We had it split up, you would do like shooting half the day and some type of stock related tasks to the second half. Interesting. So it would be like, and they would like switch either. You have a stock in the morning and range in the afternoon or kind of vice versa. And the shooting skills are talking about like the unknown distance stuff. I think observation was part of that.

That would be or maybe just the judging distance and shooting. And then the green stuff would be different concealments because we kind of worked up to. stalking where you're like do some concealment exercises and get people used to movement and whatever but it sounds very similar did you guys do observational drills like one of the things i remember i feel like it was on like the Fridays of the shooting they would line a soul up on a line and they say hey there's 15 objects out in front of you from right in front of you to i forget the distances but it was it was challenging i'm talking like clear protractors that you would use to measure on maps that they would put in a shadow and and

And again, for people listening this, it may not make sense, but it trains you to look, because most people will look off in the distance. And I don't know how many times you had missed a 7-6-2 casing sitting right, literally right in front of you on top of, like, grass, where it could not have more of a contrast. So it teaches you, you know, near to far or far to near and left to right. And some days it seemed like I was on it. And other days, I'm like, I have no idea. Yeah. And then they would do Kim's games. Oh, yeah.

Does you ever do this one? Yeah. So imagine this table between us is... I forgot about Kim's Gaines of him. Yeah. All the little stuff, right? Yeah. So the table between us, we'll call it three and a half feet, maybe, maybe four feet.

And like to the stands that the microphones are on, there would be like a poncho liner. Yeah. And they would do this one in groups, and we would stand around the table. And they'd say, all right, here we go. And they'd pull it off. And I feel like they would leave it off for a minute. Sounds about right. Yeah.

And there's a bunch of objects on there. and then they put it back on and have you do some bullshit physical activity, and then you had to remember the things that you saw. So Kim's games and observation drills. The fact that you guys did that too, there had to been some cross-pollination of- There must have been. Well, I know we had guys that had gone to do some courses

somewhere down here in the States, different sniper schools and stuff. So I'm sure it came from that. And they ended up like the creative instructors that we had. Those were always evolving. we would like, they would take us out on a morning run and it would be like a moving observation Kim's game. And we would necessarily know and be like, okay, we ran past 12 military objects in the morning.

Does anyone recall whatever? We're like, oh, shit. Yeah. I don't know. I'm tired. Or we'd be jogging and one instructor would like say like 12 random words over and over well were. And he's like, do you remember what they were yelling?

I don't know what 12 also, but it was always 12. I feel like how many objects were on the Kim's game table too. Yeah. Or even out in the observation drill. The observation drill, I think, definitely helped, especially like hunting now, post-military. Just, you know, not trust me, I'm not some savage hunter, but learning, you know, near to far, far, near left, right, and that certainly helps looking for animals. I don't know if the Kim's games help me at all. I also don't know.

It's like playing a memory game, I guess. I never did it again after that school. So if there was something to be gained by that, maybe they should continue doing that and training later on. Yeah. But I don't remember it. Maybe I should add it to my morning routine.

I don't think I'm going to. After your cold plunge and then 37 minutes in a sauna. That's right. And then your breathing work. It's exhausting. It's too long. I don't do any of that shit, by the way. I'm repeating things that I see people post about every day.

I do like the cold plunge. I just got access to a cold plunge. And for me, it is far more emotional. emotionally challenging than it is physically challenging. Oh, yeah. I don't want to get into it. No, every morning I'm like, why? And then when I finish, I feel great.

But it's always like, in the winter especially when it's the best and worst, but like go out there's snow and I'm like, I have to break the ice on the thing. And then I'm like, why? Why am I doing this? And I get in, breathe, I get out and I feel amazing. And then I remember why. And it's a vicious cycle every single day. It's a rough one for sure.

What did you find to be more challenging for you personally? Shooting or the stalking aspect? Shooting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I didn't do great at either, actually. I did well enough to pass. The shooting stuff, that made a catastrophic difference in my career later on, just the understanding of that.

Yeah. The stalking stuff, it took me a while to get a hang of that one. And I tell you what, dead space isn't an amazing thing. Once you wrap your head around that concept, you are good to go. Yeah. Because I literally just couldn't crawl anymore. And I remember being on stocks, I mean if this ever happened to you, you're just working at crawling and you hear somebody's footsteps. That is like three feet to your right.

Yeah. And it's a student in your class who has like their gunbag shoulder. That's walking. Yeah, it's walking. And they look down, they're like, hey man, that's how I going for you. And they just keep walking. Yeah. So that exact same thing has happened to me. It would be like guys that already knew or were already in like the recoup platoon or had like maybe gone on course and have to be recourse for whatever reason. But it's because they do try and teach you that before you go. Like here's how you can move and here's so you can use depth and here's so you can use something to let's say block someone. But like I'm nervous. I don't want to fail. I'm down as low as it's going to be. And someone's like, oh, there's a hill in front of us. I'm just going to walk to that hill and save myself about 10,000 calories.

burnt. Yeah, and about 7,000 crunches worth of abdominal pain the following morning. Did they test you guys in the same way for the stock in? You had to get to a certain distance. Yeah, it sounds very similar. Like there would be a box or like a range. Like you have to be within whatever, I don't know, 300 and up to 100 or whatever. Fire a blank? Yeah. In the Canadian, like in the CAF version, it was blank. And then it also, it was a progression up to live fire. Okay. So it would be, you would still fire blank in the protocol like while you're being observed but you would keep that position and then later you would like each position they would go to and you'd have to hit the hit a gong with a live round to show that like you know you took a new effect the fact that there's a branch in front of you

or whatever all of that stuff a clean line of sight yeah so for us it was get to that position unobserved and of course they had walkers out there it's actually very similar to clear and present danger except we know we weren't having cheeseburgers i found where he had lunch it was a cheese But conceptually what I mean is there were people out there with radios and there were observers and they're what and they're called walkers because they're walking you on. So the goal would be to get to a position inside of that distance unobserved, fire a blank and then they would move a walker to within, well, the walker would just come within 10 yards of you. Yeah. They could be in front, behind or left or right. And then they would try to actually then you would fire a second blank and they would try to walk that person onto you.

And basically their radio was the tagging device. and if they could put it on you, if you get to the second blank, I think it was an eight. And is that a point system you mean? It was a point system for graduation. It was pure math for graduation. It was X number of stocks. This is the mathematical score that you have to achieve to graduate. Same thing on the shooting standards.

These are the number of shooting tests, whether it be unknown distance, you know, snaps and movers, whatever it may be. If you hit this, you move forward and go to the stalking phase. If you don't, you're not going to go forward, but you're welcome to come back. You know, it's not like it was the end of your career if you didn't graduate sniper school, because at that point you're already in the community. So it was, yeah, first blank, and then they'd put a walker within 10 or the walker we'd get within 10, second blank. And then I almost think they would have you fire a third one. But either way, if you could get through all that, you got a 10.

And if they found you after the second one, you would get an 8. Okay. And then sometimes the instructors would be like, all right, we're going to give you a live round, double or nothing. You can get either two zeros or two tens. Oh, wow. So you can get two stocks worth or negative two stocks worth. Do you get to choose at that point? As far as what?

Like, is it a gamble you're saying, like, I'll take my 10 points or I'm going to go for 20 or that risk is a zero. Okay. They would let you choose. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. And some people rose to the occasion. Yeah.

Other people did not. What happened to you? I guess it probably happened a few times Yeah Like that they would come with a round and say I think you and I can both agree Like a 170 yard shot with a scoped 762 rifle is not that hard

I would agree with that I took the double or nothing every time All right Because at that point It was later on when they offered me that opportunity I I was before I accepted it Maybe I maybe just take another little look at my line of sight

Just to make sure I wasn't bullshitting the instructor staff. Oh yeah. I'll take it. I used to like just, you know, getting into burrowing into bushes, you know, having one in front and one and behind and just, but sometimes, you know, maybe my scope was a little bit less clear than I was letting on. I did not accept their opportunity when those came up. Yeah. But that school was, that was a challenge for me, but I think, I truly think it was one of the most impactful courses that I went to just from a field craft perspective. Yeah. And but then I graduated that prior to 9-11 and didn't do. shit.

Nothing with it. There was nowhere to go. We would shoot a little bit overseas to maintain our currency. I remember getting issued a sniper suite of 300 windbag and a 50 Cal. I made it a six-month deployment. I think I shot up one time, which sucks because, you know, as well as I do, the currency on those weapon systems is huge. Yeah, for sure.

But I was able to at least take that knowledge forward. So what was your life? So you went to that course, again, early on, but it was post-9-11. So what does your life look like when you crossed that hall and you ended up on the reccy side? It was way cooler. We got to wear black tukes now. Is that a beanie?

Yeah, it's like a beanie. Or it is like, I think they're a dent. A hat that goes on your head that is not a ball cap. Okay. And for the cold generally. Yeah, I think I was wearing one earlier today. Yeah. So we got to do that.

Didn't always have to have our boots bloused. That was cool. And then just like the field, like your responsibilities on let's say an exercise were just way better and you smaller teams you're doing reconnaissance tasks and then when you get the sniper you're doing like sniper stuff it was just I just

it was like another little step in a cooler direction I thought how often were you guys on the gun well most of my time in battalion and like I said I was very lucky was on these courses that I wanted to do so I got a decent amount of time

shooting and then I remember we went and did like a like a sniper concentration competition thing. So there was like a lot of workup training for that and then we're shooting out of the competition. So I know it wasn't, it's not always like this, but I got a lot of rounds. We would be training all the time. Which is the way it should be for that particular skill set.

Yeah, for sure. Oh, totally. And that's going forward or fast forwarding. Once I was at the hill, like once I was at JTF2, it's like every day all the time you're shooting. But in the reg force, there's like, you know, ammo budgeting concerns and all kinds of stuff. So there would be times like chatting with some other guys that like the only time you shoot

live is like to do your like your weapons test every year kind of thing or maybe one other occasion, which is crazy, crazy to me. But like workup training for overseas, obviously you'd go and kind of concentrate on it more. But then if you weren't deploying, you weren't shooting very much. Did you do a deployment with that unit at Edmonton? No, no. I had an agreement. with a troop or a platoon warrant.

Before I went on in the reccy course, there was a potential for me to be a spare, just like a backup if somebody gets hurt or whatever, for a tour that was going over, so I was going to start workup training. It was at the same time as this recic course. So I told them, like, I want to go on this course, but I want to go overseas more.

They assured me that if I go on course, The spare position opens up. I will get sent overseas. While I was on course, that warrant switched positions with another person. And that spot did open up. And then I was told like, well, no, you're not going. You're on course. That's frustrated.

I feel like your agreement was verbal or not on paper. I didn't have a contract. Actually, I had a contract. It said the Army can do whatever it wants. Yeah. So needs of the Army. Yeah. So I didn't get to go overseas.

with 3VP, a buddy of mine went instead and he had a fun tour or two, and I was like, damn it. Yeah, so I stayed on course and finished that instead of going. And then it sounds like you got the chance to go to JTF2 before a deployment popped his head up. Yeah, my first deployment was once I was in JTF2. What was the application?

And I know one of the things that's very sensitive about that course is the selection process. But broadly, you know, what was the application and selection process like? Yeah, so you go, you bring it to the attention of your chain command wherever you are. And you have to have their kind of approval. And 3VP was really good for it. They let us train a lot to get ready and stuff like that. We knew it was physically demanding.

You do a psychological evaluation at whatever base psychologist you have. And then there's a physical test that, like our PSP staff, which is our physical kind of training staff, they run. All that gets sent. And then you kind of get word back from JTF2, whether or not all of the things you did meet the requirements, and then you can go and do your invited to do your seven-day selection.

But then beyond that, you guys still have a robust amount of training. Yeah, so the seven days selection is to pick. And there's a bunch of cereals they run. And out of all those people, they want to try and make a course of who they assess are good candidates to do, I think ours was like eight months, something like that. And it just kind of all the different skill sets used in special operations. I'm assuming that training is all run by JTF2 members internally.

Yeah. So it's like the training cadre kind of runs guys through it all. Now they'll bring in guys from different. squadrons to help out and stuff like that, but it's all, yeah, kind of run everything. I remember we had some, actually no, this would be later, sorry. It's now all in the same course, but when I finished, I went and did like my para, like free fall stuff in California. So there was our instructors.

You're in California? California at, God, what's it called? Something Valley. Come on, there's a big drop. Something's Valley. Big drops. I'm sure it's called Valley. Paris Valley.

Paris Valley. Yeah. How did I forget that? Yeah, so concussions. We did a course, part of our course there, and it was like our instructors and some of the civilian freefall. Okay. I actually think I remember them hosting that military course there. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, so we did some of it there. And you left that course with your Canadian military freefall qualification? So it's part of it now. I actually did it after. I remember now that we finished our Salter course, which I think was eight months, rough. And then there was some continuation training that was part of it. And there was like more driving. The parachute free fall stuff was part of it. And I don't know.

I think there might have been some more like advanced medical stuff. Did you enjoy free fall more than static line? I enjoy everything more than static line. It is the worst insertion method known to man. Jesus, I hate it. I don't mind static line. So we did static line even on that course. but like you would

the static line would deploy your shoot but you're using a steerable a square parachute so you can you can steer and you can soften your landing probably was the double bag static line system that you were using yeah yeah so that

course I enjoyed way more than the other one but that being said I didn't love jumping when I started doing free fall no we had guys that were like immediately hooked like online to order their own parachute I was not that guy. Is it a Heights thing or just something that was in your bag? I'm not really like, I have a good respect for heights.

But I'm like, I'm a climber. Like I like climbing in the mountains. I enjoy now going to do like a sunny free fall day of two or three jumps with my friends. But the course, man, probably like the first 50 jumps. I was like, this is very uncomfortable. Yeah. It was, but I think it was the second day. of course, down in Paris, one of the instructors, one of the civilian instructors that I jumped with,

he collided with someone at like 400 feet and one of them died and one of them was like a quadriplegic or something. So we saw this. We were like day two providing first aid on the drop zone until the ambulance came. That's rough. Like, holy shit. Yeah. So that probably added to my discomfort. I mean, that's horrendous that that happened to those two people, but you want to talk about developing a respect for how serious that particular activity is very early on in front of a cohort of people that that'll stick with you for life. I've been jumping now for almost 25 years. Most people never see anything like that, which is a really good thing.

But there's a potential negative of that and they think that it's just always fun. And it's always exciting. Oh, that's never going to happen. Well, this instructor was like he was sort of like, as they were teaching me how to to be safe. So we had like the, the unit perspective and the military, like, here's how we can jump safely because eventually we're going to be doing, you know, really high at night with oxygen and night vision and all this stuff. So everything we're training is to remain safe in that type of operation or training scenario. This guy was, I was, he was instructing me on free fall,

you know, eventually we open her shoots and I was going to like a student landing area and he was going to like his super hot shot swooping area. You were landing in a national park. he was landing on a postage stage. Exactly. But he, like, he came really close, what I thought was very close. Now, at this point,

I had three jumps or whatever. But I was like, you guys just told me, below this distance, don't get close. And this motherfucker swoops by me. So I landed and I was like going to get another parachute.

And I was going to go like, fucking yell at this guy. And I'm walking back to our hangar with the parachute. And I just hear like, boom. And I was like, oh, and I didn't know it was him. And I went over.

And I was like, I didn't yell at him. But we, like yeah it's tried first aid one of the guys ended up and ended up dying shut down the drop stone obviously for that day and we went back to our hotel and it's just somber it's heavy like

well I guess we'll just jump again tomorrow and went on the course so there was great lessons from it just seeing like it's not a place and I'm still this way like I have no desire and now I don't have a million jumps now I maybe have like 450 or something like that

I got a lot more comfortable and enjoyed but I have no desire to find out what the smallest type of canopy I can use and how fast I can go and swoop and things. You don't have the time for that anyway. The people who are pursuing jumping at that level are their current and competent, and that's what they are doing. You've already described what you're doing with your life now. There's no reason in the world for you to ever go downsize. I don't know. Let's just see how this thing works out.

We'll just rip a turn off here and hope for the best. Like really big canopies. That's what I like. Glenn likes those two. Slow, starting like a school bus and land in Bigfield. School buses survive. Sports cars, sometimes they wrap themselves around telephone poles. That's right.

That's right. So you get through the training. There's a selection of the additional training afterwards. And then I don't necessarily know how JTF2 is lined out. We had assault squadrons essentially at Development Group. You'd get assigned to one. And it really would depend, you know, where they were in a workup cycle, the George cycle. and maybe you'd surge overseas

and meet him for the first time I actually got to my squadron as they had just come back from a deployment which was it was really good but shitty at the same time because they were all talking about stuff they had just done that I had completely missed out on but I had a good amount of time

to meet the guys, train, integrate as opposed to trying to you know I guess go from first gear to fifth gear. We still skipped a few along the way but it was a better integration. Is that similar for you guys as well? Sounds like very, very similar. So how did it work out for you?

So I finished that Assaulter course and I went to one of the squadrons and what were we doing? We were getting ready to, we were kind of in vicinity of where the Winter Olympics were happening in Canada. So we're doing a lot of CQB, a lot of stuff on trains and maritime counterterrorism stuff out on the coast to get ready if anything happened while the Olympics were going on. So that was the focus of the squadron when I got there. That's one of the big differences in the U.S. We have Passi Comitatis, where they want a very distinct line between any police and military role. I constantly have to remind myself, like, again, talking with Glenn, I had him on a for a brief episode. And he was talking about, you know, the mandate they have for hindering counterterrorism inside of the canon.

I was like, oh, shit. I forgot you guys were allowed to do that. So I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. You guys do some wild shit up North. I'm going to be honest with you. Yeah, I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing either. We have... Is it because there is not a police force that is capable of doing it?

What's the reasoning or justification behind it? Well, I think it's just, it's appreciated that the amount of time and money and training that the unit puts in for those, like, specific events. Yeah. Activities, if you will. is way more than even the most capable police team does or can with budgets and all of this manpower and stuff. So I think that's what's appreciated. Now, you know, the amount that we need to be used is like never, which is a good thing. Stay prepared for it.

But yeah, there's kind of, because there's a lot of responsibility with that in terms of recall time. And like, there's a huge portion of budget and a huge portion of focus and all that stuff, obviously, when it's one of your mandates. Well, and the conversation is at least, it's a valid conversation. I understand why they do it in the U.S. They wouldn't want somebody who loses their mind who has the ability to throw the levers of power and start utilizing a military element with that capability. Yeah. For their own personal gain or towards their own, you know, desired end state. Yeah.

I don't know much about Canadian politics. Glenn and I had some interesting conversations that will remain offline. But, you know, it's a, that's a powerful sword that you can wield. You've got to worry about who's holding it in their hand. Yeah, but I think there's my understanding of it, which is probably not at the level of a lot of people like Glenn, let's say. But there's, you know, there's an ask that needs to happen. There's agreements. There's certain things.

I don't think there's just a phone, like, give me JTF2 for something I need to sort out right now. Wouldn't that be sweet if there was, though? Like a legit Bruce Wayne bat line? Maybe. I just wouldn't want our current government to have that line. Well, that's what I'm saying. That's where I don't know which one, you know, not to put any value on the system we have south of the border versus the system you have

north of the border. They're different. And I think the discussion is an interesting one as to the limitations of one. And, you know, how should we use this? What checks and balances should we have in place? Yeah. Yeah. Because there are definite, you know, there's pluses and minuses to both.

I think. Yeah. Did they put you right into a recicel because of the background that you had? No. No, I got there and just went to an assault squadron and started to learn as much as I could. So the training is great. The assaulture course is great. But the level at which the squadron guys were doing stuff like CQB and the speed and accuracy

that they were shooting, just like the basics, and shoot, move, communicate stuff was insane to see. Like, they're so good. So I had the exact same. same experience. Yeah. So the conventional seal teams, the attrition rate getting into the communities, we'll call it 75% because it goes higher in the winter months and a little bit low in the summer. But so you trim a good amount of guys there. And then like when I, when I joined, I didn't even realize that there was what I would describe as a next level. Not everybody thinks

of it that way. And again, feel about it how you want to. And I actually know a lot of guys who had no desire to continue down or to go in that path and I have it's like cool you do you to me it was fascinating and I realized at least the way that I looked at it was I think there's another level to this and this is all I've ever wanted to do I'm going to at least go explore it yeah and the cccc I don't know what the fuck it's called anymore I mean entering a room and shooting shit that's what I'm talking in a room yeah whatever it's called now I remember the training I got especially pre-9-11, and then I went to selection, and they did it differently. And it was at a speed that was drastically different.

And then you get used to it a little bit. It was a six-month screening process, and they split our class pretty early on. There was a mobility focus for about a third of the class. We started with shooting, and then we did jumping, and then the mobility focus, people focused on that, and the rest of us, I would describe it. probably is an assaulter course as well. It was very, very focused on get to the threshold of a door and your job begins once you get inside of it, and all those other things.

But you get used to that pace. You're like, oh, I like this pace. I remember the first house run I did with the actual squadron. Yeah. I'm like, who are these people? I thought I was doing pretty good. I'm going to, what I would like to do is go into the back and watch this a little bit.

But since I'm the new guy, I have, they're like, hey, get up front. Oh, sweet. Everybody go ahead and get some popcorn and watch this. I'm about to fuck this right up. Yeah. It was another, it was another gear and level that I was not even prepared for. So I had the exact same experience that you did.

Yeah. It was, I thought it was very cool to see. But there was also that, like, I am running to catch up. Yeah, I'm basically holding you guys back at this point. Yeah, like the speed progressing, but also just like the speed at which everyone was just calculating and observing and making decisions like and then shooting like yeah i was like wow it was awesome yeah i described that place as everything that i ever thought being a seal was going to be yeah and there's also a litany of i think really negative things that can be associated with that

but as far as like a young man i was in my early 20s i was like oh fuck yeah yeah yeah yeah i agree and then i'm so i'm assuming you did your first deployment with that assault squader uh no actually So I did my first deployment opportunity came up. The squadron was going with, I can't remember how many guys, but I think it was like a troop. And it wasn't going to be my troop. But I was new, so they were trying to help me out. So I was going to be a spare on that tour, spare again.

But another opportunity came up to go over with a, it was kind of a mixed team from a few other guys. But that was a sure thing. So my sergeant major was like, you can be a. spare, you might not get to deploy or you can take this sure thing. But was the sure thing outside of the unit? No, no, no. It was still in the unit.

It was in Afghanistan as well, but I was going to Kabul instead of near Kandahar. So it was a different location. Different location and a different task completely. It was like working with our intelligence service and like a source handling kind of role. Okay. Like a developmental role for networks. Yeah. And more of the security side of that.

But so I ended up taking the sure thing. because I was like I don't want to miss another opportunity of going overseas and ended up doing that. So I was in the assault squadron, but I was like connected to a different group for this thing. How was your experience your first time overseas? It was really cool. Cobbles wild.

It was like. Cobble is wild, man. It's so crazy because it's, there's such violent things happening. Like, you know, there's like an attack over here. with guns and a VBID goes off over here and there's like suicide vest but then there's also like the green zone and there's restaurants and there's rooftop patios and like college and in college and like you know embassy suarez and I'm just like this is insane but I thought it was really cool to

see I've always enjoyed now after after a few tours and the careers like seeing the spectrum of human life on this planet like just how it can be so different one place to the next and just i don't know i have appreciation for seeing just how different it can be for everyone it changes the way that you view the world absolutely it uh who's i talking to it was recently oh we were on it was a podcast that i was recording with mike srelli one of the guys that uh did the triple seven expedition and we were we were asked, we were both a guest on a podcast remotely, and we were asked about our experiences in war. And Mike got the opportunity to answer first,

and the answers are usually like 80% the same. So he covered, and we've also been together when we've been asked that question. So in my head, I'm like, he's gonna say this, then he's gonna say this. And I agree with both of those things. It's not like, and he does a very good job of articulating those things.

And he was talking a little bit about, you know, the humanity and, you know, and how it helps you, appreciate things that maybe others would have a, not a lack of ability to appreciate, but a more difficult time. And I always land at the same place. War is the most ugly thing that I've ever seen, but it's also the most beautiful thing that I've ever seen. And the beautiful thing was the clarity of focus, the clarity of mission and watching people be more selfless than I have the vocabulary to describe. And the ugly things were not to me being exposed to dead bodies or taking lives.

It was actually watching how horrendous human beings can be to each other. The shit that I saw, both Iraqis and Afghanis, due to each other, and specifically to kids, I don't have the vocabulary to describe that either. But both of those experiences, it's, you know, the lenses on my life are not as dark as that, but I can no longer look at the world through a clear set of glass, if that makes sense. It changes the perspective. It has for me, again, it can only speak for myself, but it changed for me the perspective on how I view the world.

And I think for it better, because I'm actually a little bit more tolerant of a lot of things that I think people get frustrated about. I think I have a little bit, and I'm not perfected this, but I could go down a very long list of things that don't matter that I've gotten pissed off at about in my life, probably in the recent past. but on a lot of issues, I think it just rounds it a little bit. It's like, you know what, today's going to be okay, even though that happened. My latte was a little bit cold.

I'm not going to throw it at the guy behind the counter, but fuck you. Take it easy, buddy. Yeah. Yeah, that's, I feel the same. It does that for sure. Like, there's the appreciation part of it. Like, there's so many things in my life where I live. There's a bunch of things that I appreciate.

There's a bunch of things that I believe because I see where. really terrible decisions can bring a country or a population. And then there's the, yeah, like just some things are not as big of a deal as we like to make them when there's other things that are way bigger deal happening all over the place. Yeah. Have you heard the term dark night of the soul? Yes. So I'm going to...

Where did I hear this recently? I don't know. I heard it from my sister-in-law. I think, I'm pretty sure. But essentially the dark night of soul is when you experience the worst thing that's ever happened in your life. And as a child, that happens every day. Because you wake up and something that has never happened to you, and maybe it's stubbing your toe. That's your dark night of the soul.

And you lose your shit. And you lose your shit. We live in such a soft world that sometimes people getting cut off in traffic appears to be their dark night of the soul. Yeah. And when you have a dark night of the soul, you lose your shit. Yeah. Yeah. The experiences that we have, I think it helps us experience less dark nights of the soul.

Because I've had some pretty shitty experiences in afternoons slash evenings, early mornings. So it's tough. I still scream sometimes when I get cut off in traffic. But I don't pit the person and then drag them out of their car and beat him to death, you know. Well, that's good. Because it's not the dark night of the soul. And I also don't think, even if it was your dark night of the soul, please don't. don't do what I just said because I was being metaphorical, not literal.

But again, the experiences that you have, they shape who you are going forward. Yeah, for sure. There are so many conversations about war or framed through only the negatives. And there are a litany of negatives. But I truly believe that I am a better person because of the experiences that I had, good and bad. Watching the selflessness being put into position. voluntarily where you have an instant to decide whether you're not you're going to take a life and you can tell that the life that you are deciding whether or not you're going to take is at a very

early age or maybe it's a woman or wherever it may be and that leaves an impression on you for the rest of your life but I think you can still become a better version of yourself because of those experiences. I think it's more about what you do with those experiences than the experiences themselves. Yeah, for sure. I think, and I was going to say that is, you know, all of the experiences, you know, even whatever your day-to-day routine is, the traffic route you take and if you get cut off, everything, it puts, it's all these inputs that create kind of who you are, but I think even more than that, it's, it's like you said, it's how you process it all. You know what I mean? Like, we could have the exact same thing happened to us and we could both process it completely

differently. And I've seen that many times. And then be completely different people on the other end of it. Yeah. So, yeah, I definitely agree with that. So how did your career progress at the unit from there? I did that tour. And then I asked, so that would have been, I got back in 2011, and I asked to go on our units, sniper course.

So I wanted to spend some time in the squadron, try and catch up to the level of the guys were at. And then I wanted to get some breaching experience, which I did. And then I knew that I wanted to go to snipers. when I got there, I just, I didn't want to ask right away. So this now would have been a couple years that I was in the squadron, and I asked to go do the sniper course. So they have an additional level of selection for the snipers there?

Yeah, so it's a, it's just a different course. There's not, there's not another selection. It's just, it's another course internally run. Okay. Did you have to be a, have a wreck here, a sniper background previously? No, no, no, no. Okay, so they can do it all in-house. They can take somebody who was not a sniper and turned them into one for a lot of a better one.

Yeah, and there's similarities in the courses, kind of broken down, shooting and field craft stuff. But it was just, it was not nearly the same in like, um, kind of a conventional sniper course where there's a lot more yelling and a lot more other things. And then this one was very much like the snipers teaching it wanted you to be a good

sniper. Like here's the tools you need. Now the standards are high. So make sure you're given her. But like they want good snipers to come work at snipers. It was more gentleman than like my reg force one. Well, they could also tailor it to the specific role that the unit does. Yeah.

I get asked often, you know, what's the difference between a J-Soc unit and a SOCOM unit? Because it's the same people, right? They come from the same communities. And my answer is it's a much more narrow mission set, so they can spend a lot more time focusing on that. And the recic cell at that command, can then dovetail their training to align with that smaller mission set. You don't have to do all the...

Because I look at the traditional SEAL sniper school that I went through, and I actually have no idea what they even teach now. I know they integrated a lot of digital stuff, you know, pictures and transmission, which is great. Great skill to have. They did not... I think we had digital cameras when I went through? They definitely sucked.

It was like a half a megapixel probably. Yeah, I don't remember if we did any of that on my reg for us. We didn't. I actually don't think we had the... capability to do so. We had SACCOM radio. I don't even remember using radios in our course. And now I think they really kind of roll it in so you can do.

Yeah, we did not on my like, like, on the CAF one I did, we didn't not. Because I remember the first time I saw like, I think it was a PRR, like a personal radio and battalion. I was like, this is amazing. I can talk back back for that. To the person that I'm patrolling with, like without whispering and like, come here.

Yeah. I'm like, this is blowing my mind right now. And obviously it makes perfect sense that you would have the capability but yeah so that yeah we didn't use it on our sniper course yeah i wish i mean looking back i'm uh there's a degree of jealousy for sure the evolutionary evolutionary leaps that the communities have made like i'm super grateful for my time but like damn you guys have that yeah that thing does that yeah where was that you lucky bastards and what i'm really saying is damn i wish i had that yeah i wish i understood and had the capability to do the you know the scout i think they call

pick sniper. I don't know. I don't make the attempt to describe what it's called, but it's much more robust than when I went through, which is great because you get a more competent and capable operator at the end of that. Okay, so you go through that course and then what's it look like for you from there at the unit? Yes, I went into the sniper course, and then I actually went over to the sniper troop right after that. So it was dislocated from the squadrons and just really hit it hard training. It was another one of those like, get there and then realize how good everybody is and like start playing catch up you know running catch up uh so it was kind of just another out of my conference zone again and really had to kind of get to work to try and catch up to how how talented everybody was would you guys deploy for purpose or were you attached with one of the assault squadrons and would deploy with them yeah we would always almost always be attached to whatever squadron was going to do whatever job okay did you do any actually I know the answer you did a deployment as a sniper or as part of the sniper unit correct yeah yeah I did three Iraq two years as a sniper when did those start my first one was 20 15 I think

2015 and that was kind of when we went to help the Kurds it was they were holding back ISIS from trying to cross the line into Kurdistan as they were kind of plowing through Iraq so it was a very It was very strange. It was like we're on a defensive line and there was like almost like a no man's land and then ISIS over here. So it's like World War II. Exactly.

It was super, it was crazy. Like we were still doing some, some different targeting and stuff looking for people like within cities and stuff. But most of that tour was just, you're on like a line and you're like, bad guy that way. You're just looking to PID somebody and then.

Yeah. And then if they were close enough to, to engage with sniper fire. Great. If not, you know, we had an aircraft and helping the Kurds that way kind of keep them from penetrating that line.

Yeah. How about the two deployments after that? So the next one would have been 2016 into 17, I think, or just 17. Either way, it was in Iraq again, but we had now, so from that line that we did most of the fighting on

and supporting on in my first tour, I could see like Mosul way off in the background. And the next tour, ISIS had been pushed back to the other side of the river in Mosul. So now it was friendlier on our side and bad guys were now across the river for the most part. And that one was then moving, trying to get into Mosul and support as the Iraqis wanted to continue to push them out of the rest of the city. So that one was more into the city and supporting that way. And how about the third one? The third one, we were, I was in Mosul again. And it was more targeting, kind of, or attempting to little like cells or individuals in places.

And it wasn't so much like line and bad guy on that side. That one was not a very eventful. I did a lot of like sun tanning. Suns out, guns out? Suns out guns out. A lot of weightlifting. Watch a lot of podcasts and audiobooks. Yeah.

That one was. Who were you guys reporting to on those three deployments? In what sense? Meaning like the chain of command. Were you guys? It always seemed to be different. This was a lot of time, this is probably being a really bad salter.

A lot of the time when it was, like six levels up, I just stopped giving a fuck. I'm like there would, it seemed like it was always changing who was making the decision whether we could go do whatever we wanted to do. Um, an area commander or general from this or that or from US from Canada. I'm just like, okay, I'm going to push this up to my chain of command. Here's a con up. Something we want to go do. Or like our team will. And I would, it would like come back yes or no. Or like, okay, let's figure out a different way. And so all of that, I stop. Stop caring.

I don't know. It just seemed like it was always changing as the space that we were fighting it would change or go to someone else's territory or there would be like an Iraqi general versus a Kurdish someone. And I don't know. I found it all stuff that just frustrated me more than anything. How much, you know, in those years that you're talking about, obviously the U.S. had announced long before then, hey, we're removing ourselves from the country. We're going to leave it to the Iraqis. although, I mean, people should do some research as to whether or not the U.S. ever actually left and how much the Iraqis were doing.

What was your experience, you know, the term or the phrase by with and through? And my last appointment was in 2010, and it was to Afghanistan. And they wanted it to be very Afghanistan forward. So there was the A&A and the A&P, Afghan National Army, Afghan National Police. And they really wanted to start transitioning it over to, that's where. what the Afghans are going to see. They're going to see the Afghani face first. I know the same things were talked about in Iraq,

but when I talked to the people that was over there, perhaps that wasn't the reality on the ground if it was actually doing the vast majority of the heavy lifting. Yeah. I think heavy lifting was always done by the big assets that were there, aircraft and all that stuff. On the ground, like we train guys that we would go on these jobs with. and a lot of it was

yeah like by with and threadings or like triple A would be like a company whatever the hell that was the only one I cared about the other one advise assist and a company yeah there you go

and then there would sometimes it would just be you can only advise and assist and you need to be further back and all these different things so it was always kind of working with that with those rules or arcs or limitations

but it would be like yeah we would go and do stuff with with them be it when we were like my first tour it was all working with the Kurdish guys and gals in some cases that were you know on that line trying to defend and then once we moved into Iraq if you consider them two different places uh we would be training you know some guys that would be coming on on hits with us and they would try to be you know the first face that anyone sees how was your experience with the indigenous forces uh it was

so I was always very aware of the I guess you call it green on blue type of thing. You go into for instance Mosul you're training a group of people you know on the range and all kinds of different ways and now I don't know who any of them are I don't know if one of them you know if it's an ISIS fighter that has infiltrated said group and now we're giving them a gun

like so I was just always really watching for that like didn't have my back to people that I don't know who had firearms. That was a big concern. But I thought it was, I thought it was, it was all right, it was cool, I just show them how to shoot and then we go do some stuff.

And I don't know. It was interesting because there's like a language barrier and like cultural barriers. Cultural barriers. You're trying to like, you just speak everything through an interpreter. And I'm like, are you passing on what I'm saying? Because it appears as though by what he's doing that you're not.

Yeah. Can you say it like this? But I thought it was a cool experience. I had very drastically different experiences. There were some of the local forces, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, that were spectacular. Like they seemed to have an equal level of commitment to fighting for their country as any of the coalition forces that were over there. And then there was the other side of that. And, yeah.

they'd show up for training enchilah, you know. Yeah. And get on target and God damn it. It was rough. And everything in between. Yeah, it was a...

What I can say is this. I knew people have asked me about the drawdown in Afghanistan and was I surprised by the outcome, which I was not. I was surprised by the velocity of the outcome, but not the outcome itself.

And that was based on my experience with the A&A and A&P and not putting a, value judgment on them, it was just a different approach and mentality. And it doesn't surprise me that Afghanistan is where it's at right now. Yeah. Yeah. It's rough. What deployment was your infamous shot taken? That show I was on the road of six out of in my second tour to Iraq. How do you feel about the criticism you have received about talking openly about that? And at some point, you're going to have to describe what we're talking about so people understand.

So the way I've assessed everything in terms of coming to speak about a career that is generally secretive is. So one, I've consulted with a bunch of people that I respect. That was kind of step one. So we in the military like to use the term OPSEC. And then whoever's saying it, they like to say it encompasses whatever the hell they want without any, real common sense from what I've seen. So I looked at, you know, recruiting videos, things that are already public, knowledge that the government themselves have put out. And I say, okay, if I'm going to go talk about something, is it going to harm anyone for,

like our guys, like that's number one for me, OPSEC is, okay, is this going to, is this going to be a harmful thing to someone that's deployed right now or going to be? And if the answer is no, or like, okay, the next thing. Okay, is it going to give away something in a capability that isn't already public knowledge? Those are kind of the ways I look at it. So there's criticism that comes. So like for this story, for instance,

talking about how our team made that long shot. Tell the story, if you will. There we were. I was just going to say, you better start with, it's either there's only two ways. It's either there we were or no shit, there we were. Yeah. No shit.

There we were. So we ended up, this was the tour I was saying where we got into Mosul and ISIS was on the other side of the river. There was a big hotel structure on the riverbank, the Nunavu Hotel. And our deck commander at the time, so there's our deck commander, I was a two I see, and we had two other dudes in the debt. So it was a four men's night interview. As soon as we got there, our deck commander had his eye on this hotel. He's like, that's the biggest building.

I want to be in that building. and I want to be on the top floor at some point. And this was like new. We didn't get there until a little while after we'd already been in country. Was it abandoned? No, so the hotel was not a luxury hotel when we got there. That's so weird. It had been bombed.

I think at one point it had a good rating. I saw pictures online where I'm like, wow, it was beautiful. It was no longer beautiful, depending on the lens you're looking through. I don't know if it would have mattered the lens. The sunrises were nice. That's perfect. You're not looking at the hotel that perspective. You're looking from the hotel outward.

This is true. Yeah, so we ended up going. Now, there was an Iraqi force that had a position on the, I think it was like the fourth floor. So that was kind of part of the link up we did in order to even just go to look at the place. And then we ended up taking the top floor. So we'd go back and forth into this OP position. I think in total, we spent just over 50 days. there and we go for like a week and go back to cam or something we're kind of waiting for an iraqi

push north to south to get ISIS out of the rest of the city and we're perpendicular waiting for that to happen but while we were waiting we were just like doing the boring side of sniping which is just looking at everything for hours and hours and building a picture of kind of what we saw on the other side and eventually this was like really on the tail end of our tour. It was like literally the last couple weeks. The Iraqis pushed. So we had a bunch of like, oh, they're going to do it tomorrow and we'd make sure we're rip back and cut everything short and get into our position. Like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven days. And like, oh, they're not going to do it. Just wait. Did that a bunch of times. And then they started the push

eventually. So we were ninth, nine or ten floors up perpendicular to the fight that was, you know, two to four kilometers away from us and then the ground kind of sloped up and away So when it started we could see the Iraqis pushing and we could see like where ISIS had come into different parts of the village that or into the city And you know either built up a fighting position or just as they were moving in to get ready for the push like we could just see everything developing move counter move stuff going on yeah So we just like we're kind of witnessing them starting to push supporting where we could with any you know airstrikes or whatever and then it got into a range where we were able to support with sniper fire and that was like from you know just inside four kilometers let's say and so we're we're watching them push and we're

starting to engage ISIS fighters that are you know shooting at the Iraqi movement and they would take cover and go or whatever it wasn't this was like three and a half to 4k roughly at this range. And one of the guys, so we were set up in two sniper teams kind of side by side, maybe like the width of this room apart. And each team was just kind of doing its own thing,

sort of, or we would be like, oh, did you see this, did you see that? And we were not even tucked away behind, like, a loophole anymore at this point. Like the battle's happening. We're so far away. We kind of moved our positions like in front of these big windows

so we could really see and support everything. And then one of the guys was shooting at a fighter that was shooting at Iraqis and the round skipped off the ground and ricocheted and hit him in the leg we're like, holy shit you know, just hit someone it was probably three and a half

you know, 3,600 meters or whatever and we're like, that's a pose, cool, wow but we had trained in Texas to get ready for this and we were using this like prism thing that was we were pushing out to three kilometers already so we knew that that range was like

there's a capability there to support and be effective and so this shot gets made and they have like this little motorbike that was ripping around the battlefield like picking up their injuries and bringing to wherever so this guy gets picked up taken off the fighting continues and then I think it was that it was either Later on that morning, it was all, almost all the fighting was like done by lunchtime or just after lunchtime.

And everyone would just like hang out until early morning the next day. It gets hot, man. It's too hot. Can you keep fighting night. But like no side realized that it would be to their advantage to keep pushing when the other side was. Anyway, the fighting was early morning to like mid after lunch. It was either that same day or the next day that the angle of it was kind of like 4K and slightly moving closer to us as it moved off to our left to like between like 2,000 meters

and up to 4K um there was a we were supporting in a bunch of ways like the rounds would be close enough that a fighter would fuck off to a different position change of behavior change of behavior the iraqis would now gain a couple extra meters or blocks or whatever um and there was a bunch of fighters that ran into this building and we tried to so we called an airstrike on it and it was like a dud I can't remember. There's like a name for like I don't know it doesn't happen. It might be done. It's like maybe. I thought the J-Tex did something differently. Anyway, it didn't do shit.

So one of the fighters we saw, it was like a second story and he was lowering his like webbing and stuff out the window and then lower his AK. And then he like hung and went to go down. And while this was happening, I was, so I was spotting. My buddy Scott was shooting. Our deck commander over here, Ben was spotting. And then his shooter jobs were shooting. We were both looking at this, doing our own, like, prep for sort of like the corner. And we knew all the ranges to everything that we could see because we'd been there for 50 days.

So it was just, I gave Scott a quick. Here it is. The dope and wind call that I'm assessing it at. And the guy was like just dropping to the ground now. It gives me a standby. I said, send it. They were doing the same thing at the same time. So two rounds go out, like, almost simultaneously.

Not coordinated. Not coordinated. That is a coordinated thing you can do. Yeah. Not coordinated. And one of them kills the guy, and one lands like maybe a half mill to the left. Half mil is a lot at 4K. It's a lot.

So it's probably like three and a half. So we're looking at like two meters probably off to one side. And the guy goes down, obviously, because it's a 50-cal round. We're like fucking hit. Yeah. Crazy. see, we don't know whose bullet it is. It was a simo.

So one of them did, because at that point... Clearly, it was your teams. Yeah, 100%. Wasn't those fucking guys? Well, none of those other people are here, so obviously it was yours. Yeah, I could just hijack the story. Then I stepped over and pulled the trigger for it. I could hijack the story and make it someone's a superhero.

But no, because you're shooting, like the culmination point is super, like you can't spot the swirl the whole time for a three and a half. No, it's going to arc and fall well out of your shot. Yeah, so none of us had eyes on like the bullet the whole time. Like, you know, from shooting, if you're shooting at 300 meters, you can see the swirl, the trace all the way to the target. You'd be like, that hit right in the middle of the target or whatever. So yeah, one of the bullets hit this guy at 3.5K. So there's been questions and things like, you know, was it a first round kill shot at that range?

That's impossible. We had already been firing that day. So the guns were on, the wind calls we need, like that stuff. Yeah. We had that knowledge. This call wasn't. a first round hit. Yeah.

Impossible is a big word. Whose it was? Statistically, unlikely? Sure. Impossible is a very far stretch. I would agree. Yeah.

Because it happened. So yeah, that's how it went. And then that fight continued from there. And it was kind of slowly getting closer to us. And then off towards like we're the city center, the old town or old city, whatever they called in Mosul was. And it was just like a week. of us on the guns supporting

and then like I said after lunchtime it would die down and go into like a boring kind of OPE routine and then the next morning get up again until it was kind of out of sight to us and it was at the tail end of our roto anyway so we'd been ripped out

of that replaced by the next team and they carried on the fight and we came on home it seems like some of the criticism around that is the fact that a video exists of what you're talking about. Yes, there's a video. There is a video.

You haven't posted the whole thing. No. I have not. So again. But again, I come back to, I'm curious how you deal with and what you think about the criticism. It depends. There's been a lot of criticism. So it depends which you're talking about.

So the criticism of me talking about it or the criticism of me putting pictures, let's say, or whatever. or small clips into the world. It's like, I don't know, what criticism are you? Both, either or. Okay, so for posting things, posting pictures, all of this stuff, that criticism I don't really care about. Does it come, does it come a lot from your previous peers in the unit? Not a lot.

So like I said, before any of this next career thing that I'm doing, which is music, but I'm also talking about a part of my life that was a large part of my life. And I think there's a lot, from what I'm seeing and what I'm hearing from people outside of the criticism, a lot of people are finding a lot of value in it. From people being inspired and wanting to go, like, serve the country. Different, different chats and posts and podcasts, people sending me emails that are just like, this has helped. so much. That or even music, songs that have written or whatever that just have connected with

people. All of that is, is amazing to hear and see. The tradeoff is like, you know, there's a picture of me in multi-cam in some place and someone doesn't like it. I'm like too bad. That I don't care about. I compare it to, like when I'm going to post something, I'll look at like a recruiting video that, you know, the unit has already put out. I'm like, okay, there's nothing here that isn't already open source or whatever. I don't know. There's opinions probably on I'm using it to benefit myself, my next career, whatever it is, and I am.

But the actual argument of, is there something that's an operational security breach? I don't think so. When I look at it from the lens of, is it endangering someone or giving out a secret or something? Because there's stuff that I obviously leave out. Yeah. that I've assessed are things that could be an operational security concern.

So the criticism, I don't know, I don't really care about it. I mean, is it wrong for somebody to use their previous experiences as a continued, I don't want to say springboard a catapult for it in their future life, but as a building block, that's probably a better word, in their future life? I don't think there's anything wrong with it. As long as you don't, what you're talking about, talking about as long as you are TTPs, tactics, techniques, and procedures. Are you viewing what you're putting out there and using it through the lens of protecting the modern

era warfighter? Are you exposing those things? And if you're not, I think, you know, one, you're never going to be able to please anybody. Let's just start there. Yeah, please everybody. Forget about it. So it doesn't even matter. If you, like, you will post pictures of you wearing multi-cam playing a guitar. Yeah. I'm sure, fucking piece of shit. Why is it always going to be about your most? Like, whoa, dude. Take it easy. I was just up on the mountain skiing two days ago.

A guy was head to toe multi-cam. I'm going to tell you, I'm making a judgment of a book by its cover. All right. The only team this guy ever served on was Meal Team 6. All right. He was like a gravy seal at best. So like, and here's the thing. Like, anybody can wear that shit.

I don't know if those are common terms here, but that's funny as shit. I've never heard that before. Okay. It's like, you can buy the shit. shit on the internet, right? And you used to wear that camouflage pattern in the execution of your job. I don't think there's anything wrong with in a tasteful manner talking about the experiences that you have had and passing those lessons forward.

I think it's actually an obligation for modern era veterans or maybe veterans of any era to take the experiences they had and the impacted had on their life and find a way. And I think the emphasis on this is tastefully move the ball forward and take those lessons and pass it on. Yeah, I agree. I think one of the biggest issues that, and this is, you know, there's the quiet professional is something that is important. But there's a difference between a quiet professional and a silent professional. I view a lot of people, especially if they're still in, they want you to be silent as opposed to being quiet. And the experiences that you have are the experiences that you have are the experience.

that you have. I think you have every right to do with them what you see fit. I agree. And I see I see critics being also extremely hypocritical. Like the fact that, let's say I put it in a country song or I put it on my website or something or social media, I know there's people that are criticizing that have used their experiences, stories, deployments, all these things, to get positions in a company, to get positions. positions in a school to go to a certain program. Or just to open doors in general. Exactly.

Not literally open doors, metaphorically. Open. But yeah. Wouldn't it be sweet if you could. That would be amazing. Less TBI for sure. I didn't get that far in my training. Way less TBI.

So it's totally. No over pressure. So I see it as like, you know, people doing it and then criticizing me for doing it just in a different fashion. Um, again, I don't know. I think you'll never please everybody. I don't plan to. I plan to please like myself. Yeah. So if my lens. A lot of ways we could take that, but I'm like, like, not right now. In all ways. Michael's like getting excited in all ways. Um, how can you see under the table? I just know you well enough. That's why this isn't glass. He immediately was

just like sitting up more straight. Take it easy, Michael. He's bigger. picture um but yeah like i want to i want to make the people i care about proud in what i'm doing um and i have a lot of conversations with people that i care about that are my family friends uh guys that are still in guys that are out um and i take all of that into consideration when when pursuing this next part of my life um but i recognize like you're not going to please everybody it's impossible Yeah, and your biggest critics, I think, unfortunately, will always be from the community that you came from, which could be a really hard pill to swallow. Well, yes, but the part of that community that is very critical of me or what I'm up to are generally the part that I don't care about anyway.

It's not entirely, but for the most part, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's. It would never be the people that I went to talk about it anyway for advice or whatever. The people that I look at as intelligent, capable warriors that are also good people, that's who I go to talk to. And overwhelmingly, like, the support is unbelievable. So I don't know. I'll always use that as kind of my metric to... There's a fine line too.

I think one of the worst things that happened in the SEAL community was an excessive level of notoriety, which probably happened around, maybe it happened before. I don't know. I guess I noticed the peak around Neptune Speer, the Bin Laden raid. And then there were, you know, some subsequent events and individuals that made the news, not generally for the highest level of performance or making great decisions. but it's a community of human beings and human beings fuck up. The people I have talked to around JTF2, it seems like it's an organization that wants to remain as much in the shadows as possible.

And I can understand that. It's much the same like, you know, J-Soc elements. They're very hesitant to come out and talk. And I think that the balance is really tough because there is a way to talk about what the job, what the job is and what has been done in a way that doesn't put anybody at risk. Because again, you view it through the lens of like, okay, there are people right now that we both know overseas doing the job and it'll continue to be that way and almost nobody will know about them. Am I doing anything that's putting them at risk?

No. Okay. Is there a way that I can talk about the experiences that I have had that can impact people's life and maybe change the trajectory of their life? I think that there is. Is there a way to talk about the experiences in the community that I came from and maybe inspire the next generation of people to join? Because if these organizations stay in the shadows completely, you're going to have a hard time actually getting people to do that job. And if they do too much, though, you know what I mean?

Like, that's that balance. Yeah, there's, yeah. You have to try and find a balance, yeah. For whatever reason, and like I have very few touch points on this. Like the JTF2 thing is very, like, it's shut up, don't talk about it. Yeah. And I don't know. I don't know if that's the right course.

You know, and I'm not the person to make that decision whatsoever because, one, worked with some of those people, but not a part of the unit. That's for the unit to decide, but I hope they're considering both sides of the argument. Well, I think what's missing is a conversation. The unit puts out promotional pictures. The unit puts out recruiting videos. The unit puts out, that story about that long shot that the boys that we did. Like, that was out in the news before we were out of Iraq.

Or before we were out of that, before all of our teams were out of that O.P. Really? To me, that's concerning. To me, that's operational security. Me talking about it five years later, I just don't see how anyone could say, it was fine that we told this story while the fight was still going on. But five years later, can you please shut the fuck up? to me, I'm like, the piece that's missing is the conversation in between.

Is there a way that this can benefit both people? Yes. Or the unit and myself. Can we talk about it? Can we say, like, I went to my unit before getting out and said, I'm getting out. I'm going to talk about my career. For a whole bunch of reasons, is there a way that can work well? so that what's being put out as a as part of your brand essentially is what you want it to be i said i will

that every single post i do on social media every single thing if you want me to crop something out or blur something or speak differently um let me know and it just never happened and i gave like i'm out in six months i'm out in three months were they responsive to that conversation It was like someone's going to reach out to you. Yeah, yeah. Someone's going to talk to you about it. Okay. Can I have their contact?

Send an email. No response. Okay. I'm out in two weeks. I'm out of the military in a week. I am out tonight. No one has spoken to me. So either you don't care.

And if you don't care, then please don't care. Or just say so. Yeah. Like just don't care after. Or if you do care, then let's figure out what's best. Don't make it seem to me like you. don't care, but then really care later. It was just a very weird thing.

I think there's a conversation in the middle that's missing. Yeah. Because it could be great for the people that get out and for what's being passed to the public as a brand kind of thing. Yeah, I think that would be a beneficial conversation. And it also doesn't surprise me that they never got back to you. Yeah. Just left me on red. Fuck.

Why did you decide to get out? I was it was kind of decided for me I don't know how political how political you want this conversation to get but it's well it's up to you you are responsible for what you say I'll be responsible for what I say so

we um we had COVID happen really yeah even in Canada it happened in Canada okay a lot of places think it's really not over anyway there was a mandate that came down for that you had to be vaccinated for for COVID to do anything else.

You're talking about in military service? Yeah. Same here in U.S. Yeah. So it was all coming out anew and I'm like, well, this is, I found it a little strange. And I was like, okay, I've never seen this much emphasis put on anything. It's very weird. So I declined it at first.

And I was like, I think I just want more time to just to see. see what happens. There's a bunch of different reports coming out. Like, right at the starting, J&J, the Johnson Johnson one was like, there's some issues with something. And then AstraZan, they were like, oh, don't do that one. Take this one. Don't do that one.

And it was like every week there was something else coming out and then something else being censored right away. Some doctor talking about something and they're getting cut off. And I was like, okay, I just want to do what's best for my health. And right now I think that's just waiting. How is that received? That response was like nothing I've ever seen. So I declined getting this my first dose on a Friday.

And by Monday, I was being told that I was getting kicked out of the unit. Where I wanted to be posted outside of the unit while I transition out because the mandate's coming for all of the calf. And I couldn't remember if it was in place at the time or not. But like, if you choose this, you're out. I was like, well, that's strange. Like I've been in this unit for almost 14 years. I've never seen a response like that to anything, to anything. and like

it's like this takes it up another level because now they're like no you are being forced and I don't know what type of people get selected

down here but you're being selected into a unit because you're like this person is probably pretty hard to bully

yeah now this comes up and I'm like and it's like no like you are doing I'm like no fuck you now

now I'm like I have a line in the sand like I just I'm gonna make my own decision from this point for at the same time there was all the masking theatrics um going on where it was like you have to wear a mask in this

building or if you're in this one but not when you're here in one building people don't care but so-and-so's coming to the briefing so put your mask on and blah blah blah and I'm already like I have a line in the sand I'm like I'm not playing all this game also like it's it makes no sense to me it's all a charade. And I'm not saying if someone wants to wear one or doesn't or the effect of it. I'm just saying the way we were doing it, it was a charade. It was so and so's

coming. Let's pretend that we do this all the time. You have to do it here. You don't have to do it here. We're getting ready to take a picture. Everybody put your mask on. Exactly. Like you saw those clips come out on the news. So I just I decided I'm not playing this game. And from there, they're just like administrative trouble started piling.

up. How quickly? Pretty quickly because it came to like, no, you will. And in the military, that means like you'll do it. And I'm like, no, no, no, I won't. So you could imagine, like, there's some headbutting. And I was supposed to go to a meeting in a room that required masks. And I just, I was like, I'm not doing it. So there was a conversation and then like almost an order.

and I got I got kicked out before I even got into this meeting I kicked out of this particular building and that was the last day my past ever worked at Dwyer Hill Training Center Yeah So

It's all so funny It's all so funny and weird to talk about Because like after so long and so much It's like that's not the way I saw it going That being said Sitting on the civilian side of everything I'm super happy that I stood my ground where I did.

Were there others who were in the same boat as you, standing their ground? There's others that stood ground in their own ways. Yeah, just it's not a large group. But, yeah, I don't know, everyone kind of dealt with it their own way. And for me, that was just like,

I'm not going to get bullied into this nonsense. So my past never worked again. How'd they get you out of the Army, though? Oh, that was all a release process. So I medically released, actually. So like I keep talking about concussions, had a lot. And as you know, some of the explosive entry and the 50 cal firing and all this stuff kind of builds up. So it was a good time anyway, I think the amount of concussion symptoms that were coming on very easily for me in all kinds of different training environments or operating.

environmental environments was becoming quite concerning. How'd you start noticing them? Oh, I noticed them years ago now. It would be like, I think one of the biggest things I noticed first is I was getting agitated or angry, easy, which normally wasn't really, it's not a characteristic of mine in general. Now, I was in our sniper troop with like the most aggressive angry people in the world sometimes.

So I was like, well, I'm not doing so bad. But I would notice it in myself. And then it would be like shooting 50 and I would just feel nauseous and like I couldn't I couldn't bring words out that I was thinking and like sleep disruption. There's all kinds of stuff and time away from impact on my brain would kind of help something, some things it wouldn't. And then something else just like even parachuting like openings were like rocking my fucking world, even bear. even bare ass like towards the end like I would just do like just a jump and I was like oh my god like sensitive light and headaches and nauseous um so it was it was time anyway and the way I'm looking at is a big blessing in disguise that I'm away from kind of head impact now yeah I remember at the

tail end of was it sniper school it was we had and this was actually out at the desert facility. There was a long-range, raffle range of there. And we had like a pallet of 50-call ammo. We had to shoot. Yeah. I shot until my nose was bleeding. I mean, it's not funny, but I know you're talking about it. Like this, so for people in video like this can of water, it's, it's, the diameter is larger than, actually this is about the diameter of 50-cal round right here, and that fucker is huge. It is an explosion going off right near your face. Yeah. And it, yeah, I just shot it and shot it and shot it until I had. the worst headache in my life and a nose bleed

and then shot it a little bit more because we needed to get through the rounds. Yeah. Yeah. And just damage my brain. Yeah. Didn't any clue at the time. Yeah, that adds up for sure. Yeah.

Has the, what's the Canadian military stance now on COVID vaccine? I remember hearing something that like it's no longer mandatory, but there were people in the process of being kicked out. And I think they were still going ahead with that because at the time they were not doing what they were ordered. So it was more of a discipline thing than the current.

I don't know. It's a mess. You'd get better information talking to somebody else. I don't really track it that much. I don't think it's mandatory right now. I think it's tied to certain things you can do maybe. Interesting. But, yeah, I don't know.

I'm not the right one to ask about that. I think the U.S. military just rescinded their vaccine. Okay. There was an interesting, well, it wasn't interesting. I guess it should be expected. I would have people who were still serving active duty. And of all people they would call to talk to about it, they would call me. Like, hey man, I'm already like kind of out.

But, you know, they would talk about groups of, you know, 30, 40, 50, 60 people who were, they were not in line ideologically with just getting in the lockstep of taking the vaccine. And I don't know what ended up happening to them. I don't know if they ejected anybody out of the community, but it was an issue for a while, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, that was some wild times. Yeah, I just, I found it so crazy. And more than anything, like, just looking at, like, the reaction of everybody.

It was, like, something I'd never seen. That's what just, like, really made it. Like, this is strange. What do your parents think about your military service? They're very proud of it. My mom has worried some. some days and nights for sure. Yeah.

But she was also happy that I ended up in the unit that I wanted to go to because she's like, I'm assuming everyone trains as hard as you and you're deploying with very, you know, extremely talented, aggressive individuals. Like there's, there's strength in those numbers kind of thing.

So she was always, she had, we talked about it a bit where she'd be worried, but she overall was like, I feel pretty good that you're deploying with this group of, of people kind of thing. Yeah. And do you have kids now?

I do, yeah. How old? Three kids. My oldest son turned 16 in March. My youngest son is 14, and I have a two-year-old daughter. Why did you do that to yourself? Man. You were out.

I know. It's free and clear. I want to have more kids, actually. Well, now they have a two-year-old, you fuck might as well. You're in hell for at least the next seven years. I might as well have a whole debt. Yeah, I don't know. I've done a lot of thinking and assessing.

about what's important and it always comes down to my family and my friends and so I'm like sure it takes 20 minutes to get out of the house but like there's zero chance I'm gonna let's not say zero

but there's a very very small chance that I'm gonna ever regret having more kids when I'm older and a bigger family when I deem it the most important thing in the world. Any interest from your older children and join the military?

Not really. Really? They enjoy shooting. They enjoy hunting. I don't think they want to be gone as much as I was gone. For over 10 years, it was like I was deployed or gone training over half the year, six to eight months a year. I would not want to do that anymore. And I think they probably will not either. If they came to you and expressed his desire to fall in your footsteps, what would your response be? Um, I would be supportive. Um, I would rather they play guitar, but I would be supportive. We'll start them now. Yeah, well, they are starting. It's funny. I'll do like FaceTime guitar lessons with them and stuff.

We'll line up and change. Sorry, my boys live in Alberta and my daughter lives with me, uh, with my now spouse in Ottawa. So I go back and forth a lot. Um, but we'll line up like now they're starting to get interested in guitar and playing, learning. And so that's really cool. I like seeing that.

But if they wanted to, I would be supportive. Would you tell them? So the reason I ask you is I'm fascinated because I get asked it all the time. One of my biggest fears was that any of my kids would want to follow my footsteps. Thankfully, I am the most boring person my children know. They don't give a fuck about anything that I used to do and I wouldn't have it any other way. Oh, good. But if they did, like if my oldest son or my middle son said, hey, I want to go be a seal.

My first response would be, I'm stoked that you found something that you want to do, and I'm not going to try to talk you out of this by any stretch. But let's talk over time about the cost of that profession. And what it really is. And I would probably start a lot with, like, you know, brain health, damage to your brain. Like, I didn't know anything about that. Probably intuitively, we all did. Like, again, let's just shoot a 50 cow until our nose bleeds.

That's not good for you. No, there was actually when I was just getting into it in 3VP, there was like a, I don't know if it was a rumor, but they're like, you're only supposed to shoot so many rounds because your retina could detach from your eye. You ever shot at Carl Gustav? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think the maximum daily dosage of the old Carl G is, I think it's under three. I remember many situations where there was pallets of ammo left. And you look at it's like, you know, after six, it starts detaching the lining of your lungs.

Yeah. Yeah. And so we never follow. I don't even know. I don't think there's even a number now. Guys are at least more aware of it now. Like, you shoot enough. That's what,

well, the awareness, and you can train smarter. Yeah. You know, like, we all need to learn how to shoot Carl G. We don't,

we don't need to go step up to the line and shoot eight of them. Yeah. You know, like we can figure that out. And that's just the stuff that I would want my kids to know. Like, listen,

if you pursue this path, I'll do everything I can to help you be successful. But I want you to make your decision based off of, the information I didn't have. And I still think, looking back at the age that I was, if I had the information that I am aware of now, I still would have pursued it.

I think I could have just been a little bit smarter in my navigation. Yeah. And I don't think it would change their mind, but I think it would help them in the future. Because the brain health stuff, that does scare me for sure. Oh, it's crazy.

Like, there's so much stuff that I don't remember. like just things that I should remember. Yeah. Like here's an important event. And I'm like, I have no memory of that. Until you show me a picture, I'll be like, oh, yes, that is something I did. And it's weird. It's not, it doesn't seem to be prioritized in like what was important and what wasn't.

Just like things, I just don't fucking remember. Is the music helping you at all with your memory? I think so. I've read that it does. There's a bunch of benefits to continually learning something new, but there's also something specific with music, I believe. So it seems to be. Because I can remember a lot of songs.

Like, I can play a three or four hour set without looking at any chords or lyrics. Really? Yeah. So I think it's helping, and I'm building off of that. It doesn't seem to be helping get back memories that are gone,

but at least I've read a lot that it's good for brain health and prevention of other things, whatever dimensions. stuff down the line. What's your favorite song to sing? Favorite song to sing? Cover. And then I'm sure you have an original as well. I think my favorite cover to sing is in color by Jamie Johnson. Okay. How about your favorite original? That changes all the time. I don't know. It's like sometimes I'll play and then I'm like, yeah, that's song that I wrote sucks. I'm not playing it anymore.

And at one point it was super fun to play. And then it changes depending on the audience or whatever the vibe is too. How far do you want to take it with music? We're talking like filling stadiums up? Because again, it's a chance you'll lose out on time with your family. Yeah, so I'm trying to balance it with that in mind for sure. And pursuing this career in a way that enables me to bring my family along for things. I don't want to be gone from them all year long just to fill up stadiums, let's say.

To me, it's not worth. You'd be changing one deployment model for another. Exactly. So I would love to play to a stadium full of people. I don't have a bunch of real expectations in music other than I want to get really good at the craft and I want to write songs that I really, really like. Whoever wants to hear them later is kind of up to whatever. I don't want to write for somebody else.

I don't want to, I don't know. I just don't have a ton of expectations. I'm going to work hard. but what it turns into, we'll see. Well, it seems like it's continuing to grow. I mean, right now we were able to link up because you're on the road touring through Canada right now, right? Well, I'm doing a show in,

so I'm kind of spreading out shows so that they're, it's kind of the evolution from playing in bars, because I was playing a lot like three or four nights a week in different bars for a few hours. But that's mainly like, you can play originally. but originals and covers and then just you're kind of a jukebox in the back

right like people are eating dinner and drinking beers and talking about whatever sometimes clapping sometimes not caring at all to like now ticketed events that are like a concert and people are there for music that's what I'm up to now so I'm spreading the gigs

out a little bit more so that we can you know market appropriately it's not really a tour but I am I'm playing in Calgary in a couple days and it's going to be super fun it's the first time I'm playing in Alberta which is where I'm from ever? Since I've started playing music, yeah.

That's awesome. Yeah, I'm excited. So we're going to play at the Ironwood and last I checked it was like we were eight seats from sold out so it probably is sold out now. So it's going to be fun. I think it's going to be a lot of really cool energy

and playing with a couple of other artists that's just going to be a good night. That's awesome. Yeah. In Calgary's basically a straight shot, well, nothing's a straight shot north from here. We're technically like 30 miles from the border. It just takes two hours to get there.

I know, but it's a beautiful drive, so that's okay. It's not bad. Yeah, I've made it many, many times. Where can people find your schedule and where you're going to play? I have a website that is Dallas-Elexander.ca. Also, anything... Was dot com taken? It actually was.

Really? What kind of... Dallas-Elexander.com. Look at it. It brings up like a... Have we found who owns this yet? That's son of a bitch. Some guy who are like, we're very different people.

But a buddy of mine mess with me, he's like, you're obviously, I'm not looking at the right thing. He sent me a shot. Because this is not you. It's not like a dildo salesman, is it? I don't know what he's up to. I would be, it would be pretty funny if you would. I might actually even link it to my website.

This is where you can find me. And then Instagram is at I am Dallas Alexander. Facebook's Dallas Alexander music. It's kind of all around there. I think if you search Dallas Alexander, you're going to find me or the dildo salesman. So depending on what you want to do. There is.

This is the dildo. There's Dallas Alexander.com. Time and knowledge of the most valuable assets in this world. Not money. Money is a tool to achieve these valuable assets in our lives. I don't like this guy. That guy's the first sergeant.

So there we go. Neal Team 6. There's the real. There we go. Dallas Alexander. Dot CA. How dare you wear camo, sir. Yeah. That's like Yeti Cambo. Is that the hat you're wearing right now? No, this is another one. So I actually, these hats are super cool. I was looking for a camouflage pattern.

hat like that one. I looked everywhere. That reminds me of the camo that's on Yeti tumblers and it might be proprietary. They're like they're a camo. Well, this is before that. So this, these, I found a collection of that one, this one and like this orange camo hat in the small town that I went to high school in this crazy store that's like full of a bunch of antiques and junk. And it was like, I walk, I don't even know why I walked in, but I'd been on like a month long search to try and find a sweet hat like that or this. I go into this store. No one's even working. I'm like, hello. If I wander around, there's just hat rack with all these old vintage, like, hunting hats. It's like $8.00. Like, hello, I would really like to buy

these. Leaving cash and walking out. I did. I took three hats and I was like, they're eight bucks piece, but I'll leave $40. That's probably pretty fair. They're probably going to be pretty happy. I left a little note. I bought three hats. Here's the cash. And then like these ones I put like some of my like merch, a little dude on. But so now they're like my favorite hats. I'm fascinated to understand the business model of that store. I mean, their margins are great because they're not paying shit for overhead because I don't think they had anybody on staff. No, and I paid more than they were asking anyway. Yeah, well, that's the move.

Yeah. You got to leave no question that the hats were paid for. Yeah. Okay. Man, I need to look into that model. Just leave your cash here with a note of what you took and we'll just trust you. That's right. It's going to work out great in my favor.

What are you the most excited about right now in your life? I'm excited the most about having time to spend with my family. That is, it's so fucking precious. Like I really, really, I really appreciate it. After having been gone for so long, all of it. Even if it's doing nothing, I love it. Yeah. Yeah, I feel the same.

You know, Dildo guy. Sorry, whatever your name is. You're going to be a dildo guy. He is right. You know, money is not the end-all be all. I went through a phase of my life where I certainly thought that it was. And in the famous words of Tony Stark, you know, no amount of money ever bought a single second of time.

Or however, I just fucked that quote up. But it's true. Yeah. It's one of the things that I value the most. And to me at this point, like wealth to me means I can choose what I do with my time. It's not a car or a whatever, you know, fill in this shiny object thing. It took me a while to get there. Yeah.

I bought a lot of dumb shit thinking it was the answer. Oh, yeah. I fucking loved every second of it. You had to take that path to get where you are. So there are some paths you have to walk down to realize like this was just stupid. Even though everybody told me along the way, it was just stupid. There's enough. Warning signs that I ignored, yeah.

It's like people who want to marry strippers. Like, listen. Yeah. You're making a mistake. Maybe she does love you, but she tells other people she loves them too. She's just a very loving person. Yeah. Hey, I don't know, I guess you've got to get your way through med school, however.

That's right. No judgment of strippers. Do you do you? What do you want to close it out with, man? I know you got to do a drive north, so I'll get you back on the road. I'll close it out by saying, thanks for having me. Yeah, man. I was super pumped to come down here and talk.

Like I said, the drive was beautiful. I enjoyed all of it listening to the music and podcasts on the way down. So I'm grateful. Thanks for having me over for a chat. My pleasure, man. It's actually what I enjoy most about social media is one day a bunch of people tag me in one of your posts. And we were connected later that afternoon, chatting back and forth. Yeah, it's one of the benefits.

Just about everything else sucks about social media. Most of it, I wish I had at most a flip phone that I could barely text on. But what else? But then we wouldn't be sitting here today. That's right. Hell, awesome, man. Thank you for the time. Thank you.