Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - The Secret History of Operation Red Wings | Ross Schneiderman | Ep. 450

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

Ross Schneiderman spent his career as a reporter and editor. Newsweek, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, ESPN. He covered mixed martial arts, then ran a foreign desk working alongside Afghan and Pakistani correspondents. In 2016 he wrote a Newsweek cover story about Mohammad Gulab, the Afghan villager who sheltered Marcus Luttrell. He never went to Afghanistan. He never covered a war. He spent six years piecing this one together anyway. For twenty years, Operation Red Wings has been told one way. Lone Survivor turned it into a legend. He FOIA'd the documents. He read the MERC chat, the debriefs, the after-action reports. He interviewed SEALs, Green Berets, and Afghan sources who were there. What he found doesn't match the movie. We go through it in order. The comms that were supposedly never made, and the records that say otherwise. The vote that never happened. The phone call, and who really made it. The stinger missile that wasn't. And why a story meant to honor four men became a recruiting tool built on things that weren't true. This isn't about tearing anyone down. Four men died doing the best they could in a terrible spot. It's about what happens when an institution picks the myth over the truth. Politico Article: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/03/20/operation-red-wings-lone-survivor-luttrell-00833548 Today's Sponsors:    Montana Knife Company:  https://www.montanaknifecompany.com Firecracker Farm:  https://www.firecracker.farm

Okay, got the red smoke. West of the smoke, I'm looking at danger close now. Come on winter, baby. Give it to me. I made it. You're clear it hot. All right. You ready to get in this?

Let's do it. So this is a tough one. It's a tough topic. I think it's important topic. I was telling you before we started recording, what I don't want to do is try to diminish anybody who found themselves in a horrific situation, the bravery that was involved in that, whether it was sought out or unintentional or whatever the situation led it to that. But I think more than anything, integrity and telling the

truth is essential. There are stories about the SEAL community that I think are very demonstrably true. And then there are some that seem to navigate a little bit more towards the gray area. Some get a lot of support from Big Navy and Special Warfare community. Others don't. And this is a This is an example of an incident. There are only a couple that I can point at where I start scratching my head at a little bit of this. The story starts to fray and it starts to deviate. Most afteractions are pretty straightforward. You'll have, whatever, 40 people there.

And they'll have versions of a very similar event through different angles or optics or stuff like this. this particular topic there's some pretty wide differences in those that were directly involved and those that were maybe a layer away and those involved in the recovery process and I think it's just important to tell the truth

but again in having the conversation I don't want anybody to think that this is an opportunity to like snipe away at these guys two plus decades later trying to diminish what they had to deal with because that's that's not the case. And more than anything, I'm, so I was not in Afghanistan at the time. I know quite a few people who were involved in the actual recovery.

We're talking about Operation Red Wing. It's Red Wing, right? And a lot of people say, it's Red Wings, plural, like the hockey team. Many people may not recognize that title, but they would probably recognize the title, Loan Survivor, which is based off of a movie that was directed. by Peter Berg directly associated with that. So that's kind of the optic of the area that we were talking about. But again, so I wasn't there.

I know some of the guys, a good amount of the guys that were there. I'm fascinated to know what your research was actually able to shell. Because a lot of what I have heard over the years is going to be six degrees of Kevin Bacon, right? Third party, fourth part, as it goes and it goes and it goes. some of the stuff is easier to believe than others but this one has always seemed to have a little bit of a question mark associated with it so i'm fascinated eventually i think we should just go through it sequentially and just have you show what you were able to piece together with actual

i don't know what the term is evidence but probably evidence or black and white whether it's the communication whether it's the actual grid coordinates it's after all of those things that you can kind of piece together. Again, not through the lens of taking anything from these people, but if the official story isn't correct, I think it should be corrected. That's where I come at this type of stuff from. Sure. Yeah, I mean, that's where I tried to come up with it too. And I wrote a story for political magazine that came out in May that. Pull that mic closer to you. Keep that thing about a fist away. Sure. There you go. I worked with another reporter by the name Ed Derek. He wrote a book called Victory Point.

He was in Afghanistan and he was with the Marines that took part in this operation. And Operation Whalers, which drove Ahmed Shah, you know, the villain of this story out of the Coringold Valley. And I should probably go back before I like that. I was gonna say, one of the first things I was gonna ask you, is A, how did this subject matter even capture your interest?

Yeah, yeah, sure. So I was not a war correspondent. I've never been to Afghanistan. I was for most- Missed opportunity. For most of my career, I was an editor. And that was in part one because I was just way too scared to be a real war correspondent. You know, I graduated college in 2004.

It's like right after Daniel Pearl was murdered. And so I was like, I don't know, Pearl Schneiderman, maybe this isn't the best place for me. So I got my start variety of places. One of them was Newsweek. And one of my mentors there was a reporter by the name of Michael Hastings. and Hastings is the guy who wrote the article for Rolling Stone that, like, you know, led to McChrystal resigning and everything. And he was a war correspondent in Iraq. And I got a job part-time at Newsweek when he went abroad. And so he was the one he taught me how to, like, file a story to a correspondent. He taught me a lot.

And one of the other lessons that he taught me, you know, he died when he came back to the States in a car accident. But his fiance, for his first fiancé, was killed in Iraq. And I remember when that had. happened. And I was like, yeah, I don't think this is for me. I think I'm going to be the guy in New York, like, talking to these guys being their like makeshift therapist. And so for most, I, you know, I was a reporter. I reported mostly on mixed martial arts. And at places like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ESPN. And then when I went to Newsweek again later on in my career, I eventually became an editor. And along the way, I would work on the foreign desk with Afghan correspondence, Pakistani correspondents, and communicate with them. And I knew this Afghan correspondent,

who's like a legend. His name is Sammy Yusufzai. And he is one of the first reporters to write about Muhammad Gulup, who was the Afghan villager who saved Navy SEAL Marcus Lattrell, the only survivor of this mission. Marcus went on to write a book, lone survivor before it became a movie. And later on, I think this is like 2012. I was working for some shady online. news site and I still was in touch with some of, you know, really good reporters from Newsweek. And Sammy pitched me this story and he said, hey, you know, I'm in touch with this guy, Muhammad Gulub, and that, you know, that movie just came out. So this must have been, maybe it was 2013 then. And he said, you know, the movie just came out and something's happening between

Gulab and Marcus Latrell. Like Gulab got sent back to Afghanistan after promoting the movie. And now the Taliban is trying to kill him and nobody will return his emails. And he's kind of desperate, we should do a story. And it's like, that sounds good. Sammy had a long time writing partner by the name of Ron Moreau and who had, either he was ill at that time or he passed away. And Sammy doesn't write in English. He speaks English, but it's not, he doesn't write in English. And so I linked him up with a really good reporter named Mike Spees. And I was their editor. And they wrote this initial piece for this website called Vocative about how Gulab and Marcus had had this falling out. And we were really cautious with the story. We were just like, oh, you know,

something's lost in translation between these two heroes. But the State Department official in Kabul read that story. And they said, you know, holy shit, this guy's, A, alive, but B, we got to help him. Today's episode is brought to you by Montana Knife Company. In less than two weeks, actually, I think at the end of this week, they are going to have a restock of their newest blade, the newest innovation in the MKC series. And it's this knife right here, the Montana, which if you follow their brand, you know, is the first folder that they've ever made. I think they started with 5,000. Then they gave a bunch to employees, friends and family.

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It's not like something you have to put into a sheath, although you could say that the handle is, in fact, the sheath. It's got a belt clip on here. I throw it right inside of my fanny pack or in my pocket, depending on what it is that I'm doing or what I'm carrying for that day. It's got a really cool arrowhead logo right there in the middle for those of you who are watching this. An ability right here for you could put a loop on there or some 550 core, whatever it may be, whatever you would want to have on that bad boy.

Made in Montana by the team that Josh Smith and Brandon have put together. Lifetime servicing, sharpening, all of those things. Montanaknife company.com. I know they're going to continue to restock these, but if you want to get one of these at the end of this week, you're going to have a chance. Montanaknifecompany.com. And then there was a lawyer by the name of Michael Wilde who wanted to, who read the story and was a source in the story and he wanted to represent him. And those two started working and had to jump through, especially the State Department official, had to really jump through hoops to bring Gulab over here.

And it took over a year. And he eventually got here. And I can't go into detail about how exactly he got here. But like the level, it had to go very high up to bring him here. And then so he gets here and he and Marks the Trellar still do not have a relationship. And he's, you know, living in a small like housing unit for refugees in Texas. And he's like, I've got a story to tell. And so he reaches out to Sammy again.

And Sammy's like, I live in London now. You know, I can't do this. So I try and find a reporter to write about this because I feel like there's a story here. I mean, when we had tried for that first story, when we had tried, for that first story, when we had tried to contact the Latrells, Gulab was offered money to stay quiet. By who? By the Latrells to stay quiet,

to not talk to the press. And, you know, everything's going through an interpreter, so you kind of wonder how much does Marcus actually know of what's going on. But the interpreter was saying things like, oh, your reporter never spoke to Gulab. It's made up. Your reporter's fabricating it.

It's like, I literally have pictures of him were in Gulob's hideout. I have a copy of Gulab's passport. What are you talking about? And so I knew that there was something weird here, but I just couldn't get anybody. It's 2016. We're at the middle of the election.

I'm working for a dying news magazine. And they couldn't get anybody interested. And I was just like, fuck it. I'll do it. And so I spent about six months on this story, and I flew down to Texas to where Gulub was. And I heard his story, and I wrote about it. And to me, it was really important because at that

that time, you know, the SIV program for Afghans who had been, you know, Terps for military, I mean, they were, it was already a mess. It had been a mess. It's, it's inception. There were huge backlogs. It's just really hard to get people over here who had helped our country. And it was really hard to vet people. It was a long process. It took a long time. And I was like, well, this story matters not because of whatever happened in loans. survivor. It was like, this is like a window into like somebody who did something good for our country and ended up kind of almost getting screwed over it. And he's in some ways was lucky because this State Department official took an interest in him. And so I wrote that story. And then it was

really interesting. When it came out, the responses were either this Afghan is liar. He's a piece of shit. He just wants money for Marcus Lestrille or Marcus Lestrille is a piece of shit and a lot And there was nothing in the middle. It was so one way of it. It was unfortunate because most of life is more nuanced than binary choices like that. Yes. But it was like a real window into like the direction that everything was headed

in this country and this is 2016. And that was really depressing to me in a way. I think I'm not a full-time journalist anymore. I freelance. It's no longer how I make a living. I do this when there's a story that's important and I think that that audience reaction is one of the things along with,

the complete financial instability of the profession is kind of what drove me to be like, I don't know if I want to do this full time because if this is the direction where, you know, we have these only either, and I don't even mean partisan wise. I mean just like every prism that we view is filtered through social media in that way. It's just kind of ugly. But in any case, I write that story and then some family members start reaching out to me. And I should add that Ed Derek and Sammy both worked on that story. with me. Ed Derrick wrote Victory Point, as I said, and I was reading that book as I was doing

research on Red Wings. And I was like, shit, this guy knows all the things that I don't know. He knows all the equipment. He knows all the weapons. He's been there. I can't just take his work and then cite him. So I called him up. And he's also a really great photographer. And I called him up. And I was like, hey, Ed, do you want to just like be my partner on the story? And between Sammy, who actually speaks Pashto and lived in Afghanistan and Ed, who was embedded with the military and me who can kind of put it all together in a way that, you know, I have enough distance that I can make a good narrative. It's like, we're going to have a good team and we'll make a good story.

And we did. So then Ed really actually is the one that family members started reaching out to. And we started hearing that Danny Dietz may have made a call while the recon team was being ambushed. And, you know, for people who don't know the story, basically, it's a four-man-man. recon team, they go up into the mountains of Konar to look for Ahmed Shah, who is the best way to describe him as like a Taliban linked militant. He was kind of part of the Taliban, but like very recently he was historically affiliated with another militant group that went by the name of Hig that didn't really get along with the Taliban. And people who haven't been to Afghanistan or haven't

read about it, they just assume that the Taliban controlled like the whole country. But actually, you know, they didn't really control Konar in the beginning. And they only started making inroads in response to the U.S. going in there. And, you know, as we looked for bin Laden, as we looked for Al-Qaeda, there were missions and things that upset the locals. And then, you know, the biggest thing that I could see, and people who know more about this could correct me, so correct me if I'm wrong. But one of the interesting things is what we did with the timber trade in that area.

So, you know, for years, people would cut down these. trees and they would sell them to the Gulf because they have this really beautiful cedar up in the mountains there, especially during the Mujahideen era. You know, it was the, it was called Jihad Wood, as West Morgan who you've had on the show, writes in his really good book. And so people made a lot of money off this timber trade. There's a lot of wealth generated in that area. But there was a study conducted, I think, in 2002, that said that the way the timber trade was occurring was degrading, the forests. And so the Afghan government banned it. They didn't ban the sale of it. They banned the cutting of the trees. And that changed. What's kind of bans the sale of it too? A little cascading

downstream effect. Right. But it totally changed the economics of the whole area and pitted two different tribes against one another. And again, if people are interested in this, like Wes's book really goes into it. It's really fascinating. It talks a lot about the tribal nature in that it wasn't, there were pockets of influence in control. It was much more warlordish than blanket Taliban controls everything. Like you said, Taliban adjacent, Taliban cousin,

it was versions of that all over the place. So Shah is a guy... I'm sorry. So Shah is a guy that people have described to me as more of just like a lumber smuggling murderer than like Big T Taliban. And he saw an opportunity, which was the Taliban realized,

Oh, locals are pissed off about the changes in the timber trade. They're pissed off about, you know, J-Soc and CIA raids in the country. Taliban start making inroads. The counterinsurgency begins. And this mission kicks off as a way to show that the counterinsurgency is working in the lead-up to the parliamentary elections. It was originally a Marine mission. The Marines from the beginning, you know, you see a lot of comments online, like the SEALs stole the mission from the Marines. It's not how it happened.

It's not even how it does happen. You don't get to go in in the middle of the night with a ball of clava on and take the mission. Yeah. That'd be cool if you could, though. Yeah, it would be cool. It would be adorable. But like Eric Christensen, who was commander, a ground force commander, he had a good relationship with the Marines. He had worked.

It was the two, three, three Marines. He had worked with the three Marines who had preceded them. And, you know, it wasn't. They, they, they, they, they plan the mission together. Yeah. It's not this Seals versus Marines idea. It wasn't parochial in that way, is my understanding. Well, the Marines were the battle space commander of that area anyway, weren't they?

I'm not particularly sure, but I mean, you know, the Marines being a conventional unit, um, they would do things. They would sometimes work with soft. And I guess the previous. Well, oftentimes, like if you look at, uh, the provinces there, you, you, you know, RC South, RC East, it wasn't always under the control of a SOF officer. Oftentimes, if not very frequently, it's a conventional that the SOF integrates with. So, I mean, I've worked for Army.

I've worked for Marine. I think I've worked for a Navy once we had enough senior officers. But you have to be able to interface with those battle space commanders. That's what I'm saying. You don't get to go in and steal the mission. Yeah. You might have, you might be able to finesse and work your way into the lines of operation. But you're not stealing anything from anybody because it's being, it's being directed from above.

Hey, this is what we want to accomplish. Let's array our forces. What do we have? Who's best suited for this particular thing? Right. And so the three three Marines had worked with soft and they had run missions from beginning to end. And when the two three Marines came in, the Soft task force, the siege of Sotom, the commander of that Jeffrey Waddell, he was not okay with that arrangement. He was more sort of doctrinaire, which was like.

like, you know, conventional guys are not going to control, they're not going to run soft missions. And so the Marine, and Waddell had been eyeing Ahmed Shah as well. He had originally wanted the Green Berets to take care of him. He was on the wider CJ76 task force list of targets. But, you know, these targets, these aren't Al-Qaeda, these aren't Bin Laden and associates. These are just like local guys, you know, local warlords.

They matter, but they're not, when you say high-value targets. Yeah. You know, and that's one of the... It's one of the entry points into this story where there's a lot of deviation. In my opinion and in people that I have talked to and what you are describing, where somebody may show up on a J-Pel list, which is a targeting list. There have been stories told about this individual high-level al-Qaeda. We had to get him off the board, high-level Taliban.

And the reality is that's not true. No. He was a nuisance as, you know, one of the Green Berets in my story described to me, but he was not a major player. Yeah. He had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda or bin Laden. Valid target for sure. Yeah.

But, you know, if you're, it wasn't in the top 12th at all. And also he, to my knowledge and what I saw, and one of my sources is the actual, every iteration of the con-op of the mission, beginning with the Marines' as original mission, they had no record of him killing any Americans. He had allegedly killed a Turkish engineer working, you know, on a contract for USAID. He had attacked the Marines using IEDs and other things, but he hadn't actually killed Americans. And in the movie, they said, oh, he killed 20 Marines. We have to stop them right now. It's like that's not actually how it happened.

And so SOF is basically like the Siege of SOTA, if you want to, Marines, if you want to do this mission, and we want to get this guy too, you need to work with the SOF unit. You guys have already talked to Air Christensen, the SEALs. Fine, you guys do it, but the seals need to run the first two phases of the mission. And so that's how it kicked off.

The Marines had had a different plan. And it involved walking into the mountains with a six-man scout sniper team and a machine guy. Good. God. Pack several lunches. Yeah. And, you know, Ed, Derek has written a lot about this. If people want to know more, they should look at Victory Point. It's really his reporting.

He interviewed those Marines 20 years ago. Well, and when they, not to fast for it, but when they ended up going into try to do the recovery. They did hike in there. And it destroyed people. Oh, yeah. It was the hardest thing that the most physically fit members of soft said that they ever did. Putting them flat on their back. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the terrain in Konar is just in areas of it, unforgiving. Yeah. Yeah. So pack several lunches and a good amount of water. Yeah. So, you know, that was the Marines. That was the Marines plan. The, the Seals plan was slightly different. They were going to insert via helicopter. an MH47. And this is why the Marines ultimately had to work with Soft, is that the Marines for at least one portion of the mission, not the insert, but the,

you know, later when they were going to bring in the strike force, they were going to insert via the night stalkers. And the night stalkers belong to J-Socq, the Joint Special Operations Task Force. Seedesodaf doesn't own those helicopters, but they can borrow them if they're available, which sometimes they are,

sometimes they aren't, but they didn't want to give those to conventional troops. to command. And so that's how the seals really get involved. So the seals want to use the helicopter for the insert. And they do, they're supposed to do a series of false insertions that night. They're also supposed to like kind of do a bunch of flights at night beforehand. Like conditioning the area. Yeah, conditioning the area. But, you know, what that ended up kind of doing was like, Ahmed Shah, the leader of this sort of militant group, he was like, ah, aha, they're trying to, you know, they're trying to do a mission against me.

Like it didn't condition him. It put him on high alert. And they had pretty good intelligence, actually, at least in retrospect. I mean, we're not here to Monday morning quarterback, like you said. But actually, if we could call some of this stuff up. What fob did they launch from? They launched out of, I believe they launched out of Bogram. Okay.

I was going to say, depending on... You could put it in a list so I can scroll down. Because some fobs, we use, you know, A-Bad and J-Bad are closer to that area. If you scroll down to one, it says Red Wings Kahnop 1. It would be 1, 2, 3, or 5 right there. 0, 2,0, 0,0. Scroll down. Keep going.

Keep going. Keep going. Yeah, right there. Those three, it will be one of those. So this is from the Kahn-Op. Most deadly, most likely. God, the number of times I've seen that slide. Yeah.

So they're saying, you know, Ahmed Shana's fighters are not prepared for helicopter insert of coalition forces. They're not going to coordinate. effective resistance that they didn't really think he was going to do much. But if you go to that number two, hold on a second, Michael, let me break this down. So for anybody who's audio only, we're just pulling up con-ups or concept of operations. I say this to people and they think I'm joking. If you want to immediately overnight shut down the United States military, you just need to kill the office suite. Because what we're looking at is Microsoft PowerPoint. Yes. And mission approval occurs via email and PowerPoint. And man, they will nitpick you to death. And I've said this.

before too. I had a mission approval sent back one time because my helicopter icons were not facing the appropriate direction of flight. Now, the only thing that I was requested to change was the direction of the helicopters in flight visually. And then it was approved as it was. It's like, do we have nothing else to worry about? But in every con-op that you put in, and this way, sarcastically they made the joke, the number of times that I've seen this, mission planning is often very robust. I know in TV shows and movies, it's bangs and bullets and things whizzing by your head. But to lead to that stuff, if you have time, you're going to plan for 72 hours. And one of the things that you are going to look at is always this.

The most likely enemy course of action and the most deadly enemy course of action. This is the appropriate way to show the people that you are briefing for your mission approval that you have thought through the potential reactions that you may encounter. And that way you are analyzing, assessing, and mitigating. like the most likely enemy course of action. You can, if there is risk they're associated with what you think they might do, you could have a different piece of equipment.

If you think that they'll have a reaction to the helicopter, you could land farther away. You could go with the Marines tactic that they were talking about of walking essentially themselves to death via dehydration and a stair climber that never ends. But it's a way that you show your boss or whoever's going to approve this. Like, listen, we have put the thought into this.

So every single con-up has this. the most deadly course of action and the most likely. And then you plan, honestly, for a little bit of in the middle. But this is always front of mind when you're planning. And the con op in this case, a lot of it was planned by the Marines and then the seals did their work. And you had other folks in it. And it's like, you know, like it's like 103 pages long. I just took selective slides.

If you go to the next one. Not that you should cut and paste con ops. But sometimes about 60% of the con up can just go ahead and refurbish. that repurpose, if you will. So this is, you might find interesting. Yeah. These are some of the things that they were afraid of. SR, meaning special reconnaissance.

Yes. Actions on number one bullet point. Do not get fucking compromised, which I'm going to say is good advice. Yes. Yes. That was one of those things when I saw that. I was like, holy shit. So everything else that's on here, it's contingencies, which again is a, man,

the vast majority of your planning is going to go into contingencies. It says HLZ is foul. That means helicopter landing zone for whatever reason. There is no way to land there. Perhaps it's foul. It's the timber area. Maybe there's tree stumps, whatever it is. They don't have the rotor arc.

Layup. You know, you need to be there for a little bit longer than you had planned for. So you're going to be laid up. And at this point, you know, do you have enough water, things like that? These are just all contingencies. Soft compromise. Kind of actually what happened on this operation. Kinetically, they were not engaged first.

They were soft compromise or exposed to civilians. Hard compromise would be an ambush. Actually, they got both soft and hard compromised, I would say. And then 24-hour Rolex is, I mean, Rolex is obviously a, speaking of time, it's a watch. So bumping either to the left or the right, 72 hours total is probably talking about how long they thought that they were going to be in the field maximum, I guess. And then if you go to the next one, 025, Red Wings Conop 5 right there. That might be the one I was actually looking for. Here's our guy at Ahmed Shah.

So they had intelligence on him. And some of the intelligence said, oh, Ahmed Shah has 600 guys. Another one, he said he had 82 fighters loyal to him. But the assessment by the intelligence was that that was, they referred to it as Haji Math, which is like a bit of a slur. But, you know, like they're basically saying that they were exaggerating their forces. And they had, you know, NSA taps on the guy's phone. So they, you know.

600 guys. Yeah, in Konar. In all of Konar or at his village? At his disposal. He's living in Pakistan going across the border and using this village named Chachal as, you know, an area. I mean, maybe you'd have total influence and ability to manipulate 600 people, but I, again, the likelihood of that being in any of these villages, the size just doesn't support that. Right.

Even remotely. So what they said was he travels with assessed to have three to five bodyguards, permanent traveling companions, possible roving nighttime patrols, may have a group of 12 to 15 ACM anti-coilition militia in his general area, which... That's viable. Yeah. And if you talk to people after the fact, that actually is what they believe to be much closer to the assessment.

And we'll get into that. So that's the intelligence that they really believe. But they're like, but we do have these reports of 600 guys. You never know. We want to be cautious. So Christensen originally and the Seals, they originally want to do an air reckey. Like they don't want to be on the ground at all. But, you know, it was one, they kept getting bumps.

They couldn't get the air assets in the, for just in general. It was very hard to get the J-Soc air assets. And then, you know, Waddell and others, they're like, you're not going to be able to see anything. I mean, this is 2005. the cameras on those were not what they are today. You're not going to be able to see anything, let alone be able to identify this guy who we only have a grainy photo of anyway. That's actually better than the vast majority of photos I ever had.

I've gone out in the field with literally the black silhouette picture. This is who we're looking. So I would just draw mustache. Yeah. Like, since you don't know what he looks like, maybe I'm right. Maybe my picture now is more accurate. As comical as that sounds, literally the black silhouette. This is who we're after.

Cool. I will keep my eyes out for him. He appears to be two-dimensional. Should be easy to recognize. And if you could call those files back up on the screen one more time, there's one other one I'd like to take a look at. If you'll scroll all the way down, I think it's at the end. It says, oh, 023 Red Wings Conop 3. One above where you are right now. Yeah, right there. I think this is it. No, that's basically the same one. Sorry. So it's in the story. I apologize. But it's in the story and it says that. that Ahmed Shah believes that the U.S. is about to attack him. He wants to ambush a group of seals. He wants to let 10 guys off a helicopter, and then he wants to shoot it down with either an RPG or a special weapon.

They have that intelligence before they go in. And in fact, there were a lot of people who were worried about just that on the Siege of Sotom staff. And so the initial plan after the air recidivism. doesn't work is I think they're going to go in. They had two plans. One was with eight, one was with 12. And it all depended on where Shah was going to be in the village based on his phone intercepts. He was going to different houses, at different locations around this village. This village isn't

just one place. It's like kind of spread out across the area. But again, it doesn't work out. They can't get the air assets. So it gets pushed. So they've got like kind of one more chance to get Shah before the siege of Soda turns over and a new group of, you know, green berets and folks come in. This task force, there were seals on it, but it was mostly green berets, mostly from seventh group. Colonel Waddell was from seventh group. He was a guy who's a big Steelers and Grateful Dead fan who kind of chomp on unlit cigars. A lot of people really liked him, especially on the SEAL teams. They said that he wasn't parochial, that he was smart, that he was a good dude, good commander. But in this case, and they said he was pretty meticulous in most

cases, but in this mission, for whatever reason, and I don't know why, he was, it was very much like, let's get these boys out there out of the wire one more time. You know, let's get them beyond the head. It was like very rah-rah, like, let's just fucking go. And the Green Berets on his task force couldn't figure out why. And a lot of them were like, we shouldn't be doing this, especially not with four guys, which is what they ultimately, the plan that they came up with. And the reason they came up with four was just the location of where Shaw was going to be at. It was in like the worst, you had the worst view of it. It was the worst place to do an assault.

It was the worst place to hide a reckey team. But they were going to do it or they weren't. And so they came up this plan, okay, we're going to do four because we need X many assaters for when we spot the guy. The recie team spots the guy. Then we're going to go in. In retrospect, one of the seals involved, the mission said that, yeah, we totally fucked up. We could have just had the rec, you know, we could have had a team of eight, 12 recie guys.

And then had them just join the assaulters on the, mission and that that would have been smarter than sending four guys up to Konar. And I'm curious, like, based on what you've heard over the years, you know, I heard several Green Berets told me that they kind of went to Eric Christensen and others and say, hey, guys, we should get this guy. We should go after him. There is a counterinsurgency going on, but we shouldn't do it in this way. Four guys is too few guys, especially if you don't have a machine gun, like this is not the way to do it. I'm curious if in, you know, in your circles, your community if you had heard any seals say something similar. So I believe Red Squadron was

overseas at the time and I was at Gold Squadron at the time this occurred in talking to them afterwards. They, from what I have been told, I wasn't there, but they were directly advised that you never go into Konar with four people. I mean, that was an area where squadrons would go as heavy as they could because of the remote area and the terrain in topography is just gnarly. So the people that were up there were up there generally for a reason. They were harder to get to. Oftentimes they were more hardened fighters. They were more ideological because they under, you know what I mean?

They're looking at the tactical situation from both coin, from the coin from both sides. They were direct from what I have heard from many people. They were directly advised to not go there with four people, not only by green berets, but by Marines, but also by J-Soc SEALs that were overseas at the time. There's something else I think we have to add to this to. That element was extremely inexperienced. You mean the four guys that were ultimately chosen? Yeah.

Seal Team 10 in general at that time, the guys that were overseas, they had extremely limited combat experience, which when you're at that place, and I'm not going to make an absolute statement, but often you're very itchy to go get more experience. And it can cause you at times to not listen to advice given to you by others. So it was pretty slow there at the time from what I heard that they were always looking for more missions. Christensen was a young, talented guy.

People really liked him. Supposedly fantastic human being, very smart. But it was his first real combat operation. He was a really young. For most of the people there. And that's what I'm saying. And I don't say inexperienced as a pejorative. I'm not trying to negatively talk about them.

I'm trying to set the actual foundation for what the reality was. Being a seal in peacetime and latering over, it takes time to go from that conceptual training and environments that you know are training. And a lot of our training pre-9-11 was looking in the rear view of me. It was all Vietnam-based and river and stream crossing, which is awesome. It's the origins of the seal community. But it takes time to get up to speed and to get an understanding of what feels right and looks right and what's reasonable and what's a good expectation and what you should be able to do and minimum forces and why it's a bad idea. Not saying anything negative about those guys.

They were just relatively inexperienced. And they had a lot of people who had more experience than them, had more experience than them. I'm not going to say forcefully waving them off, but trying to give them some suggestions that, hey, this may not be the best idea. Yeah. And the agency also tried to get the mission killed. I don't know if they called the seals per se,

but, you know, they definitely contacted the siege of soda and tried to stop the mission. And the goal wasn't to say, we're not going to go after Al-Met Shah. The goal was going to say, hey, this is the other thing. It was happening during the changeover. So you had all this new people

on the siege of sort of staff coming in and all these people leaving. And then you've got this structure of the mission where you've got like you've got some people working on the operation in Jalalabad, some people working on it in Bogram at the seal talk, then some people at the siege of sotiv talk and you have liaisons in between there.

But now you've kind of got like three talks you're handling this out of. The talk is a tactical operation center. Yeah. Well, to give you an example, sure, we're going to go get this guy. But if it's that dangerous to go up in that area and he is maybe not the level of an individual, we're going to send a J-Soc element up there and commit that level of force.

And he's traveling back and forth from Pakistan, blow the dude, kill the dude, do a vehicle and addiction, whatever it is as he's making travel back and forth. You know what I mean? Those are other ways that you can solve this problem. Leave the guy on the target list. But with more experience and exposure, you are, I think, more likely to look at those avenues and say, hey, there's other ways that we can do this. When you're young and your junior, full back dive, seems like a good idea.

And that's the other thing is that so they had these, they had the teams of eight and 12, and there were more senior guys on those teams. When they whittled it down to four, they chose what was considered to be four new guys. You know, people who had done a handful of recon missions before, but this was, what I was told is their first real combat deployment. Now, Marcus LaTrell, the only survivor, has said that he had pre, you know, he had combat experience in Iraq,

that he was on a mission to find Saddam's chemical weapons. He said this in a 2008 interview with Michael Spurkonez. So I was on that operation. I hit the number one chem biotarget, and that was in 2003. So I know everybody who was on that helicopter, the multiple helicopters, his name was not on that list. He could be talking about a different operation.

However, he didn't have that much time to gather that experience. Because if this was in 2004, Iraq was literally in March or April of 2003. Yeah. That's a quick turnaround too. And most people, most rotations in the SEAL community, if you get off of a deployment, you have probably 24 months until you pick up another deployment because you have to go through an 18-month workup cycle, the whole, the individual skills, the team unit and skills. the unit level training, all the exercises and all that stuff, to be able to go from one to the other

and he's back overseas again, I'm not saying I haven't seen that particular. If he's talking about the number one chem biotarget in Iraq, I can tell you with absolute certainty as somebody who was physically there. He was not. The other thing that he said in this interview is like, you know, Saddam definitely had mobile labs and all this stuff. And I was kind of like, this sounds a little odd, but I don't know for sure, but his reputation at least at the time was that he was still pretty much a new guy. So maybe if he had had a little bit of experience, maybe more than Murphy, Dietz, or Axelson. And again, he might have been talking about some other operations in Iraq, but as far as a J-Soc target, the first one actioned when Iraq kicked off shortly after

the Tomahawks, you know, we didn't actually fly overhead, I wish I could have seen them, but I didn't. The Shockin-aw campaign, we flew his 47s, and And Blackhawks and Little Birds in the back, C-130s, and landed them at Desert Landing Strip and pulled them out of the back and hid this huge operation. That was the number one Kambio target. So, and that's a J-Soc mission. He wasn't at J-Sog.

Yeah, right. So I don't know. But in any case, the point being that these guys were considered pretty green. And they also, none of them were part of SEAL Team 10. They were from SDV-1, right? S-D-B-1, except Dietz, who was from SDV-2. SDB2, seal delivery vehicle unit two, they did the, they did do the workup with SEAL Team 10. And, but SDV-1 did not.

They came late. And I'm not saying that these guys were bad seals. I'm not shitting on them in any way at all. By all accounts, they were great dudes. They had a lot of talent. They could have someday become amazing if they're alive. hadn't been cut short, but that platoon had had a lot of problems. And, you know, one of the things, and this is not new information, this is in the book about Michael Murphy, written by Gary Williams,

I think came out in 2008 or 2009, but Michael Murphy had shot another officer in training, a young officer by the name of Andy Halfley. That incident ended Halfley's career. And it created a lot of issues in that platoon. And the, a, you know, a trident review board apparently said, we, you know, we're going to keep Mervin. We, you know, up to this point, he has had a good career. He seems promising Todd DeGhetto, who was the, you know, the commander of SDVT1. And Admiral Joseph McIre apparently signed off on that decision. and he was kept on and then soon deployed.

But among the guys in that platoon, it created some problems. It's going to be rough. It's going to be rough. Yeah. I can't say I know of another situation that is like that, fortunately because that doesn't happen often. I think I do know of one other kind of blue-on-blue incident

in a training environment. I don't know whether that was career ending for the person or not. It makes sense that they would do a trident review board or a disciplinary review board. Whatever the outcome of that is, the people made that decision, made that decision. But yes, as the, we'll call it the E5 mafia or the enlisted people. And for people to understand, a seal platoon at least when I was in and probably during this time period would usually be about 16 people. You'd have two officers, your chief petty officer or three officers, a junior officer who was kind of just learning the ropes because you have your OIC officer. in charge, your AOIC, your assistant officer in charge. If there were more officers at the

command than billets available, sometimes they would throw in a third O so they could gain experience before becoming an AOIC. You'd have your chief petty officer, which is the E7, and then your LPO, which is going to be your senior E6 doing that leadership role before he becomes hopefully a chief petty officer on the next advancement cycle. So that's four out of 16. The other 12 dudes are where the sausage gets made. And we call them the E5 mafia because they run shit and they know how shit gets done. The boss will say, hey, I need you to go do this. Roger that. We're going to go do this. There is not always, but sometimes in what you were talking about, shooting one of your own guys in training, would probably fall into the category of that's going to create some tension

between the top four, not even necessarily the top four. We'll just call it the headshed and the boys. I can understand that for sure. Is it salvageable? Probably. But that's going to be likely a pretty tenuous working environment, especially if the boys didn't agree with a decision that was made to retain the person. And I'm not saying that that happened, but sometimes that lower level doesn't agree with what other decisions are made at a command level authority and too fucking bad. It's a rock paper rank organization. You got to deal with it, but it doesn't mean that it's always seamless when that happens. Yeah. And so actually, Marcus Latrell is new to the platoon and he saves Andy Hathley's He is a medic there.

And so they deploy. And there's some tension. Maybe not amongst everybody, but at least among some of the folks. And, you know, Dan Healy, who's the senior enlisted in the platoon, when he gets there, he informs leadership what's going on and that there is tension. Murphy apparently is bunking in a different area from some of the guys. That's not good. Apparently, Murphy, Axelson, Latrell, and Dietz were friends. Lee, like they would work out together. So it wasn't like, you know, these four guys are going on

this mission. They all hate each other. I don't, I haven't seen any evidence of that, but there is that issue. And so one of the questions I pose is like, why on this difficult mission that you're worried about do you send the least experienced guys? And some of it is, I've heard, is just that, you know, Murphy was a get after him kind of guy. He was eager to get experience. Like, how do you, if you're inexperienced, how do you get experience? You go on missions, you know. It might have been based off qualifications as well. So you're always going to need a calm guy. You're always going to need a medic or an 18 delta. They were doing wrecky stuff. I don't know how many snipers that they had, but the snipers that you have or the snipers that you have, which are supposed to specialize in that particular

type of operation. So it might have been a matter of who they have available based off of the skill set because you know how many people you're going to take. You start plugging and playing with the people that fill those qualifications. So one of the things that I was told in reporting the story from a senior seal who was over there was that part of the reason there was not a more senior and Marcus was considered the senior enlisted guy in that group and he was a new guy. Part of the reason that when they dropped the team down to four, they kept that little team intact was basically Healy who by all accounts is an awesome dude like not taking anything away from him. He'll come to really be one of the heroes of this story.

so when I say this, I'm really not trying to do that. But Healy basically did not want to be the adult supervision on with a bunch of new guys on a dangerous mission that shouldn't happen. And, you know, you can, some of the folks I interviewed were uncomfortable with me printing that and saying that in the story. They're like, I don't want to throw Dan Healy under the bus. And the way I looked at it is, is like, he's kind of sending a warning. If he's not comfortable with this and he doesn't want to be out there,

that should say something to you about your personnel and about what you're trying to do. And we'll come back to Healy later. because he does a really heroic, amazing thing on this mission. So they keep these four guys intact, and this is going to be in the group that basically goes out there. And before the... Not to interrupt you, but as I'm thinking through this, it doesn't matter if you want to do that or not.

If you're in a leadership role, you go do that. Or if you're uncomfortable with what you're going to be asking your guys to do, you change the plan or mitigate the risk in another way where it reaches a level where you would be comfortable going. You don't get to just cast off and say, I don't want to be a part. That's not how the military works. I don't understand why he would be allowed to do that. Well, I'm not certain that he had already been tasked to go out there. He was on one of the three teams when they had it at 12.

Yeah. But it was described to me that he had made it known that if, they were going to go out there. He did not want to be the adult supervision. So I'm not saying. You get to make that choice though. He might not have. It might have just been Christensen's choice,

knowing that that's how he felt. Yeah. That that is ultimately what Christensen chose. But that was the way it was described. Okay. I mean, again, I wasn't there. So I don't know. But just thinking about the leadership structure,

if you're in a leadership role, you lead. You don't get to say, I don't want to be the adult supervision. It's like, bitch, you are the adult supervision. revision. You've got to go out and do your job. But again, I wasn't there. Something about that is, I don't, I don't have enough information to truly form an opinion on it, but something about that doesn't sound right to me. Yeah. This is what I, you know, was told by someone with a window into basically the entire mission. And they were very hesitant to say it. But again, we'll come

back to Healy because what he does later is pretty special and pretty amazing. And I think really epitomizes like the best of the SEAL teams. So they're going to head out on this mission. It's going to be this four-man recon team. Before the mission kicks off, Green Beret, Lieutenant Colonel by the name of J.P. Roberts, who was helping the SEALs playing the mission. He's pretty concerned.

And so he actually has an intel guy stand up in the, you know, like the final briefing and be like, what does Ahmed Shah want to do? And the intel guy stands up. He said, Ahmed Shah wants to lure the Americans into the area. He wants to wait for 10 men to get on the rope to slide down the helicopter and he wants to shoot it down with a RPG or some sort of special weapon. He says, okay. Was the illusion some type of Stinger essentially?

No, we don't really know. You know, it might have just been something he said. I mean... No, the special weapon. Yeah, that's what it was called, but I think it was citing. This must have been something that he was saying. Okay. We'll get to the whole Stinger thing because that's like part of the lore of this mission.

Oh, we heard about it quite a bit. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. And I've got some things I can call up in relation to that because people did investigate it. Well, we did maybe provide some Stinger missiles to Afghanistan. Right, right. That may not have been accounted for in the best of ways.

But as we'll get to, I had every incentive to unearth it if it was true. I don't think it is true. And I'll explain why. I also don't think that the stingers that we gave to the Afghans for the Russian conflict have the battery life to likely still be functional. That's one part of it. Yeah. That's one part of it.

Also, they were the going rate for them about $100,000. Pretty good chunk of money if you're a low level. It's not bad. For a little hand on? Just a little handoff. Yeah. But in any case, and Roberts tries to basically, he's one of a few green braids to try to get the mission pushed off.

And Waddell doesn't want to do it. And it's still unclear exactly why it had to go at this point, at this point, the way it happened. I'm not sure. I'd love to find out more. Maybe there is some other explanation that I didn't see. You know, journalism, you know, the old cliche, it's the first draft of history. I wrote this story about 20 years later. So maybe we're on the fourth draft, the fifth draft.

But still, even when you're kind of taking more of the role of a historian, there's still going to be gaps. There's still things that you don't know. And so to the audience, I just want to let them know. everything but because so much of this stuff is still classified and so I did my best to piece it together based on the information that I could dig up and was able to see new a variety of new things why is the information classified great question it's there from my understanding of the way that the operation was conducted there were no sensitive tactics techniques or procedures there's no means or ways that

would be need to be protected by any level of sensitivity or classification, the equipment they were using at that time is well dated by this point. They just say, what specifically is classified? All sorts of things. I mean, I foiled everything that was basically available from Red Wings after the mission, and I received redacted copies of the lessons learned, the after action report, basically everything that exists, some of which I was able to obtain without the redactions. And it's all just all, you know, blacked out, basically. They almost nothing. And yet, Naval Special Warfare has helped put out multiple books about this mission. In one case, they have given classified information

to a reporter to use for a book for the Murphy book. Interesting. And so they have at least participated in these things. And yet all the stuff is classified still, how? I mean, it's a real, I have, I have theories, but I don't know for sure. I mean, I could sit here and hypothesize. None of the hypothesis hypotheses, hypothesize, would be, would be positive in nature. Again, nothing that they did, no asset that they used, no ways or means, no TTPs are sensitive. Well, and then again, there's an entire book written about this called Lone Survivor and another one called Service, both written by Marcus Littrell. Yeah. So I don't understand any of that.

But in any case, the mission kicks off. And, you know, from the get-go there are problems. You know, they are supposed to do false inserts, but they don't because the AC-130. the aircraft that is accompanying the helicopter that's inserting them, it has a mechanical issue and it has to go off station. So they don't do any false inserts. I'm not sure that really would have made a difference, to be honest. It would depend on where they were going to do them, the proximity to where they were going to go,

the number, maybe. Not a bad idea, but may not have impacted or changed the outcome. So that's one place where it could have, you know, again, not to Monday morning quarterback, but that's like one issue. The next issue that they noticed, and part of the reason they continued is that the helicopter pilots, they didn't see anybody,

like around at night. You know, they're flying low illumination. That's what the nightstockers do. But then after they decide to continue the mission, they do see some fires on the mountain and they realize that it's not entirely unpopulated. So one of the, you know,

the air mission commanders was kind of like, oh, that's interesting. So then they go to do, the insert. And when they drop the fast rope, the nylon line that the seals are going to slide down, it gets stuck to a tree stump. And they have to cut it or release it. And so the rope falls to the ground. And that's a big deal, obviously. That's like, you know, some people would say, well, you know, it depends on the circumstance or what other. Other people would say, that's mission abort criteria. The seals on the ground believe that they are able to cover it or hide it effectively.

They and Eric Christensen decide to continue on. But there is a giant nylon line now on the ground. These things are huge. I mean, the diameter of them is probably not much less than that smart water right there. And who knows what they had? I mean, I've seen 50 footers, 100 footers. And you want to have about 10 feet of it on the ground. you know if you think you're going to do a 50 foot rope you're probably going to take a hundred footer just so you have extra

but it's a i mean they're huge that's it would be the size of a tree stump and oftentimes they stuff them into a kit bag or something that you can move them with but it's the size of a massive backpack not easy to hide yeah and so they decide to um they decide to do that and you know it was it was really interesting talking to Brett Thomas, who was the officer on the backup team, because he was, you know, Brett's a really interesting guy. He spoke to me on the record. He's now a therapist. So, very self-aware. And he was just like, to be honest, I was on that helicopter. And I was, you know, I was ready to do my job, but I would scare shitless on this mission. That's a natural reaction. Yeah. And I just like appreciated his candor and honesty. And he kind of, like, when they

hit the ground, because Brett didn't know that the rope had been cut. He's like, I breathe this. sigh of relief because he was also a new guy, you know, and he, I wouldn't say that Murphy had more experience than him, probably more recon experience, because, you know, the SDV-1 guys, they came billed with this recon experience. For the guys in the back, yes. The guys in the front of the SDV, their expertise is driving that thing. Right, right. But this is the other thing that I forgot to mention when we were talking about the experience of that team, and guys only find this out later, but that platoon had, they had failed their overall ready. evaluation before deploying.

Which does happen. Yes. Did they reload and do another one? They did, and this is a little bit murky. Okay. So I've heard it this two ways. The one thing I can say for certain is that they did fail it, and they did fail it due to land.

I have also heard that they failed it to other times. I can't verify that that is accurate. Not incredibly uncommon. It happens. And those two times were supposedly via, had to do with issues and in the water. Yeah. But I was told, and again,

I know that they failed it and I know that they took a retest. I talked to Nick Baggett, who is Danny Dietz's father-in-law, and he's on the record in the story. And he was told me that the test was retaken at the team level, not at the group level, and that it was a very quick retest. Okay.

I could not verify that that is indeed the case. but he said that that was unusual. But either way, folks that I talked to basically said, look, we were trying to get people out there. We needed bodies at the time. The SEAL teams needed people in theater, but that these guys were probably pushed through when they shouldn't have been.

And that, you know, in retrospect, that that was a mistake. Well, put that, I mean, everything you're saying is plausible. Failing OREs, not unheard of. Not common, but I actually think it needs to happen. You can't have a 100% success or pass rate with these elements going out the door. So it's expected that some will fail. You can have tactical issues, leadership issues, the combination of the two, equipment failures, all of this stuff.

I've seen it happen many times. You get the chance to rejock. It also gives a chance to do a really thorough after action review at the end of that and determine where the issues are. If you need to, you can remove leadership at that point. Because for people listening, this is kind of your last go-no-go test. which is why I asked if they got rejocked and they did another one. So it's not unheard of for units to fail, or elements to fail OREs.

How does it work when they redo it? Like how soon should they get that test? What should it look like? Who should conduct it? It depends. One, on timing and what you have going on available. You need to, depending if you can identify what the deficiency is, you have to give time for them to retrain on whatever it may be.

Right? If it's a tactical issue and maybe it's not a thorough understanding at a certain level of a tactic or where that's failing, you're going to have to give them the chance to retrain before you can go back out there and do it. I would say, though, it's probably going to be within a matter of weeks in my experience. Days potentially, but at least within a few weeks. There were at least some people who felt like this retest occurred too quickly and that they were not prepared. Now, maybe that's in retrospect, not in the moment. I can't necessarily say. If the element had not had this particular incident happened overseas and they had had a successful deployment, nobody would be bitching about the frequency with which they were given their ORE, right? So vision is perfect in the rearview mirror. It's easy to say that now was failing the ORE. It was that, oh, they were pushed in too fast. And that's the reason why this happened.

Possible? I don't know about the plausibility of that. Yeah. And we'll come back to that too because the question is, what was the land warfare training like in Hawaii at the time? Was it up to snuff? But the water training, apparently, these guys were, you know, it was great. Well, that's what the STD you guys specialize in. But, you know, and how soon after did it get fixed?

And that's one of the questions that people asked in the story and that I talked about. But so these guys hit the ground and they almost immediately there's another problem, which is they have issues making comms. They're, you know, another AC130 aircraft does go on station. So why they weren't able to initially make comms is kind of unclear. You know, you and I were talking before the show, like, well, what kind of radios do they have? What did they bring? You know, I know they brought a prick-1-48 embitter.

I know they had an iridium satellite phone. They probably all had embitters. They all did, yeah. In the Pace Plan, which is the communications plan. Primary alternate contingency and emergency. This is great. This is great. A PSC 5, like big radio, is implied.

Satcom radio. Satcom radio is implied. I talked to several people who were part of SEAL Team 10, who said they believe that Danny Dietz, who's in charge of communications, did bring the PSC5 satellite radio, that he wouldn't have brought it. One guy, you know, put it to me,

he's like, of course he brought it. He's a new guy, but he was smart and meticulous. Not bringing that radio on that mission is like not bringing your gun. So I was a com guy for many years. You, before you step out the door, you are doing com checks across all of your platforms. Every time, even in training evolutions, you make sure that you have your crypto device. The radios I was working with when I first got in were way less sophisticated than the PSC-5. So we would have a radio and then a crypto device that had to go with it and the cables associated and you had to connect the two.

It's taken up a lot of real estate in your backpack, I just tell you. But you are, you have then your kick 13, which I know that I think they've switched to a crazy 10 or something like that, which is just, as I told you before, the most anxiety producing device ever because you feel like your entire career is gone. If you lose this thing, which means your entire career is actually gone. If you lose all the crypto that's being used overseas, you might be getting a little bit of trouble. No calm guy worth their salt. it would be a mortal sin to go out on an operation and not do a com check across UHF, VHF, SACCOM, whatever it is that you were planning on using. I have to believe that he had that radio.

If they didn't recover it, my guess would be if I was going to take anything off of even a non-sophisticated person and maybe didn't know what they were looking at, you would take the things that you probably think have value. The PSC-5 looks pretty interesting. They probably would take it. And I know that they tested it Because I spoke to two people who said that they were practicing calm shots with it That they tested it

You'd have to. Any calm guy worth their assault And one of the guys that said that they tested it is on the record His name is Dennis White And he was a Navy communication specialist who, you know, helped Danny test it. It was actually a seal who programmed the radios You know and and that individual, you know Would also attest to it. So the seal seemed to think that he did

bring it. Their explanation was just like sometimes crypto just shits the bet. It doesn't only have to be crypto. I was almost the reason that we failed an ORE one time in Korea. We were riding on Mark V's and then we were going to, we were in Korea at the time, South Korea. Riding on Mark fives, we ended up pushing off into Zodiacs, got the Zodiacs about, I don't know, a couple hundred yards offshore, swam in. We were going to be doing an overwatch of a shipping vessel where they had to to follow-on combat swimmer attack. Did the comm shot on the pier before we went out and gone onto the Mark Vives. We got in there.

We got in the morning. I go to make my morning comm shot. And the coaxil cable had stripped on one of the ends. And the only reason we didn't fail that ORE. And after my mentor in the teams walked me through, we were trying to make HF communications with all these radios and bounce stuff off the atmosphere. And we were trying to reach out on unsecure nets over HF, not on SACCOM. One of the lane graders was like, hey guys, what the fuck are you doing?

Like the coaxo cables busted. About an hour later, he walks over and he was just, oh, something fell out of my pocket. It was a new coaxo cable. I've had headsets fail. I've had the cable connectors fail. There are electronic devices. Sometimes, you know, you know the frequencies that you're going to be using. You're probably going to have them written down, stuff like that.

But, you know, there's a lot of things that can happen outside of just the crypto in and of itself. And the crypto can dump too. So I don't know for sure. There is a Green Beret on the internet who has a show called Valhalla VFT. And he has, you know, Nate. Nate has done an episode about this is the real story of Red Wings. And no disrespect to Nate. I've never interviewed him.

He wasn't a source of this story. I tried to reach out and talk to him about. you know, who his sources were. He did a video about things you've never heard of about Red Wings and he was talking about the comms. And almost everything that he said in that, I can say is most likely false. Sometimes that's how it goes on the internet.

Yes. So, you know, no disrespect to Nate. I would love to talk to him about it and explain what I know and how I know. But they make... So the other thing is in Lone Survivor, in the book, they say, you know, they finally make comms. And I'm pretty sure in the book,

it's actually Marcus says that he's the one who makes commas. comms with the AC130. Well, on to this point, too. Yeah. If you get in there and you are unable to make comms, you're done. That's go-no-go criteria right there. So just so people understand, especially in the real world, this isn't an ORE where one of

your buddies in the training cell says, oops, the coaxel cable fell out of my pocket. Yeah. This is overseas where you can't reach a higher level of authority or you can't reach assets. You're done. And you have a plan, like most the contingency slides are roe. You have a plan to figure out what you're going to do. And also, hey, if you don't hear from us in six hours, maybe you should do this. If you don't hear from us in 12, you need to send it. You know what I mean? So you work your way through these. But that is absolutely mission no go. If you can't make comms, you don't continue. So it took them a while to get comms, but they eventually did. And they actually, and people ask like, Ross, how do you know this? Well, I happen to have Merckchat from the, the seals in. in Bogram at their talk talking to. You should explain what Merch chat is.

Merch chat is like AOL instant messenger for the military, basically. And it really looks like it. And I can call some up in a bit when we get further on when we talk about comms. But I also have a sit rep or situation report taken from after the mission. And that shows like everything kind of happening from a variety of sources all compiled together. I have a copy of Marcus's debrief, at least a typed version. It was the intelligence debrief taken down by, I believe, an intelligence officer. I can't tell you for what agency per se.

It could have been Navy. It could have been, you know, the agency. I'm not sure, but it's an intelligence debrief. I also have a summary of action report that was sent to the families after the fact, which is similar, but not exactly the same to that intelligence debrief. It differs in some pretty critical ways. And, you know, just a variety. And then I also have letters that. Dennis White, who was the communications liaison in Jalalabad,

wrote to the Dietz family after the fact saying about what happened from his perspective 20 years ago. You take all those things together and, you know, there are blank spots, there are holes, there are inconsistencies, but there is a consistent pattern at least. I also spoke to a senior seal who was familiar with the columns log in Bagram, which may differ a little bit from the ones in Jalalabad for a variety of reasons. And the SEALs made communications at least eight times throughout the mission. So this idea that they never made comms or that they just had no crypto or something can't be true. It would have been mission abort.

Right. And having the Eritium or satellite phone, you're not going to continue as that as your only source of communication. That would be one of your contingencies, hey, we'll call you and you guys need to come get us. We can't make comms. We're not continuing. And there is no record of unencrypted communications, nor does Dennis White. who I interviewed or any of the other seals that I spoke to or any of the other Green Berets that I spoke to who were on the task force. None of them remember anything about unencrypted communication being used on this mission.

So still some holes, but I can say that this idea that they never got comms or something just isn't true. I think you're my, I'm not an expert, but having talked to all the people I did, having dug into this for years, I think the simplest explanation is probably just kind of a hard place to get communication. locations. Something just kind of fucked up. Well, it depends on where the look angle for your antenna as well. Maybe the antenna was slightly damaged. Sometimes, I mean, it depends. The SACCOM antennas have improved over time, but they're largely unidirectional. You can't just hold it up straight up and it's going to go in every direction. You have a look angle. You have an azmuth. You're sitting there holding the thing. Probably not great for irradiation, by the way. But hey, it's easier than setting up the little tripod legs and then you get it all perfect and the fucking thing tips over on you every single time. So guys will hold it. But what if you're in a place where your look angle is really hard to achieve? What if you have to, it's right, you know, it's, you have terrain there and your look angle is just over the top. It can get sketchy.

There are reasons why Combs can be difficult to achieve. And so, you know, I've also been told that, you know, by all accounts, and, you know, Danny Dietz is not infallible. Like we're not here. I wasn't here to create a geography about him. I think his father-in-law, Nick, would say the same thing. Mike Peter, Ossil, who I interviewed, who was, you know, mentor to Danny and actually introduced Danny and Patsy at a party. He also kind of mentored him. He would say the same thing.

They said, look, Danny was promising. He was good. If he made a mistake, like not bringing the radio, it should be talked about. But they don't believe that he did. I guarantee you he took the radio. I can't fathom a world where he didn't. The fact that it wasn't recovered would me, to me would indicate that when they were going through his stuff, not to leap forward in the story after he was killed, that would look at to be something that would. have value. Like, for example, I know they had night vision. That wasn't recovered either.

You know. So that's not saying that because there was no night vision, that also the radio was taken, but night vision was demonstrably on them and not recovered. So things it would appear were either lost or taken. It was also in the in the con-op, at least. And I realized things could change. But in the con-op, it was listed as his radio, as something that he would take. And most of the agreed berets on the task force where like there's no way he was allowed outside the wire. I would have to agree. So that was my take too. So, you know, in the story I start talking about, you know, Dennis White is manning the comms, right?

They continue the mission after the fast rope. They continue the mission even after the comms issues. They resolve the comms issues. And they're going through, you know, they're getting to their, their, their, their, their, their, their, so. Observation point. So, um, they. They get there. Put the laptop right in front of the mic. That way when you're looking at it, sure. There you go. Yeah. So I'm looking at this. I can feel Michael getting anxiety over there.

Sorry. So I'm looking at this because we're about to get really granular here. And the reason I got so granular on the story, the story is 18,500 words, which is insane. The idea that anybody would let me publish this is like, I'm trying to think of what the equivalent would be in your world. But like... When I started looking at it on my phone, my thumb was just going for days. Yeah, exactly. It's basically like a book. And let's not get crazy. I mean, you know, how many words was your book? By the way, congratulations.

76,000. Okay, so it's not quite a book. Your shit's rookie numbers, okay? But it's a lot of words for a magazine article that runs on the internet and is not in print. Most quote unquote long. Do we even call that a magazine anymore? It's Politico magazine technically. But it's not printed.

It's not printed. We have to evolve with the times. Yeah. But, you know, most magazines. even in like the New Yorker, like they don't normally run things that long. And I was talking to the editors who were really supportive about it. By the way, they did not pay me for 18,000 words. It was assigned at 6.

And I said, if you guys can figure out a way to cut this down to 6, I'm all for it. But I can't figure it out. Good luck with that. Yeah. And I was like, look, we need to write this for the people who care about this mission. People who care about this mission, the details matter. And if I'm writing a history of this mission, which is what I'm really setting out to do, I need to get as granular as possible while still being interesting and because people otherwise

are going to have these same questions. I'm going to interject and say, I don't think the mission matters at all, but I think the truth does. Fair enough. Because that to me is what is the most important. I don't want people to think what I want is for people, when they hear something coming out the military, I want them to have the ability to believe it because there is no history of things deviating from the truth. And again, I wasn't there, but I will say even in the SEAL community, there were questions about this story almost instantly. And I'm not somebody who can pass judgment on that because I wasn't there. But as I mentioned, there are very few operations where tentacles start to spread out. And to me, oftentimes that is an indication that somebody in some or aspect of that.

And maybe it's the leadership in naval special warfare is deviating from the truth because they see they can turn this into something, which I'm sure they sit in a room and say, you know what? For the greater good, we can get more people interested in joining. Fuck that. Tell the truth. We don't always win. We don't always do the right thing. I don't ever want to set this expert. of perfection and that shiny object. It's not fair to the community, and it's not fair to the people who are looking at that, trying to figure out if that's what they want to do as a vocation in their life.

I think that's exactly why this story matters, but even more broadly outside of the seals, this story is about institutional distrust. And we see it in the media. We see it in my industry. We see it in government. We see it in finance. We see it everywhere.

And the reason is, is because people feel like they're being lied to, and then when they are lied to, they no longer trust things. And when they don't trust things, we then get this backlash, right? And that backlash is to, like, destroy these institutions. But like, these institutions matter. And they comprise our society. And so I think that that's, you know, you asked me earlier,

how did you get in this story, why you care? I think that's the reason that I care, because it's a window into all the forces that are roiling our country, our society, our people. And it's a story. about the stories we tell ourselves about people in occupations that have Laura and Mystique associated with them. And I believe, based on my own experience, you don't need to add anything to the things that legitimately were accomplished. And I'm not saying that this operation wasn't

legitimate. But the things people have done enough, trust me, are more than enough for Laura and Mystique. People wouldn't believe some of the shit that legitimately happened. You don't have to layer on the other 30%. But once one story gets 30%, man, if we're going to get you to pay attention to the next one, is it 35? Is it 40? Right. And, you know, one of the things that happens with this story is that, you know, it creates a permission structure for other stories to be told publicly without really necessarily vetting and, you know, also become recruitment tools. I mean, we'll get to that.

But, you know, I wanted to get granular. Yeah, I wanted to get granular because this is a really important part. of the story. So the way it's told in lone survivor is, you know, the seals are going along with their mission. They don't. In the movie, I think they actually see Ahmed Shah, but in the book, they don't because in reality they don't actually see him at all. There's a reason for that, because he's looking for them. He's not in the village. But then, you know, basically what happens is they get compromised by goat herders and two goat herders and, you know, young boy. This is the soft compromise, though, was referencing in the con-ups.

And they were worried about, as you saw on the slides, like they were worried about a compromise. As any rec team should be. And what I was told was, you know, basically this concept of a soft compromise and what to do, that there were tactics, techniques, and procedures that had bled over from Bosnia into places that, or even Iraq, for that matter, that were not appropriate for them like in Afghanistan. So like the way Mike Peter described it to me was, you know, if you get compromised, you know, in Iraq, you can just like take another building and, you know, be in the same place. And it's fine because you know you've got an airplane that's like pretty close away can help you out. You could. Yeah. Trust me. There's arguments for and against what you're just describing.

But yes. You know, just in theory. But in a place like Afghanistan, if you get compromised, especially on this mission and in this rural area, it could take over an hour for anybody to come help you get you. Like it's a ticking clock. Well, urban and rural operations are very different. Yeah. Using, you know, the option to a strong point or hard point another building. Those are ballistic. Probably going to stop a lot of stuff that could do damage. You can achieve high ground.

That isn't necessarily case in a rural operation. Wherever you may be, it's all compromised. You may end up having somebody having the high ground on you, right? It's not just as simple as like, oh, we'll go hard point this tree over here. Yeah. That doesn't work. Yeah. So they're different environments.

They're different tactics. And so in any case, in this instance, they, you know, they're worried about the compromise. that the SEALs knew what the right thing was to do. But there was also some cultural issues going on at the time, both in SEAL Team 10 and on that task force. There were three other teams that had been compromised by Goatherders in previous missions by SEAL Team 8, which was the team that was there before SEAL Team 10.

One of them did the right thing. They called for extract. They did exactly what you're supposed to do. And they were mocked when they came back to the base and called basically a bunch of pussies. for not continuing the mission. The two others stayed in the field, despite being compromised

and continued the mission. And for the young guys, the inexperienced guys on the team, that sent a message of like, whatever you may have learned in the classroom, you're in Afghanistan now, and this is what you do.

The other thing that was happening is this is a task force dominated by Green Berets. Waddell was not parochial. It gave opportunities, but the seals at least felt in some ways, like they were the odd men out,

kind of looked down upon, kind of not seen as, you know, up to snuff in some cases. Peers are equals, perhaps. Yeah, I mean, they had had some successful missions, but they felt they had a chip on their shoulder in some ways, is what I was told in that they at least felt like they were viewed a certain way. And so it contributed to...

I wonder if that was real or self-imposed. I don't know. It depends who you ask, whether you're asking the green braes or you're asking the seals. But in any case, so this had been like a live issue. And so there were actual missions by... by new guys in which they were soft compromised by goat herders. And they just never told anybody. And they just continued the mission because, and this was happening.

And so these goat herders compromise them. And the way it's described in the book, in the movie, well, at least in the book, is that they take a vote. They, you know, and I think it's like Axelson, Matt Axelson wants to kill the goat herders. Danny Deetz doesn't care. you know, Murphy seems to want to let him go. And I think it's like, I think Marcus actually makes, kind of makes the decision, the deciding vote in the book, even though Murphy was the officer. And needless to say, in Marcus's debrief that I have a copy of, you know, at least the typed out one,

not the handwritten one, there is no mention of a vote whatsoever. Most people, including Michael Murphy's dad, have said this vote never happened. Marcus has to try to explain it after the fact like, well, I was describing it as a vote as like a mechanism so people could understand it, but everybody kind of gave their assessment and it happened pretty fast. Needless to say, there was no vote. Like, it's a total myth of the mission. And they decide to let these goat herders go free and continue the mission. And they then, they had moved about 15 minutes away to another spot because there was like from their initial observation point because there was a fog. And they go right back to where they had been before in their initial observation spot.

Here's what happens, though. Supposedly, they never make comms with anybody. But actually, they have a radio check-in at 520 Zulu time. Zulu time is like the universal time used in the military. They call in, they say, you know, everything's fine. So at, and if you could, God, I don't know if I have it in one of these, but call up the Merck. Call it Merck 1. Is there a reason why you have that window so minimized, Michael? Are you trying to make your life hard? Or just our life hard? Your life. I mean, obviously, that was implied, but I guess

you know, you can maximize that window a little bit more and you can see more options. Well, the text size would be the same. Yeah, this is it. So 524 Zulu, they call back. So four minutes after their check-in, they're compromised. Spartan is trying to get a hold of Mr. K, Eric Christensen or Mr. McGee, Grievy, will attempt to raise on stat. That's Jalalabad right there. NASS off JAB. Then, you know, there's a 10-minute gap,

but we see Spartan's last calm was that it was packing up and moving on. This is pretty demonstrable truth, again, to go to that no comms were never made. Like, these entries don't get made unless, you know what I mean? This is, you would be, you would, your career,

If you were to make up something like this and put this into Merckchat, you're done if this didn't end up. And then this is a way for them to, it's, it's, again, I don't want to overstate what it is or minimize it either. It's basically Google Chat, but it allows people to look at it. And it's a way to share information to stay off of the net. You know what I mean? It's connectivity and spreading information and not taking up voice traffic, essentially. One of the lore, some of the lore that happens after this mission and we'll get into that of why that law happened is that the talk wasn't manned, that there just weren't people there.

I actually think... Which is insane if you have an operation going on in the field. It's also just not true. Yeah. It's demonstrably not true. This is Jalalabad talking to Bagram. There are people there. The talk is manned.

And I actually think that some of those myths may have come from Marcus LaTrell, believing that the talk wasn't man. Maybe that's what he thought, but it wasn't true. there is some confusion here. You can see. Yeah. They literally say, okay. Who's backup?

That was confused by everyone here. Yes. So there's some confusion. Neptune 11 is Bogram. So they think they're moving on, right? There is no mention here of a soft compromise or goat herders. In Dennis White's letter to the Dietz family, there is no mention of a soft compromise or goat herders. How do you think that story made its way into the...

lore of it. I believe that the goat herders store, I believe they were compromised by goat herders. I know there are some people who question whether or not it ever even happened. I can't give you definitive proof. I can only tell you I interviewed Muhammad Gulab extensively and he seemed to be aware. He seemed to think that there were goat herders, that he had heard that they had run across locals, that that was the lore around the village. So, but I know that I, you know, it does, somebody who once told me, he's like, isn't that like in the Ranger manual? Like, you know, like, This is like one of those things, this moral dilemma that you, that you face. Do you kill them?

Do you let them go? It's also. But there is no moral dilemma. No, there isn't. Because with any level of experience, you realize it's not a binary choice. It's not, do we kill them or do we let them live? It's, hey, guys, we're already having enough issues. We've been struggling with comms.

We're going to go ahead and detain this bit. We're going to get on comms, tell them to come get us. Like, we're done at this point. We have a casketing error chain of things that are going to. going wrong. When we can hear or see the helicopters on short final, let them go. So it's not even a hard decision. So in this place, now you could say, okay, they're just trying to speak to Christensen. They don't want to tell the like Navy, you know, comms guy on the other end, you know, that they got compromised. Maybe they're embarrassed to do that. I'm not sure. I don't really

know what's in their head or what they were thinking. We don't even need to hypothesize. What we can say demonstrably is that they were making comms with somebody, which I think is, an important. Yes. Now, the next thing, so then, so 524, this is the compromise. Then a certain amount of time passes. And the way it's written in the book, the way it's shown in the movie is that they, this is shown in the movie, this call is actually in the movie. And they don't tell anybody that they're compromised. That happens in the movie.

Peter Berg must have been aware of it by talking to Seals. But it's presented as if it's normal for them not to say that there was a soft compromise in that moment, even though they can't reach Christensen or McGreevy, who just, you know, the call, there was also a, you know, the call just, I think there was a first a radio call, then there was a sat phone call, an eridium call, and the iridium call drops before one of them can get on the phone. And, you know, whether they were sleeping or doing something else, they're very close nearby.

And there are other people who answered the phone that you can basically explain what's happening, but maybe just due to inexperience or embarrassment or whatever they don't. What is written in the comms logs at Bogrum was that they tried to call again at about 6 o'clock and they don't get through. So they did supposedly try and call back and say that they were compromised and find out what to do. But in Dennis White's letter and in that sit rep, if you go to sit rep, I think it's 02 sit rep, go up. one more. That one right there, I think. Oh, boy. Enhance. No, sorry, it's a different one. It's not that one. It must be

0-1. It's 01. The very first one at the top. Enhance that one, too. Okay, so here's use. This is, this is a situation report taking from a variety of sources, and it can give you, like, I'm not saying that there aren't errors in that these things are created in real time, but it gives you a sense of, like, what's happening. So you see 1627 Zulu on the 27th. That's the infill. Then recon teams were in their OP, 2058, 2343, eyes in the objective.

0608. Recond team reported eyes on target and doing well. That's 45 minutes after the goat herders compromised them, more or less. They have returned to their spot. This indicates that they called again and again did not tell anybody that they were compromised. Dennis White writes this. in his letter as well. It's not in the logs in Bogram,

but it's also possible. And apparently this call happened, according to White's letter. It happened, they called both on the radio and on the Eridium and got through both times. Now, again, is this inexperience? Is this an error? This is the closest we have to what happened

in Marcus Littrell's timeline more than an hour elapses that they try and make comms at seven o'clock Zulu. And the timeline is totally off in that. I think to me this indicates that they did call. For whatever reason, they did not say they were compromised. Again, inexperience, could be embarrassment. I'm not second-guessing them or judging them.

But this is the best evidence that I was able to see that these calls were made. And nobody was told of the compromise. I had heard people say over the years there had been stories that they actually called the Siege of SOTIF. from Tactical Operations Center, I've spoken to enough sources that I've determined that that is not true. That the Sieges Sodaf, the task force run by Waddell, was not aware that they were ever compromised either.

They just didn't know. And so whether, you know, if this is an error and White is misremembering, it's still possible, but either way, they had opportunities to call and say what happened, and they didn't. And so that changed the story from a story of, you know, in lone survivor, it's presented as we were too kind to enemy,

to civilians on the battlefield, therefore all these people lost our lives. This is the problem. We need to change the rules of engagement. I'm not saying that I'm an expert on the rules of engagement or what should happen. That's beyond my expertise. But I think that these phone calls change that story into a story of training and experience, not a story about moral compromise. There is no moral compromise. And you absolutely, do not need to change the ROEs for a soft compromise. You need to have, and I'm not now, I am now not speaking specifically about Red Wings,

but just in general, you need to have put in the thought process and the planning. Most of the times you'd have a brevity code for a soft compromise that would initiate a change because you know that the operation's over. You're going to need an extract. You're going to need to be able to change your behavior. And it's easier just to say that brevity code

than it is to try. try to explain on the radio what's going on. But you need to, you don't have to change the ROEs. There's no ROEs that need to exist that if you're soft compromise, you get to execute people who are living their daily life. No, fuck off with that. You need to have the experience to understand the potential effects that can come from that and make the appropriate tactical decision in real time.

Because the next call here, recon team came in contact with an unknown size of anti-colleation militia element called for immediate close air support, moving down the valley towards Chikaw Village last known Recomposition. This is a 10-dig grid quadrant that is given which is a position down to one meter Which is only as accurate as to when the call Was actually given. It's no longer accurate If they continue to move but at least it's a good reference

To start searching for. So yeah They're calling in that now That would be a hard compromise. They are now Tick troops in contact And so there has been a debate over Who made this call As I was telling you before we started talking I was given one of the last

letters that Dennis White wrote. And Dennis White believed he was speaking to Danny Dietz on the phone. Two people, though, took this call. Dennis White either went to the bathroom or went to get chow at a certain point. And the JAG, the guy by the name of Mark Tackla, he picks up the phone as White is coming back. Tackler believes it's Murphy. White believes it is Deets. And White is tough. Have you ever heard been on the receiving end of an iridium call? It would be pretty hard to tell by somebody's voice. It's, well, oftentimes it's a little digitized as well, too. It's not the same as you and I sitting here talking. There's slight distortion. Those phones have a extendable antenna as well as specifically the ones that were being used in that time period. And I know this because that's how we used to check in often with friends and family. Actually, not even friends, just family. And my wife at the time, I know what her voice sound like. There's a horrible delay. It's this weird conversation. And again, oftentimes things trail off and digitize. I knew it was her because of the volume of conversation. I could have with her, but that's going to be a tough one to recognize voices if you are not intimately familiar with what they sound like. Exactly. And, you know, at the time we were, what, what Dennis thought was that he thought it was Dietz and he thought that Murphy's call came on a cell phone because that is what Marcus Littrell wrote in Lone's Arrival, that Michael Murphy pulled out a cell phone and called, or at least what Patrick Robinson, Littrell's, you know, co-writer.

Do you think he had a good roaming plan? I think he had AT&T. What do you think over there? In Coenar, like 3G? Three bars? Maybe you had cricket? I don't know. Your cell phone doesn't work over there, guys.

What are you talking about? And especially not at that time. So it was just an error in the book, honestly. But White is not trying to take anything away from Michael Murphy, considers him a hero. He just legitimately and very innocently wanted to let the family know that, like, Danny was doing his job and wrote this letter. And he wrote, you know, he wrote one apparently to Patsy,

and he wrote one to Cindy Dietz, who was Danny's mom. And so I was, you know, Ed and I were going to do a story about this because at the time, the Dietz family was pushing for Danny to get the Medal of Honor. This was like a 2019, 2020. Trump had her at the White House for a celebration. I think that she handed, it was either Trump or some of the other congressmen who were with him, a packet for Danny to get the Medal of Honor. And they were kind of pushing for this.

And we were going to do a story about this. What really happened thinking, you know, maybe there was another phone call. We weren't trying to take anything away from Murph. We were just thinking, well, if you gave one guy the Medal of Honor for a phone call, shouldn't you give the other guy the Medal of Honor? And we were writing it for the New York Times as at war section. And that section shut down. And so we never ran the story.

And actually, I'm really glad that we didn't run it. It was like, because I just didn't know if it was true. And I didn't want to put the family. through all of this without knowing, like, I had something definitive. And I had spoken to a lot of seals, but nobody was on the record. I mean, it was all just like everybody on background. Nobody felt comfortable. Everybody was just nervous about upsetting the families.

But a lot of people believed this. And so I just like let it go and just assumed I would never write about this again. I could see it being plausible because as the calm guy, yeah, maybe. He would have been the one responsible for communication. So to make a little bit of. long story short, the reason I got into this again, and I was just going to let this go, I kind of left full-time journalism, but then a couple years later, Kabul fell.

And I started getting phone calls from sources related to stories that I had written or edited about Afghanistan, and they needed help. And I, you know, as I've told people before, if you need my help in a life or death extraction situation, you're probably fucked because I have no skills. What am I going to, like, write a poem to get you out of it? With that attitude. You know, you need to be a high agency person. You're just sitting there saying, yeah, don't call me. You're fucked. Yeah. We need to work on your skill set here. Right now you've got probably a butter knife going on. We can do better. But, you know, I still try, obviously. So I just start calling everybody I know. I, State Department officials and USAID folks and Marines and

ex-agency people. And I actually get in touch with someone who knows someone who's at the airport. And we get some people out and some people we don't. And that sets me on a path to be involved in these rescue operations for like several years. And suddenly I'm getting like all these midnight phone calls from like random Afghans and I'm plugging their names into spreadsheets. And my phone is just like if you were to look at it, it's just photos of my daughters and then a bunch of random Afghans passports. Yeah, you're definitely on several watch lists. Yeah, absolutely. And what I kept hearing over and over and over again from the people.

that I worked with, and they're mostly former Green Berets, including a guy by the name of Jim Gant, who wrote a book called American Spartan, which I really recommend to people. It's fantastic. Jim spent a lot of time in Konar. And I just hear over and over again, the things that haunt us about the war are not

seeing our guys get killed, or the people that we killed. It's feeling that we were lied to. It's the moral injury of being told one thing and another thing actually being true. It's tough. And, um, they really felt that with these Afghan rescues.

And when I would tell them, oh, I wrote this story about Muhammad Gulab and I mentioned all the issues with, you know, Gulab coming here and the fraying relationship with Marcus Littrell, people would be like red wings. That's why Red Wings matters to me. It is a symbol of all the things that got,

that were fucked. Like not the mission per se, but the aftermath. It was a symbol of everything. And so then I start thinking, maybe that's why this story matters. Who cares about the phone call? Like, these guys did the best they could in a bad situation.

Maybe we'll never know who really made the phone call. And I started reporting the story again. And that's when a seal by the name of Eric Deming goes on the anti-hero podcast. And he kind of unloads what he has heard through the years

from being an instructor at CQD, close quarters defense, from guys about what really happened during Red Wings. And I have a buddy who, an army guy who knew about all the stuff that I had reported and is a good friend of Goulog, and one of the people that kind of really looked out for him. And he's like, I'm hearing this guy on this podcast. And he's telling me things that only you've ever told me before in private.

You've got to see this. So I go and I check it out and I listen to him. And about 50% of what he was saying, I was like, yeah, that's totally right. And the other 50, and then maybe 25%. I was like, no, that's not true. No way. And then the other 25% I was kind of like, well, maybe. So I don't know, Eric, I know the episode that you're talking about. To the best of my knowledge, he talked about things that he had heard about a variety of situations, well beyond Red Wings, and produced zero pieces of evidence to support his feelings. So it is all oral history and it is all lore. And as you know, that plays an important part in your community. He took some big swings, though.

And some of those swings were huge misses. Yeah, but I would say, and honestly, like I consider Eric a friend now at this point. I've had a lot of conversations with him. I've been very honest about the places where I disagree with him, and I don't think that the evidence supports what he said. But he gave space to guys to tell the truth, and I'll always give him credit for that. These guys, I talked to like six, seven seals on the record, those guys would never have talked if Eric hadn't done that. They never would have done. And they never would have certainly never talked if Nikki Baggett hadn't been willing to come forward.

and Brett Thomas, who were the two first people to go on the record. And some of it was because they just didn't think what Eric was saying was true. And others felt like, yeah, I'm glad that he's saying this stuff. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not. But like, why are we having to say this on podcasts? Like, why Ross are you the one who has to investigate this? Then we should have done this for ourselves. And Eric didn't have documents because what he had were the stories of people coming through at CQD

and telling him those stories. And you know in the teams, when you hear it from other people, people. If they're guys that you trust, you tend to believe it. If they have the ability to show that they were proximal to the event, you have to keep in the back of your mind things. So as an example, the things that I take with a very heavy hand are the Red Squadron guys that I know that physically walk the terrain for the body recover, specifically of the helicopter. Firsthand reports of the people that physically went and recovered the bodies, the three bodies from Red Wings, the Marines that actually went into the village to help Marcus get. Like that is pretty

verifiable information. The farther you get away from that, and I'm not saying it's not true, but I always keep in the back of my mind, is this something that you saw or is this something that you heard? Yes. It doesn't diminish necessarily what you're saying, but games of telephone produced the same result every single time. Yes, 100%. And I will say the other issue is that, as you know, the military is so compartmented. So you could be an eyewitness to something

and believe something and it just not be true. And then you tell one person about it and they think it's true because you were an eyewitness. So like there were people that Eric talked to that were there. And so it is not like six degrees of separation that he's reporting necessarily. Some of the things he said were,

he crushed it over the left field wall. The problem is he mixed that in was striking out quite a bit as well too. But some of the things that I think they missed were things that were firsthand information even. And it's because of this, because nobody, this that you're looking at right now

that people are seeing, this was totally redacted in a FOIA request. This same sit rep. Almost nobody who was involved in this mission has ever seen this, ever. And so. Which is an uncanny. common. Right. Most of the people who are going to be on the ground are not going to go into the

talk and look at the merch chat. No. And and and and not a lot of people saw the after action report. Not a lot of people saw the investigation. I mean, everything was so compartmented that people were left with lore. And so I don't blame them for believing the lore because they had nothing else to go on except lone survivor, which had such, you know, obvious holes and exaggerations. And again, I'm not going to say lies because I think lies involve intent. I don't know what the intent was. It could have been just accidental falsehoods in some cases. I'm not sure. I'm not here to pass judgment. But if that's all you have, then the lore becomes really valuable and really important if you are not going to spread the lessons learn in the way that you're supposed to. So I call up Eric

when I start talking to him and I'm like, all right, I'm going to dig into this. Now I have a reason to tell this story. I think it matters. I think it speaks to what's happening in this country. country and I'm going to and I'm going to dive into it. And it's interesting. Like it's actually how journalism is supposed to work, which you might go in with certain assumptions that you try and stay objective about and you let the evidence follow. So I actually came to believe that Michael Murphy did make the call. And the reason is that in the con up, it shows what the equipment that everybody is supposed to carry. Let me guess. You have on the smartphone. No, there's a typo. There's a typo. Does it say cell phone? It does not say cell phone.

No, that would be great. That would be a good tie-in. No, so first off, when the mission was supposed to be like eight or 12 men, the officer had the eridium. But in this case, the person who had the eridium was a guy by the name of Bones Murphy, who was the Intel officer. They just put the wrong Murphy. They put the wrong initial in front of Murphy. And so that led me to believe it most likely probably was Michael Murphy. you know also it's never a bad idea to let's say your primary comms were backpack stuff for the com guy

if your rucksack burns in for whatever reason and it's oh the eridium was in there too that's a whole different problem so it's not a bad idea to disaggregate the communication equipment right right so and you see in other of this comms thing like so now the clock is ticking right they've been soft compromised that last call is a hard compromise the 918 but at that 608 So there is another call at least at 843. 608, I wouldn't even say as a soft compromise. That's just reported eyes on target and doing well. Right, but that was 40 minutes after the soft compromise took place.

It's happened. Yeah. That wasn't what was reported, though. Exactly. So there is another call, at least one other call at 843. And it's on the iridium and it's kind of broken. And it's like somebody is saying it says HLZ 1-2 Swift appear to be good HLZ. I was thinking, okay, well, maybe they're trying to call in for extract.

Like, could that be it? But the more people I read it to, they said, well, it's hard to say, it sounds like they were continuing the mission. That doesn't make any sense, though. Well, because the battle hasn't started at 843. Oh, sorry, sorry. Okay. By 843, the battle hasn't started. We're getting close, though, based off the times.

Yeah. So either they are trying to call in for X-40s. extract at that point and now they're just not getting comms and there might have even been another call after this it's unclear from the comms logs um but if at 843 they are continuing the mission that makes you wonder well were were they surprised when they were ambushed did they know these guys were after them in the book lone survivor it says you know they see these guys in the ridge and they know they're about to get it on that 843 call those those helicopter landing zones those HLZs, that was for the assault.

So those weren't really for extract. Yeah, let me break that down for people. So they were up in OPs or observation positions or that's what they were working towards. Is the small reconnaissance element, correct me if I'm wrong, but the conops basically said, if they could identify the person that they were going after, there would be a follow-on assault, utilizing those HLZs where they would land and then assault looking for that particular individual.

So, yeah, these pieces are all tying together. That is interesting that they, would be talking about HLZ is associated with the operation, listening to that. And again, this is super fragmented information. If you are referencing an HLZ, it is likely going to be much more advantageous for the ground assault coming or the half, the HALO assault force, it's probably not going to be anywhere near you up in an observation position. You're going to have other HLZ established.

The fact that they were talking about that would lend me to believe that they were continuing on with the operational plan. That's what a lot of people said. Again, I don't know. What you wouldn't do is say, hey, we need to close air support, and we're going to get extracted from the HLZ that's near or proximal to the compound or village that we were about to assault. You'd be going from the outside of the fire pit jumping right into the ashes. Would you commence the operation early? Not if you were compromised, especially if it was in a place where the gunfire was going to be able to be.

be heard and the kinetic activity that was occurring in the mountains, all you would be doing would be setting up that Helo assault force to be coming into a potential enemy that is prepped and ready to go. Because they're probably not just going to sit down there and lit and like, oh, I wonder what those guys are. I hope they're having a good time up and decided. No, you're going to go get your shit. It's time to do gangster shit at that point. So that would not possible, I suppose, but not probable for me because you'd be setting up in my mind that follow one forced to be going into an even more dangerous position. So if you're Dennis White or other folks sitting in the talk, you don't really know what's going on.

You haven't heard for them in a couple hours. You're getting bad comms. But you don't really have a sense that there's anything urgent. I mean, and you do see... Based off what I'm seeing here so far, you would think we're good. We're continuing on. I don't know exactly what the comms windows were. I think it was every hour or every two hours.

But, you know, they didn't miss three of them at this point. You know, they may have missed two or they may have missed one. And they're trying to get in touch with them. And you see the back and forth. And they, and, you know, and then you see Bagram talking to Jalalabad. And they're like, oh, yeah, have you heard from them? And they're like, no, I haven't heard from them since like, you know, that 610 comms window or whatever. In any case, the next call they get is for the tick.

And, and. Which, by the way, for people listening, that gets everybody's attention, specifically in the R.C. that you might be in, regional command that you might be in. But depending on the net that that's reported on, that might be the satcom net for the entire country, people are paying attention. That's why you report troops in contact because assets are going to start getting shoved in your direction, which is what they were calling for. Close air support were cast as the way that it was described.

And there's this line in the book and in the movie, you know, where Mike Murphy, who, again, most likely made this call. You know, he makes this call. the way Marcus Latrell describes it is he can see him, he sees him go out on a rock and kind of sacrifice himself, go out in the open to get reception to make this call. In the movie he gives Marcus his ammunition before this happens and Marcus knows he's climbing up the mountain to do this.

In reality, in Marcus' debrief, they're all just like tumbling down the mountain. And he doesn't say that he sees him make this call. He says he hears him make the call. And so if we go to Latrell debrief one right there, I believe in the slide. Michael, drag that box a little bit bigger, if you will. Oh, which one? The one your fucking mouse is on.

Just grab the corner. Not that one. Not that one. Just grab the corner. Michael, I am going to come over there. The box you just opened. No, the one we're trying to fucking read. Make it bigger.

Now make the text larger. Do you see how this helps everybody, Michael? Yeah. Thank you for my coming to me talking really tiny screenshots. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk, Michael. You're welcome. So I will say if there are any typos in here, it's because this is a situation where I recopied this. It was, you know, I was in a room, happened to be on the table. I happened to type it up as one would. We can just leave it at that. Yeah. So this is one of these things that's very different from the book. In the book, every one of these guys. this is coming from a debrief. This is coming from the debrief. It's an intelligence debrief taken at Bogram. In the book, Latrell, basically every guy, he sees every person die. And in the movie as well, too. In the movie as well, too, in the book, Danny dies in his arms. Actually, I take that back. In the movie, he is not with Axelson when he's not with Axelson. He sees Murphy. He's not with Deets either. In the movie, again, the movie being in these cases more accurate because Peter Berg was told these things. He may have had a copy of this for all I know. Um, he. Um, he. It.

Yeah, but so it says, you know, as NavSov element began abounding movement, LaTrell observed Dietz 75 meters behind him. He heard Dietz yell, help me, and he never saw Dietz again. And then they're continuing down, and they're taking heavy fire from, you know, three directions. And in the course of this, he hears Murphy make this call for help. Now, in the version in the book and in the version that was sent to the families, there's a lot more detail here.

And I don't know exactly why there's less detail here than in the other versions. But there is Murphy's call on the phone for help. And then there is Murphy calling screaming Marcus's name, as he says in 60 Minutes interview. And that's when Marcus says, I heard Murphy scream my name and I tried to get up to him and I couldn't get there. And, you know, I had to put my gun down because I just couldn't stand here, him screaming my name. So none of that is in here. Is it an error because they didn't type it up? Is he going through, is he still involved in trauma when he's saying this?

Or were those embellishments? I don't really know. But in this case, all we... How long after he was recovered? Was this allegedly taken? This happened. So he was, this was, you know, he had time to rest and eat and chill out. And then he just started telling the story.

And this was a combination of the story he wrote out. Or this was one version of the story he told. So he'd been to the doctor. He had gotten meds. He had. gotten to rest for a while, eat a cheeseburger, watch part of Batman. It's not like immediately after, but it's not days later, you know, like it's probably next day. I ask because he may not have been ready to talk about that aspect of it.

Yeah. And he's also told the story to the Rangers and the Green Berets in the village already, you know, when after he's rescued, I think everybody knows the story. It's not a spoiler. Well, the book is titled Lone Survivor. Yes. So you kind of know. Spoiler alert on the cover.

Yeah. So my point is, is like, I cannot say this is ground truth and everything he said afterwards is not true. But I can tell you in this version of the story, he does not see Murphy make the call. He hears him. It says when they heard Murphy's call for aid, he was examining Axelson's head wound at the time of the call. Latrell thought the wound was fairly severe and that Axlson's skull was exposed. Littrell attempts to move back to Murphy's location, but he couldn't find cover. and he could only move back 50 meters towards an exposed position on top of a rock.

So none of those details that you see from the movie are there. This tells more of a story of like four guys. They get ambushed. It's not good. They break... Pass over tea kettle down the side of the mountain. They break contact maybe in a somewhat disorganized way. And they're very far apart.

They're separated. I mean, I don't have it in this slide. But, you know, Marcus hears this from like, you know, like, 250. 50 feet away or something like that in a gunfight. He's down the mountain. Murphy is up. So it's a very... I don't think they were wearing earpro during that gunfight either.

I think they all might have had cans on suppressors. Also Murphy's on the iridium, so it's not connected, right? Yeah, no, it's not connected to a con. It's just a handheld. There's audible exclusion that's happened sometimes when you're shooting. There's a lot of things that can degrade your ability to hear. It's tough. It's a lot more nuanced than crystal clear hearing from 250 feet away exactly what's happening.

And from what I was told when Marcus is telling this story, he's telling it over and over again. He's still traumatized. He was really sick. He lost a lot of weight. He had been shot. He was injured. You know, and a lot of people were like, you know, who were watching this were kind of like, he just seemed exhausted, tired, still traumatized. So how that comes into play, I don't really know.

know that this is a different story than is in the book. It's a different story that's in the movie. You know, I don't know how this differs from the story that you heard. But, you know, this to me was somewhat revelatory. Now, the first story somebody tells is not necessarily ground truth psychologically. But, you know, it's tough. It's hard to say. It's murky all the way round. And this was part of what I was talking about. So when guys who had read this, or when guys who had heard this version of the story, saw or heard lone survivor in the book, a lot of them were like, hey, no disrespect to Marcus, but like, what the fuck, you know? Which would be a natural reaction to have. You're seeing a stark difference in what you're seeing here and then what was

portrayed, you know, in the written medium and to some degrees in the, the movie as well. If you'll go to the other debrief slide, it's 004, if you'll call that one up. Today's episode is brought to you by Firecracker Farm. We're going to talk about salt. That's really what it is. An overlooked seasoning by me for most of my life. Look at this thing. Look at this dispenser. This thing is badass. A metal dispenser, it's got a plunger or a push button so you can totally have this be a choose-your-own adventure. If this becomes overwhelming for your meal, it's probably because you want a little bit, heavy on the plunger. That's one of the things I actually like about this. It's spicy salt for sure. But like I said, choose your own adventure. Put a little bit on there. Or you could choose a different

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bit backwards but this is he's describing the initial ambush and he's described the fighters as all being dressed in white man jammies with a dark sash at a traditional Taliban headdress he talks about breaking contact how they're tumbling down the mountain now i want to focus on that detail of the white man jammies with a dark sash okay that it's the choward camis a traditional Afghan outfit. So the militants film this attack.

They have portions of it, right. Portions of it. They have two cameras. I have, and there are time stamps on the camera. The versions available on the internet don't have the timestamps. And actually somebody has done this thing where like you seemingly can hear American voices in the background

and they've dubbed it seemingly with like audio from the movie or from what they think happened. And it's like, you know, Marcus, come and help me, which is like what Marcus said, you know, what was happening. I took that audio and I took it to recording studio and I asked them to, you know, enhance it and see what we can hear. And it's just guys speaking in Arabic and Pashto. It's a total optical, it's a total cognitive bias and illusion. And I mention it because part of the reason I reached out to you and wanted to come on the show.

One, I listen to the show and I like it. But also, you know, I heard your interview with Alan Mack, who I spoke to for the story. And in the comments of that. Michael. Now he's crushing it again. It's like a metrodome. We just want to be careful with this because we don't want to show like Murph's body or anything like that. Like it's pretty gruesome.

Yeah. But this is the video we're talking about. See how there's like. So Michael, the way to get around this is just keep the camera. Yeah, I'm not showing. I show it. Just in case you don't have a little negligent discharge over there. It's a time.

I usually do. So these are the guys. Now this date, on certain videos, this is June 6th, 2005. So this is a day before the attack, and these are supposedly the militants, and then it will switch over to the attacks. The videos that I have show them, you know, basically being, you know, walking through the mountains, doing all this stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it's kind of compiled together over various dates. They did produce a propaganda film in which they set it to music and like all this stuff, but this is. is not the propaganda film. This is just the raw footage. Yeah. Skip to maybe halfway, Michael. Yeah. So where they have those little recording buttons on the bottom there, in a version that I have, you see timestamps. And those timestamps are accurate based on the Merch chat. So you can kind of

recreate kind of what happens. This is probably the attack. Yeah. I mean, it's all, it's all like blurry camera footage. So what Ed did and what the Marines did is they took these videos and they're... We're good with the video, Michael. It's going to be tough to find anything meaningful. Yeah. They did like a shadow analysis and they got Terps to translate it. I got a terp to translate it, at least the portions that I had. And they were able to distinguish nine voices, nine different people in the video. That doesn't mean there aren't other people in the video. I think that those estimates of the troops in the intelligence were actually pretty accurate. And I'll get into why in a little bit. But, you know, you. you don't see a bunch of people wearing white with a dark sash in their video. And again, some of what you're looking at was the day before. Day before. And you see some guys in white. But when you actually see the guys of the day, none of those guys are wearing white. And again, I'm not saying that he made it up.

It's he the battle. Why are you paying attention to like the clothing people are wearing? You'd be surprised what you remember and what you don't. But that's what I'm saying. Like there's a lot of trauma. There's a lot of different things involved. but you would think that when this comes through, people might ask, okay, how accurate is this? How are we going to vet this? You know, there are some information that he had really accurately, and there's some that he didn't.

Some of this might be his brain just filling this in as well, because you see it and you know it's a traditional garb and you're not necessarily sure. So your brain connects the two. 100%. Yeah. 100%. And a lot of the people who were involved in the reintegration process said,

you know, like, you know, this, he's the best witness we have, but we can't say if it's 100% right. I have questions to what extent they really use the video and really anybody really tried to say, okay, this is what he said. We're not saying he's lying. We're not, but what actually happened here? I think they were, and maybe rightfully so, really worried about his mental state, reintegrating him, having him return with honor. Yeah. And that's important. And that's good. But when people are then, it's not an investigation, the reintegration. They're being very deliberate and very careful what they do. But there were investigations afterwards. And I'm curious to what extent they really dug into this and really

looked at it, because if you take this account and then you mesh it with Afghan accounts, so in this account, by the way, Marcus says that there are 30 to 40 militants who fire at them. and he says he kills like six or seven on his own. In the book, it's like at certain points, it's up to 200 people. It's a tremendous amount of fighters to have geographically located in any one area in Afghanistan, let alone Konar. Yeah. There were reports of 200 guys. We saw the report of 600 fighters and all that.

Yeah. Those reports were real, but they were also very false. And anybody... I've read a report one time that said Osama bin Laden was getting ready to go have tea in Kabul. It doesn't mean it's true. Right. And so same thing.

Just like how Ahmed Shah was not a member of Al-Qaeda, he wasn't an Osama bin Laden close the associate who was trying to attack America, as lone survivor says, you know, this is another detail in the book that's exaggerated. Now, 30 to 40 guys, that seems to be more than most people who were, you know, in intelligence thought there were here at the time.

But, like, you know, you're getting fired on by a bigger force with superior firepower. It can certainly feel like that. Yeah. You know, I would say not even necessarily superior firepower. It seems like they had the terrain advantage on them. Absolutely. So one thing, I've never seen the classified history written, you know, by the J-Soc historian of this mission. It's never been released.

I would assume that that history. historian would take into consideration what Afghans said about this. So what did Muhammad Gulub say about it? What did the villagers say about it? What did informants that they had say about it? But that point of view has been totally absent from this story. It's always been, Marcus Latrell is the only survivor. Nobody else can say anything. Nobody else was there. Well, there were, according to him, 30 to 40 other guys who were there. And as it turns out, an intelligence agency did have a source that was like a part-time member of Shah's militia. And then there was another source that basically helped, years later helped a special missions unit with a separate, totally separate issue.

And to kind of prove that source's accuracy, they started asking him questions about, you know, how does he know so and so. And this source started describing the lone survivor story. And this source was one of the men involved in it. And when you hear that source describe it, he doesn't say anything about goat herders, for example. He names, you know, eight guys or eight to ten guys, but then said, yeah, there could have been a couple more. So, you know, the people who were in the room,

they thought that the estimate of anywhere from, you know, about 12 or as many as 20 was about accurate. And again, that doesn't take anything away, from the seals in any way. If you have terrible, if you're in terrible terrain, you have the disadvantage, they have superior firepower,

the element of surprise, they know it. Like, you're in a bad spot. These guys did the best they could with the training they had and the moment they had. They don't have superhuman abilities. Yes.

You know, tactics for tactics. Exactly. And that's the issue with the story is like, okay, it doesn't really matter whether it was eight, ten guys or 30 or 40 guys. It doesn't matter. What matters is the story emphasized rather than emphasizing, you know, these are the training issues we need to take care of. These are the mission planning issues we need to take care of. And maybe you just keep that quiet and you keep that within naval special warfare. But instead, you come out with a story that is basically all about changing the rules of engagement and, you know, we should be more brutal to civilians. And that's the what you're presenting. And then you take a story that's essentially a tragedy. And in a way, it's kind of, it's kind of,

It becomes a hero's story. A lot of the guys that I spoke to about this mission, they tell me both seals and Green Berets, I talk to young guys all the time and they say, oh, I wanna go to soft and I say why. And they're like, oh, lone survivor, man. And they're all just shocked because they still feel awful about this mission.

And they, you know, a lot of them carried a lot of weight about this because they felt like, what should we have done to stop it? So that maybe these guys could have survived. And I was really worried when story came out like what are what are the families going to say like what what did they say well maybe it's a bias because of the ones that talked to me or ones that if they're willing to talk to me they probably didn't hate my guts but a lot of them were grateful and a lot of the guys would want to know the truth

if it was my child that's that's what basically people said and they felt like they had been lied to and they felt like a lot of them had different opinions of marcus some of them like marcus some of them Don't some of them still feel like, and I think, you know, money is a part of this, like what happened with the proceeds from the book that, you know, promises he may have made or may not have made about where the money was going to go or, you know, I didn't get into all that. But some of it was just did Naval Special Warfare not tell us the truth about it? That's the issue and why I wanted to sit down and talk with you, because to me, that's what matters. If this is instead of a hero's tale, likely one of the largest tactical failures, kind of from soup to nuts, from planning to execution, not intentionally. And again, that doesn't take away from the actions that were taken on the ground and the bravery and them doing the best they could in a horrible situation. But there is a conversation about whether or not they should have been there in the first place.

if something that was way more impactful internally in the community as a transparent lessons learned that could have permeated far and wide was turned into something by leadership of the community that no longer has a direct tie to the truth under the guise of let's inspire and recruit the next generation I have a problem with that. I have a very deep problem with that. And the reality is both can be true. You could tell the exact story, still focusing on the actions that were taken by people

that were in a situation that was over their head, literally, I guess, metaphorically in this instance, because they didn't have the high ground. It's an amazing story still. You can point out all of the things that could have been potentially different without a signing fault and still inspire

the next generation of people that would look at that and say, man, I wonder if I have the stones or if I could have done what they did. You could still do that and tell the fucking truth. So this is one of like the murkiest parts of the story is and to tell the abridged version is basically Marcus comes back.

He's healed up. He tells the story and the talk. A lot of people, People have a lot of questions about what really happened. And they never really felt like that got answers. There was an investigation by General Frank Kearney, and it was a commander's inquiry, and like, almost nobody got to read it. Where is it today? It's classified.

There was also an after-action report. Why classify that? Everything is classified. I mean, like... Again, there's no state secrets there. There's no national security measures or matters there. It's a weird move. I can, you know, I can conjecture and say, that looks conspiratorial.

Right. I'll leave that. I'll say it looks odd. I don't necessarily understand it. I mean, overclassification is so common, though. For sure. Everything is classified. You know, 20 years later, it's a different conversation.

Again, there's no TTPs, ways, means, methods in there that are going to be exposed. What there might be exposed is. what the military or the Navy or those that supported that narrative did with information that they shouldn't have. And embarrassment is what there might be. So, uh, currently does this report. Basically, nobody's allowed to read it. There is also an after action. I've been told there's an after action report done by Dev Groo.

I've never seen it, but I've told that it is separate. I haven't heard that one. Again, they were involved at the, uh, with the recovery aspect for sure, Red Squadron. I don't know. They may have done an after action on their aspect of it. Pretty sure I was told it was Dev Guru. It might have just been all of J-Soc. I know that there was a J-Soc history,

which is, again, classified. And then Kent Paro wrote Lessons Learned. I know this because I have a completely redacted version of it. But I also have a sense of what was said. And a lot of it is like the really obvious things that we were talked about. One thing that isn't, as far as I know, talked about in that part is, and I think this is interesting is, were guys with limited experience.

Again, a lot of talent, but limited experience put in situations they were not prepared for. So a guy like Eric Christensen, again, by all counts, amazing guy. But he was very junior to have that position and to be in charge and to make those decisions. You know, one thing we haven't talked about is what happens with the helicopter. So these guys are compromised. The phone call comes in. Heaven and earth starts getting moved to this happens. And so they, one of the, like, there was no, apparently no back brief by CJ76 to understand, like, who was doing what and where.

So the whole, like the helicopter plan was kind of a mess. Like a lot of the people in Jalalabad thought that the Apaches were supposed to be in Jalalabad to go get the guys. And then there has been this rumor and this, this is in the movie where they remove the appellee. And they go take them away for some army mission or the rumor was also to take some general around. And that did happen. There were Apaches at Jalalabad that went and escorted a general of some sort or were being used for other missions. Those were not assigned to the Red Wings mission. What happened was is the Apaches for the Red Wings mission that were on, you know, they were basically on call for Red Wings and then any other missions. They were already at Bagram.

But because nobody knew where they were supposed to be, it created all this confusion. and all this delay. Substantially different flight time as well. And right. And then, so Christensen gathers together a makeshift, you know, QRF. They weren't supposed to be the QRF. We're supposed to be a bunch of Marines and SEALs and Blackhawks at Jalalabad. At least that's what the SEALs thought.

So he's gathering guys to go. And then nobody, and people are just trying to figuring out and becomes this kind of mess. So Christensen and his team, they fly from Bogram to Jalalabad. And then the Apaches do eventually launch. And by the time they get the word to go and the confusion is understood, they get together really quick. And Apache pilots for years

have felt like they've been scorned. Like they just didn't have their shit together. And that's why everything bad happened. It's not true. They got together really quickly once they knew what they were supposed to do. But the confusion, you know, the lack of command and control

in the design of the mission created these problems. So Christensen is at Bogrom. They've got the Blackhawks there the Apaches are landing and the MH47s with Christensen and them on it, they're taken off and they're going. Which, by the way, are the fastest helicopters of everything you just mentioned. Right. And they're supposed to slow down and wait for the Apaches to look and clear the sight of any of the airmen. Trips and contact, brother. They're hauling ass. Right. Those aviators are amazing. They will move heaven and earth to try to get people on the ground. However, they can get risky.

And they were, it was supposed to be an air wrecky. And they were just, they were not supposed to touch down. They were just supposed to circle. the area, see if they see the team, do they get voice contact? But you know, guys, they want to, they want to save their brothers. And they, you know, I guess an audible was made in the helicopter and they made the decision to drop guys off and land. And that was exactly what Ahmed Shah wanted them to do. Amat Shah, you know, helicopters hit. It, it rolls down the mountain, blows up. There were guys on the rope who kind of just fell down and there were no survivors. One of the rumors and the lore over the years is did somebody survive? Did people, did leadership?

Were they cowards? Did they not go in there? One of the things that I've seen that were, I can't show because I don't have permission to do it is I have the Apache, the camera on the Apache where you can hear all the conversations that are going on between the helicopters. And it's so chaotic. It's amazing. Anybody can understand anything. And one of the things you hear is the Blackhawks are telling the MH47s to slow down. And they're saying heavy metal, heavy metal.

And they choose not to slow down. They choose to go to the site. But the other thing you hear is you hear somebody say, oh, we have a possible survivor with their hands up. And that is also in the Merck chat, right? But when the Apaches go to check out that exact spot where that is Survivor, they see a guy with a red shirt or a red scarf, and an RPG gets fired at them from,

from very close range, and they nearly get shot out of the sky and blow up, which is what led people to believe, oh, no, that was not a survivor at all. This was a militant trying to trick them going into it. But if you just saw that Merck chat, and you might think, oh, my God, we left somebody behind. And this is some of the lore that spread over the years.

The other piece of lore that spread was, was it a Stinger missile or an SA7 that shot them down? Again, as Eric said in that podcast, Amet Shah did say that he had some sort of special weapon. There are people who really thought they saw a certain type of smoke trail. There are witness statements. If you'll go into that file, go all the way to the bottom. I think it is.

Scroll down. Let's see. Redacted. And that's the sit rep. Sorry. It's pilot deep brief. WikiLeaks. Which one is it?

God. I should have organized. It's much better. Hilo crash assessment. Go up a little bit. So this is what all my FOIAs look like. I don't see what the issue is. I can really pull some stuff out of that.

So this is the assessment of the Hilo crash. It looks like this is NSW's assessment. There was also an assessment by the Army's aircraft shoot down assessment team. Scroll down to the bottom, Michael, just so I get a sense of the document. I feel like I know what I'm looking at. But okay. There are other interviews that are less. redacted with witnesses who witnessed this. So people really did say and really did believe

that it was some sort of shoulder-fired missile. They genuinely believed it. They told it to people at the time. It doesn't mean it's true. It doesn't mean that they're lying. It's fog of war. The reason I think it's fog of war, again, because an intelligence agency and the special missions unit both talked to people, sources who they felt were vetted inside Ahmed Shah's group later and they said, oh no, we had an RPG. We didn't have a... RPG is very common. You would hear about Stingers very much. I am not aware, though, of there ever being an actual Stinger fired at an American aircraft in the 20 years. Well, that's what, you know, Alan was talking about on the show, and I talked to Alan about this,

and this is interesting. And one of the things that he said that is true, he said, well, did anybody see the flares come out of the helicopter that would disperse if it was? as some sort of heat. It's an auto countermeasures. Yeah. And he said that he was watching in the talk as this was going on and he didn't see the flares. Which an RPG wouldn't set off. Sometimes you're flying in these things and it scares the shit out of you because they'll go off for no reason.

Or you could go over a heat source and they go off. They're very sensitive. An RPG is not going to set that off. Right. So here's the thing. I included that in my story. I interviewed Alan. He's great. He's the best. His book is great. I really enjoyed it. The only thing is that there was no feed in the talk showing this live. And we got it wrong. And we had to make a correction in the story. Alan remembers that. That there was. There are several other people who told me that they remembered it too. The problem is the technology did not exist for non light of sight. The only aircraft in the air at that time that could have seen the explosion.

and recorded it was an A-10. A-10 may have had a lightning pod on it. Yeah, but they don't pipe to the talk. Not then, because Rover didn't exist at that time. And so there's no way anybody could have, now they could have heard it or they could have seen a video afterwards. And I believe that that's probably what Alan is remembering or other people are remembering.

I had a lieutenant general tell me the same thing. You are watching a lot of feeds in the talk. And again, this might be an issue of your brain filling in blanks. 100%. 100%. I mean, and also it's been 20 years. And so this is one of the challenges of the story. So, you know, no disrespect to Allen. I called them up. I told him, hey, you know, we have to make correction. But he's right because no pilots reported seeing the flares. And, you know, wow. So again, this is a sort of thing where you think you saw this smoke trail. You really believe it. You think that it could be in SA 7. And then when you get in meetings and people interview, you know, they say, No, you didn't. You didn't think what you saw. You should just kind of shut up, move on. And that's what some of these seals were told. And so then for years, so then they're basically told up to shut up about something they thought they saw. Then a book comes out with information that isn't true that Naval Special Warfare is essentially signed off on. What are you supposed to think? All you've got is the lore, right? As a guy who's enlisted or an officer, like you suddenly feel like your government, your military, they're lying to you. I have a lot of compassion for those guys. Those guys aren't conspiracy theorists. They shouldn't be dismissed.

It doesn't mean that their information is accurate because they haven't been given the full picture in a way that accurately allows them to understand what happened and move on. And this is a real, this is something that's not in the lessons learned, but should be from a military organization's point of view or from just a general PR point of view. and so that's why you know that's how you get some of the things that Eric said that I don't think are true like that it was an SA7 or that there was drone footage I know from the

from the Merckchat that there was a predator drone eventually in the air but it wasn't until about 15 or 1600s of you it wasn't on station it wasn't on station while it happened so they never would have seen the mission and so it couldn't have recorded the shoot down. Now, if you'll go here to these files real quick, there should be something called WikiLeaks in here.

Pilot debrief WikiLeaks. Or no, not pilot debrief WikiLeaks. Sorry, go up one more. No, no, no, keep going. Keep scrolling out. It's a different WikiLeaks. A10 seeing the crash right there. Go down. So this is on WikiLeaks. This is public information. And again, Alan is right. The A10, Grip 21, witnessed the explosion of the MH-47 as it was flying. Large explosion consisting of lots of black smoke. Grip 21 immediately tried to contact the MH-47 but was unsuccessful. So everything he said was true.

It just wasn't on a live feed. And the A-10s would see it. Now, I haven't spoken to the A-10 pilots or the AC-130 pilots. I've been trying to get their point of view. I'm sure that would add in holes in the story and allow us to. It's something that they don't necessarily want to talk about. for whatever reason, and that's their prerogative. But, you know, those sort of theories

continue to proliferate. So there is no video, I believe, of Marcus Lattrell abandoning and running away from his guys. That's my understanding as well. There was a rumor that there was a video of Marcus telling the story to people that was not disseminated

and was squashed. by dev grew or by other SEAL leadership because they felt like it wouldn't serve the community by spreading that around. Maybe because some of the things that he said were inaccurate or maybe I don't know. But somehow that story got conflated with the pred video. I've talked to people who say, oh, I was told in real time there was a pred video. But every time I've asked, I've been like, well, who's the person who told you? And I've never been able to get a direct source. So based on the documents and the evidence, I don't believe it's true.

If it is true, someone should send it to me. And then I will gladly come back on your podcast and be like, hey, I'm sorry, I was wrong. Here's the video. But I don't think it's true. Well, it's not going to change the outcome. No. It might change the way. And again, we're talking about the crash here, whether it was an SA7 or an RPG,

it was horrendous loss of life with people trying to do the best that they could. I don't think that particular detail changes much inside of it. No, and I think it was seen. There were a lot of guys who were mad at leadership for not, after the helicopter goes down, everybody goes back to base, and they want to go in for another rescue. And there's a delay, and they don't want to go in the same way, because leadership was worried that they would just get shot down again. And some of this was legitimate.

Right, because some of these guys had been a part of Anaconda, and they knew what had happened, where you had all these helicopters getting shot down by going back to the same place. And they didn't want to repeat those mistakes. but for the newer guys who were there, they wanted to do everything they could to save their guys. And they were upset.

And they weren't told everything. And so this kind of lower spread of cowards being in charge. And in retrospect, it was the right decision, actually. So they had to wait, but then bad weather comes in. So they have to wait longer. And then they try this trek over the mountains like you were describing this insane.

Which nearly every individual involved in that describes it as the most horrendous evolution of their life. Yeah. It's like the worst day. Like harder than buds, harder than ranger school. I hate my life choices. I'm only continuing on because of the importance of this. Yeah, just, yeah, just destroying people.

People are getting IVs halfway up. Yeah. Yeah. So it was really tough. And then eventually they were able to fly helicopters in. And actually, that recovery operation is really remarkable. Yeah. And I mean, it's really amazing and heroic.

And before I move on, I wanted to get back to Dan Healy really quickly because as Christensen is gathering guys to come in, there are a bunch everybody's piling on the helicopter and there are a bunch of guys who were on and healy apparently pulls some of them off and says hey those are my guys down there there's too much weight basically and so he pulls guys off the helicopter and he inserts himself and some of the guys from sdb one who all want to go and save their brothers and they get on the helicopter to save them and because of that some guys lived and some guys died yeah and and some guys got back and didn't realize that this switch had taken place like carl finney and he told

me he thought he had lost all, like, all his men. Yeah. And I tell that story because whatever happened with Healy not wanting to go on that mission, that decision is amazing. To me, it's like some of the best of what you guys do. And I consider it to be heroic. And that's why I didn't feel like I was disrespecting him by telling the first story because that second story is kind of what it's all about. And somebody willing to make that decision on the second portion of it, it doesn't align well with the potential decision in the first one. So you know what I mean? There's a little bit of a divergence there.

Not to say that both didn't happen exactly as he described it, but also maybe the story about Dan or the reasoning that he had isn't necessarily that accurate to begin with on the first part. I don't know. Yeah. In any case, so they eventually do recover Marcus LaTrell in the village. This is one of the most contentious parts. You know, it's a mix of Rangers and Greenfield.

Brays and they kind of meet up towards the end. And it's kind of like these hodgepodge teams. And I was able to find some of the stuff out because Rick English, who was leading that group of Rangers, he's since passed away, but he had had handwritten notes that he kept. And he gave him to Tony Brooks, who was another Ranger who wrote a book about this mission and has been on a variety of podcasts. And Tony was willing to share some of his notes and things. We With me, there's a ranger by the name of Nick Moore, who was also in the village who wrote a book about this. I interviewed some of the other rangers, and then the Green Berets put together their own kind of unpublished history of being in the village, and they have that. So I have these kind of primary source documents that I was able to use to kind of determine what really happened there as best we can figure it out.

And basically, these villagers, they decide to save Marcus based on this concept of Pashtunwali, which is like cultural. decision. Yeah. We're supposed to save this stranger in need. They shelter him from the Taliban. Essentially, it's if they take you in, they're responsible for your protection. Right. And they protect him. Muhammad Gulab is, you know, he's not the village elder, but he's, you know, one of the leaders in the village. And Marcus sends a handwritten note through the village elder who walks all the way to, I think it's camp blessing. The Marines meet him there. a bunch of soft guys come by when they find out

they put a hood over his head, they cuff him, they put him in the helicopter and they bring him to Assadabad where he speaks to intelligence officers and other people. They try and figure out

like, okay, they've got this note. It's kind of, it's like, I don't, I've never seen the actual note, but people who saw it described it to me and it's kind of like, the villagers protected me, come, help me,

you know, and then he signs his name, but it's kind of like hard to read. So it took them some time to figure it out and they wanted to make sure it wasn't a trap. And eventually what they figured out was the name of the village that the village elder used was different

than the name of the village on the map that the Americans had. And they were able to figure it out by asking him, well, who are the bad guys in your area? Which one intelligence officer told me was like the smartest question he ever heard somebody ask to figure it out. And they figured it out. But then there was, and this isn't in the story,

but there was this like confrontation between the Rangers and CIA officers at Assadabad, because the CIA wanted to let the source go and they're all about like, okay, well, you're our source now, we'll help you or whatever. And the Rangers had orders. This is our only source.

We don't know what's going on. Do not let this guy go. To make a long story short, apparently guns were drawn between CIA officers and the Rangers. It became a big incident. Just so you know, that's really not going to go well

for the CIA officers. Probably not. The Rangers have a little bit more trigger time. Yeah. You know, I kind of thought that was one of those stories that was kind of BS, but when I had heard it from enough people, when I finally, because when I finally heard it from the Rangers and they were like, yeah, we weren't only going to let that guy go off on his own. Then I was kind of like, okay, maybe this, maybe this is true. The question is like, pulled guns. What do they mean by that exactly? We'll see. I'll leave it at that. But in any case, they go to the village. They, you know, they, they share the intelligence. They find Marcus. And he is, obviously, he's shot. He's injured. He was, you know, hit by shrapnel. I'm sure he had a variety of other injuries. I don't

have access to, like, the full list of them or anything. Some people have said that he's exaggerated certain injuries. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. He was banged up and he was sick. I think that that's the important takeaway. And also, he just saw his teammates. He knew all his teammates were dead. Again, he didn't see them, but he heard about it from the villagers. They go to rescue him, and one of the most contentious things is he seems to have a lot of ammunition on him. Gulab has said that he had 11 magazines. Let me tell you how that conversation went when I interviewed Gulub about this. I should add that Gulub did not talk to me for this recent story.

This is all from my interview with him in 2016. He is a green card holder and does not want to be involved in this. We're cool, but he was just like, hey. No, I get it. Also, he went to the 20th anniversary for Red Wings, where he saw Marcus for the first time in years. I think they had a good conversation. I don't know if that means their relationship is on the end.

I hope it is. And I don't think, I don't want to interfere with that. And I don't think Gulab wants to either. So, fair. What I'm reporting on is something I reported in Newsweek in 2016. And I, you know, I said, you know, he said, yeah, Marcus had a lot of ammunition. And I said, well, how many magazines do you have on them? And Gulab without blinking, he says, 11.

11 is the exact number that Marcus said that he had in the book. And you could say, well, Goulog just read the book, except that Goulop can't read in English or Pestow. How would he know the exact number? How would he know that? How would he remember that if he was just repeating something? Years prior to Goulog telling me that, the Rangers had said they didn't put a number on it, but they said he had a lot of ammo. Rick English, you know, had said as much.

And if you go to that slide, just, you know, to show people that I really do have these documents that are Rick English. This isn't reference the magazines per se, but if you'll scroll up. Where is it? Scroll down a little bit. It's got a little green icon, 17. Yeah. That one right there. These are the handwritten notes that Rick English took in the building.

So, you know, they're getting out of there on July 2nd. Muhammad Alam Shina, that is Malik Shina he's the elder Gulab is the helper We have Dr. Sarwar Who is, his name is Sarwar

He's Gulab's brother He's one of the guys You have nine SF, 8 ODA, one JTAC Three ASF, I assume That's Afghan Special Forces So these are his notes

From Being in the Village Now, what he told Tony Again, years before Gulab, had I ever said this was that Marcus seemed to have all his equipment and ammunition. That does not mean they were saying he didn't fire a shot where he was a coward. They were just saying he had a lot of ammo. And more than you would expect from a hours-long battle like the one that he described.

And so they weren't, they were trying to figure out where the bodies were so they could find his, other guys. And he was telling them they're all dead. You guys need to watch out. There's a lot of guys. They're going to get us. Like, he really believes there's a ton of guys. He's obviously traumatized.

He's spooked. He's happy when he gets his weapon back and he's injured, but he's capable of putting up a fight and willing to put up a fight. So they were not saying this as an example of cowardice, but that just he had a lot of ammo. Maybe it was, maybe, you know, he had just fired part of one magazine. Maybe he had actually brought more on the mission. I don't know the detail. The importance of that detail, again, is not a judgment towards him. It's to say, this was not some three-hour.

or shoot them up firefight where four seals are killing 100 Taliban and running out of ammo. This happened pretty quickly. They were in a bad place. You know, that's the importance of that detail. A lot of people in the comments, that Alan Mac video or other videos are saying, Gulab found him 100% with full mags. And, you know, he never fired a shot and all this stuff. And they were taking that from my article.

Yeah. And I've had people with me on the internet argue with me being like, I read it in Newsweek that, you know, Newsweek published that Marcus LaTrell never fired a shot. And I'm like, I wrote the article. I never published that. Yeah. I think Gulab had questions about whether or not he really fired a shot. But unless somebody is going to show me, oh, I logged his ammo.

I know exactly how much he brought. I know exactly how much he brought back. I'm not going to say that and print that, you know. I've never heard of guys taking more than 11 mags. I mean, that's a lot. That's a full setup in front. 11 mags fully stuffed at 30 rounds, even if you're 30 plus one in the gun for your first magazine, right? That's 331 total rounds. It would be very hard to get through a multi-hour engagement and have any ammunition remaining. And this is not an accusation towards anybody. I'm just looking this purely from a mechanical perspective. It is in line, though, with essentially being ambushed ass over tea kettle down a mountain to maneuver away from an enemy unit. losing sight and contact with that and not having another opportunity to shoot another round,

though. Possible. Yeah, I mean, what the Rangers assumed is that he probably had shot, you know, almost all of one mag, or then maybe, you know, maybe he could have gotten another mag from somebody else or something, but that, you know, this idea that he had, he in the book says that he shot all but one magazine, basically, a magazine and a half. And, but in the debrief, it's pretty clear that the, by the firefight, which he says starts at about 850 is over by 930.

That's when he crawls behind a rock after he's... 40 minutes is still a long time being a gunfight. But a lot of this, it's not all on gunfight. There are breaks where they're hiding, they're running. So again, I felt like it's something important to say because people have taken things that I've written to like cast this moral judgment on him and what he's done. And they are, again, surprise, surprise,

people on the internet saying things, but they are exaggerating what has been written in that way. I have heard people say that he did not fire a shot, but I have never... Hey, unless that you were there, maybe keep that one to yourself. That's how I felt like people are getting out over their skis on that one. If under the assumption, if he had arrived when he was rescued and had the vast majority of his magazines,

if you were initially ambushed by a numerically superior force that has the high ground, for anybody who's never been taught or talking, very basic fire maneuver. If you are ambushed, you need to develop an overwhelming fire superiority back in the other direction. So yeah, you're going to zip through your first mag, maybe your first two if you need to, depending on what the situation is. But if they got caught in a place where it was a sheer cliff on one side and they were pinned in and their decision was to go over, you might not have a chance to shoot more than one mag. But you probably would dump some rounds at least, it's, and even, you don't have to be point shooting. Get heads down. Get person on rifle.

off of rifle. Kill them awesome if you can, but get them to stop shooting at you. Pointy ballistic things that are coming at thousands of feet per second so you make a decision. If he did arrive with that level of equipment, again, it takes away no bravery from them doing the best that they can, but it would be more in line with an initial contact and then becoming separated. And if it's that vertical, it would also be very difficult for those people to continue to track you from above than to an engage. So therefore, you probably wouldn't be shooting back that much. And so I felt like it was important to mention that. Maybe it was the way that I wrote it that led people to that assumption. But then I have a responsibility to kind of explain it. And so I wanted to do that. So then,

you know, then Marcus, they, you know, they rescue him. Again, another detail in the story that people focused on was the Green Beret said that he, when he had his rifle, he jumped over a little thing and ran into the helicopter. Again, it does not mean he was not shot and was not injured. adrenaline is a thing. It means you want to get the fuck out of it. I'd probably be running over. I'd be probably a qualifier in the Olympics on the hurdles at that point. And just having my best,

not that Usain Bolt was a hurdler, but I would do my best Usain Bolt over any wall that was in front of me to get on a helicopter as well. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, I've had guys read the story. Team guys tell me you were too nice, you know, that you should have held him more accountable. I just felt like that's not, my job is just to present the facts.

And as fast I can and not to get out over my skis on anything. This sucks to say, but I'll say it because it's how I feel. If there is a point in time where, and this is a hypothetical, I'm not saying this is the case, where there needs to be somebody held accountable, the community needs to do that, not an outside source. It's not even your place to hold him accountable. At least what I want the SEAL teams to be, what I want the SEAL community to be, it is their role. Not yours. You can help maybe push in that direction and bring enough scrutiny or a spotlight on it to a place where they would be forced to take action even if they don't want to.

But at this point, a lot of the leadership that was in is probably on the tail end of their career or already out. And if there was a mistake and a record that needs to be corrected, the current leadership is still capable of doing that. Well, especially because the head of NSW was at SD1 at the time with that team, Admiral Allman. I mean, he knew Murph, he knew those guys, and been told by people that he was a good mentor to some of them. So knowing that, I didn't know he was the senior person.

It may be an issue of they're going to let every single person time out or retire until they would do anything. And I'm not saying that's right. I'm just saying that's a possibility. Again, I am not saying that we're at a place where that needs to happen. But if it did, in my opinion, which accounts only for me, the only entity that can hold somebody

from the community accountable is the leadership of the community itself. That is their role. That's their job. And so I think we should now talk a little bit about, we've talked about the debrief a little bit. We've talked about how guys didn't really know it was true, how like things weren't disseminated,

how Afghan accounts were basically ignored and how this mythology is allowed to grow internally. But we were talking about how the book was created, and that's like kind of the murkyest part of this story. And this is where it edges a little bit towards naval special warfare. Whether they, again, I would have to hypothesize

about the intent behind it, but they certainly threw a lot of support behind it. Yes. So I can't talk to the intent, but the support is undeniable. So you have a situation where you have, this is the largest loss of life in naval special warfare at the time because extortion 17 hasn't happened yet. There are greater casualties for that one. And, you know, they're trying to figure out their need, they need to give the family answers. They're trying to console the families.

You know, Marcus is going around. He's going to the funerals. He's meeting with him. Admiral McGuire, the head of Naval Special Warfare, is doing the same. I mean, this is not an easy situation. You can put yourself in their shoes how difficult this must be. People must have so many questions and they're trying to figure things out. My question was, like, how did the book get created?

And the way Marcus told it at the time was, you know, he wanted to honor those guys by telling their stories, which is an admirable thing. He also said that there was misinformation. coming out in part from the Taliban, which is true. There was a video. He also said there was disinformation or misinformation or misinformation rather coming out from the media, which is true.

I mean, they're always, every breaking news story, usually you'll look back at it five years later and you'll see a variety of things wrong. It's the nature of the general. The first reports generally are the least accurate. Right. They can get some wavops. Dan, the peaks and valleys are vastly different.

So there is some of that. for sure. But at the time he basically says that, and this is, he tells this story in a 2008 interview with Michael Samarikonish on a program called Book Club. It's a great interview. It's really fascinating. Marcus tells a great story. He's like super charming.

It's like him at the height of his storytelling powers. And the story he tells is he's basically recovering the hospital. And someone above him, not like, Admiral McGuire, but somebody implies comes to him and being like, hey, someone is trying to tell a story about this mission. This is, I think, August of 2005 that this happens. Well, the only person who was really trying to do that at the time, not a news story, but a book.

Write a book about the mission was Ed Derrick, who's my writing partner, who was embedded with the Marines at the time. It was trying to write Victory Point, which told the story of the mission from the perspective of the Marines, who, as we know, part of the Navy. So, and, and they're the men's department. Let's be clear. So, and Ed is like authorized to like embed with the Marines to do this.

They give him full access. It's a very flattering portrayal of the Marines and frankly of the SEALs too. It's not some hostile like. Yeah, it's not a take down. It's not a take down at all. I mean, like not even close, but Ed got death threats for that book because it went against the lone survivor narrative. It's crazy. And so Marcus tells the story of like, oh, we got to get the copyright.

What do we do? And so he then decides to write this book because like somebody else is trying to tell a story that's going to somehow dishonor the guy or not tell the truth. And so he then he gets permission to write the book and he chooses Patrick Robinson as his ghost writer and he talks about how he does it. And then he flies out and he meets with them and he tells a story and Robinson writes it down. and, you know, they do it. And he even says, like, you know, I wasn't going to reveal classified information. And there was nothing negative to tell about this mission, except that we got, you know, our butts kicked. But there was nothing bad to say, you know, implying that, you know, there were no mistakes made, like, nothing like that.

And that's how the book essentially happened. Well, years later, he would tell a different story, which was that, like, this was basically an assignment from Naval Special Warfare that he was asked to write the book. And it wasn't his idea and that he was given his lawyers and given the agent. And there would also be stories that were spread that like the book was just kind of written for him and he didn't have anything to do with it. And I don't really know what's true, but I did interview Patrick Robinson about this on the record. And Robinson said, I only got involved once the Navy had signed off on it. And he was like, and Marcus read every single word in that book. He signed off on it.

the Navy Naval Special Warfare I sent you know Naval Special Warfare or the Navy whatever it was he's like I sent it to at least three admirals they signed off on it now the public affairs officers involved to their credit they're not like fact checking books written by

how could they yeah they're not doing that but it raises the question of what kind of oversight was given to this book in terms of what the story was being told so then I kept digging and you know Robinson I realized he had told a public story to a newspaper back in 2005.

And he said that Marcus wanted to write the book to honor his fallen teammates, that it was his desire. It might not have been his original idea. I mean, from the moment he got back, people were telling him like, oh, you should write a book, man, like you tell this story. Like, you'd give the money in charity, you know, all this stuff. So it might not have been his idea, but he got a literary agent and an entertainment lawyer. and eventually once it was signed off on,

he got this ghostwriter. And the way Robinson tells it is that the Navy didn't want to say no, and Naval Special Warfare didn't want to say no, but they didn't necessarily want to say yes. They were kind of on the fence. And then same thing at DOD, and that it went all the way to the White House.

And the issue was not whether or not he could write a book. If he leaves the SEAL teams, you know, he could do what he wants, right? As long as he doesn't divulge classified information, but he wanted to stay in. He wanted to redeploy to his credit. And for an active duty seal to write about a classified mission, that is a little bit of a different story. But apparently, President George W. Bush, and Robinson says this in a British accent impersonating a Texan, I'm not going to do that.

It's a mess, yeah. But he just says, you know, let the boy write his book. And I always, for years, I thought that story was bullshit. I asked Robinson about it's true. And then I spoke to a naval special warfare official who was in the room, apparently when this happened. when there was a phone call between Admiral McGuire and someone from the White House, and this official was like, yeah, that is exactly what happened. The president made it clear that if Marcus Atrell wants to be an active duty Navy SEAL and write a book about the death of his brothers, that he should. America needs a hero. And from then on, naval special warfare helped Marcus with what he needed to do.

So is that an assignment? I don't know if that's the accurate way to describe. But certainly they encouraged it. Certainly they supported it. And that support sent a message to others in the SEAL teams that it was okay to write books about classified information and classified ops that was full of exaggerations and in some cases falsehoods. I don't know if we can draw causality there, maybe correlation. This is what was written. This isn't my analysis.

This is analysis by a seal by the name of Lieutenant Force Crowell who wrote a paper for the Naval War College about this. He apparently is still in, but I think it's called Navy Seals Gone Wild, which props to him for that. It's an excellent title. Excellent title. Yeah, I support everything about that title. I may not agree with the causality aspect of that. Causality is a tough one. There may be correlation, but did the book Loan Survivor let everybody else off the chain?

No, that takes agency away from the authors who choose to lie. because it gives them an out, an excuse, and I don't accept that. If you're going to put something down on paper, you decide whether or not you're going to tell the truth or you're not. I agree, and I think the irony is that lone survivor was written to tell the truth because supposedly, you know, the liberal media and others were telling falsehoods about what happened. But it actually didn't. It actually added to that misinformation. And it was, it's, look, Patrick Robbins. and is a good writer.

He tells a really compelling story. Marcus is a very good storyteller. Like, you hear him on podcast. Like, he's good. Much better than I am. But, you know, the reality is that's a political book. It is all about stop asking questions about dead civilians. That's what it's about.

Dead civilians? Yeah, dead civilians. Because the whole thing is like... Well, and survivor? Yes. Dead civilians. Yeah. What are you talking about?

Meaning, like, when they're doing the vote, the reason they choose... to let them go is because Marcus said, or maybe it's Murphy who says, we're going to be pilloried by the press. See, we're going to be on CNN and they're going to send us to Leavenworth if we kill these civilians. And, you know, whatever, and in the movie, they're like, whatever we do out here is our business, we should be allowed to do what we want. And a lot of people in the SEAL teams were pissed about that. It's not an accurate representation. Exactly. Yeah. But it was, again, it wasn't the fault of issues with training or mission planning.

It was the fault of the press. But the reality is that when you write a book, when you write a memoir, you are a journalist. So you should be abiding by the same standards, the same standards that I have to abide by, which is if I get something wrong, I need to correct it or I need to try and fact check it. And this is the part that I think is really important in this. Why did you have to ask the question whether it was called Operation Red Wing or Operation Red Wings? Because I've heard both. So why have you heard both?

because it's been written down and reported as both. Yeah. So on the cover of the book, Lone Survivor, it is called Operation Red Wing. So Patrick Robinson and Marcus Troll get the name of the mission wrong. And you could say, okay, this is not a big deal.

I make mistakes all the time. I have like, you know, tons of them, right? But you correct them. Instead, what has happened is that we have just, we've just insisted that 2 plus 2 equals 5 throughout. We say, oh yeah, there was a vote. Oh, yeah, it's called Red Wing.

It's never called Red Wings anywhere by people who support the official story. And it's funny, like Ed Derrick has made up. He was like, I was the original Red Wings Truther. That's what he's called himself. But it's like, okay, you write a book and you make errors and you make mistakes. And you say, hey, guys, you know, I made mistakes. That was the best I could do at that point due to whatever or I wasn't filled in on certain information at that point. More typos happened and you didn't catch it in the editing process.

Right. But it's been brought to my attention and we're going to correct it. I have absolutely done that. I mean, you know, probably on things recently. But again, it's this mentality of we're going to hunker down and we're going to just say, when I asked Patrick Robin, or when I asked Marcus's lawyer for comment,

Tony Busby for the 2016 article in this article, the statement that I was given is everything in the book Loan Survivor is true. 100%. And I just, I don't understand why we have to do that. I think that. There's two numbers that I deeply, deeply don't agree with. One of them is 100%.

The other is 0%. Right. I struggle with people who can grasp on to either one of those because over a sample size that's large enough or a timeline that's long enough, they both become untrue. Speaking in absolutes is a dodgy game. Yeah.

It's amazing the amount of support it did get from the community. And I know this because I was, a Buds instructor when they facilitated and hosted Peter Berg. I met him in the first phase office of the SEAL training command and went out to the obstacle course and explained to him how to do one or two obstacles because they asked me to do so. He didn't just walk on. He had the full support of naval special warfare. And I have questions about the intent behind that. Well, actually, I think I know the intent. They saw it as an opportunity to present a community in a way that they probably justified, detached from the situation as a net positive and an ability to draw more of the

right people into that community. So what was happening in 2005 in the seal teams is that they had to increase the number of seals by about 500? No, they were, trust me, I was around around this time. They were told to do so, the numbers didn't change, especially from the training pipeline. Well, but, but so I mentioned in the story what, what they were told by the, it was the 2000, it was actually 2006 quadrennial defense review. Yeah. They had to increase the numbers by like 15%. And so they try to do a variety of things, apparently.

And I would love to hear about what we saw, but what I saw is that like they would bring a lot of people in. They would get some people through the pipeline, although that's always the problem is how many you get out, but that net net, you're not really adding bodies because people retire, people unfortunately are killed. For a couple of years, it was something along the lines of 300 people made it through buds and 301 people got out of the community. Or the other way around, where it was a net game of one, but a net loss of thousands

of years of experience. Well, they really messed around with a lot of stuff. And I think for a good reason, I understand why they were doing it. They started personality assessments looking at the people who made it through, Did you come from, did you play sports? Did you come from a broken home? Do you play check? Like everything, psychological assessments.

They did the pre-training pipeline. They tried to increase the quality of student that was going to attempt the large end of the funnel. Right. The curriculum just works, man. The small end of the funnel spit out exactly on statistical average, exactly the same. And I think the way that they were able to increase it was slightly increasing the size of the classes. Because that multiplied by a small number is going to at least be a little bit. bit larger. I was told that they had never like actually filled a class before, except like there

was like one time in like 2006, 2007, but that even then net net, they still didn't really gain a whole lot of people. Not with people getting out. Yeah. Yeah. And then it became from my understanding, and I wasn't directly involved in the pre-training program or the pipeline leading up to it, that it became very competitive and more people wanted to go into training than slots would allow for, which I think is what they were trying to get to. Yeah. So I was told that Lone Survivor, the book, was never part of the directorate of recruitment that it was not this sort of thing

where it was like, okay, this is how we're going to do it versus active valor, for instance, like it started all the way back in like 2005, 2006. So I know those guys too because they were buds instructors. They were excellent buds instructors

and arguably the worst actors to ever step on the other side of a camera. It was almost as if they weren't actors. I love those guys. But you're not Thespians

So what I was told is not that Naval Special Warfare didn't take advantage They didn't need to They just needed to get it out in the wild Right and that and then they essentially got behind Yeah you don't need to actually make that a part of the recruiting directorate You just enable that to get out into the wild

Because that it'd be like throwing a fireball Into a national forest If it catches and your desires to burn the forest down, it's going to do all the work for you. But maybe we'll help develop a machine that launches it out into the forest, right? So that way we can say we're not directly involved,

but some tacit support. And so the way some of the P.A.Os described it to me was like, we didn't know it was necessarily going to be as successful as it was. But once it was, obviously, it'll rent their hands around. Yeah, it kind of became a model. And so I think that there is some truth to what Mark, again, this is somewhat speculation,

but like I think there's some truth to what Marcus is saying. in how it becomes an assignment. But I don't think it's as simple as, you know, a couple admirals sit in a room or like, all right, we got this disaster in our hands. We got to console the families and we got to recruit seals. What are we going to do?

Put them together. Like, I think it was a little more ad hoc and accidental. And the reason I say that is because they back loan survivor and then they back the Murphy book. And those books are totally different. Like one of the things in Marcus's book,

he says he crawled like seven miles to get to the village. Well, it's not. miles. It's a little bit under the under a mile. But in the Murphy book, it says it's a little under the mile, a little under a mile. And the PAOs were worried how the Murphy book was going to contradict lone survivor. Well, if there had been like a master plan, it was pretty bad one. You know what I mean? So I think there was some element of building the plane while they were flying it. But like you said, and I go to one more document here that I want to show that didn't get in here. Let me find it here. It is scroll up a little bit. scroll down, scroll down, keep going. Where is that? It's basically the Navy and Naval Special Warfare have taken it down, but there was a Q&A on their website,

and it said, does the Navy and Naval Special Warfare consider lone survivor to be an accurate depiction of Operation Red Wings? And they say, yes, we do. It is an accurate depiction of Operation Red Wing. And I've got a screenshot of that somewhere. somewhere. I don't know. I'm not seeing it right now. But how about 27? It's 20. Yeah, yeah, 027. I think that's it. Does the Navy consider the book Lone Survivor to be an accurate depiction of Operation

Red Wing? Yes. So they are behind it. They are supporting it. Yeah. They, you know, one of the things that, you know, upset people and I was very nervous about is what happened with the metals. You know, these guys were given the Silver Star. Murphy was given the Medal of Honor. A lot of people debated about whether or not those medals, you know, the Medal of Honor at least was deserved. Some people said yes. So for clarity, they're never given.

They're always awarded. Award it. Sorry. The only thing I can tell you is that there was a heated debate and it was submitted, the package was submitted multiple times and that they kept submitting it. For Murphy? For Murphy?

Because they kept wanting to submit it. And then in order, you need two witnesses. Well, in the debrief, Marcus doesn't say he sees Murphy make the call. He hears him. The person on the other and the line, again, whether it's Mark Tackler or whether it's Dennis White. They didn't see either. They heard it. And so, again, whether he deserves it or not, they didn't have the actual requirements,

but they found a way to make it happen. Again, the only reason people were upset about that is they felt like they never got a proper accounting of the mission. they felt like the lessons learned were not really disseminated and that it was they just handed out medals supported the book and tried to move on. So meanwhile, you have a guy like Mike Peter from SDV2 he goes over to SDV1 and I think 2008 or 2009 and he assumes he's heard all about this

who's a close friend of Danny and he assumes the team would be doing great that they would have learned the lessons from Red Wings that their land warfare training would be awesome and they would be prepared and he goes over there And he's like, they're a mess. They hadn't learned anything. And it wasn't because they didn't do lessons learned.

It was because nobody wanted to talk about it because it was an embarrassment. Well, doing an AAR and then doing something with the information that comes out of the AAR or two very different things. Yeah. And it would be very, it would be very, I was about to say impossible, but that's, I don't know why I would say that. It's very possible to keep the lessons learned from an AAR and put them into the training cycle. without making some expose of that internationally or in the, you just, you change training and we changed training consistently throughout my career

based off of real world feedback that we were either getting from our forces, allies, or the enemy, because both have a vote. That's how you keep people alive. Stuffing something like this because of embarrassment and shame, if that is what happened from the SEAL community, it's the opposite of the community that I thought I was going into,

or that I believe the community to be. And I have to be clear, when I say this, I don't think that those actions, if that did happen, speaks for the community itself because it's a community of individuals. The people with the power and authority to do that are very limited in number and in status. And if they made that choice,

that's a poor personal choice that reflects negatively upon that community. Then it's a fucked up one. And they should be able or should be held to account for that decision. And I can't tell you if that decision, was intentional, but it was the result. And, you know, some people said that people tried to do the right thing.

They had good intentions, but they couldn't really predict the blowback of not telling the truth, or they couldn't predict the media environment. I think you can always predict the blowback, not telling the truth. But they couldn't also predict the media environment that would develop over the next 20 years. And so they didn't. Do you know, though, how not to have to worry about that? Telling the truth. Exactly.

other people have said other things, which is that, you know, the decision was political, that that the admiral had either political ambitions or was just a political animal and was trying to solve the recruitment problem at the same time was trying to solve the grieving family's problem. And basically not so much, again, made this happen, but allowed it to happen. Or at a certain point, encouraged it once it became clear that the president was behind it. So that's what I can tell you. I still have a lot of questions. I hope I provided some answers for some people. I hope I've done so with respect. I did want to tell you about one thing, which is I'm going to continue to report on this. I was contacted

by Jeff Axelson, Matt Axelson's brother, after the fact. And you're the fact of your most recent article in political. And I had reached out to him before just to I tried to reach out to as many family members as I could to let them know is coming. I said, you know, you might not like it. I tried to treat all your family members with respect. I say the same thing to Marcus. I would love to interview him. I don't harbor any hatred towards him or dislike. I actually, when I watch him on a podcast, I kind of feel like I like the guy. But I tried to reach out and say, hey, look, this is what's coming. This is what is being said. I mean, don't disrespect. But this is why it matters to me and to a lot of the guys who are involved in this mission. And Jeff, at first he was like, yeah, I'm not going to talk to you.

But then we kind of went back and forth. And when he saw that I was, I think, genuine, we kind of started talking a little bit off the record. And then when the story ran, he reached out and he said, hey, look, I tried to do a book about my grieving process and about who Matt was years ago. I had a book deal. James Hornfisher, who was Marcus' second ghost writer,

was my agent. Marcus linked me up with him. They gave me a ghost writer. I wanted to be involved in writing, my own memoir. The ghost writer kind of took my notes and they tried to pump out something pretty fast and it wasn't that it was bad.

It just wasn't the book that I wanted. I wanted to tell the story of the 12 days that Matt was missing and my child with him and my grieving process and that's not what was produced. It was a lot of kind of rumors that I didn't know if they were true or not. He's like, I'd like to do that book again

and I'd like you to work with me on it. And I told him, yeah. And so I had questions for him Because, you know, Gulab had told me that he thought Matt Axelson may have survived the night, that that's what he heard from the Taliban. And, you know, one of the things that Jeff sent me recently was he sent me Matt's autopsy. And, you know, there have been rumors that Matt had died of exposure, that he had been out there for, you know, 10 days and survived. And because Marcus didn't see him die that somehow he had kind of condemned him to death or something, that's not true. I can tell you from the autopsy

that he died of gunshot wounds and I can also tell you that when he died he had had two broken femurs from bullets. Jeff has said that's okay that I share that on show. Those bullets did not pierce the femoral artery so those wounds were not fatal.

The fatal wounds, one involves you know, gunshot to the head. A tough guy. A really fascinating guy, the more I learn about him. So we're going to do this project. I don't expect this to be a book that millions and millions of people will read, but it means a lot to Jeff. And we'll continue to kind of answer some of these questions for other people.

And I think there's a great story here. And if we self-publish it and it's just for his kids, great. If we find a publisher and they want to do it, great. But we're going to team up and we're going to do that. And we're going to try and be respectful to all these guys. and everybody involved and tell that story. What do you hope that people get out of the Politico article? I hope they understand the consequences of not telling the truth.

Whatever the intentions were, even if they were good, I hope they understand the consequences of that. That, again, if you take the good faith argument of like everything that happened, which is that people tried to do a good thing and it went bad, these are the consequences. And like you said, you can resolve them. by just being honest. That doesn't mean you have to tell everybody

every single little detail. You can still be compassionate and thoughtful. I also think it's important for any organization to be honest with itself. This to me is a story not only about like lessons learned, but also about the way we view ourselves as Americans or the way your community views yourself as seals, the mythologies we create.

And I think I was telling you before it came on here, there are still guys that I talked to from SEAL Team 10 who know that Lone Survivor has a lot of inaccuracies in it but they still do not want to believe that a small force of you know militants could overrun for SEALs because that is not the mythology they have of themselves as SEALs and they don't necessarily want to accept it and I think sometimes we have to puncture those mythologies

to really learn those lessons and in this case at least I can't speak for always with the SEALs But in this case, at least, I think that is a lesson the SEALs did need to learn that was not in any AAR. And I think it's a lesson that we could learn as Americans and as citizens in general, too, that when we, look, sometimes you have to do really hard things to accomplish really hard things. But sometimes you have to take a look at yourself and say, should I really be doing this? Is this a good idea? Am I doing this because I have a vision of myself and who I am that is not comporting with reality? And I also think from a PR perspective, this whole saga is a lesson learned.

Like this is exactly how not to handle a tragedy. And I feel sympathy for the people who were involved, including Marcus, for being in the situation. You know, one of the things that I spoke to a source about was like, what happens if rather than being putting himself or being put in a situation where he writes this book that then, gets picked apart by everybody for the next 20 years and becomes this big thing. And yeah, it earns him a lot of money, but also earns him a lot of grief. What happens if what he did was he went on and he taught those lessons learned related to survival of resistance internally in the community? How would that have differed? And why was he not encouraged to do something like that? And we'll never know the answer to that. But I think that that's a question people should ask,

you know, and think about those consequences. What do you say to people? People who say to you, probably online, why don't you just put this down? This is 20 years ago. You're not from that community. Who are you to dig into this? Oh. I've been told that by a lot of people. And it carries weight with me.

I mean, I've thought about that a lot. I had so much self-doubt about this story as I was doing it. I wanted to quit a lot of times and avoid whatever potential blowback. In the end, actually, a lot of the families. and guys were involved thanked me. They said they felt it was cathartic and that I was an honest broker and that it was fair.

I actually got more grief for ranking the top 25 MMA fighters of all time for Complex Magazine. Who did you have as number one? John Jones, which is not something to really be controversial at all. But putting Connor McGregor... Who was number two?

Number two is George St. Pierre. Where was Connor? Connor was at like 17. He had some feelings about that. Connor did? Yeah. Connor's going to lose to John Jones Well, yes

But no, but Connor actually He had the best own He wrote in on Complex's Instagram He said, please stick to mixed tapes Which is fantastic And that is a screenshot I will ever save As you should But anyway, so

I think at this point You know, I'm going to do this project with Jeff Yeah But I think it probably will put it down I mean, hopefully that, hopefully they'll just declassify everything and there won't need to be any more reporters. But, you know, writing about this, but one of the things that the community said to me as I interviewed them was like, you shouldn't be the one to have to do this. We should have done this for ourselves. I've said that many times today that the community is in by that.

Again, I can't. I hate that word because communities are full of individuals. Right. The leadership at the top of the community, which has their hands. on the steering wheel of the battleship, which I don't think battleships are steered by steering wheel, by the way. And they're no longer in service,

so this analogy is completely fucked as it is. They are the ones who would be responsible for doing that. The community writ large, again, that's too many people. We're talking to thousands of people. And I think they could have, for this article, they did not comment. I think they could have said, hey, look, 20 years ago, we had this tragedy.

Everybody who died, our heroes. Marcus Luttrell told the story. We're grateful that he survived. Stories inspired a lot of people. If we were to do it again, we were not as straightforward as we should have been with the public and with the families as we should have been.

We have learned from it and we're going to do better. And we're not going to let this happen again. That's all you need to say. And I think that that would have been a really powerful statement and sent a really powerful message. There's one thing I would add to that too. Time.

Take more. Time. Yeah. I mean, the rush was self-imposed at best. Sure, you could say somebody else was going to write a different story. Yeah, they weren't there. So if you do ever get around to writing the story, people are going to take yours with a lot more gravity because it's supposed to be a firsthand account. Great. And also, like, do the due diligence when you comes with time. Right. Yeah. I mean, this story took me and add six years to write. If you and if you. calculate the hourly wage of doing that. It's very low. It's almost non-existent. And that's okay because I felt like it's history. It should matter. And so my response to the guys who said,

you shouldn't have to do this. And I said, well, nobody else did. And I hope that if there would be somebody inside the community who would want to pick up where I left off and do that work and declassify it and make a statement about it or write a history or whatever, I would say do it.

I would help them. You know, just you guys take it. You know, go for it. That's great. But short of that, if no one else is doing it, someone has to. Yeah. You know? I don't know the truth of what happened on the ground.

But if there is a correction that needs to be made, it needs to be made. I mean, that's where I land on this. And I know that that could have negative consequences for some people. people. But if the community, if, again, a hypothesis, if a correction needs to be made and the community is to regain some of the integrity that can be lost through things like this, if these are not true, then that's what it takes. Yeah. And I hope that it would be done. But again, I can't, I don't fucking know. I wasn't there. What I can say is a lot of the things that you have written about, a lot of the things that you have brought up here, I have heard for you.

years. But as a person who wasn't directly involved, I do the best that I can to not pass judgment upon that. And I was never in a place to correct the record. And again, I can't say here, I'm not trying to make an accusation or not. I don't know what needs to be done with the record. But I do know that there are people who are in positions that can and they need to look at the long-term integrity of the community and make the right decision if that's what needs to be made. Yeah, I agree. I agree. And I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to come on here and talk about the story. I hope people will read it in political magazine, but if you don't want to read 18,500 words, I don't blame you. I also hope that people

don't see it as an attack on anybody directly involved in what happened either. It's really not. I don't view it as that either, and that's why I was willing to sit down and talk with you, because these conversations are really important. And I think what we both said from the beginning, nobody's trying to take anything away from what the horrors of what that must have been like, the people associated with the cost and the price of what is all. That can be one thing. Because again, when we say community, we lump everybody in. But the reality is for this, if what you're describing is, in fact, more in line with the truth,

there were some people really high up who had a really heavy hand in manipulating this. Probably, again, they walk themselves into a position of things. thinking, oh, this is the right thing to do for the best of reasons. If that optic has shifted, let's do something about that. Yeah. And I think that most people that I talk to feel like Marcus's story is still remarkable. The fact that he survived, that he re-enlisted, it's amazing. Take away all the embellishment in the book or whatever. It's still an amazing story. And, you know, as Brett Thomas, young officer put it to me, he said, you know, what's really important is learning.

from that and whatever mistakes that I made, fuck it, publish them. If they help save the life of some young kid someday in the future, great. That's what you should do. That's what you should do. I also... Yeah. And I also want people to have a realistic expectation for people who out there things like this are powerful. People who are drawn to this line of work, I want them, you know, the mythos to a degree is helpful, but it's a blade that can cut in both directions. Because it has to be at least semi-realistic. These aren't people with capes and cows and shields that are superheroes that are doing things.

And what I don't want to do is present something as this shiny object with unrealistic, unachievable, unattainable expectations and have people drawn to that. That's a long-term failure for the community. Yeah, I agree. You're setting yourself up, you know, to disappoint people. And that's what I see most,

is the people who are so angry about lone survivor who take the most red meat opposition to it now, I think are people who really believed in it before. And now they've shifted completely in the wrong direction where it's like over the top in some ways. And it's a direct result of that sort of overpromise. It's tough. What do you want to leave people with?

We've been out of for well over three hours. God, I don't know. I thought we had a good ending with the whole Brett Thomas line there. We can end it right there. Yeah. I guess, you know, I did have one last question for you. It's not related to anything writing. So when you were at Blue, seven.

When you were at Buds during this time period and people weren't getting through. And if you want to cut this, like, I don't care. I'm just generally. Why do we ever cut this out? What did you see about the whole steroids thing while you're there? Because, you know, Matt Cole, who you had on the show, he wrote a piece. What he was writing about had occurred after when I was there. I get so I have two optics on that question.

One is when I was going through training back in 1997. Yeah. And the other one I went back as an instructor in late 2006 up until October of 2008. When I went through as a student, I have a hazy memory of going through training because it was 30 years ago. Yeah. And your brain is a really good idea of rounding the edges on painful stuff. Otherwise, I don't think childbirth would occur more than once. Yes.

The fact that a woman would say, yeah, let's give that a go again. I'm like, okay, we have a evolutionary system that helps you round those things out. I have hazy memories of buds at best. The memories that I do have are often just really associated with just laughter in the guys. I don't remember or recall a single conversation, inuation of any innuendo at all of any type of performance enhancing substance. When I went through in 1997, does that mean that there couldn't be people that were utilizing? at that time and keeping it to themselves, of course, that could have been the case. But I would, and again, I also remember what my friends looked like.

They certainly didn't look like they were enhanced. And there are things that you can take that are, you know, you could blood dope or whatever. But, you know, what you're talking about is essentially juicing yourself to the gills to help give yourself an ability to help recover. When I went there is back as an instructor. I mean, again, I guess possible. They would never share that with the instructor staff. But people would be drastically underwhelmed.

If you buy the physiology, if you lined up an entire class, you're like, hey, put your UDT shorts on, which are socially unacceptable shorts to wear by, I believe they have a one quarter inch inseam. The likelihood of your balls hanging out one side of those is just entirely too high. People would look at him and go, hmm, I would have thought you guys would all look

like professional football players and they don't. Yeah. So, and then I wasn't around during the time period where the death occurred. associated with that. So I cannot speak to that possible for sure. The plausibility, I have no idea. Yeah, I mean, I've always, I've always wondered about that. I read Matt's story and I, you know, I know Matt when he was when he was on the show. He and I were fact checkers at ESPN at the same time. And I knew him because he was, I was like, who's this guy just like over there screaming about

Pakistan all the time? And because I was on a totally different part of the team. And then we reconnected when he wrote his book. He reached out to me about lone survivor. Yeah. asking me if I had heard similar things in some cases I had in some cases I had. And when I read that story, I thought it was really interesting and it made me wonder like what was what was the tipping point? Was it, you know, post bin Laden when the seals became, you know, like the sort of poster child or was it a problem that went back to that recruitment piece where they're, you know, they're trying to get more guys through. And so to get more guys through were people, was steroids involved in any way in some shape or form?

I don't know. I really don't know. I don't remember dealing with a single issue associated with performance enhancing anything while as an instructor. I mean, I taught the diving phase, not necessarily the first phase, which I believe is where some of the issues were stemming from. Yeah, I just don't have any direct exposure to it. I mean, my weekends, I would go eat a bowl of pasta as big as this table and sleep as much as possible.

I mean, that was performing enhancing right there. It's carbload. Yeah. And that's what most of my class was doing. You know, after hell week, we all met up at Marie calendars and ate like seven key lime pies because fuck it. You know, but I don't know. I think the pervasiveness of those substances has increased over time. And maybe it's because people have an enhanced ability to talk.

about them through electronic means now, whereas before it would have been a face-to-face thing. I don't know. Again, causation versus correlation is a tough one. I just don't remember being an issue. Yeah. Because, you know, one of the things that came out, I think it was in that story that he said was that, you know, like instructors were involved and whatnot. And that, you know, that could just be a couple of guys, but it just made me wonder if somewhere along the lines as the seals became more popular as they wanted to get people through, if it, it It's not as if it's a seal problem. It's a cultural thing.

It's a human problem. Don't get me wrong. I know guys who were used to the tits in the teams. They really struggled at altitude. They looked great in the gym. They had some gym muscles, but they were sucking ass going uphill in Afghanistan. But it was some people.

It wasn't even the majority. Pretty tough to hide when you look like a teenage mutant ninja turtle. You know, like that chicken breast. Are you getting, is it organic? You know, and it's not great for cardio. As we've seen. No, that's what I'm saying. Here's the thing, too, in Afghanistan,

if you're up at altitude, you don't need 40 pounds of extra muscle that requires red blood cells and oxygen to be fed while you're trying to go uphill with just your lower body. It actually doesn't lend itself well to the career. Yeah, I mean, you just look at the Afghans climbing those mountains. They didn't look particularly juiced. No. They would fuck us up going off the pill too. It's like they're the Sherpa's. Well, I mean, shit, it's in the Himalayan range.

So I guess they're Sherpa adjacent. Who you have for the Gagey versus Tuporia fight coming up at the White House? I have no idea. Is Teporia the Spanish dude? Yeah. Gaj is going to have his hands full. Yeah, I think so, too. Yeah.

I don't know who's going to win, but that's going to be explosive. I think it's going to be a great fight. Gagie is always exciting. He's game. I just did another thing for Complex Magazine about the 20 greatest UFC fights of all time. So you need to stop writing these, obviously, because... Oh, they're just... I'm just like feeding the trolls.

This one I didn't get as... Well, first off, if you rack and stack anything, instantaneously you have driven a wedge into society, and the commentary is going to be fire. I think they just need to be funnier. Like, it needs to be more like top 20 groin shots or things like that. I would read that article.

Yeah, I mean... Michael's over there, like, tell me what? But to Poria, I was really impressed. When he submitted Bryce Mitchell, I was kind of like, okay, this guy is not just a strike. This dude is serious. This is not UFC 1 anymore where you can specialize.

You have got to be a lethal weapon in every category to be at the top of the game. Yeah. Except for maybe like ultra super heavyweight where you just punch people into the next universe and your cardio is gone in about two and a half minutes. Yeah. It just comes out with the fury. And then by the end they're both just like, I just have a second. Or you could be like me and be like 170 something pounds.

well, let's be honest, maybe more like 180 right now, and be like that no matter what. And just suck an air after two minutes. Personal choice, sir. Yeah, I know. Tell me about it. Yeah. Tell me about it. Well, hell yeah.

Let's get you out of here. Awesome, man. Great to meet you. Open invite to come back. Thank you. Yeah, I'd love to sit down and talk about the future projects. I think this stuff is essential to talk about. And I don't think it's something that the community should avoid.

If anything, I think it's something they should dive headlong into. I agree. Cool. All, man. Yep.