Jocko Podcast - 192: Important Lessons of Outlaw Platoon's Long and Horrific Road w/ Sean Parnell

Episode Date: August 28, 2019

0:00:00 - Opening 0:10:46 - Sean Parnell 5:00:12 - Final thoughts and take-aways. 5:08:49 - How to stay on THE PATH. 5:20:43 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 192 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Time is supposed to be a constant. A day is a day and an hour is an hour and a second is supposed to be a second. At least that's the way it's supposed to be. And you get one life made up of years, hopefully, that's still. stack up on top of one another and they are all supposed to measure the same amount of time

those years to do that. Days that seem to last forever. There are seconds that stall and remain suspended in some kind of bizarre slow motion. And that's the way life actually is. Parts of it are bigger than other parts. to have more impact. The time continuum gets expanded and hyper awareness drags out

the hours and the days and they leave an indelible impression on your soul. And it could be a good thing that causes this. Maybe it was winning the championship game in high school. Maybe it was surfing your first wave or your first parachute jump

or maybe it was holding your newborn child for the first time but maybe it was a bad thing our accident a fire being told someone you someone you knew had a major health issue perhaps it was that moment when you were told that one of your loved ones had died you remember where you were the words you heard you remember the anguish you felt and these incidents good or bad they leave Mark. Most of these incidents are short, maybe a few minutes, maybe an hour. Maybe it stretches out to a day. But in combat, you experience these kind of impactful moments day after day, week after week, month after month. You're regularly faced with highly charged emotions and life and death situations and shots of adrenaline. You don't get much sleep. And the food is horrible.

and you live under the constant foreboding weight of one of your men being wounded or killed and it doesn't stop it doesn't let up and the end of one operation is actually only just the beginning of another one each one with its own risk and each one with its own reward and that risk and that reward is what you begin to live off of like a gambling addict that can't walk away from the table you can't bring yourself to walk away so You carry on and eventually you and the men by your side have lived Lifetime's worth of life in a matter of months and those men The ones that survive become your brothers and the ones that don't survive Become your heroes at part of your life that part of your life becomes the standard to which all other parts are measured because when you're holding a machine gun in your hands and and you're with your brothers in arms and there are other men out there with guns and bombs of their own

and they're looking to kill you when your whole world can be reduced to what is happening right here, right now, in this moment. That, then other so-called normal things can seem mundane and yet with life, with work, with family, with birthdays and barbecues and the days tick by and you get a little older and when you pause you can even see the end up there in the distance still far enough off that you don't need to think about it too much but close enough to let you know it's there and you know you already got more time

than you deserved and in your mind you can still picture the faces of those who will not grow and they gave this to you. Times and those men made you who you are. And you're thankful. Thankful that you knew those men. Thankful that you got those moments. All of those moments. The exhilaration and the terror, the joy and the despair,

the pride and the humility. You're thankful you got to experience it all. And like I said, that experience leaves and leaves a mark. It changes you. It changes you in some way. Reading recently and I came across this. My old self and new self weren't compatible. I felt awkward.

I missed my men badly. I felt a sense of loss at the same time I felt guilt and shame. It shouldn't have taken the army to wake me up to the shallow life I had. Right then I knew coming home was going to be much harder on me than I had expected. I wanted to run. Find a place just for me and figure this all out in beautiful solitude. My old life was gone. Dead.

Burned away by mortar fire and the sonic crack of AK rounds passing overhead. I began to wonder if any of it could be saved. Could I take the pieces with me into the future? Or was I going to have to rebuild from scratch? And that is from a book, from a book called Outlaw Platoon, written by a soldier, a ranger, a leader, an infantry officer, and a platoon commander in the hallowed 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan in 2006, 2007. And on top of all that, a father, a speaker, and an author of several books,

a guy by the name of Sean Parnell and we are lucky enough today to have Sean with us on the podcast Sean thanks for coming on man it's great to be here

I'm excited to be here yeah reading your book definitely brought back a lot of memories for me and I never fought in Afghanistan I fought in Iraq but man

You really captured a lot. You captured the pressure. You captured the grind. You captured the drama. You captured the politics. And it was very interesting. I was probably about 50 pages in. And it occurred to me.

I said, when has this taken place? Because I'd kind of missed the very first thing. So I went back to the beginning just to read that opening line to find out when it And this whole thing took place and the bulk of the fighting took place in 2006 in the summer of 2006, which is exactly when I was in Ramadi. So you were going through what you were going through the same exact time I was over in Ramadi. We were both fighting the same thing in different theaters or different countries. Yeah. And I think I just learned that now.

But I mean, I remember hearing in Afghanistan that Ramadi was like hell on earth. you know in 2006 it was a really really tough time and and this was around the time when you know Americans flipped on their TV sets and watched newscasters talk about the surge day in and day out remember that like the surge was the big policy debate on Capitol Hill yeah all this yeah they hadn't executed yet they were talking about right they didn't execute it until 2007 like when we were supposed to go home we were speaking but they sent the unit to replace us over to Iraq as part in support of the surge But, you know, they had their own battles waging on Capitol Hill, and we were waging our own

our own life and death battles in Afghanistan and Iraq at the exact same time, you know? Yeah, yeah. And, but yeah, you did a, you did a ridiculously good job with this book. I was, I read it really fast. And, I mean, let's just get into it, man. Sure. Let's just get into it. Here we go.

Outlaw platoon. Staff Sergeant Greg Griesen. Lieutenant Taylor's weapon squad leader shouted at us incoming. Get inside the wire now. His words acted like ice water to the face. Lieutenant Taylor and I sprinted after our sergeants and back to the fob. With our new home at 7,000 feet, it took a few seconds

before my lungs started to burn from lack of oxygen. I stopped the concrete pad next to my gear and watched Griesen and the other sergeant dash off toward the battalion aid station. Taylor bolted into the hour. Operation Center. What the hell do I do? I felt rooted in place observing the action around me with yet Yet with no purpose of my own Captain Kennedy am I saying that right? Yes Captain Kennedy ran into view some kids got hit with those rounds they're at the front gate

My legs started to move I felt myself run after Kennedy Wanting to go faster but feeling an impenetrable wall between will and action We rounded a corner perhaps 50 yards of I could see some of the 173rd airborne soldiers opening the front gate crying distraught Afghan civilians poured into the base I kept running then I saw the kids I heard their screams a few thrashed in agony others lay still in their parents arms I dropped my rifle pulled my helmet off and dumped my body armor in the dirt and sprinted the last stretch to the scene one of the interpreters was shouting at an angry father two more Afghan dad's ganged up on him yelling insistence

Finally, a soldier demanded, Abdul, what the hell are they saying? Abdul, his face, a mask of rage, replied, they're telling me to make sure the boys get treated before the girls. Get them all to the battalion aid station. Abdul turned to the fathers and passed that order to them. They shook their heads and shouted them again. Abdul announced they refuse. They want the boys treated first. Grab them all the soldiers were.

The soldier roared again. The other men at the gate picked up some of the wounded kids. kids perhaps seven were still alive I scooped up the nearest child and turned to follow the other soldiers as they dashed for the age station I'd taken a half of a dozen steps before I realized I had a little girl in my arms I looked down at her she wore a tan dress that felt like burlap in my hands the collar was ornate red and green with little designs that converged on a on a V neck she felt so light it's okay it's okay I said to her her eyes were bright emerald green deep and filled with pain

Her raven hair was spayed across her face and plastered to her skin by her tears She keen hysterically pain wracked and panicked her pitch hurt my ears I kept running her head and shoulders cradled in my left hand her slight body pressed against my ribs hip and thigh and my right forearm Her left flank her left hand flailed she gasped then screamed again it seemed to never end it's okay. It's okay I began to wonder who I was talking to the girl or myself keep running her breathing grew ragged her screams choppy I glanced down at her her eyes were growing dull she stared up at me this stranger in uniform and I could see the terror in those fading eyes with my right hand I tried to brush her hair off her face

instead my fingers smeared blood across her cheek I sensed warmth on my thigh what was that I wanted to look down but something stopped me my legs carried us forward in autopilot mode as I fixed as my eyes fixed on hers she screamed again hoarse and weak this time the warmth spread to my hip and trickled past my knee I couldn't bear to look when I did my brain didn't register what my eyes saw one barefoot tiny delicate toes covered in brown dust crimson dots splattered on her cocky dress which now rode high above her knees tendrils of torn burnt flesh tapered below the other knee to a bleeding stump a white stripe of bone projected through the ruin skin and muscle I lost my stride and looked up to regain my

balance the little girl uttered a deep guttural cry one step a second perhaps a third before I realized she wasn't screaming anymore aid station we have to make it to the age station it's okay it's it's okay it's okay it's okay her hand felled away her neck grew slack in my cradling hand This is not happening. How long did it take me to look down at her again? Her breasts grew shallow. The warmth continued to spread. I looked down.

Her fear was gone. The spark in her eyes snuffed out. The world around me went on. Soldiers ran. Parents cried. Abdul argued. Kennedy barked orders. And I held a dead child in my arms.

I sleep walked back to her parents. Her mother, clad in a black burka that covered her face, sobbed into her hands. Her father regarded me stoically. I realized that this little girl had inherited his green eyes. I handed him his daughter's body. He turned and walked through the gate, her barefoot, those tiny sculpted toes dangled limply by his side.

I watched them go, stripped of words. So there's your welcome to Afghanistan. Yeah, all that, all that on day one. You know, I mean, for me, you know, that was the moment that begun inside myself, you know, a metamorphosis, you know, where, you know, one of the things that struck me about that moment was that, like, here, you know, I have a moment that is so jarring, shook me to my core of who I was, affected me to the very soul of the man that I was, and the world just kept ticking around you, you know.

It was almost as if, like, the world didn't even notice that this little girl had died in my very first day there. And, you know, I remember bringing her back to her father, him stoically nodding at me. And I remember going back to my room, my newly assigned hooch, right, of these just, like, plywood walls, you know, and I got this little bunk and little desk from my computer. I was the, I was the platoon that her in my platoon, got my little luteon. I got my little laptop there, picture my grandparents. And I just remember sitting against the corner of my bunk, you know, in this blood-stained uniform for what felt like ours, right?

And I just, I remember being sick to my stomach, took up that uniform, put on my PTs, intent to go to, like, my intent was to go to the gym, blow off some steam. But I couldn't bring myself to do it. Just stared at that uniform on the floor of my hooch. and I just like how trying to ask, you know, trying to, I feel like answer a pretty simple question and that, you know, I was 24 years old. I had never been in charge of anything before my entire life. The job that I had before the one that I had right now was, you know, history major, you know,

the biggest responsibility that I had before taking over that platoon was trying to get the class on time, you know, And I just remember asking myself over and over and over again is like how, how am I supposed to experience things like that, moments like that? But then lead my men with confidence, you know, be the decisive leader that they deserve, they deserve, right? That they were trained to expect. they deserved a leader that could handle moments like that and endure, you know, and I couldn't figure it out. I really never, I don't feel like I ever had a healthy answer to that question. The way that I answered it in that moment was like I'm just going to take this experience and lock it away deep in the deepest recesses of myself and my mind and in my consciousness and never talk about it again. Pretend like it didn't happen.

Flip that emotional switch, you know, shield myself from the pain of it. And let's, you know, to me, like, you know, this is not like a, by the way, this is not a porn me story. I volunteered for this. I do it all again in a second. I don't regret a single second of my experience. The military does a damn good job training you to go, shoot rifles and stuff, you know, train your men, shoot move and communicate together. Great. Awesome.

Mahua, I love it every second of it. But nothing can prepare you a young 24-year-old kid who's never left the country for a moment like that. You know, it just changes who you are to the very core of who you are. And so, yeah, I pretended like it didn't happen. I remember scooping that uniform up, walking it outside of my base, throwing it in this burn pit on my first night in Afghanistan. I watched that bloody uniform burn. And inside me, and I think looking back, inside, me, I remember feeling like, okay, there's some sort of metamorphosis happening here. And I look back now, it's almost as if, in a very literal sense, I was shedding this sort of insular, stateside skin that I had in the form of that bloody uniform. It's like, I am not the same

person anymore. You know, the same guy that, like, went drinking with his buddies every Thursday in the streets of Pittsburgh. Like, that guy is not, there's not, I'm not the same person anymore. And that experience was the beginning of a metamorphosis inside me from insulated American citizen to warrior, combat veteran. And that was the first of 485 days of absolute hell. And the hell, I mean, I don't lose a wink of sleep over the things that we did over there. I'm proud of every second of it, you know. There are a lot of people that we took off the face of this planet that didn't deserve to live. They made their living praying on the week and they didn't deserve the life that they have.

And I'm proud of the stuff that we did. But we never heard civilians. It was always the kids and kids and civilians that were caught in the middle that you remember and think about. And that first experience, that first day, every single day of my life, I think about that. You know, I've got three amazing little kids in my own. And, you know, it's like, I can, this might sound, it probably won't sound strange to you, but, you know, I look in the eyes of my kids and there's like this spark of vitality there, right, that I almost envy in a lot of ways. It's, I call it innocence, call it, you know, insulated existence in the best country in the face of planet. I don't know.

But I feel like I look in the mirror of myself and I don't have that anymore. And I remember watching that little, that little girl on my first day and her past, from this earth. And when she did, she didn't have that anymore either. And so there's not a day that goes by that I don't think about that little Afghan girl and how she changed me in some way, that experience changed me in some way and how that in some way connects to my own kids and the type of father I'll be. I don't know. I don't have answers to any of these questions. But it's kind of crazy, man. Like I haven't, I haven't. haven't cracked that book since I've finished writing it, you know. And so to hear it,

to hear you read it here now is almost like surreal to me. It gives me goosebumps because it brings back my experience. So it's, it's so close to home. But yeah, I mean, I sometimes I forget getting farther and farther away from the war how much it really did affect me. I was real lucky in the fact that I was old. Like when I was a task unit commander, when I was a platoon commander in Iraq, I was like 30 something years old. When I was, like, 30 something years old, I was in tasking to commander in Iraq. I'd been in the teams for 15 years. Do you know what I'm saying?

And yeah, I got really lucky in that regard. You know, I was a prior enlisted guy, so I had eight years of being enlisted. Yeah, you got thrown right in it, you know. And there's been quite a few guys I've had on this podcast. I know I had James Webb on here, and he went from the academy to the basic school. Got done with the basic school, had whatever. 12 days of leave Got to Vietnam

They brought him out on a patrol They pointed at a ridge line And they said your platoon's up there And he walked up to his platoon And he took over a platoon And there was no one to replace Because the guy that he was replacing Was either killed or wounded

So there was a sergeant run in the platoon And he said He said, hey I'm You know, first lieutenant Webb I'm here to take over And yeah Here we go And then that night

They had a massive firefight and he had to call for close air support and everything else. Was he an Army guy? Marine Corps. So Marine Corps Army, I mean, I feel like even Marine Corps they send, I mean, First Lieutenant, right? Yeah. You get to be a platoon commander in the Marine Corps, I think at First Lieutenant.

Like, it's only the Army where they send the brand new butter bars into he might have been a second lieutenant. I was in Vietnam. Yeah, it might be actually was. But I mean, isn't that, it's just, I just find that to be, you know, I had, I mean, look, I'm telling you right now, I had absolutely no idea. what the hell I was doing when I got to my platoon. And I wasn't even an infantry lieutenant, like one of the 16 or so branches at the time of the Army.

Infantry was one of them. I asked for it. I didn't get it. I ended up begging, borrowing, and steal on my way into the infantry. I think there's a leadership lesson there, but I ended up begging to get into that branch. I did. I had no infantry training whatsoever when I took over my platoon. They sent me, like, I got basically a call from my infantry branch manager saying, like, you know, hey, congratulations. You know, you got your branch transferred infantry.

You're going to Ranger School in February. And I was like, oh, shit. And so I went to Ranger School. Failed the first time. Like, you know, pretty much I do everything in life. Failed the first time. Beg the commander to stay. He lets me stay.

I recycle. I go back and I make it through. And I get sent to my platoon. And I took over my platoon. No infantry experience whatsoever. I was sort of the Black Sheep at the battalion. Well, other than Ranger School. Other than Ranger School.

Yeah. I mean, but I mean. A solid baseline. Well, the officer base, of course, for infantry guys is 16 weeks, right? And so they get 16 weeks of what is essentially. orders writing and Ranger prep and all this I was an air defense artillery guy like we didn't get any of that stuff it was just like what we trained on I was short at short range you know air and missile defense short range air defense and infantry battoons don't carry stingers anymore I'm

pretty sure seal team's don't carry stingers anymore I went to stinger school just you went to say so did I mean yeah where's that in Texas yes I was in El Paso yes we were my first duty assignment but yeah but I ended up getting to my unit at the 10th Mountain Division um I didn't didn't have any infantry training whatsoever. So it was like talk about walking into an experience like, okay, I'm going to keep my mouth shut. Yeah. Big eyes, big ears, listen, learn. That's it. Yeah. Well, that humility served you very well. And I hope if there's anyone, anyone listening that's a young leader going into a position, have that attitude because that's the way you do it. You stay humble. Going back to the book, we parked outside. So now you're, you're actually out on patrol.

We parked outside the only modern instruction within the fort, a single story, double cubed concrete building with a few undersized windows. A pair of exhaust vents stuck out either side of the door and a smear of black soots streamed up along them on the concrete wall. This would be our home for the next few days. Our battalion had deployed to this part of Afghanistan for one purpose to control the border with Pakistan. The mountain caves around here were insurgents equivalent of forward operating bases.

Pakistan was their safety zone, where they would resupply, rearm, and train between missions to Afghanistan. After sneaking across the frontier, they'd reoccupy their security. cave complexes and used them as springboards to launch attacks against coalition bases or units they did then they'd escape across the border to start the cycle all over again our job was to staunch the enemy flow of troops and supplies into Afghanistan and Bandar was one of the key bases to support to support that intent from here from there coalition troops could patrol the surrounding area and

establish checkpoints on the road leading into Pakistan controlling the enemy and securing the populace are aggressive keystones of any successful counterinsurgency operation. By getting out there and actively patrolling, we could disrupt the rat lines and force them to react to us. So that's what you were doing. Yep. Mm-hmm.

Now, at this point, you're meeting with like a friendly, and I, and I, he's an Afghan, Afghan border policeman. His name was a major alarm ghoul who had been fighting. I mean, the guy fought that. the Russians in the 80s and the Afghan Civil War in the 90s. I mean, he was like 50 years old, just nothing but hardened warrior. And there I am like 24-year-old. I'm telling you, man, like I don't really know what the hell I was doing.

I was just shooting from the hip, like, no pun intended the whole time. You know, just trying to like, you know, puff my chest out. And these guys that are these experience like this border. And again, and obviously people that listen to this podcast know I'm reading probably 10% of this book. The entire, you have to get this book to get all the new. nuance that you put in here. It's an incredible book. But you talk about that. And I kind of, to sum that up quickly, I put, in my notes, I wrote friendly Afghan border police, right? Because these guys are, these guys are kind of out to take care of themselves. They go to the

highest bidder. Yeah. They go to the highest better. Exactly. Yep. So you're there with this guy. And Afghan border police strolled by regarding us curiously. So you guys are in their compound. I nodded to him and he returned my cautious greeting. He took a few more steps, then stopped and dropped his trousers. Right there in the open, he squatted and relieved himself. The men of my platoon paused in their work and took notice. A few lost their composure and gaped. The rest put on their game faces, turned away, and returned to the task at hand. The border cop finished his business, wiped himself with his left hand and continued on his way. It was an unexpected cultural moment. So again, this is the kind of things that people in America sometimes

don't recognize. This is what's going on. This is life. It's true. I mean, we get down to Band And Bandar, the Bandar checkpoint was located like, in five kilometers from the, from the Pakistan border. And it was in southern, like maybe mid to southern Gamal province. And these Afghan border police were like, you know, left out there flapping, man. And the Afghan border police in Afghanistan were like the least well funded of between the Afghan National Army, the Afghan police, the Afghan border police. The Afghan border police were like the redheaded stepchild of the Afghan government,

man. They were just like left out there flapping. Their AKs were Rusty Hawks. I mean, there was no. no patrol discipline inside that base. I'm telling you, man, there were shit piles everywhere. It was like, you know, no one wants to walk through a minefield. I think we all agree that's a terrible thing.

And in Afghanistan, it can be a very real thing if you find, if you're, but this was an entirely different type of minefield that we thought, like, you know, how do you explain to the Afghan chief of police down there, the border police? Like, hey, man, you got to clean up some of this human shit around here. This is not, this is not healthy. But that's how they were living. Like piles of human shit. shit everywhere, big intense volleyball game, like, you know, the Afghan, I mean, it was just the

craziest, it's crazy. It's the craziest shit you ever see in your life. It's crazy. It's weird. Like when we'd go and take over a building, like if we're going to stay in a building for a few days, within, I'm not kidding, within a half an hour, guys would be fixing stuff and like rerouting things and, hey, let's get this building. And you'd go into some Iraqi family. They've been living there for however many, however many decades. And they would still have, like, you'd still have, like, you know, in their kitchen, there'd be a little hole next to the wall where they would take a shit and then they would kind of push it out through the hole in the wall. And that's just, that's just how it was. And I always thought to myself, Americans are kind of crazy in the other

direction. Like, we look at something and go, oh, you know what? I'm just going to fix this. I'm wait. Why would I shit in my own kitchen? No, this isn't making a sense. Okay, this is what we're going to do. We're going to get some kind of a contraption that's going to carry this stuff outside. You know, you figure it out. Americans will walk. Have you ever watched five minutes. of HGTV, if there's some weird master bath right next to your kitchen sink, it's oftentimes a deal breaker. People won't even buy the house. Maybe Americans will say, you know, hell with it. I'm not even going to buy this, let alone fix it. But you're so right, man. Like those, I feel like they've just been doing business. You know, get no pun intended for thousands of years,

man. And like, that's just how it is. It's just how it is. And, you know, that's what, what's now, what's truly crazy about that in terms of like a leadership challenge, right? Because not only are you leading your troops, but you've got to establish a good cultural relationship with the people that you're operating amongst because otherwise you're not going to have any success in finding and targeting the enemy. How do you talk about that without offending them? You know, you go into these meetings and you lead with that? You know what I mean? And then he's cooking for you, like, scooping into this pot of gear, have some chicken. There's like, you know, it's like, thank God for CIPRA, man. You know what I mean? Like, you just have to dive right in. You know, otherwise you're

offend in the local populace and I mean the consequences could be very real man you get your ass shot off by these guys that you know like I say they play both sides of the ball crazy moving on you do a terrific job of and in my notes I just have written the platoon in quotes right because you do what everyone has to do which is describe these guys that you're with and it's you know that's another referring to James Webb again who wrote this book called Fields of Fire. And if you haven't read it, you should read it. It's a novel, but it's based on his time in Vietnam.

And when you know his story, then you realize it actually was his time in Vietnam, almost exactly. But he wrote that book before any of these other Vietnam War books came out. And in that book, he talks about, you know, he describes the platoon. And it's all the stereotypical characters that are in a platoon. And what's, what's amazing about it is like, those were the real guys that were in his Patoon. Those are the characters you described. Those are the characters that are in every every major Vietnam movie that there is from platoon to Apocalypse. Now, like they all have

this to full metal jacket. They all have the same stereotypical American cross cut, right? Yeah. The city slicker. The, the country kid, you know, like the chubby, dumb kid that doesn't, like, they got all the stereotypes. And, you know, as I'm reading your stuff, guess what? There it is again. And you did a great job of putting these guys out, going back to the book, Staff Sergeant And I can't cover all of them, and you didn't even have the opportunity to cover all the guys that you had. But you hit some of the highlights. I'm going to hit some of the highlights. Staff Sergeant Phil Baldwin, my second squad leader approached.

Six foot four and built like a fullback. Baldwin cut an imposing figure in the growing darkness at 34. He was the second oldest member of our platoon. He joined the Army in 2001 after watching the Twin Towers fall on 9-11 on TV in his house in small town, Illinois. Other squad leaders, staff sergeants Campbell, Sabaki, is I'm saying that right? Yeah, Sabaki, yeah. Sabaki and Waits. Sabaki was a human tempest who blew through life fueled by a raging inner passion.

While serving in a mechanized unit, he'd had Sabo tattooed in a half circle above his belly button, which is anti-arm around. Waits was a leadership challenge. You talk about your platoon sniper, blue-eyed, blonde-haired, Sergeant Wheat. You know, you got the cast of characters. And it is. It's legitimately like they're typecasted from saving private Ryan, from band of brothers, from the Pacific. Like, that's America.

Yeah. Look, so I feel like when I waded into my platoon, it was, you know, the most diverse cross-section of people that you can possibly imagine. You know, I mean, rich serving next to poor, northerner serving next to southerner, like, you know, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, Muslim, Christian, atheist, Sabo was a Satanist. I mean, all in the same foxhole, man. It's like, you know what I mean? Like, in America, like, I feel like we're divided amongst those lines. But in an infantry platoon and in a combat unit, you address it directly. And in a way, you transcend those stupid, petty differences.

And this is like why I always say, like, real leaders unite. They don't, they don't divide. Yeah. You know, and my NCOs in my platoon were truly amazing. I mean, these guys came from every different walk of life. Their boots and T-shirts had more experience in the military than I did. And they had every reason in the world, right, to stick me in a corner office in my platoon CP and be like, just do the paperwork, sir. We got this.

But they didn't. You know, they took me under the wing. They taught, coached and mentored me every step of the way. These are people that had, like I said, tons of experience in the military far more than I did. Most of them had chips on their shoulders as it came to officers, you know. But they were amazing, man. I mean, six of my guys in my platoon, six of them weren't even citizens. I had a guy from Russia.

I had a guy from Haiti. I had a guy from South Korea. I had a guy from South Vietnam. I had a guy from Mexico. I mean, I'm not joking. All these guys weren't even U.S. citizens when they were in my platoon, you know? And again, you know, I'm like a city guy, like through and through. Like, I'm not like, you want to talk about stereotypical.

I'm not like, I feel like I'm not like you. I feel like you were the kind of like kick-ass take names leader. I was the guy in my unit that always needed a haircut. You know, like I didn't, I was not like, I'm like the least tough person in the world. Like, I'm supposed to be in charge of these guys. You are like the stereotypical junior officer coming in from college, doesn't know anything. He's slicker. That's so classic.

It is. Except for that, I really, really, really want to do right by these guys. And I'm telling you, your humility from my perspective on the outside looking at, because I trained a lot of junior officers. and the junior officers that were humble like you were that were like, okay, this guy knows more than me. Those guys always do well. Well, most of the time they do well, not always, but a large percent of time, those guys do well. The guys that do better, the guys are like, look, I went to college.

Look, I've been to Ranger School. I know this better than you. And that's the guys that get their horrible. So look, I mean, I walk into my unit. How could you not be humble? First of all, like I said, I mean, these guys had far more experience. You know, that in and of itself was intimidating. But I walk into my unit.

My units go into the Joint Renewitness Trading Center, JRTC at Fort Polk in prep for this deployment. I had a choice. My commander's like, I'd just stay here, get your bear. I'm like, no, I'm going with my guys. I'm going to train with my men before we go to come. So I don't even have a place. I put my stuff in storage. I'm at Fort Drum, which is like there are two seasons there, like July and winter, right?

And like, yeah, because I know. And so they issue you, go to CIF and they issue you three shopping carts full of equipment that I don't even know. It's Molly gear. We didn't have Molly gear like when I was in training. So I had no idea how to hell to use it. And I get to my unit and like my NCOs like dump these three shopping carts and all my gears mixed up and a pile that's as tall as me. And I'm like, so guys, I'm just like, so I'm going on this deployment with you.

My NCOs are like, God damn it. And they all start putting together my gear for me. And I'm just like standing in the middle of them twiddling my thumbs thinking like this is not the best way to earn the respect to your truth. Yeah, you know what's awesome from a leadership perspective as well. is, and your book shows us very clearly as this relationship develops between you and the NCOs. The NCOs, NCOs that have the attitude of, oh, my officer doesn't know anything and screw him and I want to keep him over in the corner doing paperwork. Those guys end up with officers that suck.

Yes. And they don't have a good working relationship. It's a self-licking ice. It's a self-perpetuating thing. Yes. It's a loser. It's what it is. They've had a bad experience with an officer at a young, and then they just said screw officers.

and then because they've said screw officers, every officer they get, they don't help. And then those guys never become good officers. Yes, exactly. And that platoon is not as functional as a platoon where the NCOs do what they're supposed to do, which is help the junior officer learn their job and advise them. And it's literally what their job is. In the Navy, we call it the senior enlisted advisor. That's what you have.

Your platoon chief is your senior enlisted advisor that's supposed to advise you on what the hell to do. So when guys neglect that or they're anti-officer, they end up with a crappy platoon. Yeah. And, you know, the guys that, the guys that neglect that end up with a crappy platoon or, you know, the guys that, you know, you get to Afghanistan or you get to Iraq, combat can be, you know, a great sifter of people, right? So the guys that maybe were that in your platoon that you couldn't quite, like, move out of your platoon prior to the deployment or maybe you knew that they were a leadership challenge along the way. Combat has a wave of sifting through those types of people as well. Yeah, yeah. It does indeed.

All right, continuing on. The men seem to be in good spirits. At the northeast corner of the perimeter, I found Sergeant Michael Emmerich in the truck. In the truck commander's seat of the Humvee, hunched over his sketchpad that he's illuminated with his headlamp. We greeted each other. I leaned on the door to peer over at his shoulder's latest creation. Emrick was an outstanding NCO and team leader whose men loved him. He was also a gifted artist.

A skill I'd recently tapped by asking him to create an emblem for our platoon. When we had a break in patrolling, we were going to paint it on each of our vehicles. What you're working on, Emmerich, I asked. He showed me the sketchpad. Jesus, man, that's outstanding. I said, looking at his creation, he'd drawn a fierce and toothy skull bursting from the O of Outlaws. Isn't finished yet, sir, Amrik said a little self-consciously. Emmerc, this is perfect.

We'll put it on every truck. That way the enemy will always know who they're dealing with. Thank you, sir. Like wheat, Emrick hailed from Louisiana, though he didn't have Wheat's deep accent. No, man, thank you. That image is going to give us our identity. When I had first taken over the platoon, I wanted us to have our own unique persona. We'd settled on calling ourselves the outlaws, and I'd paid out of pocket to have t-shirts

made for everyone. We also came up with our own guide on. We were the only platoon with one. They're officially for company level and above. By the time we got out here, we were known as the outlaw platoon throughout the brigade. Now, thanks to Emmerich's design, the enemy would know us as well. Boom. What made you decide to do that?

You know, we, well, in training, you know, one of the things that one of my NCOs said to me was that, hey, sir, you know, when we're here training, we have, we have a tremendous opportunity to take this group of individuals and make them into a team. and I got to tell you, sir, you know, once that first bullet cracks by your head, you know, the individual does not matter anymore. The only thing that matters is this team and we're only as fast as our slowest person. And so at that moment, I said, all right, so what do we do? You know, how can we bring this? How can we sort of transcend the traditional training relationships or professional relationships that we have, right?

So bringing all my squad leaders, we started throwing around names for the platoon and we settled on the outlaws because that's sort of that embodied the persona of my platoon we were sort of the black sheep of the battalion and training I feel like everything we did was wrong I mean we get recocked on our live fire lanes like every time at 2030 20 30 30 times like I mean I was the black sheep of the lieutenant a guy that didn't go to any infantry training like hey keep an eye on this guy so we're like we're the outlaws you know screw it like that's what that's who we're going to be and you know I'm telling you my men they took that they embraced it, man.

Like they had these t-shirts and hoodies. They rocked him everywhere. They rocked them everywhere. Like, platoons aren't supposed to have guidance and companies. In fact, I remember running with my platoon. They're all carrying this guide out.

And my battalion commander runs by and he's like, what are these idiots doing? Hey, you know, you're not supposed to have a platoon guy. And it didn't matter. Like, we carried it everywhere.

And when we got to Afghanistan, that, you know, I'll just say, it brought me on board with branding in a big way. You know, these guys, that became their collective identity,

you know, and that's the thing about, the military that is truly remarkable, right? Like they teach you to shoot movement, communicate together. And then you go to combat and you fight, bleed, and die together. And that's one of the things I always talk about about going home is when you come home, it's like, okay, now everyone goes to separate ways. It's like runs completely contrary to how you're trained,

which is, I think, part of the reason why men struggle, men and women struggle so much. But yeah, Emmerich designed this outlawful tune logo, and then they started, my men just started designing stencils of it. and put it on the ballistic turrets of their trucks and their doors and it's like painted it on their flicks or whatever and i don't know what you guys call up but flicks is that what we called it it just became who we were and you know we got in a few fights and we started to uh you know we started to have this reputation in our area of operations of like the green skulls and it got to be weird listen to the the enemy's communications on their little icons and they'd be like oh it's the

green skulls like wait for another unit we're like that's what i'm That's what I'm talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was, it was, I mean, I can't, like, I can't even overstay. I can't even believe that I live this life. Oh, yeah.

I look back on it, I'm like, it seems surreal because it's not, you know, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not the, you know, I feel like every veteran today has to be like a big MMA guy or like a shoots rifles and, you know, I saw something on your Instagram. I love MMA. I'm just saying like, you know, your last Instagram, you have some video of you pulling back this big bow. I'm like, God damn, I got to go on a podcast of this guy. Like, I was just playing Pokemon with my son. I'm not, this is not who I am, you know? This guy's going to kill me. No, that's awesome.

So, yeah, I mean, I ripped off Colonel David Hackworth, the Buckaboutface. He renames his battalion, the hardcore, right? And that's why when I took over task unit Bravo at Steel Team 3, I changed Task unit Bruiser. Same thing. Like, this is what we're going to be. Yes. And it's like the person, did it become like almost the personality of the unit?

Yeah, the bruisers. It matters a lot. I mean, it's a little like I go out work with companies. I'll go out work with companies. I met this guy. He's like, we named our like construction shift shifts. So every shift has their own name. And then they're like trying to outcompete each other on who can get more work done and stuff.

Well, I mean, I mean, look, we had a battalion football game. Like, oh, we were the outlaws. They had their own little uniforms made. I mean, they, they, They rolled into that football game with some serious attitude, man. And we ended up winning. It's powerful. You know, it is powerful.

I mean, it helps galvanize people under a common banner. I think that if your leader, you know, obviously humble, big eyes, big ears, listen. But like, part of your job is to galvanize people, bring people together from all walks of life. And a great way to do it is to come up with a name, a unit, a symbol. No doubt about it. You know? And so us versus the world. I didn't know what the hell I was doing at the time.

I just listened to my NGOs, but it seemed to work, you know? They were 100% right. You're continuing to making the rounds, talking to some of your guys in the platoon and you go up and talk to a guy that's, well, I guess you wouldn't say in your platoonies, your terp. His name is Abdul. And you go up to him and you ask him, why do you do this job? He didn't speak at first. Instead, he dug into his MRI pouch and found a package of crackers. He'll, as he opened them, he said, at the beginning of the war, my father worked for the Americans at Fob's skin.

Am I saying that right? Skin, yes. I couldn't conceal my surprise in my voice really doing what interpreter his answer intrigued me is he still working there more silence Abdul studied his exposed cracker took a bite then glanced back at me he's dead I didn't know what to say he was killed by the Taliban four years ago we received night letters I sat down peering at Abdul intently. Is that why you do this? He nodded.

Every mission I go on, I avenge my father's death. I am the head of the house now. It is my duty. That explained everything. His courage under fire. The trust Captain Kennedy had placed in him, his standing with the locals. I understood why he didn't cover his face. He wanted the enemy to know what he was doing.

How about you, Lieutenant? Why are you here? I opened a bottle of water and down half of it, thinking back to the day I had found purpose in my life. Unconsciously, I touched the St. Christopher's medal at my throat. September 11th, I said simply. So, Abdul. Yeah.

A good guy. He's a great guy. He was just great. Explain night letters a little bit. Yeah, night letters are, you know, if you're a, if you're known in country to be working with the Americans and the bad guys know, that you're working with the Americans, they'll start finding out where you live and start sending letters to your family at night. And Abdul's family in this regard would wake up every day,

walk out to their front door, and there'd be a letter stapled or nailed to their front door, which is basically threats. Like if Abdul continues to work with and support the Americans, we're going to kill him and kill your family. And so Abdul would get word of these night letters on our base. Now, we were at Ford operating base, Burmell. And so Burmell was about five clicks from the border. And right south, just directly southeast of us

were Schen, 45-minute drive south with Schen. And Army Special Forces would rotate in and out of there. And Schen is sort of famous for being co-located with what they call in Afghanistan and the Alamo, which is like a little bee hut where like these secret squirrel types would sit there with like their little calm stuff and listen to like what the Taliban were talking about.

but there was an outpost there, and Abdul's family lived right there. So they lived right in the thick of it. And Abdul was a guy that he didn't, this was back in the day before the Americans did the hiring of the interpreters, like, officially. Like, you know, I think Task Force Titan was what they were in Afghanistan. Well, I mean, when I was in Afghanistan, it was like, hey, you know, you get $10,000 from your talk from Tactical Operations Center, pay the interpreters type thing for Sergeant's going out and paying. And that's how we hired him. But Abdul was just a great find.

And where we were in Afghanistan, specifically in Pactika province, they spoke Waziri. I mean, they didn't speak Pashto or Dari or Farsi. They spoke Waziri. So you would get an interpreter from Kabul or something like that, and they couldn't even speak the language. So you had to have somebody local. Abdul knew most of the bad guys that we were fighting, at least the bad guys that were local to the area. And he just, in a big FU to them, he's not wearing a mask. He's in the fight just like we are.

And, you know, that's, that's, I realized in that moment. that most Afghans are on the front lines just like Americans. A lot of Afghans, they want the same things that we have here, you know, and they're willing to fight for it, and Abdul was one of those people. So he's getting those night letters. Eventually, they escalate to a point where he bails and he leaves camp. Yes. And this, going back to the book, the next morning out, Walpatoon rose early to prepare for

another long patrol mission. This time we'd be out beyond the wire for another six days, tasked with setting up Snapchat and observation posts all over our area of operations. We sorted beyond the wire heading into our area of operations, five hum Vs strong. We hadn't gone far when I got a radio call from the base operation center telling us to turn around and come home. There was no explanation. We swung around and drove back through the main gate.

Soldiers were running in different directions, and there was a charged atmosphere that had been lacking when we left. We dismounted. Sabo and Baldwin linked up with me. Any idea what's going on, sir? Baldwin asked me. No, let me see if I can find out. out turn the trucks around and make sure everyone stays close roger sir i walked to this to the operation

center where they found first sergeant christopher where i found christopher first first sergeant christopher overseeing controlled chaos when i asked what was going on he said delta found the body of a local national so you guys go out they find a body along along a road they send you guys out to go and see what see what's going on identify the body see if you can figure anything out and hear you guys You guys find the body. It's next to a bike alongside the road. And here we go back to the book. We drew alongside and stopped.

Lieutenant Marbury had been right. The cyclist had been shot in the leg. It was twisted under him in an awkward position. What do you think happened? I asked. Waverly said nothing. His eyes were devoid of emotion. But I knew him to be a sensitive man.

Inside, he must have been reeling. Leaders make decisions based on the best information available and a thorough gameboarding of possible outcomes. but even the most competent leaders cannot account for everything. Life has a way of breeding unintended consequences. If it was Abdul, he would shoulder the guilt of this day for the rest of his life. Lieutenant Marbury looked back up the road and spoke softly. I'd say he was coming back north out of Schen was ambushed here.

Maybe he tried to drive through it, but he got hit in the leg and fell off the bike. I nodded. Made sense so far. See how his leg is broken too? Probably happened when he hit the ground. blood had congealed around the leg wound flies were lapping at it marbury continued he tried to get away but they caught him executed him see the bullet hole in the back of his head i hadn't seen it i couldn't take my eyes off the flies you have to look if it's abdul at the very least you owe him that some of the squad leaders had called lieutenant taylor and me terp lovers they'd been through a tour here already and they'd come away with disdain and distrust of almost all Afghans. They'd seen betrayals.

They'd seen that here. Loyalty shifted like the desert sands. As armor from such things, they'd built a wall between themselves and the people we were sent to protect. We bent down and unstrapped his helmet. When we pulled it off, black red pudding drizzled out of it.

The lifeless head flopped into the dirt. Lieutenant Marbury was right. The man had been shot in the back of the head. I could see the entry run surrounded by a man. matted black hair. It was Abdul. And then you guys actually went to his family's house? Yeah, that was a, that was a terrible day.

I mean, you know. Did you have to deliver the body? Yeah. Yeah. And Abdul had, you know, I think, I mean, a brother that was probably like 10 years younger than him and younger sisters younger than that. And I mean, his. And his mom was like the, I mean, that little boy was like the patriarch of the family.

And his mom was sort of running the show. And I remember delivering the body to her. And I remember just watching from far away. I think Lieutenant Marbury walked up with the body with our company commander. And I remember just watching her collapse at the front of her, at the front of her collat. And I remember the little boy ran around to this woodpile on the side and he collapsed on the side. I mean, it was just a terrible, it was just a terrible situation. And, you know, Abdul would complain about these night letters all the time, and he would say, I really need to get back to my house to take care of my family.

He would talk to me, Commander Sean, like, I need to get back there. And so we'd go to our commander and talk to him about it and say, look, we've got to give Abdul leave to go back and sort of take care of his family. And our commander ended up, he ended up shooting that down. Because in order for Abdul to get down there safely, down and back safely, we'd have to divert an infantry platoon to bring him to escort him. and we simply did not have the combat power to do it. And Abdul ended up in the middle of the night because we denied it, hopped on his little dirt bike, drove down there, linked up with his family.

He was ambushed somewhere on the way back to our base. And, like, I mean, it happened exactly as I described. It gets shot in the leg, flips off the bike, tumbles off the bike, and takes a bullet right to the back of the head and was executed right there by people who wanted him dead. And they, they, you know, that was my first experience with losing somebody that, you know, he wasn't a member of,

of my platoon, but he was fighting with us. You know, he's an ally. And, man, I learned, I think the title of that chapter was like, I remember thinking, like, man, the enemy has a long, dark reach. They can hit you anywhere, anytime. And, yeah, they're sophisticated. They're smart fighters. They're some of the world's best light infantry.

They know how to, they know how to bait infantry platoons out of bases and bait people out of bases for that matter. They did that with Abdul, and they caught him in a near ambush on the way back. And it sucked. It sucked. So we were left with, we lost our best interpreter, which was the bridge between us and the local populace. And I feel like, I feel like things went downhill from there. I mean, because, you know, you never really know what these interpreters are saying if the translation is accurate.

Oh, yeah. And Abdul, I mean, it was one of those things like my platoon sergeant and some of my more seniors NCOs never truly trusted any of our interpreters. but Abdul was one of the good ones and when we lost him shit just went downhill You say in the book The assassination made the war Personal for all of us

Suddenly Abdul's younger brother Bolted through the front of the door And ran to a nearby woodpile He dropped to his knees Covered his head with his arms And began to sob The moment had no end We stood our vigil

Gameface is secured But beneath them We seethed The grief I'd felt As I stood in the ditch Next to his body had given away to a slow burning rage rage at the enemy, rage at the

decision that had led to his death, rage that we had been unable to help the one Afghan upon whose loyalty we could always depend, left without him. I feared what would happen the next time I had to interact with major ghoul or any of his ilk. Yeah, because you literally,

you put a lot of faith in those turps, man. He was with us everywhere, man. And like there were, you know, even the 173 airborne that was there before us, like this is a guy that would charge into ambushes with American troops. Like the war was personal for him and in that moment, it was personal for us too.

So you're out on patrol. You're in the Humvees. And here we go. Back to the book. The hackles on my neck suddenly stood straight up. My nerves jangled, spellbound by a sensation unfelt before. What the hell?

Perhaps I was getting seriously dehydrated. I opened the water, bottle in my hands my lips curled around its plastic rim just as Baldwin's Humvee exploded for a split second a bubble of orange flame sprouted from its right side the rig lurched hard left as its shock absorbed the violent blast another flame ball boiled underneath the Humvee gouts of dirt and smoke spewed horizontally from out from between the tires an instant later the fire vanished replaced by curls of black smoke haloed by swirling dusk McLeod, are saying that right?

Yes. McLeod, Baldwin's gunner, disappeared out of the turret, leaving the barrel of his M2-50-cowel heavy machine gun pointing skyward. Baldwin! I dropped the water bottle. Before it hit my lap, a third bloom of fire spawned midway between our two Humvees. My truck trembled and suddenly it sounded as if someone was making popcorn. Shrapnel on the armor plate.

The smoke and dirt shrouded Baldwin's Humvee. from view. I heard a sharp explosion behind us quickly followed by several more. The ground quaked again. The water bottle shifted, fell over my thigh and spilled down my pant leg. Pin Holt, is that right? Pin Holt sat next to me with his gloved hands tight on the Humvee steering wheel. Sweat trickled down the side of his head, more beaten on his forehead just below the rim of his helmet. He looked at me, his face tense, but his eyes determined. He was waiting for me to make a decision. ahead more smoke swirled around Baldwin's Humvee. Beyond it, I could see our Afghan National Army A&A cohorts

bailing out of their Toyota High Lux pickup trucks toward the top of the knoll. The Afghan soldiers never the pictures of discipline ran this way and that with their weapons held at the low ready. A few flopped into the road, into the dirt on either side of the vehicles. Others vanished off the road sprinting as they fired randomly from the hip. between the explosions, the drumbeat

of machine guns rang out from both sides of us. This is just get some. Yeah, so that was my first this was my first firefight.

This was the first time I was ever shot at and like, oh my gosh, I don't even know where to start. Well, one of the things that I thought at first

in that moment was like, holy shit, there is a group of people out there that wants me dead. They've never met me before. They don't know me, you know, but they want me dead. And like, when there's somebody out there trying to kill you,

the first time you experienced that sensation, it's just you've never felt it before in your life. And that's what I was feeling in that moment. And so just to give you a sense, so it was Hilltop 2474, right, on our military map. It's 2,474 feet above the 7,000 feet that we were already at. Our platoon was tasked with doing an observation post on the backside of that hill. And so we had to pull around that hill, right, to the eastern portion of that hill.

So our Humvees and this big column pull around the hill. We drive down into what looks like this depression, almost like driving down into a gravy boat. We're at the bottom of that gravy boat. Outside the right of my door, I'm looking down. And I couldn't even open my door and step out of it, right? because there was a sheer wadi right to my right and it ran. So you're stuck there.

Yes. And to the left was this cliff. And so we get around there and there were four A&A high-lux pickup trucks in front of us and just all hell breaks loose from both sides. The enemy that day had ambushes from both sides, volley-fired RPGs at both the front and rear of my Humvees, probably four or five RPGs right off the bat

and opened up with crew-served weapons. And I remember looking up from my Humvee to the left and to the right, and there were three crew served machine guns on either ridgetop. I could see their flickering of their firing, and they were trained. They were barking the guns, which means that they had enough training to, like, shoot the crew serve machine gun, let the barrel cool. Next guy picks up the, I mean, it just was the craziest thing. They were good.

They were good. And then another unit hit us in an L-shaped ambush. And so for me as a leader, I remember looking at Pinholt. Pinhold is looking at me. He's got these big, bright blue eyes. And it's like, you know, when you're in training, it's like, they always say, hey, make a decision, sir, make a decision, make a decision. This is like my make a decision moment.

And, you know, there's no assault through a near ambush. There's no dismounting in the middle of that and assaulting. I mean, they had planned this ambush in the perfect spot knowing that I couldn't assault through it, right? There's no driving through it because they used the A&A as a roadblock so we couldn't push through the kill zone, established fire superiority on the high ground. I had nothing, nothing. There was nothing in that moment that I could do or execute that was from a field.

manual that would have gotten us out alive. And so I knew that, you know, I only had seconds to make a decision. And I knew that whatever decision it was had to be bold. It had to be bold enough that my men saw it. And not only did they have to see it, but they had to move out and draw fire with me. And so I got out of the truck in the middle of kill zone. And I remember, I remember getting out of the truck. And so, like, there's chaos in the truck. And then there's chaos outside the truck. And I get out of the truck and it's just like shit is hitting the fan all around me man and I'm like looking around I hear this big crack and turns out it's this Draganoff sniper rival that I've got some sniper that's trying to shoot at me I'm watching these rounds impact all around my feet and my first thought was

like I immediately regret this decision you know and I like look at pinhole and he's like he's like he's like what are you doing and I remember shutting the door and I just started hauling ass to the top of the hill because I knew I had to get the A&A into their trucks so you do you hauled out of forward forward up the hill up your towards the front of your patrol yep the hill so I remember get to the A and yes and I remember running past Baldwin's truck which was smoking and on fire but not out of the fight with an RPG yes yeah and I'll tell you what like those uparmored Humvees man like that they were still combat effective they were all in that truck the RPG said was RPG 7 so it wasn't like anything armor piercing but they were all

still in the fight and I remember looking in the window I remember just banging on Baldwin's up armored Humvee window and I just sort of gave him the infantry follow me thing. There was so much smoke and there was so much shit going on. I didn't even know if you really saw. And I remember running up the hill and I'm like my muscles were filled with lead. I mean, you were at 10,000 feet there. It's like mile high stadium football game times two. And I'm like, oh my God.

Like, you know, because as a young leader, you're always afraid of like making a mistake in combat and drawing the eye. Just failing your troops. And I was, I'm not worried. I just, I remember worrying about, oh my God, man, that I just make the biggest mistake of my life. That I just like totally make a stupid decision in combat. Are these guys going to even follow me? I never gave them an order over the radio.

In fact, I couldn't even use our radios because the, that hilltop was obscuring our line of psych comms to our base. You know, there was so much shit going down in the kill zone that my squad leaders were occupying the platoon net yelling back and forth. I mean, it was just so I'm halfway up. I'm like, Jesus Christ, I didn't give it. an order. I'm, my men even going to follow me. I'm like almost out of the fight. You know, I got rounds impacting all around me. And I remember turning around. I see in Baldwin charging

up the hill after me and then wheat charging up the hill after him. And then my mortar guy with a 60 millimeter mortar and handheld like slung over his back with mortar round. I mean like my entire platoon started following me up that hill that day. And and it was one of those things. It was just like, you know, they followed me up to the top of the hill. We all took cover up at the top, got the A&A back in their trucks, had them push through the kill zone. We got our trucks up there, established fire superiority, and then we just ran down into the teeth the enemy

and attacked him and killed those little bastards. It was like a three-hour firefight, but we hunted them down, and after two or three hours, Apache's came in, so it helped us. So it helped us cut off their Expo routes, and by the time we got up and we were firing, I mean, we had cruiser machine guns, and our weapons were rocking on the tops of our trucks, but we were able to establish comms with our base

where we had two 105-millimeter howitzers that were firing, And I already had. How long did it take to get the 105s up? But when we were up there, seconds, because I already had TRPs plotted on the So once you got to the top of the hill and got radio comms. A minute, a minute after that. And by the way, yeah, it was, I mean, but our gun bunnies were amazing. Our artillery guys were incredible.

But I had already coordinated with our tactical operation center on where I thought the enemy would expo. And I gave them, hey, if I say fire TRP1, like this is where you're, this is what you're firing. Pre-plan fires, yeah. It was, I mean, the object of the, infantry is to kick boots on the objective, right? Like if we're in a fight, we're doing it wrong.

You know, so echelon of fires was something that I was a big believer, and we didn't really get to execute it that day. But, you know, the goal is, is, you know, you're, if we know we're, if we know we're if we know we're doing a movement to contact, I want to make sure that my howitzers are firing every second until my men get on that objective. And then we stop firing with the guns and then we exploit with boots on the ground, right? To give the enemy very little reaction time. But that day, we didn't have that, so we improvised.

We improvised. And I remember charging directly east. And I think we killed, I think. I mean, we got attacked by like probably 30 or 40 guys that day. I think that was what the report said in the aftermath. But I think we killed six or seven of them at least. You know, I mean, couldn't really find any. I mean, they're so good at Casabak.

But we killed at least six or seven of them that day. And for me, like, I remember coming back to the defact. And at the end of that fight, I still didn't know if I still didn't know if I had made a colossal mistake. I remember walking in the defect. And it was like, it was like that moment in Hoosers. You ever see that movie? The Hoos, like the slow clap. I like walk into the defect. I think my NCOs are going to kick my ass. And they just like, Sabo stands up first. And I'm like, oh, Jesus, this guy, you know, he's going to kill me. He stands up. He starts clapping. It was like some goddamn thing out of Rudy or something, you know, like that guy were going to

carry me on their, I mean, it was, I swear to Christ, you know, being a father's the greatest thing in the entire world. But that moment was one of, I don't think there will never be a moment. in my life, but I think it professionally anyway, where that peaks that, you know, and my men, so look, there's, there's earning your troops respect from shielding them from garrison bullshit and allowing them to train. I feel like that's an officer and leader's role. Like, I'll hand her the, I'll hander the collective stuff. You hand of the individual training. You can earn your respect that way, right? But, you know, none of that shit matters. You get your, you get one chance in combat to do it, and I feel like that was my chance.

It didn't, it didn't go perfect. I mean, we got shot up pretty bad, but I mean, we came out of there. It was like, it was most of our first experience getting shot at for the most part, you know, and like a really serious way like that. I mean, everyone has a couple pot shots fired at them. I think all my NCOs have had that. But man, that was like a four-hour, I mean, we got trapped in the kill zone of an ambush, fought our way out of it.

It was a nightmare. It was a nightmare. And we came out of that. And it was like, I remember just being like ACUs where like our Army. combat uniforms were like just direct I was just drenched you know walking in I mean to the defect everyone's got their little trays and they're like high five and everybody it was like you know

like imagine being an artist you training to be an artist and never painting a painting right and we finally got to paint our painting you know we finally got to experience combat and it was a great thing and it was pretty cool I mean it was cool for that like one time the hundreds of time after that it gets uncool very quickly but it was cool that one time that victory so yeah Rudy Defak

As good as it gets And I'm going back to the book here After all this stuff goes down Later that night as I lay in bed Unable to sleep despite my exhaustion I felt the flip side of that victory Braes 50 thundered A man's arm was torn from his body

I reveled in that moment The mortar machine gun The mortared machine gun nest was a charnel site Men blown apart Leave a vile stinking mess Ruined bowels The copper scent of blood bits and pieces nothing more defiled by firepower I had watched Garrett score that

hit and felt enraptured victory was evident in every kill and none of my men had been hit an infantry leader could not ask for anything more but what about the man you are I am a warrior where is the human side ugly thoughts boiled within me unformed terrifying they swirled around in my head as if my mind had tumbled across some truth my subconscious could not face today i watched a man get blown to pieces i did what i had to do as a soldier to win a desperate battle yes but what about a man what about the man you wanted to be how did you serve him today i tried to drive the thought from my mind can sean the human coexist with sean the combat leader today we had felt the indescribable rush created by bloodlust, survival, and victory. It had bonded my

platoon in ways I couldn't quite grasp. Now as I tossed in my bed, I wondered how we would ever return to our former selves after what this fight had done to us. We were becoming exactly what I did not know yet. But just sensing the permanence of the transformation inspired more fear than anything else I had faced that day. Restless, I rose from bed and stepped into the black Afghan night. I'd never felt farther away from home than at that moment. Coming down. Yeah. You know, I feel like, I mean, God, man, I remember, like, I remember this just like it was yesterday, man, laying in that bed. I couldn't sleep. I mean, I was exhilarated, but I couldn't sleep. And it was like one of those things, it's like, like, Jesus Christ, like, I sat there. I was.

was cheering. I was, I loved every second of killing the enemy. It was the greatest feeling up until that point in time in my life. It was the greatest feeling. But then I couldn't escape the fact. It's like, what does this say about who I am and the person that I'm going to be coming? And what does it mean about like, how are we as Americans? What are we different? How are we different on the battlefield? Like the juxtaposition of two selves like warrior and civilian, you know, you know, just straight killer or liberator and protector. And like I, to me and that, moment, you know, I think just think the awesome responsibility of being a young leader, whether you're a young NCO, team leader, squad leader, a platoon sergeant, platoon leader,

didn't matter. Every leader in combat has a moral obligation to be the moral compass of their platoon or their unit, their small unit. And that means that you've got to do everything that you can to keep those troops when they're in the shit, tethered to who they are, you know, not let them revel in the bloodlust too much. Because it's if you do that, you lose who you are, you lose what you lose your human side. And for me, you know, I mean, God, man, like we went through 485 days of that hell. And if we didn't, if we weren't constantly connected and tethered to our human side, that it would have been a fate, a terrible fate for every single member of that platoon, uh, the likes of which many of those

men that I served with would not have been able to escape from, I feel like. And because believe me, You know, you're there for eight months, man. If you're there for eight months, you get attacked so much and so often. And the enemy never relents. But you have to stay disciplined. You have to stay above it. You have to make the hard right decision. You can't just open fire into a group of villagers, even though you know they knew exactly

where that IED was placed. And what do you know, I mean, you have to stay above it. You have to stay disciplined. You have to stay tethered to your human self. And in that moment, I had no idea what the hell I was becoming, but I knew that I was changing in a way that I might not like so much. And I'm glad, well, the good part about this is you actually recognize this. Because this is something that you don't always recognize, right? I mean, you start getting angry at the enemy and the enemy, the people that you are calling the enemy, that definition can start to grow.

Right? It can start to grow to cover, like you just said, the villagers that knew the IED was there. Well, they knew that. Well, if they knew that, then they're the enemy. And it's really easy for that transition to take place and for that word to start to cover a much broader definition than what it should cover by the moral law and by the actual law. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so the bottom line is that it's our job. It's our job is in the infantry. And I got to believe in a seal platoon. even probably in a more precise way to close with, you know, find, fix, finish, close with destroy the enemy, kill them when they're on the battlefield. But when they're, you know, one of the things that I talked about with my men a lot, right? It was something that, like, we trained all the time, by the way, and we addressed this in our training. The enemy would hone and evolve their TTPs, and so we would as well. We never stopped training. And so that was how we were different

from a lot of the other units in Afghanistan. I think they can come back on the base and just chill and relax but no you've got to train you've got to train on escalation of force and in that as part of that training whether you're evolving your ttps or otherwise you've got to talk to them about our responsibility on the battlefield to take care of the enemy if they're wounded you know i cannot tell you how many times i had you know i had troops that soldiers that wanted to put a bullet in a guy that was wounded in the battlefield hell i wanted to with every fiber of who i was but you got to play the long game and think like if if you do take that person's life who will you be 10 years from now, 20 years from now, will you regret that decision? And, you know, the charge of a leader,

if you're going to be a leader of a small unit in combat when you're responsible for lives, you've got to be planning and thinking like that. And so, yeah, it'd be great to take that guy off the battlefield and put a bullet in their head, but you're not taking care of your troops if you allow your guys to do that as far as I'm concerned. No, because they're going to end up in jail. Exactly. I mean, and, you know, that's something, I, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, We received a brief that we were supposed to give our guys, and I did give it to my guys, but the overall broad, like, meaning of the brief was, take your morals on the battlefield, right?

Yes. And I actually said, hey, guys, this is what they're telling you to do, take your morals on the battlefield, and I'm going to tell you guys, don't do that. Don't do that. What I want you to do is I actually want you to follow the law, because here's the deal. What you just said, what I just said, like, morally, if you, set an IED or you fired a RPG and you killed a bunch of my guys, I feel like morally I can kill you. Yeah. And that's okay. But if you don't have a weapon anymore and you're surrendering,

guess what? Legally, I can't kill you. And so what you actually have to do is you have to actually follow what the law is. Yes. And guys, you know, and I know for, I know the way I felt like when my guys got wounded, when my guys got killed, I'd, wanted to kill everyone everyone all of them salt the earth rubble the buildings and turn the whole city into just just destruction and I told my guys that and I was like but we cannot do that and we are not going to do that because that is not legal and so what we do is we do the best we can with what the legalities are with the rules of engagement are we'll follow them we'll stick to him and we'll take the fight to the enemy that's what we're going to do but as I said that line is really really

it's one of those lines that if you don't pay attention to it, you can look up and you'd be way past that line. No question. I mean, for me as a leader, I was not willing to delegate that, you know. I feel like, in other words, I always wanted to have, I always wanted to be a part of that. I always wanted to have some sort of command supervisory authority on that aspect of, you know, I was always in the fight. I wanted to be in the fight. I wanted to be where contact was heaviest, but I also wanted to be involved in those types of decisions.

And so I think, you know, you mentioned something about just talking to your guys about how you feel too. So many leaders in the military don't do that. And what I mean by that is they, especially in the infantry, where leaders don't share their own vulnerabilities. Like, hey, man, like, I feel the same way that you do. Like, I want to go out there and kill every one of those little bastards. You know, I feel the same pain that you do. This hurts me just as much to see these men get wounded and killed. Like, but we can't do that.

And so just being able to identify with your men on that level is it not only does it bring you closer to them. I think it ingratiates them to you as a leader as well where they think like, okay, you know, my leader's not some abstract person out there. He feels the same pain that we do. He's in this with us. And, you know, it all goes back to sort of the established in that collective identity. Like if you're a part of that collective identity as a leader, I feel like those sorts of commands are more likely to be to be followed. And that line that you walk while it is certainly a fine. your best chance of staying on the right side of that is operating like that. Yeah, yeah.

If you're not connected to your guys, they don't listen to you at all. Exactly, exactly. So, and then, and I know you know this, you can go too far with that. And all of a sudden you become one of the guys that you can't differentiate yourself and you've gone too far and you've crossed that line and you're their friends. And you're their friend. And now all of a sudden when you say, hey, this is what we're going to do. You're not telling them that from a leader.

You're telling that your opinion from another guy appear. Yeah, exactly. They don't necessarily have to listen to you because you're just, you know, I think different from you. Okay, well, I'm going to do what I think. And then it becomes like, hey, you know, I need you to take that machine gun nest and I need you to take it now. It's at the top of that hell. See, I'm pointing to a go. And then you're sending me.

You're not sending your buddy. And then you're like, you are in crisis as a leader. And to me, you're combat ineffective. The moment that that question is asked, if you're, the moment if that question is asked, you need to be relieved of command. You know, yeah, leaders. Yeah, don't mistake like leadership with friendship. that they're not synonymous at all. You know, you might be able to be a friend of your guys after the fact,

like when we're retired sitting around a table smoking Stokes and drinking beer, but not while you're in combat. It's just, that's why they say leadership is a lonely thing. You know, and like that, because I get this question all the time, I had guys that worked for me that were absolutely my friends, 100%, that I did everything with, with surfing and drank beer and did jiu-jitsu and hung out 100%. And those guys, when I said, hey, this is what we're doing, it was like, Roger, no question. The thing is, you don't know who's going to have the professionalism in your platoon to actually be able to do that with.

And that's why you have to take that relationship building very, very slowly. And if you just decide you're going to be friends with everyone, there's going to be some guys that are going to take advantage of. They're not going to be able to handle it. It's going to cause major problems. And that means you can't be friends with anybody. and now you've created this distance and you won't have the connection that you want. So it's, man, this is why leadership is hard. Yeah, you know, you raise a great point.

I mean, I, you know, I was close with my guys. I loved my guys. They were like my brothers. In fact, I got two younger brothers and I love them too. But, you know, I can tell you who each one of my men is in the dark as they're walking away from 100 meters away just by how they, just by their gait, you know, you're so close to them. I had that bond with them. And I feel like, you know, so much of leadership is just like showing us.

up, you know, showing that you care, like trooping the line in combat or walking through the barracks at night or just, you know, being there with them in those little moments where you're not maybe intimately involved pounding beers with them in the barracks, but you're like, they see you, they know you're there. There is a way in which you can have a healthy, strong, I mean, I mean, probably in the SEAL teams, it's, you know, it's a small, you're a smaller unit. And plus the guys that make, you know, go through SEAL training and make it through seal training are probably a little bit older than that young 18-year-old privates, right? You know, I always had guys in my, I would always have one or two guys that worked for me that were like, that were three, four echelons below me, right?

That were E5s. Yeah. And they were like fully trusted, right? Like I could go and say, hey, man, what's going on with this guy over here? And they say, here's what's happening. And they would never take advantage. But what I'm saying is you can build those relationships, but you have to be very cautious when you do it. Because like you said, the minute, the moment that that relationship.

relationships, that relationship that you have with one person negatively impacts the platoon, you are a disaster. And in combat, that has a split seconds hesitation or question could mean death, you know, and you can't have it, you know. But yeah, I mean, it's interesting that you talk about the dichotomy between friendship and leadership, right? I mean, I feel like my guy, I'm so, I love my guys to this day, even pinhole. He was an E4.

I was a first lieutenant at that time. I mean, he was my RTO. He's my right-hand man. We talked about everything together, from movies to TV shows to whatever. I mean, we had a great relationship together, but he knew that when I said jump, you better damn well jump, you know. And I think a lot of that is also making unpopular decisions. He's like, hey, sir, I don't want to be the RTO. I'm like, hey, Pennell, guess what?

I don't give a shit what you think. You're my guy. And Penel's a great example of that because Penel is a guy who was mature for his age. He was smart and he got it, you know? And there's other guys that you couldn't form that kind of relationship with because they would immediately try and and utilize that for their own benefit. No question about it. So that's what I'm saying.

I guess I just, I just, because sometimes I think when leaders hear, well, you can't be friends with anybody, they think, oh, I got to be totally aloof

and no one's going to know me. And it's like, no, that's not it. You know what? You're exactly right about that. You know, because there are,

you're exactly right. Some officers or, you know, leaders, NCO's officers, they do interpret it as that. And then they're not involved at all, you know? That's horrible.

And it is terrible. And there are going to be guys that if you, buy him a beer, they're going to think your best friends, and they're going to think they're going to get preferential treatment on Monday. Calling you texting you, hey, sir, what are you up to? You want to go out to the button? No, I'm like, yeah, exactly. It is a fine. You really got to walk in.

It's a tough one. It is for sure. All right. Going back to the book, you guys had done that pretty, we'll call it a victory, for lack of a better word. Second platoon had had a probably the opposite end of the spectrum. Here we go back to the book.

Second platoon had taken a beating. We had two on May 7th, but their return to the fob was totally different from ours. Why, it was all perception. Defeat comes in many forms, both physically and psychologically. Second platoon had arrived home a defeated force. Though we hadn't destroyed the entire enemy force on May 7th, and our counterattack had hit thin air as Goulang's men broke contact with us, we'd still inflicted a lot of damage on them.

More important, we stayed in the fight. that had given us a vital moral victory that second platoon hadn't experienced. Breaking contact on May 17th had been the right call given the tactical circumstances, but its psychological effect it had on Burley's men was all too obvious. Their morale and confidence had taken significant hits. I could not let this happen to my guys ever. Hell yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, stay in the fight, the end.

That was the lesson there for me. Like I saw how some of some of and again, right tactical decisions, sometimes you got to break contact, right? I mean, but no, not for us. In that moment, like we made, every single one of my non-commissioned officers and I looked at each other after, you know, after we got back from that first firefight. And we said to ourselves, you know, we saw how second platoon came back. We saw how their men were dejected. We saw that there are several different components to defeat, but certainly physical and psychological or two major psychological. Psychological defeat is oftentimes worse, right?

and we just said to each other, like, I don't give a shit what happens. Like, I don't give a shit what the enemy throws at us. I don't care how they attack us. We're going to stand and fight. We're always going to stay in the fight, and we are not going to be the first to leave the battlefield. What's the bottom line? Like, if the enemy is going to attack us, we are going to counterattack them until they are dead until they break contact from us.

And that's what we did. And that's what we did. Sometimes it worked great. Sometimes it didn't. But we held true to that point. promise. That's one of those attitudes that, you know, I call that attitude being default aggressive. Like our default mode is we're going to attack you. That's the way it's going to be. And if you have that, the amount of power that that gives to a team is like, look, if we get

pushed, we're going to attack. That's what we're going to do. If that's what everyone's thinking, it gives you like a superpower because that's just a unified attitude that we're going to attack you. Absolutely. And here's the thing. It's empowering. and you said it was empowering because it empowers your soldiers or your troops to react on a second's notice. There can be no hesitation. When you're attacked, if your position is default aggression or in our case, an outlet between, it is like we're staying in the fight, we're in the fight until the very end. And your default is to attack all the time. Your men know exactly what they're supposed to do the moment that they get shot at, the moment that you're attacked.

And it is to attack. And one thing that is infinitely easier is to call guys and reel them in. Like say, okay, guys, or guess what? You know what? We're not going to. When you make the decision, we're going to break contact instead, okay, that's something that. Whereas if people don't know what they're going to do and then you're telling them, okay, now we're going to attack and you're trying to force that, that's a very, that's

infinitely more challenging than having to say, okay, guys, look, you put a lot of pressure on. That's cool. But I don't know what's over there and we're going to break contact. And guys go, okay, well, I'm kind of bummed out because we were, we were feeling good, but okay, we'll break contact. That is, I didn't say this in the book, but I remember having this conversation as part of this conversation was we're sitting there talking to our leadership in the platoon. You've got E5 leaders who are team leaders. They got like three to five people under

their command and squad leaders who are nine to 12. And I remember telling my team leaders with my platoon sergeant, you all need to be team leaders of people that are on the front lines. Like when they get shot at, they're the ones that are reacting oftentimes first. You're bulldogs on a chain. Right. To use your vernacular default. Like that's what you need to be. Squad leaders, if you need to dial them back, dial them back. back, right? But they're the ones talking to me. So, look, to your point, like, if I'm on the radio saying, okay, let's pull back the team leaders, that's a hell of a lot easier than trying to get multiple units to attack. Yeah. Right? Because as a leader, like, God, what people don't

understand as a young leader in combat is, not only are you trying to maneuver your troops and identify where the enemy is to counterattack, you've got to deconflict air corridors, you've got to bring, you've got a mortar and then you're firing a mortar and an Apache comes in, you stop firing the mortar so you don't knock the Apache out of the sky. I mean, you've got to, there's all sorts of things you've got to take into consideration. So you have, you almost have to have a default position. And in combat, it sure's how better be aggressive because like there's, what else is there? Like the default defensive? No, that's, that's not a thing. And by the way, those, those moments, those seconds that, that it would take to give the order of, hey,

we're going to attack, those seconds are the seconds where you actually win. Like those seconds are the times when it's like, oh yeah, we, if we wait three seconds right now, we give up the, we give up the superior position to the enemy right now. Oh my God, no question. I mean, at the height of our operational skill in Afghanistan, where we killed so many the enemy and we were there for so long that we knew the terrain better than them, it was, it was just, you know, say a battle drill, but it was almost like an un-arptune. as a collectively reacted on an unconscious level to these attacks to where team leaders and squads would attack instantly,

and I would have one of five's down range in less than 10 seconds on target. I mean, and it was just a, it was just methodical. It was just, it was surgical. And I don't think I've ever, so I always look at, like, I've always been, I've only been on like two championship sports teams in my life, right? Each time. I think that's two more than me. I know I'm not going to be like my only first place trophy in wrestling was my first year wrestling tournament. It was like this little trophy.

It's the only first one or only first place trophy I ever had. But it was just there was something special about those teams when we won championships. We just had it. We had something. I don't know what it was. Qualitative quality to the team that made us successful. My platoon was like that. You know, it was like a.

You know, there's another great leadership point in throughout this book. that is that you had this awesome decentralized command going on. And you, you explain it. You don't use the word decentralized command. I don't think, but you're explaining what's going on. And you're like,

oh, I got to the top of this perimeter. And when I got there, you know, Sergeant So-and-so is putting his machine gun over there. Sergeant so-and-so had this perimeter set up. Sergeant so-and-so has taken some high ground over there. Everyone,

you hadn't told them to do a damn thing. All you said was like, go up there. And everybody, okay, okay, the boss wants us to take the high ground. ground when they get up there they look well obviously we could take the high ground we're gonna set up a perimeter where you get security we're gonna set firing lands

they did all that stuff themselves nice to explain that to these young like task unit commanders you know they where where things would get bogged down and people be waiting like a fire team leader would be waiting to be told like hey get your get your heavy weapon over on that corner so you get good vantage point over this direction where we're looking down in this valley like you you can't tell eight fire team leaders what to do I used to tell my, we used to train on this, right? I used to tell my team leaders and my subordinate leaders, like, first of all, I want you to have the freedom and flexibility to react on your own.

But I need you to handle the implied task. If I tell you that you need to go from point A to point B and knock out that machine gun nest, I'm just going to tell you, go take out that machine gun nest. I'm not going to tell you to maneuver to the rock and then stop and then set up your machine. No, it's up to you as a leader. I delegate that to you to just get it done because guess what I don't have time for that shit I got other things going on so and so that was to me it was like anytime a soldier would come up to me and say sir like where you want me to put them like hey man I need you to handle the applied task brother like I you know go handle it figure it out you know um so you know there's

command of execution like my command of execution is knock out that machine gun nest or hold the line here they got to do what they got to do it you know I don't figure it out you got to and so To that extent, I guess it is sort of decentralized command. Oh, that's absolutely decentralized command. Your book is filled with decentralized command. You guys ran it beautifully. I just sort of stumbled upon it. I feel like you're the pro at it.

I just sort of stumbled upon it. Well, it's really easy for me to recognize. It's real easy for me to recognize. And, you know, somewhere along the line, someone told you like, hey, you better let your squad leaders do this. Or you figured out for yourself, hey, I can't, I can't tell you exactly what to do. I'm going to tell you, you need to figure out how you're going to get done.

Absolutely. And when you do that, I mean, it's healthy for a unit in platoon and a team, because there's a sense of accomplishment of your subordinate leaders when they get it done and do it right. Oh, yeah. And also there's a little something called ownership, which is, you know, when you tell me to go do something and I go and figure out how I'm going to do by myself, then I actually take ownership of getting it done and I feel even more accomplishment. Because I'm not just accomplishing what you told me to do. I'm accomplishing what I figured out how we were going to do. No question. And then when that happens, it also makes people proud of their accomplishments.

And then they start teaching their lower enlisted people on how to do it as well, right? And so, like, that's our big thing is, like, as a leader, right? I would tell all of my guys, like, I don't give, we don't train for what we think combat would be like. We trained for, we trained to, like, just react and react effectively. So in order to do that, everybody in this platoon needs to know the job of the guy beneath them and the job of the guy above them. And we'd train on all that stuff. And so the hope was, is that we could establish some form of decentralized command. And each troop, each soldier in my platoon could perform.

the jobs at risk i mean god you take you take a casualty somebody gets god for a bit somebody gets killed somebody immediately has to step in that trend step into that position step into that leadership position with no hesitation and take it over you know so it's the way it's got to be it's the way it's got to be going back to the book where and once again i'm fast forward in giant swaths of incredible information here so get the books you can hear it all you're on a mountain top it's June 10th back to the book All Elements

this is Black Hawk 3-6 we'll be starting we'll be standing two in 15 mics my four other truck commanders acknowledged we spent the night waiting for Galanghong how do you say his name

Galang Galang and this guy is the bad guy in this book and you again because I'm only reading little tiny parts of this incredible book you have to get the books so you can get the full details of Galang yeah I feel like for you guys

he'd probably be a high value target, maybe MVT. I mean, but he was the local commander in our area and he was a badass man. He fought against the right. I mean, he knew what he was doing. Yeah, he was, he's the one that's setting up all these really good. Like when, when that first ambush you were in, first of all, I'm surprised you guys got out of there. Me too. And I think to myself, if I could have been the ambusher in that, like, you know, you think, man, you're, you're going to kill everyone.

Like, it's a miracle that you guys made. It's great leadership. It's great reaction by your troops. but that this guy's a pro is what I'm trying to say for sure this guy is a pro I mean look man they were hitting like there were bullet holes we had mark 19s the feed trays like there were bullet holes stitched across the top of them that's how close some of the rounds were coming to hitting my gunners and I mean all of that I feel like it's true like a little bit of luck I mean there's something else out there I feel

like we were just blessed or lucky or whatever you want to call it man but we always we always take blessings and luck for sure yeah take we'll take that especially especially We were to get an ambush from three sides from the high ground. Yeah. So now the morning chill upon us. I shivered in my filthy clothes. We made it a standard practice to wake up an hour before dawn while out beyond the FOB like this. Experience had shown that the enemy loved to launch attacks at this time in the morning.

Soon all 24 of my men were up in position waiting to see what the enemy would make a move. I think I put, I think I circled that just because I always liked the idea. of standing too. We did it all the time. And also because you were cold. My guys hated it. My guys hated it. But we did it all the time.

I learned that from an old Australian S-A-S-S guy. He's like, you've got to wake up an hour before the sun comes up. Be ready. You've got to be the first mover of the day, man. I mean, that's just, that was my thing. It's like you set the tone, you set the tone early, right? And no one wants to do it. And typically to me, if it's uncomfortable like that and no one wants to do it,

there's a reason why we do it, you know? And you hear all the time of complacency kills, right? Well, there's no way in hell that I was going to allow that to happen to my troops. Yep. You know, if I, if I'm the cool guy, if I'm the guy letting troopers get away with shit, like taking off their helmets or whatever, unbuttoning their helmet straps and their turrets, then someone gets killed, like, I'm the guy that has to live with that forever. So those tough decisions about, like, waking up early, staying in the proper uniform,

wearing the right eye protection. I mean, come on. You let a soldier downgrade their uniform and downgrade their protective gear. someone gets hurt. I mean, it's just something that you don't want to ever have to live with. No. While you're up there on this observation point,

you guys call for artillery on a ridge line and because you suspected of being in an area where they were storing or launching rockets from. There was a big cave site there that we knew that they were using from one side of, they're entering the cave from Pakistan and exiting the cave from Afghanistan to stay out of, you know,

we had ISR and predator in the area and we're like, how are these guys smuggled? these rockets in where we ended up identifying a cave site where they were doing it from. So back to the book, a few minutes later, the first 105 millimeter artillery shell tore across the sky and exploded

on the west slope of the mountain. More shells rained down. Our gunners at Burmell were dead on. Even better, they threw in a mix of ground and airbursts, creating a lethal artillery cocktail. I watched from the edge of our perimeter wondering how anyone could survive such firepower. Mission complete,

Sir Reuter reported that was your ROTRuder yeah Ruder yeah Ruder I turned my he was my F F Farrter Okay so he would I would I would plot out the maps I'd call it to him. He'd call it in Yeah, he's squared away throughout this book. He's just on it he is he's amazing and he I mean he ended He's like a pilot now. He's a black hawk pilot now but yeah, he's amazing I turned and started to walk back to my home V. Ha ha ha Ruder. How about that? I asked with a Smile happiness is good indirect sir He replied. It was standard refrain for our for our Ford Observer, like to use.

He was right to. Indirect fire gave a platoon like ours an awesome amount of destructive power. I flicked a glance over my shoulder at the smoke smothered mountain top. Your play, assholes. I'd walked about halfway back to my rig and was just passing a thick pine tree when I called out to Ruter again. Let's see what those bastards are saying on their radios now. But before he could respond, Ruter and everything in my view disappeared as a curtain had just dropped before my eyes blackness nothing where am i the morning scene in the hindu

kush had vanished replaced by an endless void sean that voice sean you need to get up grandpap sean you have to wake up now i struggled to see him but he stayed cloaked in the velvet darkness i was left only with the smooth comfort of his voice get up sean you got to get up get up for me something stung my face I tried to look and see what it just hit me but I could not penetrate the void am I dreaming I tried to shake my head but I couldn't find fire the right neurons instead I floated captive to whatever moment this was another sting on my face at least I could feel something I wanted to move my hand up and touch my cheek and defend against whatever kept hitting me my hand refused to

obey I felt disembodied as if some how my conscious had been separated from my material form Sean get up A telephone buzzed in my ears now. The ringing was all I could hear. Disoriented, I tried to look around and realized I was flat on my back, perhaps 15 feet from where I last remembered standing. The tree had been passing looked as though a giant had snapped it in half. Then I saw Sabaki. His face was smeared with blood. His IBA stained crimson with it. In a sudden rush my hearing came back. I went from nothing but the telephone to a hurricane of sounds in a heartbeat. The switch blitzed my nervous system. I was a sudden rush. I was hearing came back. I went from nothing but the telephone to a hurricane of sounds in my heartbeat. The switch blitzed my nervous system. For an instant, I was helpless against the century overload swamped by staccato bursts of 50-cowl explosions and screams. Sir, sir, are you okay? Stattler? Stalter shouted at me. Why wouldn't I be?

He smacked me again. Sir, you got blown the fuck up. Yeah, that's what? He was like, what was it, a mortar? Yeah, so, so yes, it was an air burst mortar. And so we had heard, we had heard. we had heard the enemy during our stand to, right, talking on their icons about moving the rockets to the cave.

And I'm like, well, hot damn, I know exactly where you are. And so I called in the artillery. What we didn't realize was that the enemy had been planning attack there all night, right? And they were planning to attack us. They had identified our observation post. They had conducted reconnaissance on us all night. They identified who the key leaders were over several hours worth of reconnaissance. We had no idea that we were there until the next morning,

but we didn't realize that the ICOM chatter that we were hearing was them planning an attack. Now, that stand to is what saved us because we got to hit them first. But it was like hitting a hornet's nest with a baseball bat. They had maneuvered. They were still going to get stung. Yes. Yes.

Yes. And so I remember watching those rounds, which were fired, Charge 8, right? So we talk about Charge 8 on artillery as like rocket at rap. rocket-assisted projectiles for artillery, is that there's an inherent tactical risk involved there is that the rocket charge can flip the guns. So you have to balance as a leader. Will the tactical effects of this fire outweigh

the potential tactical risk of the guns flipping and then being ineffective? I had to make that call, fire the guns, the rounds impacted right where I wanted him to, walk back to my truck, and just the entire, the whole world goes black for me in that moment. and I remember coming to Stalter slapped my face and laughing and I'm like shaking right I could not yeah no it's like that black sense of humor you know that it's funny because you didn't say in the book

he was laughing he was like yeah but I know that attitude right there he's got a chance to smack the LT yeah and he's straddling my chest like he's like straddling over me like slap me in the face and I'm like laying on my back and I'm looking to my left and the first thing that I see is my platoon sergeant. This is a guy who's been in the military for 20 plus years. This is Griesen? Yeah, Grecian, who was in Panama, jumped in with Panama. He was with the seventh. Yeah, he's old school, like you, like you, you know. But he's, he's pointing to his back, taking cover behind this big tree, pointing to his back, had taken shrapnel there, his back is covered in blood. Sabo is wounded, who's my weapon squad leader, my second most senior NCO in the

platoon. In fact, every key leader of my platoon was wounded in the first 60 seconds of that engagement. And I was down and out myself. And so, I mean, I'm looking around me. What were your wounds? At the time, I didn't know. Later, it was, I ended up fracturing my skull in two, three different places. And I had a cerebral spinal fluid leak. And so I was, when I sat up in the clear fluid that leaked was leaking out of my nose and was leaching out of my ears for a couple weeks, it was as a result from those hairline fractures in my skull. And the cerebral spinal fluid is the stuff that cushions your brain from your skull. And it was just leaking out like, you know, and that ended up healing on its own. But again, this was back in 2005. Like soldiers today are getting evac for

injuries like that. But this was before TBI was even an acronym. It wasn't even a thing. So, so anyway, we're like, I sit up and the rate of fire was so heavy. I mean, so. I'm watching these airburst mortars hit us, and I know that they're not impacting on the ground, right? But they're hitting above us. And I'm watching the tops of trees just explode. These are trees that had been untouched by humanity for probably 150 years. You know, they're big, huge trees. And watching these things explode.

I'm looking at my hand, which is laying on the ground. And there are rounds impacting right between my forefinger. I mean, it was just insane. Everywhere I looked, it was like the dirt was on fire because machine gun rounds were just in our perimeter all around us. And I remember being stult or grasping by my body armor and pulls me up. It's clear fluid, leaks out on my nose. And I'm looking to the ridge lines.

And then in the darkness, I couldn't really tell it was a tactical mistake on my part that there were two hills directly east of our position that were taller than ours. Yeah. And from those hilltops, the enemy had three machine gun. a piece. And they were, again, they were barking the guns. They were talking the guns. And they weren't just doing that.

They were using plunging fire to drop the rounds into our position. So in other words, they were firing them on a trajectory where they would arc up and land in the middle of us. So that even if you were taking cover behind a deflate or something, the round could theoretically land on top of you. They were hitting us with air burst mortars. And as I'm sitting there trying to take in this fight, like, holy shit. like they have us dead to rights here. There's no way we're getting out of this. And you guys are in a 360 degree perimeter.

Yeah, I've got five Humvees. Yep, five gun trucks, 24 troops on the ground, one interpreter. I got 250 caliber machine guns, one Mark 19, one 240 bravo that's mounted and two other dismounted 240 bravos in my trucks. So we're the, and they were positioned in 360 degree security on top of this big hilltop, big hilltop. I had the third biggest hilltop in the area. Yeah.

Yeah, I can say, must of my chagrant, the third biggest hilltop of the area. Yeah. And I got my troops interspersed, and on the easternmost portion of that perimeter was Sabaki and Baldwin, and I looked towards there to where they are,

and their trucks are totally destroyed. I see Baldwin, he's got a bullet in his shin, and he's bleeding all over the Afghan dirt. And I remember, like, what struck me in that moment is that he's not trying to treat his own injury, he's trying to treat his team leader who was Bennett Garvin

who had taken a tumbling AK round to the forearm and almost severed his arm. And the entry wound itself was this big. The exit wound was even bigger. I mean, his arm was hanging by a thread. Baldwin was trying to get a tourniquet on there. I remember looking at Baldwin's face. He was just ghost white.

He was bleeding out. Emrick was a gunner in one of my turrets. He's up on the turret on the 50 cow. He gets shot in the head, drops in the turret. He pops back up, gets on the gun. a kid that was in my platoon who was this very first patrol. Kyle Lewis is on another gun.

I watched him get shot in the head in the turret, him fall down, him get back up. And we're talking their helmets have, like, in and out, you know, from a bullet. And somehow these dudes survive. My guy stayed in the fight somehow. But we ended up getting attacked that day by, I mean, you know,

and the predator analysis after the fight, once we finally got Predator on Station, over 200 guys. Sergeant Major is just counting them one, two, three, four, five, over 200 to my 24. And so what was crazy about that attack was that the enemy had, the enemy had, they had simultaneously in place two support by fire positions. And they had us in a crossfire and they were hitting us with plunging fire.

But in order to get those support by fire positions in place without us noticing them, they hit us with indirect air burst mortars, which is what kept our heads down. Right. So we're getting hit with artillery. I'm knocked out. Everyone's taken cover. They emplaced these support by fire positions. They put us in a crossfire.

And I'm thinking as a young lieutenant, like, okay, shit, like we're dead to rights. What's next? And I'm realizing at the time that these guys are fighting just like we do. This is exactly what I would do in the same situation. And I'm thinking to myself, if I were them, I would attack. And it wasn't but a minute that that thought had dawned on me that I see that we get attacked from those hilltops, from two successive positions, from 40 men. platoon size elements like bounding down the hill into the valley below and up towards our position and it i mean i just it just was so crazy um we started calling in fire danger close on our position

and it was just was watching 105 rounds vaporized men like on in the defilating the low ground below but it wasn't enough it was not it was not stopping it didn't matter what we threw at them there were just so many of them we'd kill one two more would replace it they were they had just amassed a force there that no matter what we threw at them it wouldn't it wasn't stopping them we were I mean all around my perimeter you know we're going black on ammunition I got my squad leader screaming that they're going black on ammunition and I'm thinking of like Joshua Chamberlain and like holy shit I'm going to have to order a bayonet chart down to the teeth of the enemy and then I remember sitting there at my trikes like thinking Jesus Christ the army doesn't issue us bayonets anymore like this is like

this is crazy so everyone starts grabbing their sidearms starts grabbing their sidearms starts grabbing and knives, you're ready to fight, and then we fight them to a, almost like a stalemate. They didn't quite get to the top of our hill. We're blowing Claymore mines. We're yelling back and forth. I remember sitting on the easternmost perimeter with my guys. You can see these long knives hanging from their belts. We fight them to a stalemate, and I'm starting thinking, like, okay, I've got to start

getting these casualties out of here because they're all bleeding to death. So we start trying to evacuate Baldwin or evacuate Garvin. We get over there. Baldwin's like take Garvin first. So our medic Doc Pantoja grabs him, picks him up, starts carrying him back and boom, watch Pantoha our medic get shot in the face and drop and thinking my medic is dead, Jesus Christ. Like in this whole time, I'm just... What's the time frame that we're talking about right now?

Like, how long is this good thing going on? Probably up into this point, probably at least an hour and a half. We couldn't get close air support either because our, like, rotary wing and fixed wing support were diverted down south to our troops in contact. where a battalion and brigade commander were involved in. So we were like just left out there flapping. And who cares about first lieutenant partner right now? Yeah, right, right.

And so Baldwin, you know, Pantoja goes down and I watch him stand up. And I'm just like, I couldn't believe that this kid was still alive. The entire like, you know, right side of his face is ruined from this bullet hole. It picks up Garvin, gets him to the aid station. We run back for Baldwin, get hit with another RPG, get hit with an RPG this time. I go flying, Pantoja goes flying. We get back up, grab Baldwin, get him to the casualty collection point. Then we start trying to prep them for Evac at Ternicots on, render first aid.

And what was the Kazavak plan? How were you going to get him out of there? Well, the Kazavak plan, we were trying to coordinate with the Marines and the A&A back at the base to come out here and link up with us. So it was a vehicular Kazavak. It wasn't going to be helicopters coming in. Correct. And that is the truly difficult thing about Afghanistan, the challenges that you face with the terrain there,

sometimes in the weather, right? So if the weather is cloudy and there's a low ceiling, the birds aren't flying, you're out there operating, somebody gets shot, severes an artery, the birds aren't coming, and there's no way you're going to evak them back to a level of care where they're going to survive. The tactical risk in Afghanistan in this regard is just astronomical

with regards to casualties. And on that day, I mean, the fighting was so. heavy. There was no way we were getting a Blackhawk in there to evacuate him. There's no way we could have a blackhawk loiter and get a jungle penetrator in to get a guy. There's no way in hell. No one was coming. So it had to be a vehicular Kazavak, a conduct link up on the westernmost portion of our perimeter with Marines and A. NAA. Casavac slash QRF because you guys needed like legitimate quick reaction force. Help. Oh, we were getting overrun. This is a great and I'm telling you got to read this book. But here's a part that's,

So the enemies closing in, like you said, pinhole appeared beside me. Sir, we're about to be overrun. We need to Z our radios. Which, for those of you who are civilians that don't know, your radios have a little switch on them that you can turn that erases all the, all the cryptographic material, all the secret material, all the code, the special code. Comsec, yeah. The special code that you've got in your radio that allows you to understand other American radios, when you turn this thing to zero, then it's gone. That means the enemy can't take your radio and listen. But you have that switch in the event that you think you're going to get overrun.

The last thing you're going to do, like literally the last thing you will do is zeroize your radio so that the enemy can't get on the friendly frequencies and listen or talk or disrupt them in any way. So Pinholt tells you we need to Z our radios, which is, which means that he in his mind thinks, you guys are done. We were. You guys are done. Because there's no, once you zeroize your radio, So you can't talk anymore.

You can't talk to your own elements. So he's just saying, look, we're done. We're going to be overrun. We need to zeroize our radios so the enemy doesn't get them and we're all going to die here in the next whatever. That's where he was at mentally. You come back. No way, I said instinctively. In worst case scenarios, we were trained to erase the frequencies on our communication system so the enemy cannot listen to our chatter.

By doing so, we would lose all ability to call for more fire support. Sir, we need to do it. He actually pushed back. Sir, we need to do it. Pinholed, insisted. No, we cannot lose our link to the fob. Both enemy assault elements had cleared their own slopes now when we're pouring across the valley floor, 100 men at least.

How many did we have left? A dozen? Maybe pinhole was right. We lose our radio link. We all die. Router, I shouted, turning to my forward observer, who was sitting in my Humvee with the radio handset to his mouth. Sir, call in anything you can, work the fire missions, danger close.

Got it? Yes, sir. He keyed the handset and began barking coordinates. I looked at my RTO. Do not see these radios. They go down. We all go down. Got it?

Yes, sir. Good. Grab a radio and come with me. I can't, I mean, I can't believe that, that, I mean, Jesus, man. I, yeah, that's where, you know, my men, I remember the feeling on top of that hill that day. My men all had, you know, nine miles in the truck with just enough rounds to take their own life. Should we be overrun because we were not going to allow ourselves. to be taken captive by these guys.

I know that sounds morbid, but that was just the truth, you know. And that's where a lot of the guys were. I mean, they were still in the fight, right? They were still going to fight to the very bitter end. But there comes a point in time where you're out of ammo and they got more ammo than you. And they're among you. That's where we were. That's where we were.

I checked with Router. Any birds in root? Negative, sir. All the assets are tied up elsewhere. Keep trying. I huddle up with Griesen. A good dynamic existed between the two of us. I was always the hot one.

He ran cold and kept me grounded. We'd become so close we could finish each other's thoughts. Throughout the fight, we didn't even have to communicate much. But all along, we functioned smoothly as a team. Greason? Yes, sir, he growled through dirt-crusted lips. What's our next play? Somebody screamed, they're coming again.

The sound of gunfire grew fast and desperate. The tempo of the fight was changing, building. I looked at Griesen and saw a relentless determination etched on his face, but also I saw a touch of fear. Fuck, I don't know, sir, shoot back. That was his plan, which is where you guys were at. And I tried, yeah, when he said that, I was, at that point, I was like, holy shit, you know, like, for a lieutenant, like, my biggest weapon is my radio. And if it's time for, like, me to start shooting back, it's a, it's a real, real bad day for everybody, but that's where we were.

you could hear these guys not only and you detail this in the book it's scary you hear him calling out al-a-a-a-bar which okay but then what what because we've all heard that but then you you heard the the squad and their squad and fire team leaders giving out orders you could hear that too yeah yeah it was it was um we were yelling back and forth screaming calling them names and stuff and they were yelling back at us and when we fought him to a stalemate And this was the first, this was the fight, you know, after Grecians, like, shoot back and I run out to where Baldwin was because, again, my big thing is that if you're a leader, it is your job to be where the contact is heaviest. You know, yeah, you have to coordinate other aspects of the fight, but you better be on the knife's edge of where the hep fighting is heaviest. And so, you know, I ran back out to the easternmost portion of the perimeter, and that's where I first, that's when I first pulled my trigger and took a life was in that engagement at that moment.

and it was at the moment where we're watching and witnessing these, um, these, their team leaders. I mean, their chain of command, yelling fire commands and bound commands and maneuver commands to their subordinate team leaders.

And it was just, I mean, we knew that they were well trained because of the first engagement that we were in with them, right? We knew that they knew how to fight. But it was a whole other thing to see their command and control and how fast they were on the battlefield. They were way faster than we were.

Yeah, well, they're a lot lighter too. That's right. I mean, that's one thing. They have this huge advantage because we wear ourselves down because we value human life. So we wear body armor and we carry radios and they carry what? AK-47 magazines.

Mags, some frags. And they're acclimatized. Like they're all used to running around at 12,000 feet, you know, so they scale up the side of a mountain better than a mountain goat can, you know, and these are the people that we were fighting, you know. And what we had started to see on the battlefield, you know, anytime you're in Afghanistan, it's like you deal with, you know, anything from al-Qaeda to the Kani network to Hekhmadir to the Taliban. Sometimes in this engagement, what we were seeing

was cross-training. And so you'd see al-Qaeda foreign commanders, you know, commanding and leading ground troops who were just local Taliban. And man, it was, it was just a wicked, wicked, wicked fight. Sometimes people will say, you know, Jocko, you talk a lot about tactics. Like, don't you think the enemy's gonna, gonna, like, learn these tactics?

I'm like, the enemy absolutely knows these tactics. The tactics I talk about are cover and move, you know, set up support by fire positions, maneuver through, you know, like, that's what I talk about all the time. There's no secret to this stuff. You either know how to do it, and if you do it, how well can you do it?

Or you don't know it and then you get slaughtered. But yeah, there's, but to hear, that's exactly everything that you just said, everything that you've experienced so far is exactly what we do. That's what we do. Like that's what we do. We set up ambushes.

We set up L ambushes. We set up, we want to get the high ground. We set up support by vire positions. We bound in maneuvering leapfrog elements. We cover and move for each other. That's what we do. And knowing the tactics

and being entrenched in them is not enough. You know, and so, of course the enemy knows everything that we do. Our FMs are on the internet. Of course. Like, you know, but knowing the tactics. You have to be able to take that the tactics are just a baseline.

You've got to train and evolve and watch the enemy and adapt. And so anytime anybody asks me a question about tactics too, it's like, yeah, of course the enemy knows our tactics. But that's not enough. And if you're even asking that question, it means you're a slave to the tactics, which you can't be. The tactics are a baseline. And that's just like any leadership. You have to be able to make command decisions on the fly, evolve, adapt, and operate in the field. And that's what you have to do to be effective in combat.

Yeah. And as you put, as you, as you related that first ambush that you got caught in, there's no manual that gives the answer that you gave. There's no manual that you can say, okay, if this is where you're at, first of all, how are you going to describe that? How are you going to describe or give a scenario for every single possible combat situation that you're going to be in you? It's literally impossible to do because you, God knows what's going to happen out on the

battlefield. God knows that you're going to be in a situation like that right there in that particular environment, in that particular scenario with that particular terrain. with the enemy in their situation, with your troops, you know, arraigned the way they are, like that's only going to happen one time. And if all you know is the basic fundamental tactics without knowing how to deviate from those tactics, you're going to get killed. But if you truly understand the principles of the tactics, then you can go, oh, okay,

here's what's going on. I'm trapped. We, I better get the high ground and I better get it now. That's exactly right. I mean, if you're, if you, if the tactics are the only thing that you understand, then you're in a near ambush, you're, you know, react to near ambush, charging into the, I mean, you're dead. You're dead. If that's your, bottom line is tactics or a baseline.

You've got to understand the principles and be able to adapt and maneuver using and understanding what those principles are. Otherwise, you're done. You know, because one thing that combat does better than anything else is throw you a curveball every single day. I mean, you'd be at the top of your game and all of a sudden, like, one of your trucks, your rear differential on your Humvee brakes and you're stuck on the side of it. Mountain Top for three days. It's the way it works. Like what do you do with that? It's absolute chaos.

And, you know, what tactics bring and what training brings is a certain amount of order to that chaos. And that fine line between order and chaos is where survival is. And like you said, the same thing. I think we both just said the exact same thing. Knowing the tactics, knowing where the X's and zeros move on a chalkboard is part of understanding. But you have to understand the actual.

principles that you're trying to to enforce on the battle field that's what you have to you have to understand what are the principles you have to understand those principles once you understand those principles then you can adapt those tactics and you can maneuver and you can make things happen which which like you said just knowing the tactics isn't good enough you have to understand the principles of why you're employing those tactics and then you can make calls and decisions that will allow you to win going back to the book the enemy wouldn't quit the fight grew even more intense Delta platoon anchored us or we would have gone down for sure still we couldn't hold the enemy off indefinitely we needed more firepower and more men on a hill a few hundred meters to our northwest to our northwest ahead appeared over the crest then another soon a dozen figures flowed over the hilltop and down the slope facing us they were carrying AKs more followed a dozen two dozen the lead element of open fire on the run shooting from the hip like something straight out of a movie I had one mag left

I'd given all my others away even with Delta's trucks we couldn't stop this fresh threat unconsciously I clutched my Gerber knife I can't believe it has come to this more men poured over the crest and then I saw a Marine in their ranks their a a and a I said to myself combat Whipsawes your emotions in an extreme way that nothing else can. I'd gone from despair to euphoria in a matter of seconds. The Afghan troops sprinted into our perimeter and counter-assaulted the enemy through our firing line.

Galang's men reeled from the blow and fell back pell-mell to the base of the hill. Several more marine Humvees and A&A Toyota trucks joined us from the northwest. We'd gone from having five trucks, three of which had been rendered immobile by damage to having 14. How does what I mean? That really is an emotional roller coaster, man. You go from thinking that you're dead one second to having a shot of getting out of there alive.

And I remember, I will never forget this A&A dude like crests on top of that hill. He's just screaming at the top of his lungs. He's got his AK-47 down on his side. He's screaming. And as he's running, he's shooting the ground in front of him. Like that's, I'm like thinking, oh my God. Like he's just shooting, like right in the ground.

I'm like, oh, my God. Like, we're getting overrun and come to find out. It was the Marines and the A&A, and it was just, you know, they augment our position. And, you know, they augment our position when we start crossloaded and ammunition. And then we fought them to a stalemate for like another four or five hours, you know. And we ended up getting an Apache on station, an A10. And then we had a B1 strategic lancer on station where we dropped, I want to say, I think we dropped at least 11, 2000.

pound jams on that cave site and on that ridge line and it was only after that that's that's get them to even break contact in the first place they were determined it was unbelievable they were determined to overrun an american platoon and behead us that was what we learned that was what they wanted to do and from then on out that's that's the enemy that we were fighting and they were utterly relentless in every way and if we weren't ready to face them every time we left the wire we again we were dead to rights just before you guys got the air support you had this unfold I'm going back to the book we got to get them to the trucks grease in order dixon now she sheet white from blood loss lifted baldwin's wounded leg with his unwounded arm the rest of us picked him up as well staying low we

moved as fast as we could off the lip of the hill down the northwest slope to the waiting humvees before we could slide him inside the truck baldwin cried sir sir the terror in his voice made us freeze I'm fucked up mouth open shallow rapid bleeding he was going into shock I could see afghan dirt around ground into his teeth you're gonna be okay bro I said I'm shot in the back what when we all went down Baldwin took around at the base of his spine we had no idea until that moment I can't feel my legs he seized my hand with his and as he stared at me with saucer eyes he squeezed it hard as weak as he had been the fear assailing him now if One last birth of strength. No words came. I held my brother's hand until they pulled me from him

Door closed driver gunning the engine the Humvee lumbered off for Fab Brumel The second one carrying Garvin and Dixon soon followed I watched them go greason and Sabo standing beside me The blood of our brothers drying on our hands and arms So as you guys were carrying out As you guys were carrying out Baldwin you guys got riddled with machine guns and Didn't you take one through the pant leg or something? Yeah, I, so, okay, so we were dropping j-dams on them. We thought we had, we thought we had driven the enemy back and given enough tactical space to start evak on our casualties in a way that we thought was as safe as we could possibly do it.

I mean, you say safe, but you know what I mean. It was the best time. And so we start picking up. We rushed Garvin down to the trucks and we come back for Baldwin on the second trip because, again, Baldwin assisted that we get Garvin for. first. And so all of us grab Baldwin and Baldwin again, 6-4-250, huge guy. So I grab, I grab him, Sabo grabs him, Sergeant Dixon grabs him, Greason grabs him. And as we're carrying Baldwin to the truck and down the hill, we get hit by machine gun fire from a rogue, you know, one of those machine gun nest that wasn't destroyed, around, went through the back plate of my IBA and down

through Sergeant Dixon's arm as we were carrying him. And I just remember watching Sergeant Dixon get shot right in the forearm. And, I mean, he just watched the blood spurt out of his arm and his face goes white and we drop Baldwin. It was sort of chaos. And then all I remember, though, is Pantoha coming out of nowhere. His face is still ruined. throws a tourniquet on Dixon, and Dixon runs over to the other side of Baldwin and grabs

him with his good hand and we all pick him up when we get him to the trucks and we get him down to the truck. And Baldwin just kept saying to me over and over again, sir, sir, and I'm just like, it's okay. You're going to be good. were going to be good because he was he was so white he had lost so much blood already from the bullet wind to his leg and the thing is is that the bullet wind to his leg he lost a lot of blood but he never he was never out of the fight he never once stopped shooting and tried to get him off the line it was

he was a god he was a pain in the ass that day and i tell him that to this day you know i could not get him off the line and he's just ghost white and to this day all i remember really a lot about that moment is just this you know around the whites of his teeth he's just had this afghan dirt just cake to his teeth and he just said, sir, you know, I'm really fucked up. And I said, you're going to be fine. I promise you're going to be good. And I'm like holding his hand like this. And he goes, no, sir, no, sir. I've been shot in the back. I can't feel my legs. And then the Humvees whisked him away. And we never really, I never saw him again. And not until we got had been back months. You know, we knew he was okay. We knew he was going to survive.

Got an updates on his condition throughout the course of our deployment. Um, but man, that was Baldwin was one of those guys in my platoon that was just a, man, all my NCOs were just so great. And to lose any one of them like that was really challenging. It was really tough. You guys got Apaches, you guys got A10s, and you guys got the B1. When you heard you got the B1, you said the wrath of God. Yeah, yeah. You know, the fact that an infantry platoon on the border of Afghanistan got a B1 strategic

lancor capable dropping like. you know, I don't even know. I couldn't even tell you, like 20, 30, J-DAMs. You know, J-DAM is a joint direct attack munition on target. I mean, I'm telling you, we must have at least 11, probably more like 22, we dropped over the course of that engagement. It was just, you know, because it didn't just end after the enemy broke contact, right? They were still taking pot shots well after the initial force had broken contact

because we had to get a wrecker up there to get our trucks out, you know, get a wrecker up to the top of this mountain to get our time. You guys needed to completely secure this whole AO. Just took forever. It just took forever. And we were out there for hours and hours and hours. And eventually, after we had hooked up our last time V, we all limped out of there. When it was over, the silence was almost unbearable.

Galang's force had been pulverized. The fighting had lasted almost six hours. Exhausted, we hooked up our three disabled rigs and towed them off the hilltop for home. Our long column traveled west with barely a word shared among us. Empty shell casings littered our Humvee floorboards and as we bounced along the rugged Afghan roads They jingled like sleigh bells when we reached Burmell the home bodies turned out in force the divide between combat troops and the men who work behind the wire grows wider in moments such as those Band of brothers no battle sifts those relationships like nothing else We called them pogs which stands for personnel other than grunts or Fobbits

They smiled and laughed and took photos of our battered trucks as we parked on our out on the maintenance pad they spent the night safe inside the base uniforms clean body armor stowed under their bunks and you actually decided to become a smoker right then yes started smoking cigarettes yes i did i did i absolutely did and um you know i that part of the book i sort i mean it it happened exactly like that you come back you're shot to shit you come back and have these guys these guys americans that greet you and they look at you like you're in like a zoo you know they want to see the devastation of the trucks the every single window of our uparmine shot out completely i mean we had we had the up armored ballistic glass thank god for that but i mean they were all just shot out completely i mean almost every single member of my batum was wounded in that engagement and like guys were bloodied and battered and so you got these guys taking pictures of you that you know they're going to send to their family and be like look at how bad we have it over here but these are guys that

like three hot in a cot every day, you know, they're taking warm showers. And then you think about it like this, you know, you get back from being outside the wire for 10 days and you haven't had a shower in 10 days and we don't have running water on the base, so there's a finite amount of it to begin with. You get back and there's nothing but cold showers because these guys who stay on the base all the time use all the hot water. And then you go in and you try to call your family and these guys who are on the base are clogging up the phones.

You've been gone for 10 days on a mission. You can't even call your family. And then you get out there and all the foods. I mean, it was just so. I, I, looking back on it now, I sort of regret that because I don't, I do value, I mean, it does take, for every one of us in the field, it takes three of them and it's one team, one fight. I believe that to every, with every fiber of my being.

But that is how it was at the time we were really pissed. Well, yeah, you know, it's like when I was talking about that definition of enemy expanding. Sometimes that definition of enemy can expand inside the, inside the wire a little bit. No doubt about it. And actually, you know, you did an amazing thing. And it's at the back of this book. You have a letter from a guy that was one of the texts out there. Our supply guy. A young private, it was a supply guy who everyone gave him a hard time, but he was just a great kid.

Yeah. And he wrote you a letter and said like, because he read the book apparently and said like, hey, man, I just read this book. And you're talking about how horrible we were, how horrible the Pogs were. And he explained his story, which was, I think after September 11th, he like, you know, was out of shape and worked out and trained. and got in shape so that he could join the army, and he took a job that he thought he could be able to handle, which was being a supply guy. And meanwhile, the girl that he was in love with who was going to marry him,

he went on deployment and got extended, and she said, you know, I'm not going to marry you. And so he gave up his love of his life and had no future. And he's like, hey, I just want you know we all sacrificed. Exactly. And you actually, I thought it was awesome. You published that is in the back. That letter is in the back of this book, you know,

because as you just said, you know, you wrote the way it was then. Yeah, right. And man, those things are real. And, you know, it takes both sides, right? Absolutely. Both sides. If you're a support person, you got to remember what the hell the guys in the field are doing.

And if you're in the field, you got to remember, okay, well, these guys aren't experiencing what we're experiencing. So they're going to have a hard time relating to it. And it's hard to build that bridge. I mean, honestly, with me, I had 40 seals and I had 60 support people that, you know, were running all of our stuff. And it was pretty easy for me because I saw them all the time. And it was a much smaller little element. And but, you know, I told, I told my support guys, the only reason that we're here is to get those guys whatever they need to do their job. Whatever they need to do their job.

We're here. They are our masters. We are here to support them. Those two platoons, that's what we're here for. Absolutely. And the guys got it. And that meant, you know, I said, listen, if it means if you see them eating and they're done with their tray, you pick up that tray and you carry it and you put it away for them. You do that for them so they can spend an extra three seconds prepping their gear for their operation.

And so the support people understood that because it's real easy for the support people to get isolated. And they're not going in the field, so they're looking at, you know, hey, I'm playing a video game. tonight, I don't know what these other guys are doing. They don't understand it. And so they start to have an attitude when someone comes back from being in the field for four days and says, hey, let me take a shower. And they go, it's my turn. No, that's not the right answer. The right answer is, sorry, let me go get you some soap.

That's the right answer. That's exactly right. And I feel like, to our first sergeant's credit, you know, he did everything that he could to, like, treat the operational troops in our base exactly like that. But as our base grew, I mean, it was a company-sized base, which mean it facilitated 120 infantrymen and maybe some and the support guys, right? So we probably had 300 people on our base. But as the base grew with our footprint in Afghanistan, the longer we were there, we had units that were there that were not under his, you know, purview, right? One part of our command. So, you know, you have these guys that would like, these support personnel that would roll into the showers, use all the hot water.

First start and be like, what are you doing, man? Like, you're doing this wrong. And they'd be like, F you. Talk to my commander. and it's just like, well, you know, and it just comes down to, like, what battles are worth fighting and what battles aren't, you know, as an infantry guy, you know, one of the things that you know is like you're rarely going to get credit for the things that you do. It's a thankless job, and it just sucks.

And, like, you've heard the term embrace the suck. Well, this is why we get to, that's why we wear the blue cord. That's why we get CIBs, you know, because our job is harder than everybody else's. And I don't mean from a financial standpoint because guess what? Like they're getting the same combat paid it. We're getting, okay? You know, and that's sort of the dynamic that we took going forward from that engagement is that like, yeah, this shit sucks. It's going to get harder, right?

But we took a sort of like black, like a perverse sense of pride out of that and that like we were the, we ended up being the best unit on our base. And because of that, we were always the forward unit. We were the lead element in every single division level operation in Afghanistan. It was my little platoon on the tip of the spear. And so we were the ones getting our ass to shot up all the time. So as a leader, it would be really easy for me to turn around and be like, well, damn it, man, you know, look at all these other platoons that they're, they're inferringy pitunes too. They get to slack off all the time. They get to sit on base all the time.

And look, they're not licking their wounds. They're not getting hurt. But at the same time, I like being the best, too. And so did my guys. So it was just like, yeah, okay, like, yeah, it sucks being out here, getting shot at all the time, getting shot up all the time. I mean, I'm not a joke. We took 85% casualties. I had guys wounded two and three times.

I had six guys get shot in the head. Six guys. They all survived. Every gunner in my platoon was wounded. Everybody that manned a machine gun was wounded and we loved it. I mean, it was just, I mean, we hated it, right? We hated it. But, like, we didn't want anyone else doing that job.

You hated it, but you guys were the outlaws. That's it. That's it, man. We, we took, look, I'm telling you, there were times. I mean, I'm telling me, my guys would complain. Oh, sir, why do we got to be the lead element? No one likes being the lead element on a division level operation, right? You're the first unit that gets blown up, shot at.

Every single time, you know, the buck stopped with us. I mean, I have my NCOs. God damn it, sir. Because if you have an entire battalion of like 800 plus troops on an infantry battalion operation, the lead point man in Afghanistan, I mean, the Russian era maps, like you make one wrong turn. Like there's no roads. There's no roads.

The entire battalion gets thrown off. So I remember my squad leader, Chris Cowan. He's not a SWAT guy with the Syracuse PD. He would be like, sir, God damn it, can't you just make some? somebody else appointment, just one operation just once. So we had to deal with that a lot, which is a fun leadership challenge to have. But I always talk to companies about this. You've got to be careful that you're in a dynamic and a corporate setting where, you know, the hardest working person because they're the most competent, you end up relying on a lot more.

And then the person sitting next to them skates most of the time. And so as a leader, you really should identify those things and not put too much on the person. that's moving out and drawing fire every day, doing the right thing every day. You've got to hold people accountable that aren't doing the right thing, but at the same time, we like being...

Yeah, and the other thing you do as a leader, is you protect the guys from the chicken shit stuff that's going on. Absolutely. As much as you can. And as you guys lost control of that base because other people started moving in, that became harder and harder to do.

For sure. Which is a problem. So going back to the book, I've been writing to my dad every chance I had. Most soldiers tell their family none of what happens in combat. They fear how they will react to the details. I hadn't been doing that. My dad had asked and I'd been, I'd never been anything but totally honest with him. In the past months, the bond between us had grown even deeper as we exchanged emails between patrols. By nature, leaders live a lonely life. As close as we

can be to our men and NCOs, there is still an invisible wall that can never be broken down, lest a lieutenant grow too familiar with his men. Familiarity can breed contempt. In a fight that could lead to hesitation to follow orders. Plus, a lieutenant who is too emotionally invested in his men, might make the wrong decision in combat. In trying to spare their lives, he could actually make the mistake that ends up getting them all killed. My dad's emails and our few phone conversations

had bombed some of the tense sense of isolation I've been feeling. I pulled up his email address. I wouldn't write him about Lieutenant Taylor and what he had said. That sort of company business needed to stay within the company, at least for now. Right then, a bolt of homesickness left me almost breathless. Words began pouring out. Dad, the enemy meant business and didn't stop coming. It was like the Russian horde.

Eventually we were going to run out of ammo, and they were going to overrun us. I'm a damn platoon leader, and I had one magazine left when our QRF quick reaction force arrived. We killed tons of them, and they just kept coming wave after wave. Half of my platoon will get purple hearts. My shrapnel wounds are healing fast. my headache is going away, but I still can't hear out of my right ear, and the ringing is annoying as hell. I paused and reread the words.

As a soldier and a leader, I cannot complain or show weakness to anyone. Such a revelation here would destroy my ability to command and battle and ruin the hard one respect I'd earned from the men. Leadership exists on a knife edge. Any sign of hesitation, doubt, or inability to hack it would have pushed me out of the platoon's inner circle. I could deal with getting shot at. I could deal with the threat of capture and beheading while my empty M4 lay at my side. I could deal with the pain in my head, the vertico, the sleepless nights where the buzzing in my ears kept me company. The one thing I could not

deal with was being pushed out. Sean the leader had to be tough. Sean the man needed to unburden himself. As I started typing again, I realized that just by reading my words, my father was performing a noble and selfless service for me. Somewhere on the other side of the world, somebody I loved knew what I was going through. And he was standing strong for me. I mean, I feel like that was a, I feel like I needed it in the moment,

but I hear it again today, and I feel like, and I know now, you know, what my dad went through, and now, you know, I know why guys go and talk about it. You know what I mean? It was stupid. I shouldn't have, I should have never done it. And almost, it almost, I don't want to say,

say it like it destroyed my father that's that's a bit much but it it took a serious serious toll on him to where i didn't know this the this dynamic until i got home but my mom was just she was the rock of my family that kept it all together i mean this deployment was just it was so hard on my family and i was exacerbated by these stupid emails i'd send to my dad but i just felt you know all the i the only lieutenant that made it through the entire deployment. I was the only officer that made it through the entire deployment in my entire company that guys either moved out to a different duty assignment or were wounded. I mean, I was a platoon leader with my men for 33 months, which is unheard of in the army. Like a second lieutenant takes a platoon for 12 months to 18 months

tops. I was there for 33 months. And so, um, when shit started hitting the fan real bad, my battalion commander's like, we got to keep our leadership in place, you know, um, but, so because of that dynamic, Right or wrong. And I largely think it was a real, it was a piss poor decision now thinking, thinking back on it. But I was lonely, man, not to sound like, I didn't have anybody to talk to. I didn't, I didn't have the kind of relationship with my company commander where I can go and vent to him.

You know, I just didn't. He was, he had been there for a couple months and he was a great guy, but we just didn't have that kind of relationship. And I'm sure as hell wasn't going to gripe to my platoon sergeant or down. And I didn't really have any contemporaries either because they were wounded and being moved out or moved around, you know, or moved around the battalion. In fact, I mean, actually, it was more like, I think we had a lieutenant go home because he had a real sickness in his family. Like his father got sick and was in the hospital.

So we had to leave. So that platoon was being run by an NCO and the other one was wounded. It was just like I didn't have anybody to talk to. So I was talking to my dad. And it was a mistake. I mean, it was, I mean, if I had a mulligan on that one, I would not have done that. So you were giving him pretty much detailed op sums of everything that was going on? Not, you know, like unclassified versions, sort of, but I would just be like,

Sort of. I mean, I think Yeah. Yeah. I think I still, I mean, that's the actual email I sent him, you know. And I think I sort of dialed it back. Was your dad in the military at all? My dad went to the Naval Academy and stayed until he was a sophomore. But then left after that. And I got- What year? What, like what year did you go to the Naval Academy?

It was the first year that he allowed females. So I don't remember what that was. I think he would say it was like 1978 or something. Okay. That was his, that was his plea year in the Naval Academy. But I mean, I don't come from a military family. I'm like, you know, I'm like. But your dad at least had the understanding. What, I should say, I don't even as I say at least. Your dad understood like the military broadly.

Oh, 100%. Yeah, and I think that he knew the role that he was fulfilling, but I think that it was slowly destroying him. I mean, because I remember there were times we'd go on missions, and there was this, we lost an entire battalion staff and 371 cavalry. Colonel Fenty, an 05, went down with his battalion staff. This was before my first fire. fight in May. But my first firefight overlapped with that. So we were outside the wire

for 10, 11 days. And back stateside, it was like all they were getting on the ticker was CH40's helicopter crash goes down. 20 troops from the 10th Mountain are dead in eastern Afghanistan. And so my parents were just like beside themselves. I mean, I can't imagine what they went through for that. And then part of this was this all this, well, I wish they would have, I would have just let them live in the matrix if that makes sense. Like, just let them like, this is why troops don't talk to their families when they're in combat. This is why they don't tell them the details of the operation ultimately is because they, I think maybe they know this, maybe it's conscious, maybe it's not, but it, it, it, this, this type of shit can really destroy

someone who loves you deeply, you know? And I'm telling me, I know it's, I, it's like one of those things I really wish I would have done differently, you know? Yeah, that's um, that may sound harsh, but I agree 100% and I never told anyone my wife anything of anything that was going on ever. Now, you know, it was hard like for my wife because I'm like telling her nothing, but then like my guys are coming home wounded or my guy, she's going to my guy's funerals and that's like the reality. But even then it was, I was just, I didn't tell her anything. My parents, same thing. I didn't tell them anything because for this very reason.

I can't. It seemed like it would be too much of a burden. It is. I mean, it was a huge mistake. I mean, now, though,

now that I'm out, I do think it's incredibly important for people to know, uh, what our men and women go through. But when you're there and people are, you know, it was like, so we had AOL instant messenger back then.

And, you know, that's how we would communicate with home. And like, my dad, he would tell me later that he, would sit there and he would turn on the AOL instant messenger chime because he in the you know how you would like go idle and your name your username would get he would stare at the computer

turn the volume up on the computers all around the house to when I instant yes and so the AOL instant messenger chime became almost like you know angel bells to him and like to think about what that experience was like for him on a day to day basis and then him having to be a father to my sister and two younger brothers and a husband and work, I don't know how we could have done it. Check. The special forces lieutenant colonel regarded me with skepticism. Behind us, the rest of his team huddled around a laptop,

silencers on their weapon, cool guy gear dangling from their chest rigs. Before we left Burmell, I wanted to tell them that all that stuff would just slow them down where we were going. No matter how fit a soldier is at 10,000 feet, the only thing you can afford to carry is water, ammo, and your weapon. Everything else just drags you down.

So that was the May 7th fight, I concluded. I'd been instructed to give the Special Forces team a brief on the combat my platoon had experienced. I started to explain June 10th and the Lieutenant Colonel's look of disbelief solidified. I concealed my frustration and continued the brief. The special operators have been pushed over, pushed down to Burmel to get a better feel for the amount of enemy activity. Captain Died asked me to take them out on patrol with us for the next few cycles, something I was not looking forward to doing. We had some friction with the other special forces teams in our area, and as a result, my men did not hold them in high regard. There were attitude differences between us, regular line infantry and the SF guys, and I'd come to regard any liaison effort with them as a ponderous and difficult task.

The ones we had encountered seemed all to have the elite attitude without the tactical acumen needed to keep them alive while on patrol. Rather than focusing on the enemy, they seem to go, they seemed to us to be preoccupied with frivolous and exonerous and extantial. extraneous details such as what color they should paint their weapons. We also didn't think much of them in their refusal to wear protective gear such as helmets. Most of the time, they walked around nonchalantly in baseball caps. After what we'd gone through that sort of theatrical stuff came across as sheer stupidity. So you're going to take these SF guys out. And I actually, I really like Captain Dye's decision of like, oh, you want to go on some patrols to my guys?

Cool. I'll say, do with these guys. Yeah, look, I mean, it was frustrating. I mean, just from an operational standpoint, some of the SF teams, because they would rotate in and out of skin, the base, right? And that was just like a really bad area, you know? And we're talking 10 feet from a Pakistani mill, a pack mill checkpoint. I mean, they were right on the border. But some of the SF teams were great.

They shared intel great. They would tell us when they were in our area of operations. I mean, these are baseline things that I feel like if you're a commander and you're in a battle space and you're calling for fire and you don't know an SF team. is out there, somebody could die. I can't tell you how many times we'd have SF teams rolling around with quads and shit in our area of operations. We're like, dude, what are you guys doing? Or new SF teams would

roll in and we'd go down and brief them, right? And I'm just some stupid infantry lieutenant. But I'd been through some shit and I knew the area that we were fighting in really well and I'd be talking to these guys and it's almost like they didn't believe how terrible it was. And I can count on one hand.

I mean, probably four or five times at least where we had to go out and bail out an SF team because they'd roll outside the wire with four dudes in a pickup truck with a teeny pinel-mounted saw on the back of their pickup truck. I mean, it looked like something out of Star Wars. It looked really cool. But we would tell them like, man, like if you're going to be in a turret, you've got to wear your helmet. You can't go out there with your New York Yankees baseball hat on.

Like I know that looks cool, but that's not, you really need to listen to what we're saying. And I feel like some of them really paid the price. I mean, I know for a fact that they were overrun in a couple different situations. And I guess we just at that point in time and the deployment over time, it just got annoying going out and bail them out all the time. SF teams have, you know, they're small, foreign internal defense is their mission.

They work with indigenous populace. They don't have the combat power of a traditional infantry platoon. And again, some of them are great, some of them not so much. And my men didn't really hold them in high regard just because they were very dismissive of the stuff that they had experienced.

And so Captain Dow was like, yeah, take this SF current. a lot with you. And of course, I'm like, God damn it, you know, no one likes to babysit anybody on a combat patrol, especially if they're not trained with your guys. I know, I know his name. He was just like this one, this specific lieutenant colonel was, uh, he was just a singleton guy. Like he was just a single thing. He had some, he had a team with him, but he was a singleton guy. He would go outside the wire on his own. Um, we took him outside the wire. And we just got lit up. and he was just, he just couldn't believe it.

He was like, this is the greatest shit I've experienced since Columbia. And I'm like, all right, sir, calm down. Let's like, let's let's let's let you know, like, he was like, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? What are we going to do? We need to take the fight to him. I'm like, okay, sir, yeah, we're going to do that. But like, just calm down first.

I mean, he was so into it. And at the end of that engagement, he was just like, he was a believer, man. He was like, I cannot believe the shit that you guys are in down here all the time. I can, you know, I've got to go back and I've got to tell General. or fracely about this. He was the 10th Mountain Division Commander at the time. He was like, I got to tell him about this. I got to tell him.

I'm like, yeah, sir, yeah. We're, like, I told you in your, in my briefing to you, like, it's, it's no joke around here. Yeah. That's, uh, we, we, uh, we had a great relationship with all the conventional forces that we worked alongside. We pretty much acted as close we could to acting like them. You know, we all wore the same uniforms as them. We, you all had the same group.

standards is them. We, yeah, that's what we did. We never got an opportunity to even work with SEALs in eastern Afghanistan. Yeah, yeah. I mean, who knows what the layout of the guys were at the time. But my point is, we had guys, army guys and Marines, primarily Army, that had definitely, we had to overcome a prejudice against special operations because they had had real bad kind of experiences that you're talking about in there.

And again, like you said, you know what? there's great SF teams. There's great SEAL teams. There's horrible ones. Just like there's great infantry battalions and great infantry companies and there's shady ones as well. Absolutely. You kind of just have to, you have to look at what you're dealing with.

But my point is, if you're out there, be one of the good ones. Be someone that's going to listen. You know, when we got to Ramadi, there was a national guard unit on the ground out of Pennsylvania, the 228, Iron Soldiers. I know. A guy that went to ROTC was. Paltoon leader. Yeah, well, we probably worked with them.

Yeah. When we showed up there, those guys were freaking awesome. They had been there for like a year or 14 months or something like that. And we went in with, hey, what do you want to tell us? How can we learn from you? That was our attitude. That's the exact right attitude. I mean, I mean, again, humility.

You go in big eyes, big ears, humble, self-effacing, listen. You know, and what I remember telling specifically one special forces commander, when I was down there who he had a great relationship with because he sort of came into it with that attitude. I was like, you know, you guys are awesome. I know you guys have got some serious, hardcore, cool guy training, you know, but a bullet kills you just the same as it's going to kill me, man. You know, and so at a very minimum,

listen to some of the intel that I got that may help you get your people out of here alive, right? And you've got your own TTPs, you operate your own way, but there are things very specifically that you need to do, here in this area of operations that will give you a much better chance of surviving. And he listened. And we had a great relationship because of that. We shared intel. And I mean, that was a great combat multiplier for us because, you know, we knew where the high value targets were. I mean, as a conventional infantry guy, like, you know, I mean, we were getting the big kinetic fights and stuff, but it's really not our job to go out, unless we're doing an outer corridor. It's not our job

to go after high value targets. And if we get too close to them, we could spook them and they could They could leave. So these are, these are, I share these things for, for the listeners, the reason, this is why intel sharing

to a certain extent is really important. It's really important. Yeah, exactly. So another thing that happened with that special forces colonel is he actually, they had some intel for you. And you talked about earlier, but I'm going to,

I'm going to cover it real quick anyways, because it's, he gave you the intel. And then here's you briefing the guys going back to the book. We know the enemy's intentions now, I said. That got everyone's attention. They are seeking a decisive victory over an American platoon.

They want to pin us in a kill zone by disabling our vehicles, then overrun us and kill us to the last man. They plan to behead anyone they capture. If they catch us in an observation point again, they will try a direct assault just like June 10th. Sabo growled. Guess we'll ratchet things up. So that's what you've been contending with this whole time.

Yes. And it's real clear looking in the rear. view mirror, obviously that's what they were trying to do. Yeah, right. I mean, I was watching you read that and you smile when you say, but says ratchet things up because I feel like that, that phrase, like everything about you is ratchet things up, like default aggressive, default aggressive. But yeah, I mean, we, I mean, when we heard that intel from that special forces,

lieutenant colonel, and I still remember him by name, but I'm not going to say it because I think he's still active. But, I mean, okay, so you know they're trying to kill you, but once you know what their mission is every time they attack you, they want to overrun you and cut off your heads and put them on stakes. And we heard them say it over and over again on this colonel gave us radio, let us listen to the recordings. I mean, we heard them say it.

And then after a while, we'd see these DVD videos trickle down to our base of attacks where they did just that in our A.O. of other coalition troops, meaning like other Afghan national troops out there, it starts to hit pretty close to home, and we thought the war was personal when we lost Abdul, now it really was. I mean, war, life, death issues are always intimately personal, but there's something about knowing the enemy's mission

and knowing what they want to do and knowing how they want to do it, that just can rattle you a little bit. I mean, I feel like to this day, the idea, of, I mean, look, have you ever seen those videos of America? I mean, I'm sure you had. They're terrifying. I mean, it's, you know, the idea of getting beheaded with like a butter knife is not something that like, you know, it's a scary way to go.

Yeah. And as far as I'm concerned, and as far as I was concerned, that was absolutely the goal of everyone I ever looked at on the battlefield like that. And you know when you, I don't know if you, did you do, did you guys? Did you guys? We did. We captured a few of them. but we would just give, we'd talk to them and get the intel that we could and we'd give them to the A&A.

Like sometimes we would capture a bad guy and actually Echo was asking me about this earlier today. He's like, what were they like? And some of them, they had a look in their eyes like, you know 100% that if the tables were turned, they would 100% be sawing off your head. No doubt about it. You can see it in their eyes. 100%. They're just black with hate. I don't know where that hate comes from a lifetime of indoctrination, but that you just see.

something in their eyes where you know that they would, if the tables were turned, they would absolutely cut your head off. No question about it. So I kind of always thought that that's what would happen. You guys, so that had a little, I guess we'll say a psychological impact on you guys, now knowing this 100%. But there was nothing more evident of a, I'll call it a negative psychological impact than a you guys were on a little outpost and you guys get hit with a massive rocket attack

and you guys are completely pinned down you're taking rocket after rocket after rocket after rocket after rocket after rocket after rocket after rocket and finally you get the call in to cap and die and you know you want indirect fire you want to put this snuff this problem out and he comes back on the radio and says negative three six that's Pakistani territory another rock It skittered past low and fast. Everyone molded himself against the Hesco bag wall as it spewed shrapnel and flame across the outpost. The explosion sent peals of terror through us. We can't shoot back.

All we could do is lie there, captives. I saw the platoon change. The men's eyes grew hollowed and wide. We'd been through dangerous encounters before, but we'd always been able to fight back. That gave us something to do and occupied our minds. inability to act now exposed us to terror's fullest effects a platoon's morale is an elastic quality from its baseline events affecting the men can cause it to bend in different directions male gives it a boost so does hot chow after a long day a

small gesture by a first sergeant showing that he has the well-being of the men in mind can also go a long way a victory in combat can bring a euphoria a defeat will bring despair and doubt. We'd seen or experienced the gamut, and the men had always returned to their baseline, laughing, irreverent selves after a little while. It was our natural state, but something happened under those rockets. We'd never felt so utterly helpless. Being unable to fight back had stripped us of our aggressive spirit. It had left us feeling impotent, mere observers of death and destruction thrown our way. That's, I mean, to me, I feel like that's the,

The opposite of default aggressive, right? I mean, that's like there's nothing worse than being on the receiving end of indirect fire and not have the ability to do, you don't have the ability to do anything about it, you know. This particular engagement happened at fobshkin at the Alamo, which is, you look, I mean, the stones throw away from a packmill checkpoint that is, that is, you know, there are probably two or three discus pointed right at the Alamo. basically this collat, you know, with four guard towers around it. You're, you know, the pack mill have, they're on the high ground all around you, right? Looking right down into your base.

And the Taliban, whoever's firing indirect at us that day, were using and cooperating with the pack mill, using them as shields, knowing that we wouldn't be able to shoot back, you know. So this was a new evolving threat the first time that we had faced it. what they were trying to do was get us to open up on a pack mill checkpoint, cause some international incident. It'd be all over the news in America. We'd get blamed for it. You know, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, whoever conducted the attack,

you'd never hear mention of them. And we were spread out from our trucks and the indirect was so heavy that we couldn't get back to them. And so, God, man, you just never feel so helpless. Then you're just sitting there, you know, tucked up against the HESCO wall. and just hoping that a rocket doesn't land on your head there's nothing that you can do about it but just like let go you know what was this trajectory the rockets

they were coming in flat trajectory like high to low they were being shot from an elevated position right into us but it was direct fire there was direct fire yeah no question and so one of the rockets hit an A and a guard tower like a wooden guard tower just blew it to smotherines which is right by the exit so the base was just basically it was a square

with a square collat on the inside. Our trucks were lined up in a row right next to the compound, and they were just taking shrapnel. We were spread out all over the base. We couldn't even get back to our trucks to Exfell. And I think we fired a couple of 60-millimeter mortars in the handheld just to make them think that we were shooting back. Eventually, after a while, after about an hour of that,

I mean, God, man, the longest hour of your life. An hour. An hour. We got an Apache. We got an Apache to come down and just do a show of force. But we couldn't engage with it. So when the Apache got down and did the show of force, it bought us enough time to run to our trucks and get the hell out of Dodge.

And I remember rolling back into the base, man, I'm telling you, it was just, I mean, God, it was like, you had this sinking feeling in your heart that it's only a matter of time. And I remember walking back into my hooch, and the mail was there and it was on my desk and I remember opened up this little letter from my cousin Freddie and he had drawn this American soldier with this flag

it was the 4th of July and I didn't even realize it you know and I just sat there and I looked at it and I thought of it and I thought of home and I missed home and I thought of the Steelers and I thought I'd go into Pirates games and a big Pittsburgh sports fan

and all the things that reminded me of home like hamburgers, hot dogs, whatever, you know, beer, music, And I just thought to myself, like, you know, if it's only a matter of time, like, I cannot allow myself to think of any of this stuff anymore. You know, I basically just, in order to survive an environment where your day-to-day life is, it's only a matter of time, hope can be a caustic quality in combat. You know, hope leads to fear, and that fear can lead to hesitation on the battlefield or

not doing what needs to be done at the moment it needs to be done. And when that happens, uh, men die. And so I remember very, very distinctly folding up that picture, instead of hanging it on my wall, folding up that picture and putting it in my foot locker and just, just, you know, keeping it there. If I made it home, great. I'd have it for later. But if not, I could not allow myself to think back to those fleeting moments of home. I just had to basically just give up hope. Yeah. I would ever make it home. It's, It's a weird way to live, man. But the only thing that you're worried about is living or dying.

Once you flip that switch, it's a hard one to turn back on. My wife, when I was in Ramadi, my wife sent me an email and said, hey, the kids want to see a picture of, you know, where you sleep at night. And I was like, okay, you know, I had in this old Saddam regime building, I had a room. And it had a plywood, whatever bed. And part of the plywood bed was, you know, sticking up almost like a headboard. So anyways, I was just going to take a picture of it.

And I looked at it and it was just completely empty. And I said, oh, that's not good. So I opened a drawer, took out a folder, took a picture of my wife and kids and hung them up, took a picture of my bed with those pictures in it, took the pictures down, put them back in a folder and put them back in the drawer. Like same exact thoughts that you had. Like there are just way too many decisions that need to be made that the last thing I need to be thinking about is my wife and family back. home and the only thing I need to be thinking about is these guys on the ground with me 100%.

And it's because I feel like if you start longing for home and you start missing those things, it distracts you from the mission that needs to be done. I got when I saw guys get in that mindset, when I saw my guys starting to, you know, stare at the pictures of home, that made me super nervous, you know, and I would like do things. I, you know, maybe try and pull them off, let them, you know, get some, you know, some, you know, some time back in camp or whatever, try and get them to get over that. Because I totally agree. If that's what's in the front of your mind, that's not going to be good for you.

And it's going to, it's going to inhibit your default aggressive attitude. And then all those things that we talked about the positives of being default aggressive are all going to disappear because now you're going to be default hesitant. Well, yeah, default hesitant, default defensive. In that case, you see in that specific chapter how caustic and destructive, destructive, default defensive or default hesitant can be, how it goes, how it destroys morale, how it can shake the hearts of men at the time where you need them to be the most formidable. It can make them question what they're doing.

You can make them think of home. It can make them hesitate in their actions. And all of those things threaten the success of the mission. And just imagine World War I just going 28 months of that. Of that. of that. Exactly. That's, that's, in fact, I did think, exactly, it is a nightmare.

Every single day, just not knowing if a round's going to land on your head is the worst, it's the worst position to be in. Indirect fire. You get back to base. You see, you see Captain Die. Sean, you all right? I turned to see Captain Guy regarding me with concern. Yeah, I'm okay.

I guess we found out today why they moved Fobbs' skin away from the border. I guess so. I'm sorry I couldn't give you any indirect. Thank you, pack mill assholes my ass. You sure you're okay? He asked again. Your hands are shaking. I'll be all right, sir.

I lied. It was just rough having to take it for so long and not being able to shoot back. He put his hand on my shoulder and shook me gently. If you need anything, let me know. Thank you, sir. And the unspoken was, we're infantry. handle it. Exactly.

Exactly. We're infantry handle it. Yeah. Like, hey, if you need anything, let me know. But the unspoken is, hey, that's what we did. But hey, brother, this is the job. So, you know, get your shit together, you know. And I remember when we had that conversation,

we were standing outside our tactical operation, operation center around the backside of where the officers were staying. And I was just standing out there smoking a cigarette. And my hands were shaking and he could see it. you know I I look back on that moment and I was really thankful that he did he said something you know I needed to hear that I needed to hear suck it up handle it I needed that and I think that was a really strong leadership moment for him you know to even just have the emotional intelligence to see that one of his subordinate leaders was struggling and come over and address it immediately even if it was handle it at least I knew he was he was he was he was keeping an eye on things, that it mattered. You know, and I think that's important for soldiers. You talk in the book about when you're on the fob and what's going on in the fob,

and one of the things you got on the fob, which I think is just a common thing for all Americans at war, is you had dogs, little pet dogs that you guys adopted and kind of have fun with, and it gives you a little break from the monotony, and it gives you a little warmth in your world. And I know when we always had dogs, my first appointment, we had dogs, We had a dog named RPG and a dog named Mordor. Cute little bastards. Ours was Trigger. There you go.

You guys are out on an op. And actually, prior to this, one of the dogs had like growled at one of the females. She complained, blah, blah, blah. And you explained this all in the book. But what it leads to is this, the leadership on the Faw. took all the dogs and killed him and burned the bodies while you guys were out in the field You guys come back and I'm going to the book anger and indignation I could work with the infantry feeds on such emotions It motivates and makes us eager to release violence upon our foe there was no fight in Chris that morning

He's one of your troops and he was the barometer of the platoon's morale I saw his resignation reflected on everyone's faces Cowan moved like a sleepwalker even Sabo appeared effected As I watched the platoon struggle that morning, I realized that I had overlooked a reality of Afghanistan. We were facing two enemies, not one. The Hakani Networks fighters we could handle. Anytime they chose to challenge us, we could smite them with firepower and make them pay for the effort. We would not give ground, and I knew we would never know defeat. But this other enemy was more devious.

How does one do battle with fob politics? At the moment, I was at a complete loss. Without a doubt we needed to figure out a way to do it because more blows like this and it could tear the platoon apart It was with relief that we put Burmell in our rearview mirrors the countryside was ours you guys are rolling out another op Devoid of politics stupid rules and petty slights It was the one place where we knew it was the one place where most feared to tread We were among our own kind depending on men we trusted and loved and the danger the insurgents presented at every turn seemed a small price to pay for these respites.

So there you are. Yeah. It's better just to get off base and go into the field so you can get away from the fob politics. It was. I mean, those dogs were members of our platoon. I mean, my men would come back from patrols. The first thing that they would do is look for those dogs, you know, and they'd sleep in the barracks with them. And, you know, there's this rule, general order number one or some part of general order number one,

no dogs on the bases because, you know, out of fear that they'd have some disease. And so the decision that was the decision to put them down was made. The dog grout at one of the male clerks who wasn't even a part of our base, wasn't on our base, who flew in on a ring route and got grout at and then went and told her hire our brigade headquarters elements. And they flew medics down to our base that weren't stationed on our base that killed the dogs the moment we left out of the wire. And we came back, man.

And it's just, we weren't supposed to have them, right? But our medics had also vaccinated them, you know, our medics that made it safe. So it was one of those things that was just like, God damn, can't you just give us this small thing, you know? Rules and regulations are important. I think it's of the utmost importance to follow them even if you disagree with them, you know. but some things like this when you're trying desperately to have soldiers cling to what little humanity that they might have

left in a savage land like Jesus Christ just give us the dogs you know they couldn't even give them that and the way that they took them from us was even worse you know to come back and have you know wait at the barracks hey where are the dogs oh hey they they killed them and then they threw them on the burn pits

you know my guys like ran out to the burn pit I mean my men were ready to kill somebody you know and I just remember like, Jesus, you know, you fight the enemy out there. It's at least, you know, it's life and death and there's elegance and that simplicity, right? Your only thing you're worried about is living or dying and the man next to you. But when you come back on the basis, how do you fight against that shit? How do you deal with that stuff?

Those things are morale killers. And I'd rather control for that by being outside the wire and be, you know, call my own shots. and my men were familiar with the terrain. We know that we had each other's backs. We know that we weren't going to stab each other in the back like that. You know, I mean, it's like those fob politics, like door kickers, warriors, they don't deal well with stuff like that. Yeah, and it's like a glimpse of the rest of the normal world.

It absolutely is. Yeah. Like the fob is one removed from the normal world because you get a little bit, but it still is a reflection of life, just normal everyday political. crap that runs around you guys get out on patrol and You guys are driving and you see a boy like a young boy alone and you stop the vehicles and here we go to the book Something ain't right sir greason said in that sleepy Sam Elliott voice of his The years of smoking and drinking had given it a gravely rugged quality

Indomitable really nope. I said shaking my head under my helmet Campbell was kneeling in front of the boy now talking in a low comforting voice the boy whined his head waving from side to side he seemed disengaged lost in his own tormented world world who the hell would give dope to a little kid with the a and a do something like that I thought 15 feet from the boy we both gasped and stopped in our tracks under a shock of dirt-encrusted black hair we saw a disfigured face about six years old. His eyes had been gouged out. The sockets burned black by whatever heated implement

had been used to do the deed. Next to me, Grisand exhaled sharply. Jesus Christ, what is this? The boy opened his mouth again. Another wine spilled out between cracked lips. Behind them we saw ruptured gums and no teeth.

You're fucking kidding me, Griesen said. Get Yusuf and Doc Pantjota. Pantoa. How do you say his name? Pantoja. Pantoja. I said to my platoon sergeant. Yusuf reached us first and looked down at the boy.

Either he'd seen this sort of thing before or a half a decade of war had steeled him to such sights. The boy's condition evoked no visible emotions in my terp. He stood quietly next to me, his used car salesman. affection stowed for the moment. And we haven't really talked about Yusef much, but when you lost Abdul, Yusuf moved up into the primary interpreter position and you described him as a used car salesman,

he's one of those guys that seems a little bit shady, but you're working with what you got. That's right, yeah. You end up taking the boy to a nearby village, and here you described the village. The village was a frightful sight. A clean bed would have been a priceless luxury in this place. The mud-walled huts were barren of even the most basic essentials.

Little food, no clean water. The ground between the dwellings was riddled with human feces, animal dung, and filth. The smell of such a place is one that none of us will ever forget. It lingered like a tangible presence in the air. I could feel it seeping into my clothing. For a second, I flashed back to my first day in country. After the girl had died in my arms, I had burned my blood-soaked ACUs. No amount of cleaning would ever get out this stench.

A boy, perhaps six years old, limped out of a nearby hut and took station near one corner watching us with burnished black eyes. There was a wary worldliness in them that I'd never seen back home. Welts and bruises ran the length of his face, neck, and arms. He'd been badly beaten. And then an ancient man clad in dirt marred clothes emerged from one mud hut. His beard was dyed red, something that all village elders do to show their status as community leaders.

When he saw us, he paused and offered a guarded greeting. Then he saw the eyeless boy. His composure cracked, and a look of pure love and relief crossed his face. He hurried over and wrapped the boy in his arms. The two shared words, and the elder held the boy in a fierce protective embrace. He looked at me. The boy's head tucked under his jaw and pressed hard against his neck, and I could see that the old man's eye.

eyes had grown wet he began to speak to me yousef listened and then said in a clipped and professional tone the village elder thanks you this boy is his grandson greecen his voice barely a whisper said yousef find out what happened to this kid yousef nodded and engaged the villa the village elder in a long discussion we listened as the two conversed in their native language anxiously awaiting the answer. At last, Yusuf turned his attention to us. His face a mask and matter-of-factly told us the elder's story. The enemy had swept into the village a few weeks ago,

bent on punishing its inhabitants for supporting the coalition. I doubted that any Americans had ever visited this place. The enemy had kidnapped the elder's oldest grandson. He was the future of the family, the boy most cherished and revered in Afghan culture. Taking him was a blow that nobody in the village would forget. They had taken the elder's grandson back to one of their mountain hideouts where they gouged out his eyes. They had turned him into a sexual plaything, knocking out his teeth to increase their pleasure with him.

They had raped this six-year-old boy. for weeks. So that's what you're dealing with. Yeah, you know, the enemy that we face over there, that's what they're capable of. In this village, there's no way that, I mean, we had never even come into contact with them.

There were so many small border villages in the Hindu Kush Mountains that have not even talked to a tribe that's a click down the road, let alone ever seen an American troop. There's no, just the mere thought that they may have been working with Americans was enough to cause something like that. It just shows you the depth and depravity of the enemy that we're fighting. This is why we fight against them.

This is why Americans are there. This is why we matter. This is why the way that we fight matters. You know, there is a right and wrong to how the world, you know, conducts itself. You know, I firmly believe that, you know, some cultures are better than others. You know, I think our Western culture should be preserved and fought for and protected and promulgated as much as possible. We live in the best country on the face of the earth.

Why shouldn't we try to do that for other people if and when we can? I know that that's probably a controversial view, but, you know, those, I know that those people in Afghanistan, this village in particular was so grateful for what we brought to them, how we helped them. We did a med cap in their village. so much of what we did in Afghanistan was taking care of the people. That was really important to us. I mean, we were the, we were the main power brokers in the AO.

There's no question about that. We dominated the terrain. We kicked the enemy's ass, but we really did care about the Afghan people. In fact, that first engagement that we talked about today, we were going to do a humanitarian, our initial tasking was to do an observation post. Yes, but we were stopping off in a village

to do a humanitarian distribution. You know, blankets, food, rice, coloring books, crayons for kids. And I remember, like, getting back from that mission pulling out this creola crayon box with a center-punched pole of a seven-punched hole of a 762 round right through the center of it. And so we cared a lot about the people, man. And, you know, the enemy in that first rocket attack where they killed a bunch of those kids didn't matter.

They knew those rockets had landed in a school. They kept firing at us, you know. There was an informant, a human intelligence. informant that we were working with the help exploit high-value targets in the border early on in the deployment. He was one of the few people that lived in the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan and had the courage to stay there throughout at all. And then he found out that he was working and helping us. And they threw a grenade in the middle of his compound and killed a newborn baby, killed his baby. I mean, they just do terrible things

to their kids. And that's the kind of shit that stays with you forever. It's, you know, I'm telling you. Like I said before, I don't lose a wink of sleep over the bad guys that we killed over there. I'm not, not, don't lose a wink of sleep over it. But it's moments like this that stay with you forever. It's you see. And I think like, you get a lot of time to think about this sort of shit when you're over there. Because like, when you look at the kids and you're driving through these villages and, you know, they liked American troops. You know, they appreciated what we did. They appreciated how we protected them. The people in Afghanistan and those children, they have nothing, nothing. There's no running water. There's no electricity. There's no roads. There's no

economy. There's no jobs. The men all summer long go out there and they cut wood so they have enough wood to keep their family warm during the winter and then the cycle starts again. And so these kids though, I remember watching them from an observation post one day early on like just watching them run around and play soccer with this deflated soccer ball and bare feet in the mountains running on these like rocks that had to be razor sharp. And I'm just thinking to myself like Damn it, man. Kids are the most amazing thing in the world. You know, it's because here they are, they don't even know, they have nothing. They literally have nothing. And probably one of the most dangerous places in the face of the planet. And here they are, running around playing soccer.

They don't even have shoes, you know, run around playing soccer being kids, you know. They're so awesome, you know, and that's why we were there to protect them. And then to see, you know, the way that the enemy treated them, I knew we just had to kill as many of them as humanly possible. Like for the year that we were supposed to be there, we ended up being there a year and a half. But the year that we were there, I just felt from this point forward, like, yeah, we were in fights.

You know, we weren't going to draw our weapon unless we were fired upon first, but all that changed after this. You continue on here. More members of the elder's family ventured out. They came to the boy to hug and reassure him. He whimpered softly. and I wondered if he was crying. Then I realized he couldn't cry.

His tear ducks had been burned away. I mean, don't people that do that to young children, you know, don't people like that deserve to die? Yes, 100%. I mean, they don't deserve life as a privilege. Every single waking breath that you have is a privilege, you know, and they certainly don't earn it. We've been on back to the book.

Pinhold and I sat together watching an episode of the, TV series The Office. We howled with laughter and thought about how foreign the world of cubicle land was to us. This is the greatest show ever, I told Pincholt. I knew you'd like it, sir. Was that your first time seeing it? Yes. How far away from Scranton did you grow up?

I'm from Pittsburgh. Oh, there you go. A couple hours. You know, but we watched it, man. I'm telling you. So we were into all kinds of shows over there. You know, the whole platoon would gather around. This is like, I mean, we had these like little laptop computers we all sit around.

like screen this big and watch these shows, but the office was one of those things, that it was just like, holy shit. Like, look at what we just talked about how much of a, I mean, it's just the most sad, depressing thing. I mean, but people actually live like this. Like, I know people like Dwight in real life that work is, you know what I mean? Like, this is, I just thought it was such a crazy, like, compared to, like, here we are doing this.

Americans actually live like this. Yes. This is where they go to work every day. It's completely crazy. You know? It's completely crazy. You got a kid who's had his eyes burned out. He's had his teeth pulled so he could be a sex toy for these savages.

We found, we found kids like that, other units all over Afghanistan. It's heinous. And then the movie Slumdog Millionaire came out a few years later and that happens in that movie too. It's, it's just, I mean, it's just a, I don't understand it. I don't understand. It's just people that do that to children do not deserve to breathe. They don't deserve to live. No.

Zero. So you guys are carrying on. For a rare change of pace, we were inside the wire with a day off. We had desperately needed to break. The men were relaxing, sleeping, and lifting weights. The episode ended. Got any more? I asked, whole first season, sir.

You're awesome. We started another episode. Midway through Pinholt, wrinkled his nose and looked at me. Wait, are you an office fan? Yes. You are? Yes. It's like my favorite show.

Have you ever watched the British office? Yes. I don't think it's as funny. It's not as funny. I don't find British people. And you know which one I like more? The British one. You do?

Because the British one is, is. I don't like this. I don't like this hot jaco take. It's kind of depressing. The British one is kind of depressing. Dysopian? No, because in the American one, it's funny. and it's it's funny because you're like oh this is a little bit this is a little bit um it's a little bit

too much right Michael Scott is a little bit too much he's just a little bit too much I love not tons too much but he's just a little bit too much and you go okay he's a caricature he's he's he's he's an extreme version for comic effect right that's what you get when you watch the american office and all the characters you know Dwight he's he's he's like you know a guy like Dwight but Dwight is like is like one level up from that that's what makes him funny right so you and then you mix in kind of the regular kind of normal characters and we know people like them and so then you get to see this story unfold but it's all slightly beyond actual belief I feel like I know bosses like Michael Scott I feel like I see them sometimes I'm like oh my God you do see them you

see them in little bits and pieces but the British office you're like hey this is this is like what a guy is really like. This guy's really like delusional and this guy. It's just to me, it has this sting to it that I like. I like the fact that, you know what? I heard this say it about singers, really good singers have a hint of sadness in their voice. When you hear a, when you hear a really good singer sing, you'll think it's really good if they have a hint of sadness in their voice.

And I think the British office has like a hint of sadness in it. That to me makes it better. You like the sadness? The sadness makes you happy? No, I don't know if it makes me happy, but it hits me in a way that I feel is, is, I think it hits me in a, in a stronger way. This is, this is some deep Jocko stuff here.

I didn't really expect to get that deep into your emotional response to the obvious. Here we are. Here we are. Here we are indeed. We're at Shrewt farms right now. I'm my mo's Are you Dwight? Am I mo's?

You think you're my moz, yeah. Quit talking. The funny thing is my family, my whole family likes the office. So we've had, you know, if we're going to watch a TV show, that's probably, actually I don't even know if we watch

any more TV, any other TV shows. Do you watch Office Space, the movie? I've watched The Office Space movie at any times. Yes. Because Office, I forget which is which, but The Office, the show, an office space,

One was made to be like the, like office space was made to be the movie version of the office or vice versa. I forget which one. No, that, well, maybe. But the British office came out and that is what the office in America is based on. And it's the same. I thought office space was based on a cartoon, like a comic strip. Yeah. So it was like, so it might have been vice versa.

But basically one was like the movie version of the other. Ricky Jervais in England wrote the original office. and that's ones in England and then they took it and revamped it a little bit made it a little bit happier for the US of A we like to smile and laugh and we want to make sure Sean Parnell is getting his humor on over there

and the rest of Outwaple 2. You know what? You know what, Jocko? Sadness doesn't make me happy. I know. I feel like there needs to be another podcast exploring that. Well, we'll go into that. But speaking of just

things not being funny Going back to the book, sir, that's pretty nasty. What? That shit coming out of your ear. I reached up and felt something like jello coming out on my neck. It was pink and red and street with yellow. It smells like bananas, sir, he added. I got up and wiped it off thoroughly embarrassed.

Sir, you need to get that checked out. I nodded as I sat back down. I know. I'll get a scan at Bergram a few days when I head home on leave. Thank you. Everyone's worried about you. I was worried too. But I knew if a real doc examined me,

he'd never let me return to the men. I was having bouts of double vision and frequent migraines, and at times I was having trouble remembering things. As a result, I made an obsessive effort to write everything down before missions. We finished the second episode, and I said goodbye to pinhole, headed back to my room.

Lieutenant! A deep and booming voice called. A staff sergeant was walking down the hallway in our hooch, a cigarette dangling from his tight lips, about my age with receding, brown black hair. He walked with gravitas, as if he were made of chiseled granite. He had a rounded face with sharp cheeks, eyes partially concealed by a squint, a ranger tab on his shoulder. What can I do you for, Sergeant? Who the hell is this guy? Jeff Hall, I'm your new squad leader, sir. He stuck out

his hand. I shook it and nearly had my fingers squash like sausages. Glad to meet you, Hall. Welcome to Outlaw Patoon. Thank you, sir. And this That's your introduction to this guy, Hall, who seemed like he was just a highly motivated individual. He was, man. And he's, I don't know if, I don't know if we're going to talk about it or not, but he saved this Marine's life. Marine gets shot in the pelvis is bleeding out.

From a for more artery, he was severed, retracted up into his pelvis, bleeding out, like, a guy wouldn't have survived if it wasn't for Jeff Hall. And, man, was he a character? That's for sure. You're out in the field, and we'll just jump right into it. We triggered the ambush early and from a different direction that they'd expected. As we pulled into a perimeter around the village, their fire was disjointed and not nearly as accurate as usual. We'd thrown them off guard and they'd reflexively open fire.

They had they waited until we were in the northern part of the ambush, we would have been hit as they originally designed. For a moment, I wish Captain Die was here. Having two platoons to manage was awkward since I couldn't really give orders to Delta. I could only give the platoon squad leader's guidance. So you're out there with two platoons at this point? I was a senior officer on the ground. But it's not my job to maneuver more than my platoon.

I'll do it and I'll do it well. But it was a leadership challenge for sure because those guys don't, they're not under my command. Was their officer out there too? It's hard. No, they had an officer. I wasn't sure if he was out here for this specific engagement. I think that he was, which is why it makes it awkward. because we were the same rank, you know.

I was the senior platoon leader, senior lieutenant out there on the ground, but still this is why captains exist. And, you know, this is why company commanders exist to maneuver companies, you know, lieutenants exist in the army anyway to maneuver a platoon. So it would have been great to have a company commander out there

maneuvering these elements. He, but in captain dyes defense, and I know that he believed this. He believed us to be, you know, he didn't micromanage us. Yeah,

he knew us to be competent and he let us do our, He let us do our job and he felt that he could maneuver us from the Fob, which is his prerogative. And he could. He could do that. So you guys are in this. It's like another scenario unfolding where clearly these guys are looking to come and cut all your heads off, which is a real reassuring thing. And here we go. You guys are going back and forth, going out, going out to the perimeter, like assessing, making

sure you guys are doing a good job. And then you're coming back into the middle, kind of debriefing each other on what's happening with the fire team leaders or actually the, I guess, the squad leaders. And you're doing that a couple times and then finally it gets to a point just as our leaders return to the middle of the perimeter the enemy commander made his move Hall whose rig was on the eastern side of the perimeter said calmly sir they're rushing us Coming at your coming at our hill now The two enemy forces struck the northeast and southeast parts of our perimeter in one pal-mell charge This time they did not bound as on June 10th instead they ran straight for us We picked out a leader and sniped him in the mid-stried

He went down with a wound to the shoulder in a flash two insurgents grabbed their fallen comrade and wisdom to the rear. Their casualty evacuation was stunningly fast. I'm thinking, when I was reading this, I was thinking, oh, these guys aren't as good as the guys you killed last time, right? They weren't. They weren't. You guys killed the good guys. Yes. Yes. And now they had inexperienced guys that were just bum-rushed. You know what? You're one of the few people that has ever picked that up in the book. Yes, we killed so many of them. And look, we were getting intel around this time that the Pakistani Taliban, the tribes in Pakistan, they were no longer willing to commit their sons. So the

fight in our area of operations because we were just killing them and stacking bodies so high, they couldn't keep up and they didn't want to commit their sons to a losing fight. We were killing all the good ones. And now we reached a point in time in our deployment where we were starting to know the terrain better than the enemy. We'd been there and operated there longer and this is what you're seeing in this chapter. Yeah. And I'm just thinking to myself, you think about our view of terrain over time.

We're looking at maps. We're seeing imagery, one meter imagery. We're plotting points on it. I mean, and you're out there every day. Yeah, you're going to have good terrain knowledge after however many eight months you've been there at this point. We did. They couldn't hide from us.

They couldn't hide from us. And we would roll up on them and disrupt their operations, just surprise them. So whereas early on in deployment, we were the ones getting ambushed. Now we were the ones rolling up in the middle of them trying to lay an ambush. And we were laying waste of them while they did it. Back to the book.

Right then, the first 105 shells exploded. in their midst. We'd called for fire dangerously close. Captain Dye, who was the operation center, who's at the operation center in Burmell, had made sure we had ample support again. The gunners back on base had poured it on, mixing high explosive shells with white phosphorus, the dreaded Willie Pete. The gunners called this deadly mixture, shake and bake. The high explosive shook the ground and the Willie Pete cooked anything it touched. A curtain of fire and steel streak with tendrils of white phosphorus erupted behind the enemy's main line of advance we pin them against us it we pin them against us if they

tried to break contact they would be massacred by artillery fire if they stayed in place they'd be mowed down by our men if they tried to close we'd mow them down faster desperate now the trapped insurgents bolted for us they're wounded and dying carpeting the hillside in their wake there was a confidence in the men we'd lacked on June 10th we'd seen this drill before with a more talented enemy force and the men reacted with ruthless violence no shouting this time no Moments or episodes of near despair our emotions remained even keeled cold but laced with controlled rage that had been bottled up inside us for weeks We unleashed it all in a merciless torrent the enemy closed to 25 meters we could see those wicked eight inch knives dangling from their belts

Insight inside oh the site infuriated us the men fired and reloaded with accomplished speed the artillery rain grew ever more intense over the radio Captain Dye reported that he dispatched second platoon as our quick reaction force. 20 minutes later, the NCOs returned to the middle of the perimeter. A lull had descended on the battlefield as the enemy's lead waves had been killed almost to the last man. One at a time, our squad leaders reported the situation to be well in hand. Hall triumphantly announced, we're fucking wasting them, sir. Yeah, Campbell echoed, the men are slaughtering them. Behind us, the moon rose over the endless ridges of the Hindu Kush,

brightening the battlefield with a silvery glow. They're coming again, sir. You know what to do. The huddle broke, and back into the action they went. The slaughter continued unabated for almost three hours. We killed so many of them that their casualty evacuation plan collapsed. They simply didn't have the manpower left to pull their men out. Torn bodies lay uncollected on the hillside,

bits of white phosphorus embedded within them. Their fat sizzled and popped for hours until the metallic stench of the Willie Pete. blended with the sticky odor of burn flesh, hell's barbecue. Second platoon arrived, burly all over the top energy. His voice echoed over the hilltop as he bellowed orders at his men. Griesen jumped out of one of Second Platoon's trucks and on the, and on bowlegs sonned over to us. Hey, sir, he said, sounded like Slingblade. Look at you, acting all John Wayne out here without me.

Where the hell have you been? I asked. It had taken 45 minutes to get this to this abandoned village after leaving Burmell. It had taken Burley and our quick reaction force three and a half hours to go the same distance. Griesen later told me that Burley had called up a possible roadside bomb a few kilometers away from our fight. He had ordered the platoon to stop. They sat parked on the road out of the fight. Griesen grew increasingly frustrated. He saw no evidence of a roadside bomb and nothing was being done to investigate or clear anything in the road. But since he was only a passenger,

he could not do anything about it. As soon as the assaults against us has ended, had ended, Burley declared the road ahead clear, and the platoon had continued on its way. Not the kind of support you're looking for. No. No. You know, and that's, you know, not everybody that puts on the uniform is beyond reproach. We all make mistakes. And, you know, that initial ambush that second platoon got caught in set the tone for that platoon, not the men.

The men, they wanted, they wanted to do the job and do the job. But for the leadership, it set the tone for the leadership in the culture of that platoon to where they wanted to avoid contact at all costs. You know, they were playing the long game in so far as, you know, they didn't want to be in the fight because they didn't want to take the risk of losing or having guys wounded, hurt, killed. And I get that. I do. And, you know, in this particular, for example, one of the leaders of that platoon had a wife that was pregnant. And he, you know, he wanted to go home. And I get that.

but that is not unlike the situation of every single one of my soldiers who are out there bleeding on the line need help. In this particular instance, we had it well in hand. But the fact of the matter is when you call for a QRF, it's a no bullshit. Like we need you as fast as humanly possible. Now there is, I mean, God, I mean, how many times is a QRF hit with an IED because the enemy knows that that's our battle dry? I do get that. And it's nighttime. But Griesen was on the ground with him and said that they took a long time to over three.

three and a half hours to get to us on the battlefield that night. And really that drove a rift between our platoons. It really did. And I think that the, I think that the, what we learned that day is that like we really have to rely on, we really can only count on ourselves, you know. We operated with Delta and Delta platoon out there. They always had our backs. Second platoon did as well.

I mean, I don't want to say that they didn't do the job, but the leadership culture was different. It was a different culture. You're now back on base, and it's actually time for you to go on leave. And so here we go back to the book. The next day, our once overweight forward observer, Cole came to see me. He'd been working out nonstop since arriving at Burmell several months before. He dropped more than 20 pounds, looked lean and mean,

and was all set to go out on patrol with us. The first sergeant cleared him to roll beyond the wire, and he was eager to rejoin us and be part of our band again. A few more days in the gym, a couple more after that for final preparations, and he'd transitioned back to us. In the meantime, he was still working with the aviation guys to schedule seats on available helicopters. Sir, we have a bird coming in an hour. Aren't you supposed to go on leave?

Do you want a slot? Cole is wearing ridiculous yellow sneakers. Through my exhaustion, I gaped at them. Yeah, Cole, that'd be great. But what the hell? I said pointing at his shoes. He grinned. They're cool.

Cole, they look like big bird shoes. They make me run like the wind, sir. Run like the wind. I had no time to shower, barely get time to unpack. I threw a few things into a bag. I changed my uniform later. Cole checked back with me about a half an hour later. Sir, the flight's full, but I'm going to get you on it.

Don't worry. He told me to get out to the landing zone and wait for the helicopter. I said a hasty goodbye to the platoon. I had no time to do anything else and made my way to the pad. The abrupt farewell, even if it was temporary, felt jagged and raw. Truth was as much as I wanted to see my family back home I didn't want to leave the one I had here

So the helicopters come in, Cole dashed up to me in a moment After they touched down Got a spot for you sir, you know I always take care of you I was profoundly grateful Yeah Cole you sure do I'll see when I get back he smiled and waved Can't wait to be out there with you sir I shook his hand and thanked him for all he'd done for us He seemed embarrassed he hated to have attention drawn to himself and felt most comfortable

Working in the background taking care of the platoon any way he could so you take off the first stop is in as it bogram you get there and of course You're walking around and you get this lieutenant a US Army major demanded he stood staring at me hands on hips a look of disgust on his face his A CUs were so clean and well-fitting that I assumed they had been tailored and pressed He wore no combat by badges no sign that he was a ranger or even infantry He had never I'd never noticed that sort of thing until that moment. I wondered if he was going to be salsa dancing tonight.

Yes, sir, I asked Wearily, clean yourself up. Your uniforms of disgrace. His war and mine were, his war and mine were so different that there was no way for our worlds to meet. I didn't even have the energy to try. Good times. I know. So go back in Bogram.

I mean, they had salsa dancing night. Oh. Yeah. I mean, you go on Bogram. I mean, like those, I mean, again. this is the divide between war fighters and the rear, you know? It's like you get back and like I remember I didn't have time to change. I still got blood on my FLC and on my body armor.

One of my squad leaders have been shot in the ankle. I'm rushing to get on these ring routes because they only come out to these outlying fobs so often, you know. You've got to get on the bird when it shows up or you might not get another one for a month. My whole family's expecting me to be home. So I rush, I get off the bird. First thing that I see is this major right on Steel Beach. And I'm like, I see this guy. He's got like this eye for me and I'm like, God damn.

I'm like trying to like not look at him and he like makes a beeline right for me. And the first thing he says is, you know, your uniform is a disgrace. You got to get, you got to get your ass cleaned up. I know I know that, you're probably out there. He gave me the hole. I know you're probably, I'm like, sir, I just, I'm like thinking to myself. I'm like, sir, I just got off the goddamn bird. Like, Jesus.

Like, and of course he's like yelling at me about taking the magazine out of my weapon. Like, because you're not supposed to have a magazine on your weapon at Boggroom. You're supposed to wear a road guard belt everywhere you go. I mean, there are. There are more regulations in Boggham Air Force Base in Afghanistan than are on Fort Drum or any military base back here in the States. And so, I mean, it was just like, I got prison strong when I was in Afghanistan. And we weren't on operations.

All we did was lift on our gym, you know, and it was like it was ghetto, but it worked. We made it work. It was great, you know? And so we get back to Bogram, though, man. And it's like, it's like amazing. You know, I'm like walking down. I'm like covered in dirt, filled blood, muck. I take a warm shower.

There's much hot water as you could want. They got these like sauna-like wood panels. I'm walking on it. I'm like, this is great. I'm in the bathroom. There are actual toilets. We would go in like the first experience that I had, like going to the bathroom in Afghanistan after MREs,

I'm like, you're sitting on this little concrete square, right, with a little toilet seat over. And all of a sudden I just hear this like, like, and I look down and I see these two hands, man, pulling this big pot of shit out from, I'm like, oh my God. Jesus, like that was my first experience. I'm back in Boggroom. This is a place like a medical spa. It's like a spa.

I'm walking to these gym. There are world-class gyms, at least three of them on Boggum. I mean, seriously, with all this hardcore, awesome weight equipment, I mean, serious, like peck decks, cable cry. I mean, everything you could possibly imagine, there's water cooler's in every corner. There's green bean coffee. There's Burger King. There's salsa night.

There's movie night. I'm like, people that come to Bogram should pay the military to go to Bogram. This place is awesome. I just want to take my family. family here on vacation, it's so nice. I mean, it really was nice. And I'm just thinking, like, people that are, like, there are infantry staff members or staff officers that go to this, they make the same amount of combat pay that I do. It's a totally different deployment. It's worlds. It is. It's universes. And I'm sorry. Like, you know, it, so I write about the resentment,

right, that we felt at the time. I know it's not mature. I know it's not nuance and complex. It's probably not right, right? But I only read. wrote it that way, not because, just because of how I felt in the moment, right? I look back and I'm so thankful for all those guys now, but I, the truth of the matter was is you get highly pissed. This dude's making the same as I am and I got shot in the chest last week in my body armor. You know what I mean? There's a qualitative difference in experience that the military does not recognize with pay

and that pissed me off. It just upset me. You see, you, this deployment went down in 2006. You said you started writing this in 2008. Yes. Luckily for me, Leif and I didn't start writing extreme ownership until like 2014. So we had enough time to like get over it. One of my friends.

I'm still like, I'm still like, you're getting over it. I'm still like all fired up. You still have blood on your boots. Somebody gave me a copy of an email that I had sent while I was in Ramadi to my Commodore, who was a friend of mine, who. I had a great relationship with, but I couldn't believe that I wrote it. I mean, it was one of those, it was like I literally didn't care. Like, hey, you know, it was like a, he had sent out an email and I sent, he'd sent out like

kind of a group-wide email to all the officers, you know, asking for some feedback. And I gave it to me. And I was a straight shooter, you know, everyone knew I was a straight shooter. And like I said, I had a great relationship with him. But like, this guy told me the email that I sent. I was like, wow, you know, it started off with something along the line. Because, you know, he was questioning, hey, how can we get more seals? And, like, my opening line was, we don't need more seals.

We needed better seals and tougher seals. Like, that was my opening line. I was like, okay. That's a jaco opening line. That's everything I expected to say. Yeah. But I, you know, probably not. I wouldn't have addressed it the same way if you took me out of Ramadi.

Like, and I was sitting in a, what did you say, a salsa night dance or whatever? Yeah. It would have been probably a little bit, okay, here's some ways we could. think about recruiting, you know. It wouldn't have been just coming off the toprobes. Of course. So yeah, you wrote this book. You said you started writing in 2008.

Yeah, I actually started the writing process in 2007. Okay, yeah. So this thing was fresh. You were surprisingly gentle then. I mean, I really wanted it to be a warts in all story, like my failures. But I mean, look, I got a piece of advice from John, my co-author on this book. And he said, look, this country is a wash of World War II memoirs written by generals that feel, make you feel like the war was just a chess board. Like, I maneuvered this unit here and we

did this. And the truth of the matter is, we cannot write a book like that. It has to be a warts and all, blood and guts type story. And so that's what we set out to do. Yeah. Well, those are the kind of books that we don't cover on this podcast, books by the rear echelon. Like, we literally, I don't think I've covered, I mean, I covered patents because patents, and I've covered some other senior generals from older times when you don't have any first person accounts from privates, because a lot of times the privates weren't educated enough to write a book right the few that are out there that I've definitely we've definitely nailed some of those uh we've got uh Napoleonic foot soldier yeah that's a foot soldier so yes that's what this book comes across like you get you get it right um

so now you're on leave by the way which people may not understand leave is absolutely mandatory when you're on a one year deployment in the army that's right yeah you two weeks of our rest and relaxation leave there was a I didn't I didn't know that and the commander of the first of the 506 who was the best guy the like one of just the best combat leaders ever leaders period for one one five oh six really first the 506 in romadi just totally just an awesome guy and I didn't know that it was mandatory but all of a sudden he was on leave and I was kind of like well that's that's kind of a let down you know I thought to myself what I can't believe he took leave because in the seal teams we don't do that because we are on short much

shorter deployments. Anyways, then someone's like, oh, yeah, he's on leave. He had to leave. That's interesting. I didn't even think about that. I figured it would be a mandatory for you too. Our deployments are generally six, seven months. So we're not going on 14, 16 month deployments like they do in the Army. And the Marine Corps is the same way. The Marine Corps goes on like six, seven month deployments. You know, that's kind of, they don't get, they don't get mid-tore leave. They don't get like that. You only gone for six months, bro. I mean, you don't get, there's no 40. I mean, I didn't ever even really thought about this. Yeah, I guess if you're only gone six months, do you, you don't get anything, nothing? No. No. No.

I don't know what would be better. I think a six-month appointment with no leave would be better than a 16-month appointment with two weeks in the middle. I would say that that's rough. And even reading your thing, like there's no way I would have wanted to go on leave. It would drive me crazy from an infinite number of ways. But just I don't want to taste like, I don't want to taste chocolate chip cookies. I know. If they're not going to be like if I'm not going to have at least the whole chocolate chip cookie.

I don't want a taste of it. I don't want to taste of it. Just give me an MRE and I'll keep eating that. I don't want to know what this other thing tastes like. Yeah, leave me in the suck. I know. Don't take me out of the suck and expect me to want to go back to the suck. That was one of the hardest things ever.

Yeah. I mean, you're right about that. I can't even. You know what they do? In basic seal training, we're going through this thing called Hell Week, which is like five days where you're up the whole time and it's cold and wet miserable. At some point during that, they go, okay, guys, you know what?

We've pushed you guys too hard. And the captain he said, you know we need to we need to get you guys a rest so it's our fault look go change into dry uniforms and we're gonna put you guys to bed you guys are gonna get six hours because we've we shouldn't have done this we shouldn't have pushed you guys like this and you're like whoa okay cool so you get in dry clothes and then they put you in bed and this is one of the times where you get to sleep but you're you don't go to sleep for six hours you go to sleep for about 15 minutes and then they come in and they're lying and they're just

but what's interesting is what's interesting is so many people quit right then because you're cold, wet, miserable for like a day and a half, maybe two days. Then they tell you, oh, okay, sorry, that was a mistake. We need to give you guys a rest. They get you dry. They get you warm. They get you sleeping only so they can wake you up and put you right back in the cold water. And so many people quit right then.

God, man, this is a fascinating parallel because I mean, you're speaking to some deep fundamental truth of the human condition. Yet leave is mandatory for Army. And I have to tell you, man, I didn't want to leave. It was, it was terrible, right? I went home. I could, there was rest and relaxation. It's like what, right, yeah. Like, there's no relaxing at all.

And then going back, though, was the hardest thing. It was so hard, right? It was just so challenging. So there is something to that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know what's amazing. Stay in the suck.

Yeah. Yes, exactly. Stay in the suck. Keep me in the suck. And you know what's amazing, though, is there was not more AWOLs. Yeah, that is shocking. I mean, for real. Yeah, that is shocking.

Well, I guess it's partly because we have an all volunteer force. Yeah. And people know what they're doing. I think that is a major component of it. If it was all draft force, the AWOL number would be significantly higher. I don't know, though. Man, I talked to the leaders that I talked to from the Vietnam War, the draftees were awesome. Unless you were a crappy leader and then they were horrible.

And guess what? Everyone that worked for you was horrible because you sucked. Yeah. Interesting. So you are in Ocean City, Maryland. Yes. Down on the water. That's where my family's gone for their vacation.

So this is just hitting every, every damn sentimental thought that you have is all getting hit. Going back to the book here. What, go ahead. No, yes. You're exactly right. You're written the nail on the head, man. Yeah, everything that I've experienced my entire childhood. That is good.

Coupled with the shame and guilt of leaving my troops. It was just hell. It was horrible. Oh, and I had to try to pretend like it wasn't. Oh, yeah. You'd act like your family. Oh, yeah, yeah. Mini golf is fun, which it is, you know, because I always win, but it wasn't fun when I was on leave, you know?

I rose from the bed and went to the open window. My family had rented a place on Maryland Shore in honor of my temporary homecoming. We'd be there for a week. Then I would return to the war. The salter smelled divine. I closed my eyes and filled my lungs. With each exhale, I tried to purge my mind to the foul odors. I had stowed away with every Afghan breath, burned flesh, white, white, fire.

And steaming bodies rent asunder filth sewage mold and decay and then you go on but at the same time I felt disconnected Unplugged from my hive at Burmell Burmell now all my instincts telegraphed that something had gone terribly wrong and I wasn't there to help out Somewhere on the far side of the planet. I imagined the platoon cleaning weapons and getting ready for chow I love being home I hated being home. My folks appeared in the kitchen, and my grandmother wished them good morning. I went back to watching Fox News,

savoring every bite of my home-cooked breakfast. The little things matter the most after combat. The news anchor began talking about two Fox reporters who had been kidnapped at gunpoint the day before in Gaza. Then the news ticker at the bottom of the screen caught my attention. American soldier killed by enemy mine strike in eastern Ireland. Afghanistan. The wires inside my head were screaming now. I stared at the screen and listed all the reasons why this couldn't have happened to anyone I knew. The outlaws were a tiny unit, just a

platoon. There were thousands of U.S. troops fighting in eastern Afghanistan. The chances that was one of my men were astronomically small. Then you obviously run, get you your laptop. I sat down and started my laptop as soon as I logged into Yahoo Instant Messenger, a conversation box popped up. It was Rowley. Hey, sir, Rowley, everything okay? Actually, no. What's wrong? I received no immediate reply. I waited in dreadful suspense.

And then finally, Cole is dead. Rowley sent a file. The download took forever. When it finally finished, I opened it up and saw a photograph of one of our home vs blown to broken junk. I had a I had a dream that day I don't know if you all believe in this sort of thing but I had a dream that day that something was wrong

in Afghanistan. I could not sleep. It plagued me all night. It was a dream about being overrun and all this other stuff. It's just hard sometimes to get centered when you come back from combat, especially on R&R and you know you're going back.

But just something in me was screaming that something isn't right. Something's not right. And I sort of just wrote it off as like, hey, you know, you just don't want to be here. You want to be back with the guys. Like just sort of try, let it go. Let your guard down, right? Try to relax.

But I couldn't let it go. And I remember waking up that morning, having pancakes. My mom makes amazing pancakes. That's like a thing. We go on vacation, right? So I'm just like crushing some pancakes or whatever. And I'm like watching Fox News and I still could not shake this feeling that something was wrong. and I see that ticker

and immediately I knew I knew it was my platoon 100% just knew it in my heart of hearts and I run over I mean this is back in 2006 where Wi-Fi wasn't everywhere you know what I mean like I had to go find a place that I had Wi-Fi

some coffee shop across the street I got my like my laptop and I sprint across the street to get there hook up find out that I lost one of my soldiers in my only two weeks of my two weeks that I was gone was just one of the most devastating

experiences of my life because by this time I realized that, you know, sending, I'd seen the toll that the emails had taken on my dad firsthand now. Like, he didn't talk about it. He didn't complain to me about it, but I saw it. You know, I could feel it. And so by this time in the deployment, I just sucked it up. You know, I found out the cold, I had to keep it a secret for the rest of the time. You know, and I think my family knew something was wrong.

They didn't really ask me any questions about it. But, like, we were going mini golf and having family dinner. walking on the boardwalk and I just had to just not say a word about it. It was just the hardest thing in the world, man. And Cole was just such a great guy. Like, he had a newborn baby before we deployed. The reason why he gained all that weight is he was gained all the weight because he was gained sympathy weight during the pregnancy and he couldn't shake.

He couldn't lose it. And so he got to stay back. See the birth of his kid. I remember our battalion commander said, yeah, we're going to let you stay back. You know, take care of your family, have this baby. because when you come to Afghanistan, we need you 100% focused on the mission. So thank God he got to stay back and watch his baby be born and come back up. He got to the base overweight.

He couldn't really like go on patrol with us because he was overweight, but he took it in stride. He didn't get dejected. He looked for other ways to help, you know, like we'd get back from base. He'd run over the truck, start grabbing and throw an MREs in if we needed MREs. He looked for a way to be functional, man, and the platoon just adored him. And finally, he ends up in the gym losing all this weight, gets these stupid Big Bird shoes, think it makes him run.

fast and stuff. They did. He was just a character, man. It was really funny. He was really funny. He was, I left on leave, like, something like August 12th.

His first patrol was August 15th. He was killed August 16th. It was just, and I, I, to this day, it's just, it's just, I missed his funeral. I missed his,

I missed the, you know, the salute, the funeral, the memorial service, the bagpipes, the, you know,

uh, his casket being flown from Bermel back to Boggroom. It was just the worst experience. You know, just to not be there. You know, as a leader, like, you know, you always want to make sure that you're there, you know, where the contact is heaviest, right? That's my, you know, on the battlefield where the contact is heaviest. But sometimes it's not just enemy contact.

Sometimes it's emotional and psychological contact as well. The leader has to be there. It has to be, cannot be a detached, must be involved. And this was one of those moments for me. And I'm like, I was screaming. inside. I'm like, God damn it, this is where my platoon needs me the most. I need to be there for them. I need to be struggling through this with them. And I totally missed the entire thing. By the time I got back to the base, Cole on the base, I mean, never would be forgotten. His name

was just been painted on our wall. It was just one of the fallen that we had lost in the deployment. And it just killed me inside not to be able to be a part of it. You know, and it would end up being my truck, you know, my truck that was attacked. I mean, there's a whole story behind it, which I'm sure we're going to get into, but it ended up being my truck that was a tag. It was a targeted attack at the command vehicle. So it just sucked. I wish I was out there.

That was your truck in the line of March that got hit? Yeah. And that's what he was in. What position was he in the vehicle? He was sitting behind the driver. So when I was on leave, Griesen took over the truck commander position in the command truck, which is typically in a convoy,

the way that we did it is I was right behind the point man in the truck. So would you be in the lead truck? I wouldn't be in the lead truck. I'd be in the truck right behind the lead. So Chris Cowen was sitting as us then. Yeah. So I was sitting in a TC spot directly next to the driver, Coles, was sitting behind the driver. Chris Brown was my gunner and I have a pinholder, Reuter in the truck behind me.

So I was on leave. Greason was in that truck, fulfilling that role, but it was that truck that was hit. It was a targeted attack. So you get back. You're back in Burmell. Hey, sir, I need to talk to you, Greason said to me, as I ended our hooch. His room was across the hall from mine.

He was supposed to get evacuated back to Bogram so his head wound could be treated. Instead, he refused to leave the men and continue to lead them after the aid station at Fobb Salerno had patched him up as best they could. And those were wounds that he got from that same ID last. Yeah, yeah, he got,

I think this is a second or third Purple Heart on this deployment. We'd just come back from my first patrol since I had returned from leave. Sir, what I'm about to tell you cannot be mentioned to anyone. His preface caught me off guard. Okay, I said cautiously. It's about one of our interpreters.

He had my attention now. Quietly, he began to talk, unbeknownst to us. Some top secret national level assets had been tracking unusual communications coming from our area. Over the past several months, they had narrowed those transmissions down to Fobbermel. Somebody on post had been using our sat phones to contact an Iranian bomb-making cell operating out of a Madrid. just over the Pakistani border. We had an enemy mole in our midst. Youssef fell under suspicion.

He'd been observed asking questions. He shouldn't have been asking. He had often wanted to know where we were going before we left the wire, something that had annoyed us throughout the deployment. A quiet investigation had revealed that he was the only local national on base who could have had knowledge

of the platoon's destination. Plus, Griesen had caught him talking on a phone, introducing himself with a different name to whoever was a person. on the other end of the connection. When Griesen said, hey, I thought your name was Yosef. Our head turp offered a wide, suspicious grin,

and replied, that's just my stage name. Grecian finished the story. Captain Dye is going to take him to Oregon E. Is that how you say it? Oregon E, yeah. Oregon E later today to arrest him. Nobody can know about this. We can't risk spooking Yosef

and causing him to bolt. I want to go to Oregon E. I said in a furious voice, Griesen growled, fuck no, sir. You're way too close to this. So am I. Let Captain Die handle this. He was right. As the news sank in, my own responsibility in this disaster became apparent. I had become complacent with the cozy nature of Yousef's

relationships with the men. He'd been too close to them for many months. And every time I'd seen him around the barracks hanging out with them, it had rankled me. Grisen had noted it too, urging me to put a stop to it. And although I'd mentioned it to the platoon in passing, I'd not done so with any conviction. When it continued, I should have put my foot down hard and ended it fratinization with a local national no matter how much he was trusted was an operational security breach plain and simple even more damning was his use of satellite phones that never should have happened though we had told him he couldn't use them he still had access to soldiers who worked in

the operation center and he could get his hands on the phones whenever he wanted it had always seemed like a minor problem and my plate had been so full with that dealing with yousef's behavior it ended up on the bottom of my priority list. I had never gotten around to dealing with it. And now what Griesen told me revealed the consequences of that failure. It had gotten coal killed. No, I had gotten coal killed. This was not on the men. This wasn't on Griesen. This was my cross to bear. I don't remember much of the morning after that. I know I went to my room to change out of my filthy uniform. I know I felt my strength failing me as I faced the totality of my guilt. Another

part of me slipped away and died I hadn't didn't even have the will to fight for it this time the war had sucked me dry so this this Judas in the purest sense of the word Judas Yousef had had betrayed everyone obviously and you know in my mind I was wondering okay I wonder how like how they knew like okay they got some very good evidence but in the back of my mind I was thinking still like you're gonna you're gonna go how do you really know and then I read this later that day captain die assembled a patrol from part of my platoon and part of the headquarters element Yousef was assigned to be the turp he suspected nothing and climbed on board one of the

Humvees at Oregon E he was confronted with the evidence against him at first he denied everything but when the sat phone was mentioned he laughingly confessed yes yes you got me I did it his attitude earned him a face plan on the hood of the Humvee our men zip cuffed him and pulled him into the battalion and detention center later that night he was flown to bogram in any other time in the hands of any other army youssef's body would never have been found he'd have been dispatched and dumped his corpse left for scavengers nobody would have known or cared that an enemy spy had vanished vanished discipline was the only thing that saved his life instead of a bullet to the brain he faced due

process in a prison cell in the days ahead i wondered if that was a weakness or a strength. There's a certain elegance to outlaw justice. Besides, the enemy would have afforded us no mercy had the roles been reversed. And then later you find out that he actually also was the one that got Abdul killed. Yeah, he was responsible for the assassination of Abdul, baiting him outside the wire, had a hand in the night letters, just so he could ascend to the head turp and ingratiate himself to the sensitivity of some of our mission sensitive, mission sensitive intelligence. And so this is, this, this is 100% on me, 100%.

I mean, throughout the course of the deployment, like, we get there, even myself, we're like, oh my gosh, this is a totally different culture. Look, we're having fun, we're having tea together. We're friends. We're out there serving together. You know, after a while, these Terps would show up for our convoy briefs, and they'd listen in and Greece and be like, hey, they can't be having these guys listen to our convoy briefs.

I'd say, okay, I'd talk to the squad leaders about it, but again, no conviction. You know, we'd have interpreters for a while sitting in my truck in the command truck to listen so I could react in real time to the ICOM chatter. We were looking because he would listen to the enemy and I'd hear about it. I'd call on fire. But he was also hearing sensitive commo coming back from me on the tax set and stuff like that. Griesen was like, you can't do that. You can't do that.

So we moved into a different truck. But again, I never addressed this issue with any real conviction. and because of that, he coordinated with this Iranian IED cell. He knew exactly where we were going, what OP we were setting on. He had an eight-digit grid. He knew where my truck would be that provided the greatest, it was just the best position for the command truck to be. We'd been at this location before, so we'd know.

So he ceded the area with a couple of different plastic, Italian TC6 anti-tank mines. So even we had these metal detectors for that purpose to detect mines, there was more metal when a pack of cigarette center is in this mine. And my truck with coal in it rolled over that mine, totally destroyed it, killed coal in an instant, wounded Doc Pantoja for a second time, wounded it was greasing for the second or third time, blew Cole Wallace out of the turret. He was wounded in another time. I mean, it was just an absolute disaster.

And it was 100% on my failure to address. this specific issue and failure to protect operational security around mission sensitive things. And, you know, it just, God, it just bothers me to this day. You know, because, you know, man, regret is life's worst poison. It just is. It eats you forever for the rest of your life. You never want to look back in your life and say the word should. Should is like one of my least favorite words in the English language.

Yeah, sure. Yes, sir. I should be able to do that. No. or can you do it or can you not do it because you can't do it. I'm going to find somebody else who can. I hate the word should. My kids say, yeah, I should. No, I don't want to hear should. Yes or no. I hate that word. I also hate it because I don't want to ever look back on my life and say, God, I should have done this differently, you know. And I have to say that with regard to Cole.

I mean, his death is on me, no one else but me. And his death rests solely at my feet. And I've got to live with that pain. for the rest of my life. Losing a soldier when I knew it could have been preventable. You know, I think I look back, I look back on it, and I think I just, you know, part of me just wanted to be liked by the guys. You know what I mean? Like, they thought it was, they thought it was cool to go sit and have tea with the interpreters and stuff. And I just didn't want to, you know, I think that was it.

I think part of me just didn't want to make that hard decision. I didn't want to take that away from them. I wanted to be cool. I wanted to be liked. And ultimately, that's what that, that, right there is what got one of my soldiers killed. And something like I said, I have to live with the rest of my life. Every day, I think of that.

Every day I wish I could have done something different. I talked about that on a recent podcast, like this idea that, and it's the same thing that you and I have been talking about because this idea of like, I'm going to be friends with the people in which I clearly said and will freely say that I absolutely had friends in all every unit I was ever with I had real good friends up it when I was a junior guy guess what when I was a junior guy when I was the youngest guy in my platoon I had great friends that were what we call khakis you know whether they were the chief or the assistant platoon commander the platoon commander like they were my real true friends like real legit

friends and that was when I was really young so I always had it there but man the bleed over the mistake that people make where they say, you know what, and I know the feeling, I know this uncomfortable feeling of, you know, the guys want to do this and I don't think it's the right thing to do, but I don't feel strongly enough about it that I'm actually going to say anything. And this to me, like I said, I had a real advantage because I was older and I'd been in the teams for a long time. You know, I had a lot of experience in the teams. So it was easier for me as a junior officer to hold the line.

I didn't always and I look back and I can tell you a thousand stories of times where I should have done something better than I did and I didn't and I should have and it was a mistake and I explained that to these young officers when I talk to young officers now, I'm like you're the guy You're the one that has to make these hard decisions and you know what? This is the part that's good for them to understand. It's counterintuitive What's counterintuitive when you're in a leadership position and you actually say, hey, guys, we're not doing that. You're afraid that they're not going to like you. You're afraid that they're not going to respect you. They actually respect you more.

It's true. They actually respect you more. Like you know, looking back now, if you're going to go, guys, hey, listen, this is OPSEC. We're not playing. I'm not going to have foreign nationals know our routes. It's not happening. Everyone in that platoon would have gone. Hey, boss is on it.

You know what I mean? but we don't know that. And it's easy to look back. Hindsight's 2020, man. Hey, you're 100% right. 100% right. You know, and I think part of me it was just like, you know, you laid it out there perfectly.

Like the guys really want to do this, but I know this ain't the right thing. And maybe 99% of the time, if I don't say something, it might be okay. It's no big deal. You know? But it's that 1% of the time, or if you don't say something and tragedy strikes,

and when I talk to young officers about it, I'd say the exact same thing that you do. The buck stops with you. You are the guy. Do not seek popularity for popularity's sake. You know, be the leader, be the strong leader that your men know, need, and deserve. And that's the counterintuitive part.

The counterintuitive part is that if you do, if you hold the line, your respect actually goes up. Now, can you go overboard with that? Yes, you absolutely can and everyone can hate you because you just and it happens. It happens a lot. Yeah. But the other thing I think I was playing against you in this situation is it kind of doesn't seem like that could really happen.

You know what I mean? Like I look at some things that I experienced in combat and I'm like, you know, if somebody would have told me that that could actually happen, I would have said it's like it's like you watch it in a movie. Yeah, but that would never happen, right? That could never actually happen. And it seems like that's a situation where you're like, listen, what are the chances that of all the thousands of people that could be assigned to us out here, we're going to get this spy, right? A spy, that's what's going to happen that has access to Iranians. Like, you can't, if you wrote a book about that, you'd be like, okay, that's a cool plot for a movie. I know.

But in our minds, we're like, hey, and that's why I reached a point. And I'll tell you, I reached a point. I can't really talk about what happened. but I had some intel that was not the way it should be. And I learned that lesson one time. And from that point on, I never doubted that these things could go the way they did. And all these little suspicions that I thought maybe,

and it happened to me luckily on my first deployment to Iraq where I was like, okay, yeah, I dropped the ball on that one. We got away with it. It'll never happen again, you know. So I think that's another thing that was playing against you is it seems kind of like far-fetched unrealistic. It does. You got James Bond.

Well, it does. You got the Afghan James Bond in your truth. Well, you know, and the thing is, is I think it's even more nuanced than that. I think he was, he, he, you know, maybe for a time he was a legit interpreter, you know, worked with Americans for five years, you know, and I think he just was unhappy with his pay, and the enemy said they were going to pay him more, and the guy's trying to feed his family, and these people are perpetual fence sitters. Like, you know, it's the graveyard of empires.

That sort of attitude is ingrained into the soul of every tribe in the country of Afghanistan. And so I think that he just flipped. And his flipping was more of a cultural thing and less of a lawyer. I mean, it's a loyalty thing to us, right? But to him, it's just like business as usual. That's the other piece playing against you. Yeah.

Because we don't do that. I don't get, yeah. We don't. Right. It didn't even register with me, although it should have because you have Abdul telling me literally, you know, you got to see how to watch this guy. Keep an eye on this guy. This guy's all about the money. You know, and again, I'm just thinking like, well, I know a thousand guys like that are all about the money. They're not going to like turn on you. And then you look at the war since I've been home and God, man, the war is awash with green on blue incidents. It happens all the time. But to me, in the moment, as a young, inexperienced leader, who, wanted to be popular, didn't want to make the hard decision, maybe just consciously or unconsciously blew it off. It bit me in the ass, you know, and it got one of my guys killed and got four of them wounded,

and it was just, it just is the worst feeling in the world, you know? Well, the good thing is you're in here right now, and you wrote this book to teach these lessons to young, young JOs that are out there and NCOs that are out there that have to hold the line. Going back to the book, enough was enough, Lieutenant Colonel Toner coordinated it, battalion size mission to clear and this again so this is jumping now we're on page 32 of this

whatever it is book because now we're getting to a point where you've been through all this crap over and over and over and over again and the enemies they're getting theirs i mean you guys are kicking their ass but as as a battalion the enemy is they're hostile look we had taken in that year we took over three or four thousand rockets and at this point this is around uh october november time frame, they were hitting us with 122 millimeter rockets. I don't know if you know what that looks like. Those are six foot long rockets. It's a freaking nightmare. It's the only one that has ever been used with a launcher in Afghanistan and we could not find them in every single day, 122s were pounding our base. We fired more artillery that year in Afghanistan trying to find

this 122 launcher and take it out than both Iraq and Afghanistan combined. It was just an insane amount of 105s dropped. And so every single day, we had this old school World War II air raid siren on our base. And every single day, that thing would go off at a different time. And guys would run to the bunker. It just got to the point where it was like October, November. Our battalion commander was just like, to hell with this.

We're mustering the entire battalion in your area of operations. And we're walking online all the way to the border until we find this thing and kill the people who own it. It's legit. That was our mission. And who was leading that operation was my platoon was responsible for pushing all the way to the border. And it was like a four or five day mission. I mean, God, it was cool to be a part of, man, to see four different companies and another company directly at that six companies total, all in line walking, you know, at A&A and the Marines are on the high ground.

We've got my trucks in the low ground. And then we'd rotate. I mean, it was just like something out of World War II. I mean, look, we were doing trench clearing. I mean, the enemy had, we were walking in areas that no American troops had ever been in. And there were enemy trenches and we were doing trench clearing. It was, it was awesome. I mean, what other infantry unit is doing trench clearing?

We were. And, I mean, man, we rented those little assholes out, man. Yeah. I was so lucky in Ramadi, we were doing brigade-sized operations. And it was so awesome. Yeah, I was going to say to seals get to see that. Do you guys do that kind of stuff? Not a lot.

But like we even, we didn't execute, but there was a big like division operation that was going on. And I sat through this big briefing. Yeah, they're cool, man. And I'm thinking to myself, this is so awesome. And, you know, for us it was like World War II because we had tanks and the tanks are rolling through smashing buildings and firing their main guns. I can't imagine that. It was really cool to be a part of it.

I mean, be a little tiny, tiny part of that was awesome. To see, you know, for me, yeah, right. To be a tiny part of that is awesome. And to see the combined arms power of the United States military brought to bear on an enemy, oh my God. So brigade battalion level operations are no joke. I mean, the Apaches and 810s, we had a British tornado, tornado, whatever, like a British tornado, come do a show of force and a Wadi system.

And those British pilots are crazy freaks, man, flying down. I mean, it looked like you could reach up and touch this jet, come screaming down overhead and peel up away. And I'm like, this is something like I've never experienced. One thing to be in a kill zone, platoon versus platoon with an enemy, but seeing a battalion brigade division level operation and to be a part of it, it is, I mean, we'd go to bed at night. It would be like something out of saving private Ryan. We'd be sleeping on this ridgeline.

The horizon would be a wash. It would be light up every now and again with 105s. Boom, boom. You can feel that shutter in your bones. You can feel it to clatter your teeth. And it's just, you can feel the crue. crump of it. And then all of a sudden, you know, it's an AC130 specter gunstick would come on station. Yes. And I'd be the guy on the front, like coordinating targets with it with a JTAC, like hitting targets. And we just fall asleep to that all night. And then we'd get up and we do a sensitive site exploitation like at night or the next day. It was just like we just methodically took out everyone. What was the resistance? Did you guys push through this? Oh, so we, the very first day. We go, we went down a route called Route Transam. And that was the that was the that was the, that was the, that was the, that was the.

route all the way to the border that we had most of the issues of the enemy on. And the Marines were on the high ground with the A&A. We were on the low ground. We entire battalion mustard right behind us. My platoon pushes into the mall of this Wadi system in Route Transam. And three dudes and Black Man Jams, RPGs, AK-47s run out from this side road and just start like waving their weapons. and the A&A on the high ground just start chasing them

and I'm just like I get on the radio, the Marines, I'm like, stop, stop, stop the A&A, stop, stop. Too obvious. They got baited into an ambush. They got surrounded and cut off. All the Marines that were with them that were wounded. The Marine commander on the ground was shot in the pelvis. This is the guy was telling you about. My platoon, our battalion commander and our company commander come running up to us.

So what's going on? I gave him the situation. and they're trying to figure out a KazVax situation. I'm like, send us in. We'll go get them right now. Send us in. And so they sent us in and we drive into this kill zone. We start taking fire from all sides.

I mean, it was just crazy. Start taking fire from all sides. I'm watching the truck in front of me, window shattering all around it. I'm looking up in the trees. The Wadi system is real tight, right? And these guys are just perched up on trees on these cliff sides, just taking pot shots at our gunners.

And we couldn't traverse our guns. We couldn't traverse them high enough to actually make. So guys were coming up with the. rifles and trying to shoot him and stuff. It was crazy. So I watched the gunner and St. Jean, John St. Jean from Haiti. Get shot in the head, dropping the turret.

So get this. When we eventually evacked him, the bullet punctured his helmet. His helmet slowed the round enough that the round still punctured his skin, but stopped on his skull, skirted around his skin on his, like, around the outside of his skull and back out the other side. I mean, this is like, this is the kind of shit that you expect. I mean, it's like, how is he alive? How did that happen to a guy?

It's crazy. I had the exact same thing. It's just crazy. It didn't come out the other end of the skin. The medic, the corman just came over and like pushed the bullet round back up to the entry point and squeezed the bullet out like a zip. Oh, God. That's gross. Oh, God.

But so we end up being the skills. And we can't get to the Marines where he's completely cut off. And so we pull out, we got like four or five cashies. I had to evacuate. We got them out. We got them treated. And this is when Hall. And this is when Hall says, I'm going up to get him, sir.

Give me five guys from second platoon. I'll take my squad up and get him. And he fought up there. He fought up the hill, fought through two flanks of the enemy. All the way, I know, I know. Just like, I have a picture of him assenting the hill, like looking back down the hill, like doing this number. I don't know how we got that picture. But it's, it's, Hall was just a badass.

And fought through two flanks of the enemy, gets to this Marine, treats his wounds, leads in a, jungle penetrator, a Blackhawk helicopter comes in, two Apaches for an escort. They get a jungle penetrator in. Both Apaches take shots. They have to pull off station. The Black Hawk gets shot up. They get the guy, the Marine on the jungle penetrator and flying back. But, I mean, our birds got shot up. I mean, so we ended up killing a bunch of the bad guys. This is when when St. Jean got shot in the head. He fired, and the guy that shot him fired, they hit each other, right? And St. Jean hit the guy in the stomach. And this guy tumbles down right next to our truck. and that's when I see him, like, looking in this guy's eyes.

He's got this gaping stomach wound. He's, like, bleeding to death right there on the dirt. There's no question he's going to die. And he's just looking at me. And I'm just, like, looking at him. And there's just no remorse in this guy's eyes. If it were reversed, he's just the most evil. There's no, no redeeming, no redemption in those eyes, you know.

And over the radio, stalter's on the radio. The guy that saved me on June 10th, he pulled me up. That guy, he's on the radio. He's got a shotgun leaning out of his one. He's like, let me take him out. Let me take him out. Let me take him out. And I'm sitting there. I'm like, no. No. Come on, sir. Why? Let me take him out. And my gunner's like, sir, because he's got a shotgun. He's like, sir, he's right there. Let me kill him. Let me kill him. And I'm like, no, we're not. We're not. We're not. I just remember thinking this was like a split second thing too. It was like not happening. I had to reinforce it several times. They're like, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm like, no, you're not.

I just felt in the clear sense. It was like divine clarity or whatever. I just did not want this shithead. I don't want this guy's soul, this terrible, evil, disgusting human being's soul on the hearts of these men. My men are worth so much more, you know. And so we go out, we evacuate our casualties and we go back in, right? You know, evict our casualties, go back in, try to get the Marine. We couldn't do it. But the guy was gone. He'd be an evak.

There was just a puddle of blood there. But still, like, these guys evacked this guy of what was like a sheer cliff face. You know what I mean? And so that was first five minutes of the battalion operation, just to give you a sense of the enemy we face. You know, we got an entire battalion of infantry brought to bearer that was the first five minutes. So we took those guys out, and that's when we did the trench clearing on the next ridge line. So these guys were shooting us from these trenches.

And I got all this crazy pictures of this trench complex and we're like, you know, just like room clearing with number one man just kind of marching down the trench and stuff. It's the craziest shit ever. I mean, we did trench clearing once at JRTC. It's not like it's something that we trained for, you know what I mean? But it was just crazy that there we were, no shit, doing trench clearing, you know? And people will criticize, hey, we're enemy really in the trenches? I'm like, yeah, we really were in the trenches fighting these guys.

And then we'd take over their trenches and light infantry, we'd stay there, we'd hold the line there. It was just crazy. And we ended up fighting all the way to the border and we found a bunch of their camps. And this was our thing. Like halfway through the deployment, we just started burning their camps to the ground, shooting their livestock, you know, killing their livestock, burning their camps, taking their guns, ammunition, whatever intel we could exploit from their camps and just burn the rest of the ground. And man, that pissed them off. And we found their final camp right on the border, ended up getting like in one final attack with them, ended up killing them.

But along the way, we found the 122 launcher, killed the guys that were operating, it captured it. Yeah, we captured the launcher first ever captured in Afghanistan. And then we found this 107 launcher that had been using, that they had like a dummy cord of wires. and we got in this crazy, like, okay corral shootout with the guys. We're like, I'm on a dismounted patrol, and I got a fire team with me and my platoon behind me, and I'm on point with them, and I just, like, give the freeze, right? And everyone takes a knee, and I pick up this, like, little piece of yellow wire that's this long. And I'm like, I mean, honestly, I didn't think anything of it.

I should have, but I'm like, this doesn't feel right. And all of a sudden we look up, and Canton win, my guy from South Vietnam, he's like, Dr. Jones, like that guy. He's like, so, so we got him, where guy? And like all of a sudden, it was like they're 10 feet away from it. It was just like, like, okay Corral shootout right there. And Conton, like, ended up pegging the guy and chasing a bonsai chart and everything else. And we're like running after these guys.

It was a crazy. This was my life, dude. And this is not the kind of, I mean, I cannot believe that I went through some of this shit, man. I mean, just is not the kind of, you know? Yeah. And so this was, we pushed them out. Then we went to Christmas. And then, and then we got like, we.

We got attacked one more time by like a big, big, big, big, big, big force. Yeah, you guys, you guys, I mean, when you guys closed it out, I mean, you get to the point where you close it out. You're like their last stand. On the final day, we seize the high ground overlooking the frontier. We remain, the remaining enemy soldiers chose to make their last stand here between us and Pakistan Army border checkpoint. They marshaled their remaining weapons and in place their machine guns with their usual tactical cunning. We'd been under fire for almost a week. filthy reeking of gunpowder and body odor

constipated by MREs we'd spent Operation Catamount Blitz sleeping in our rigs between skirmishes. Now came the climactic moment. We'd spent all year making last stands against their furious assaults. Here the rolls were reversed and they would die in place. Yes, yes, it was awesome.

It was awesome. Our forward air controllers called in a final series of airstrikes. The A10 pilots were, the A10 pilots unleashed to do, were unleashed to do what they do best. With J. Dam's and 30 millimeter strafing runs, the ward hogs pulverized the enemy.

When it was over, there was no need to assault their last stand. Not an insurgent remained upright. Captain Dye and Lieutenant Colonel Toner walked to R. Ridge. They'd been working the radios with the forward air controllers and now gazed down into the smoke-shrouted valley. The last A-10 swept past its chain gun throwing lead in one final act of overkill. As it pulled up and raised skyward, Dye and Toner erupted in cheers.

soon all along our line the men joined in. It was crazy. It was like, Cures all pain. I'm saying, I'm telling you, man, victory cures all pain.

It's the truth. I mean, we had, we had been on the receiving end of this shit for almost a year. We finally drove those little bastards back to Pakistan and we cheer. It was like something out of a movie, man.

It was like, everyone's like holding the rifle up in the air and cheering. And we thought that was the last attack, but it wasn't. We thought that was their last stand. But then they threw, I'm telling you, they threw everything but the kitchen sink at us in January right one right two days before like

is this where you got the heads up from Intel yeah yeah so you're you're out in an OPE right and and you're we built this was the very first combat outpost that's right it's a little compound outpost yeah yeah yeah so we built it and we were there with these engineers right and we're like it was built in literally the worst place you could possibly imagine I'm like sir this is fucking this is stupid like this is not a good place to put a base now we got to put it here brigade says you got to put it here okay so we'll put it there so we bring these engineers in to do this and we get attacked. There's like some stupid rocket attack or something.

And we all go to bed. We all go to bed. And keep in mind, we're like, this is like one of the most dangerous places in Afghanistan. I got like four gun trucks up there with me. So I got 16 guys that are six, something like 16 guys on the ground.

And I got a bunch of engineers filling these Hesco walls. Well, we wake up, right, the night after the first attack. And it was like a nothing burger attack. And we wake up and all the engineers are gone. They had ditty mound in the middle of the night and left us there. They left us there with half filled Hesco walls. The base wasn't even complete.

So now we're. really stranded. There's nowhere we can go. So there's 16 of you. Yeah. So we had to call gun trucks. Yes. Yes. Do you have any Afghan with you? Any A-A or anything? No. No. No. They didn't want to go up there in patrol. This was up in Margad. Mar-Gaugh was right on the border. And so we had to call for reinforcement

and get a couple more trucks up there. I got like, now I've got like 26, 27 guys up there. And it's like we're going home in two weeks, right? Everyone is like checked out at this point. Like they just want to go home and go home safely. And I get this call. Like no bullshit. this call, I'm in my truck at like three in the morning.

I get a call from my S2, my intelligence guys up at battalion saying, hey, Blackhawk 3-6, this is Catamount 2. You know, just, I don't want to alarm you, but there are 350 guys coming to attack your position right now. And I just was like, I like take the hand mic, and I just like, do you ever see the Hitler memes where he takes his glasses off slowly? He was like, oh, you know, it's like that much. moment for me. I just like, okay, just, okay, Roger, and I put the hand mic slow, and I, like,

slept walk over to Greece. And I said, hey, yeah, did you hear that? And he's like, I heard it. I'm like, so what do we, what do we do about that? He's like, he literally just goes, I don't know. So I go back over to my truck. And I call, I said, I said, what's going on? He said, he's like, look, we're going to stack up air for you. We're going to make sure that you have error. All we need you to do is observe. We've got a predator in the air. We've got a predator up. You've got a force coming from directly from the east marching down this route just north of route Trans Am where we had thought we'd wiped out the enemy

a force of 250 coming from that direction and another 50 force of 50 coming in from the northwest so in a massive sort of pincer movement into our platoon they had marked them on the FBCB2 like you guys have those two like yeah like yeah they were watching these like little red marks coming to our you know come to our position

how often did you see that see that see them actually marking their like I never, never had to have to like we'd never even really. I mean, look, the entire battalion was in here. So they had, they had two predators out there on the objective under a nods. They were sprinkling where the bad guys were. And look, later, I still have the predator feed from that. You can count all 250.

So they stacked up all this air. And we waited for him to get a kilometer away from where we were. And the last thing they said before we dropped probably 150 rounds of 105 is on. them simultaneous three or four two thousand pound bombs on them they said like when you you know when you get to say said something like here's what you wrote in the yeah what did I write when you overrun the Americans caught their heads off and mount them on stakes yeah good luck and I'll see you on the objective I'll see you on the objective did you guys get that Intel report while you were out there yes and

then and then so we drop okay so we kicked off the engagement we had a B1 on station kept off the engagement I have I have the I have the predator of all this I have the predator of the J-DAMs falling, everything. And the bad guys scurrying. It's the craziest shit you'd ever see. And like three or four right in a row, they were all marching in a tactical column. So one bomb, boom, boom, boom, all the way down the column, right? And you see these, it's on white hot.

So the explosion is just blazing on the predator. You see these guys run around and then a specter comes in and starts lighting these guys up. And Apache takes on this force from the, I mean, it was the crazy. I'm telling you. And an A-10 coming in, and then the predator gets in with the hellfires. I got the whole thing on Predator. And it's just that we went on the objective that the very next day, and this went on all night. We just lit these mother up all night long.

And we get on the objective and it was it was the most gnarly thing I'd ever seen. Just do an SSC like a sensitive site exploitation. We get on the objective and there are literal body parts hanging up in the trees. There are human body parts that stretch from where they were about to, to, pre-po and attack on us, stretched back two kilometers, two kilometers of just utter gore and devastation. And there were one survivor when we get back there. And the A&A is like hitting this guy with the buttstock of an AK-47. The guy's barely clinging to life. Really wasn't worth much to which anyway. But what we found was these guys had better marrow combat boots than we did.

They were all wearing body armor. They had helmets on. Their rifles were fresh, still with a pack in Greece, Iranian serial numbers, right? And I mean, their equipment was better, just as good, if not better than ours. I'm surprised they didn't have night vision. And some of them had pack mill military frontier core ID cards. And we sent all this intel up higher. And I swear to God, two days later, we get a call back to the, to the 82nd Airborne comes in to relieve us. My guys start getting sent home one at a time. And no bullshit. Like my guys are in various phases of redeployment like I'm the last one with the greasing on the base right and I'm like thinking Jesus Christ I'm surrounded by all these guys I don't know because your deployment's over at this

it's over at this point so you've started to you started to send guys on once and people a lot of times people think so the military you know just everyone will come in and leave at the same time no but it's sort of a trickle thing you got to squeeze people in where you can get rid of them people are just trying to head home at this point correct and so I got guys home that have already made it home they've already reunited with their families I got guys in bogram ready to fly home I got guys in the air. I mean, they're spread out all over. It's just me and Griesen left on the base with a bunch of 80-second airborne guys.

And you're going to do some turnover ops with them? Yep, we did what's called in the Army, like a riptoa relief in place. So now it's just you and Griesen. Late January. Everyone else is gone. They're in various stages of getting home or they're actually home. And then this happens. Five days later, 0300, Griesen and I were roused from restless sleep and told to report to the

Operation Center. We rushed over to find Lieutenant Colonel Toner waiting for us. on our computerized conference system. When Captain Dye joined us, Lieutenant Colonel said, Men, I'm going to read to you a quote from the former Marine Corps Commandant, General Charles C. Cruelac. And here's the quote.

When the hard times come, and they will, people cling to leaders, they know and trust, to those who are not detached but involved, and to those who have consciences. They will seek out leaders who stand for something bigger themselves and to have the moral courage and strength of character to do what they know in their hearts to be the right thing and you're thinking what the hell is this and then he says men we've

been extended for 120 days he let that sink in thoughts of home vanished as i did the math june we would be here until june we would have to survive another spring offensive what were the odds of that The room spun. The men around me looked ashen. After Lieutenant Colonel Tomer signed off, Griesen let out one of his classic sling blade laughs, as if he didn't have a care in the world. I need a cigarette.

He growled as he stepped out into the night. I followed furious at his reaction. What the hell is wrong with you? I yelled. How can you not be pissed off at this? Griesen just shook his head. Sir, every deployment I've ever been on has been extended. It don't mean nothing.

It just means we get to play Army for, four more months. Over the next 48 hours, my platoon reassembled at Fob Burmell. Most of the men had learned the bad news at Bogram as they were waiting for their flights home. They were reissued their body armor, helmets, and gear and thrown back into a Chinook. Others had already made it back to the United States. Military police knocked on their doors or met them at the airport and told them the news. They were told the pack and escorted onto the first available flights out.

They came back, sullen, fearful, and devoid of hope. everyone knew the odds. We had all had close encounters with death. A few inches of one way, a failure to duck, a turn to the left instead of the right, and death would have had us. We cheated it so many times that it seemed inconceivable that luck would have our backs now.

When we all gathered back at Burmell, Captain Die addressed us. Men, he announced brusquely, we will begin continuous combat operations tonight. We're back on it. Suck it up. We became a platoon of condemned. As darkness fell, our bullet-scarred home viz awaited us.

In ones and twos, the platoons gathered around them. Drivers slipped behind the wheels. Gunners climbed into the turrets and loaded their weapons. My dismounts stacked extra ammunition into their rigs. Greasing smoked and stalked around with his near beer, unflappable as ever. Sabo blew a fuse and yelled at one of his men. I watched the familiar scene and felt nothing but abiding love for these incredible. human beings did America know the medal of her warrior sons not a man refused his duty

despite everything we had not lost the one thing that mattered most faith in one another Chris Brown stood in my turret shoulders sagging as I opened my door I asked him how you doing brother he looked down at me with young man's eyes a thousand years old We got this sir No worries We got this sir No worries I actually wanted to call that out specifically because to me that little statement from him

It reflects The main broad Overarching Spirit of the soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines That I work with their collective response to whatever the world throws at him is that right there we got this no worries and then you know you asked the question right there does america know the medal of her warriors and that's that's another thing and that's why i'm glad that you wrote this book and i'm glad when people come out

and explain what it's like for real on the front lines because you know we just talked about that psychological thing of getting home or getting to get to sleep and be warm and comfortable and then having to go back and you guys got that to the nth degree. I think it was by far the most difficult part of our entire deployment because if you think about the history of any military, you know, in the days of Sparta, like and you were called to arms, like you were directly responsible for how good you were with your weapon system. You had your own weapons system. You trained on it.

You lived or died by it, you know? And in many ways, you were accountable, almost directly responsible and accountable for how you performed in the battlefield, right? But in the modern day army, it's like these things are issued to you, you know, and you're issued your weapon. You're issued three meals a day. You're given shelter. The army itself, in an abstract way, almost fulfills an almost paternal-like role to a lot of these soldiers. So when we were extended, you know, guy like Griesen who's been there done that, he knows it's a possibility, right? But young guys like me who made up most of the platoon, like we didn't.

And it felt like a betrayal, you know, almost by like a parent. And that violation of trust, you know, how we felt about it at the time anyway, it was almost insurmountable. You know, there's something that happens when you get back to Bogram and you turn in your armor-piercing sappy plates and all your ammo and you, You know, you know you're going on. You just say, you say to yourself, okay, I made it, man. Psychologically made it. You brain dumb stuff. You let your hair down a little bit.

You kick back. You smile. Everything just feels a little bit better. Life, the world just feels a little bit more colorful. Like you're not looking through, you know, a dirt and crusted window all the time, right? That everything, it's like, everything is amazing. Food tastes better. Water tastes better.

Your workouts are better. Like, everything is better, you know? And to find out that, like, all of the, that has been pulled out from underneath you and somehow you have to go back into the fray and survive another spring offensive or I get more volley fires of RPGs more listen to those assholes on ICOM. I mean, seriously, more rockets, more air raid siren going off in the middle of the night. It was just, it was the greatest leadership challenge that I've ever had to endure to see those guys get off the Chinook with, again, young man.

Man's eyes a thousand years old. This is this is the plight of I think the warrior in general in that we come back to the states and like we might, you know, an age-wise B-20 something, but we've lived the lives of someone who's a thousand years old and lost just as many people of senior citizens on our own country, you know. And so this is what I had in my platoon, a group of men, a group of boys who would really had the life experience, lifetime of experience is a man, you know. a man, grown man. And at the end of the day, it was, you know, the love and brotherhood that we

shared for one another. You know, you always hear like the, the might of the American military and the things that we can bring to bear and we got the best equipment and we have the, you know, the best rifles and the best technology and you're on the cutting edge of everything and all that's great. But really what makes the American military the best in the history of the world, you know, our secret weapon, our real secret weapon is the great. the love, the brotherhood that we share for one another. And it's that attitude and that love that we share for one another that allows us to accomplish anything on the battlefield. You know, we rely, we don't want to fail the man and woman to the left or the right of us, you know. And that love

drives us to do extraordinary things. And that's what I saw. I mean, look, the outlaw between, these weren't Navy SEALs. These were kids, you know, a lot of my machine gunners who performed the most heroic acts you can possibly imagine, I've never seen, never seen, year old kids do the things that I saw that my men do in that platoon. The jobs that they had before toting a machine gun in the mountains of Afghanistan was high school shortstop. Yet somehow these guys came out and they brought it every single day, you know, ordinary men doing extraordinary things. You know, the greatest triumphs of the human spirit were the things that I saw in combat every day. So, you know, combat can be, I mean, obviously it's hell on earth. It's destructive.

It's terrible. People get hurt, wounded, killed. But I, you know, I also saw some of the greatest, most beautiful triumphs of the human spirit as well, all in a motley group of infantry guys that different races, socioeconomic statuses, different countries, whatever, different religions come together and accomplish amazing things. And, you know, really, if it weren't for them, I mean, I'll tell you right now, in a very literal sense, if it weren't for them, I wouldn't be here. I mean, I had one of my soldiers saved my life on the battlefield when I got wounded.

But, I mean, I owe them everything, and that's what that book is about. out that book is a testament to their legacy. I remember getting back, you know, I go to my R&R League and leave, and actually my soldiers would go on their leave, and Americans would be like, so where are you deployed? Oh, thank you for your service, right? And we're great. I'm grateful that we live in a country that's like that. And be like, oh, oh, you're in Afghanistan?

Oh, good. You're in Afghanistan. Oh, just thank God you're not Iraq. Iraq is just so bad, you know? And my guys would be like, Jesus, I just got shot in the head last week. And they'd come home and be like, sir, Americans have no idea what the hell we're doing over here. So I just felt like it's my job as the leader to step up and try to capture their legacy and write a book and make sure that their heroism on the battlefield is not lost through the ages.

I want their exploits to be written so that we can pass down the heroic exploits down to future generations. And that's what that book is. It's their story. It's not mine. And so you guys wrapped up the next four months. How was the last four months? Hell, it was terrible. I mean, we still got attacked, you know?

I mean, and the thing is, the people that we attacked were not nearly as good. They weren't nearly as well trained, but, you know, a stray bullet's a stray bullet. Doesn't matter. You know, it doesn't matter. You know, catch a ricochet off a ballistic shield hits you in the head underneath your helmet. You're dead, you know. So it was still pretty rough. I didn't write about it in that book, but it was still pretty rough.

And somehow, you know, I had some crazy. Also, the combat was crazy, but I also had some crazy leadership experiences as well because of the surge. All the units that were sent to were supposed to replace us went to Iraq instead. That's why we were extended. There was literally nobody to replace us. Well, they ended up tag in the 173rd airborne, the guys that we had relieved going in to come back. And they were tasked with going to Iraq. And so they were in Germany at CMTC training just a month prior to the deployment just to get ready for an eventual deployment.

went to Afghanistan, they hadn't been training for that area of operations. So they plucked one lieutenant and one senior non-commissioned officer from the battalion to go and train these guys in Germany on a moment's notice, and it was me. So for three weeks, just prior to the second spring offensive, I found myself boots on the ground in Germany, training 173rd airborne guys embedded with a company in Germany. I mean, it was just, this has never happened before. This has never happened before, you know? I mean, our deployment was 485 days, man.

I mean, like easy company, the 101st Airborne jumped into Normandy and fought to Hitler's Eagles nest in less time than 45 days. We're just out there flapping in the wind that whole time, man. And, you know, and then I get so it would get extended the last day, go to Germany. If you put that in a movie, you wouldn't believe you. Be like, oh, yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah, the guys are back in America.

Now they're getting told, no, that's not going to happen. That is what I think about now. I look back on this experience and I'm like, oh my God, this truth is stranger than fiction, man. Yeah. And then you guys get, you guys eventually do get home and they start their workup, but you're, you're like non-deployable now because you're, because of all those wounds that you talked about. Your brain, your fractures to your skull, your brain, you're leaking, leaking fluid out of your ears. I had cerebral spinal fluid dry.

It healed. I was able to function in combat. And by the way, I'll tell you, I, since that book has come out, I've been criticized a lot about, hey, man, like, you're a leader. You've got to take care of, if you can't take care of yourself, can't take care of your own injuries, how you expect to take care of your troops. And that's a good, it's a good criticism.

It's a valid criticism. I just respond, you know, and I think it's, I kind of want to address it here, going off script a little bit. Like, I'd guys getting shot in the head every day, wrapping up their heads like mummies and going back out on patrol. You know, how, I'm their leader. Yeah.

How can I leave them when they're doing that? And so that's my response to that. Like, look at my, might at the, I would have done it the same way now. Well, I'm not leaving them, no matter how badly I was hurt,

you know. But I get the criticism. I do. And so when I get back to Fort Drum, you know, I start having vertigo and all these issues. I end up having surgery to get all the cerebral spinal fluid removed from my sinus cavities

because it dried in there, that was terrible. And then it had gone back to the traumatic brain injury clinic at Fort Drum and occupational therapy, physical therapy, like find motor skill stuff, speech therapy. It was just this round robin thing.

And my battalion was working up to go back again. I was made the rear detachment commander. That was the worst job ever where I was doing all casualty notification for the guy. So the crazy thing, and again, I don't talk about this. So you just like flew through that. Your guys deploy again. Yeah, my platoon, yeah. You can't deploy because of your injuries.

And so now you're stuck back in the rear. And the job they assign you with is what we call, in the Navy we call it, Kiko officer, casualty. assistance calls officer. What do you guys call to the Army? Well, yeah. So we called a CAO, a casualty assistance officer, but I was the rear detachment commander as well. So it was my job to liaise with all the wives and train the new recruits to go and take care of the wounded ones when they came back. So every single soldier that was wounded, it was my job to call and notify the family, right? And the casualty assistance officer was like an every other month thing. So we'd rotate, there'd be one casualty

assistance officer from the brigade and it rotate through the battalions. So every couple months I'd be the CIO where you're going to the doors and notifying family members. I end up going, I have to tell you that that was that duty position was worse than combat because, you know, it's like when you're there, so like you just, I just want to be the best leader that I can be to get as many men as home as possible, right, kill as many bad guys as we can, accomplish permission, get my boys home. And then you come back and get assigned a rear D commander job. My men are given a different platoon leader. They're, you know, a good platoon leader, you know, where they train up, they go back,

and now I'm the rearty commander and I have to watch from them as far as my platoon gets torn apart. Just torn apart. Jeff Hall died in that next deployment. Five of my guys died in that next deployment. It was just, I had to go to their funerals. I had to meet with their families. I had, and it's like, here I did 485 days of absolute hell where I would have done anything for these guys to get them home alive. We finally do.

And we go back to Afghanistan nine months later, and Outlawful Toon just gets torn up. It's just torn up. And I have to watch from afar as it happens. It was just, just hell. It was just hell, man. Those guys went through so much. And they still struggling.

We've lost men since. And I think, I mean, to this day, we've lost more soldiers to suicide and accidents and things after the war than we actually have in combat, which is crazy. You're on that duty and this is the last thing I'm going to read from the book. Two years earlier, a young man had walked into my office at Ford Drum. Fresh-faced in all smiles.

The kid had saluted me and told me that his uncle had told him to seek me out. Who's your uncle, I asked. Philip Baldwin, sir. I want to serve with you in his old platoon. I'm Baldwin. Stunned, I said to him, do you know your uncle was a hero? He shook his head. I told him the story of what Baldwin had done on June 10th.

When I finished, I said to him, you have some really big shoes to fill. If I put you in the platoon, you need to measure up. Resolute, steady eyes greeted those words. I could see he'd been cut from the same mold as his uncle. Not only did he join third platoon, his brother-in-law, Private Matthew Wilson, did as well. Third platoon had become more than a brotherhood.

It had become a family. Private Wilson was killed in action during the same attack that claimed Sergeant Hall. Baldwin's family had paid a terrible price for their love of country. Now Wilson's coffin lay before us sealed with his body inside. We stood back in the crowd alone with our thoughts. That's when we noticed him, a tall man wearing a black suit. He had a goatee now, and he leaned heavily on a cane.

Is that Baldwin, I asked? He saw us and hobbled over. words were exchanged our arms wrapped around each other in a fierce embrace long into that desperate and sad moment I could only think of how I'd last seen him I can't feel my legs sir I can't feel my legs as we talked among the crosses Baldwin's mother and grandmother walked up to us Philip turned to them and said mom grandma I want you to meet the man who pulled me off the battlefield and saved my life they drew me into their arms and told me I was family

I held them close, total strangers, but still connected in ways most people will never fathom. Thank you. Thank you for what you did for Phil, they said through streaming tears. He is my brother. Was all I could manage. I held on and never wanted to let go. And I think you're right about that. I think that most people will not ever be able to fathom that emotion right there.

And you were kind of forced to leave that at the end of the day. You were medically retired? Yeah. Yeah, it was, you know, my battalion got back from the second deployment. They were gearing up for the third deployment, you know, and I was put out. I was put out. I was medically retired. It was terrible.

The way that it happened to went down. It's just like, you know, you come down red as a captain in a battalion, a senior captain on my way to 04, on my way to major. In a battalion, there are only so many senior captain O-4 slots. Come down right on a PowerPoint slide. It's like, we've got to get this guy out of here. And it's like, I can't move any faster than the med board process. You know, it's like once it gets up to the big army, it's just a waiting game.

Well, it takes forever. You know, there are a lot of guys wounded, a lot of guys being medically retired. The system was slow. And so I was basically given, okay, once my medical retirement paperwork came down and was approved, my battalion commander, like trying to get me out and get a new captain. in, gave me two days to clear Fort Drum, got put out of the Army, two days. And look, this isn't a sob story, but it's like two days to say goodbye to everybody that I lived my life with for the last six and a half years. But that's the military, man. You know, there's a mission and that, you know,

we moved that. The machine keeps rolling. Yes, we moved to that mission, like a locomotive freight train. And if you're wounded or you're hurt, like, I get that. I love that. I respect that, you know, but you got to get out of the way of the train, man. That's what it is. So. And so then, so then, So now what year is it? I was put out December 19th, 2010. And then what? Had you already started writing the book? Yeah.

I mean, I was in the process of cobbling together the chapters and the outlines with minimal success. You know, I was... Because you're not a writer. No. I mean, you weren't a writer.

And I didn't understand the process. The agent, I mean, it was like, it was like drinking from a fire hose. Did you know that you wanted a book to be published? That was the purpose of what you were doing. Absolutely. I mean, it was my job as, I mean, the charge of command, the charge of leadership is lifelong. You have that,

that you will always be seen as a leader of your men as long as you breathe. And so it was my job, if that's how I'm approaching a leadership philosophy. It's my job to also make sure that their legacy is captured and enshrined on the page. And so, yeah, I wanted to, I wanted to write a book, and I wanted it to be published and I wanted to be in the Library of Congress. So if people wanted to learn about what my men did in the war of Afghanistan, they could pull out out Lobatoon and read it. And it was hard, man. It was like, writing a book is really challenging, getting an agent's even harder,

and then finding a publisher that would publish your shit is even harder than that. And so it's just like... Did you just start writing and figure that the rest of that stuff would come together as it came together, the agent and the publisher and all this other stuff? I started writing and writing and writing and wrote a proposal,

submitted it to agents, got rejected by everyone I submitted it to, rewrote it, submitted to agents, got rejected by everyone I submitted it to. And eventually it just, you know, it was like a learning experience for me. It's like, I don't have this skill set. I need help, you know. And so then I started reading these military memoirs, research in the market, like, doing everything I could to just soak up knowledge, learn everything I could about the

phases of publishing. And I ended up reading house to house and a couple of other books that John Bruning had wrote. And I'm like, I love this. This guy's perfect. And I, you know, this is before like Facebook was a thing. This was like, it was like Facebook was in its infancy, you know? And like, I'm like on MySpace.

trying to find the guy and I end up finding this this is no like I'm stumbling across this is like my me sleuthing on the internet you know stumbling across some cat website and I see the name surely I see the name. I see the name Bruning right Sally Brunning I can't remember what his sister's name and turns out to be a sister and I'm on this cat website and I'm a man I write her this email on her website and I'm like ma'am you know my name Sean Parnell I did the whole schick like my guys were in Afghanistan we had a tough deployment I'm desperate to meet your brother. If you are indeed his sister and I think you might be, can you please put me in contact with him? It's like long shot, man. And I remember like sitting there in front of the

computer. I'm like, oh, damn, I don't want to send this email. I sound like a tool. Like he's not going to want to work. She's going to call the cops. Yeah. It's just a cat website. Yeah. And so I did and a week later I get an email from Bruning and I had a phone call with him and after I, after. How long did it take for him to comprehend the story that you had? In, I told him briefly, we had about, we had an hour phone conversation. He goes, this is, this is like the craziest infantry story I've ever heard. He's like, this, this, we need to get this book out there. And John just became, I mean, he just was so inspired by my men.

He went to Afghanistan himself just to do the research, to learn about it, the smells, the sights, the sounds. He just wanted to experience it. And I mean, he just, he was all in, man. And when he was all in, we had a great creative vibe, you know, and that's really hard to come by, you know. It's hard to come by a guy that's just your personality's mesh, that creative's mesh. And, I mean, we worked 12 hours a day on that book

and ended up signing with an agent. And the agent that had rejected me two or three times already. But it's like, that's life, man, you know? So much of life is like, how many times you knock on that door? And the answer is until your knuckles bleeding. And if that don't work, you got to kick that fuck around. Breach you up. Yeah.

Sorry, I'm dropping Fums on your podcast. But I promised I wouldn't do that. No, but so I ended up submitting this proposal, which I thought was awesome, to all the big five publishers gets rejected by every one of them. At least I thought every one of them at the time. And I'm like up in some, you know, Walmart pool, like crying in my beer. I'm like, I failed my mission, but still like I'm publishing this. I don't care if I have to self-publish it.

Three or four months ago, I hear nothing. You know how that process goes, you know, and you're never, I just didn't, I hadn't heard anything. I get a call from my agent and he's like, hey,

you know, David High Phil from William Morrow, Harper Collins, like love this. Like he wants to buy it. And I ended up reading the email. He's like, I've been on vacation abroad for a while. I stumbled across this.

I don't think that there's no way that this could still be available, but I want it. I sold it to David. And I've been publishing him with William Morrow ever since. And it was just, I'm sort of given the clip notes version of my publishing experience up into that point trying to get an agent, trying to get a publisher. Oh, my God, the game is exhausting.

But, you know, bringing Bruning on board was what really made it happen. I didn't have that skill set to do it. He, you know, I can write a good op-ed, like a good history paper, but writing a good story is a whole different thing. He did a great job. I mean, he just talking to you for the last however many hours, 12 or whatever it's been. He was sitting there. A week-long podcast. Yeah.

But he did a great job because. you know, the book sounds like you. The book reads like you. Yeah, he's, he's since become just an amazing friend. And he's, he's, he's the most prolific military writer. I mean, he wrote the Trident, too, with Jay Redmond. And he's, you know, oh my gosh, Level Zero Heroes, Gond Blaski about Marine Raiders. I mean, he's written a couple CO books. I mean, the guy's just, writes about World War II. The latest, the latest book is indestructible. I mean, the guy's just prolific. He's awesome. He's a great writer. And more than that, he's a, he's a legit historian that knows his stuff with a deep reverence for the military and the

legacy of the warrior. And he's just, he gets it. That's awesome. And so the book comes out. The book, the book does great, right? New York Times bestseller. It did. It did. But it was like, it was not expected to, like, it was not expected to. Nobody, I mean, like, I was the newbie. I was the captain like nobody really knew what to do they changed the cover five times like i didn't have any media context or anything and the book comes out and it debuted on the list like it debuted on the new york times bestsellist i think i don't think it did i think it was like 10 might even been 12 or something but i was like holy shit like this is crazy and not only that it started ascending as the weeks went on and so it was the new york times bestsellist i think i think it were like 28 weeks or

something like that again I mean no one expected it um and then it came off the list and then around Christmas time that year went back on the list and it's been boomeranging on and off the list ever since which is just sort of crazy that's awesome you know I think you know at the end of the day people just they just they take the book they read it and they pass it on to their friend and that's that's what it's all about that's why I wrote that book you know and so and so then you also started working with businesses started talking yes doing speaking engagements and that's what you're still doing yeah yeah that's what i do i talk about i talk about you know my experience in the military i tell tell combat stories talk about leadership as well

servant leadership is you know there's sort of the style that i stumbled upon um when i talk about that talk about with a corporations and you know i've sort of started doing some executive coaching as well which I'm sort of like i'm kind of like that I just like the dialogue like rapping about leadership and stuff. More than that, it's just like having the opportunity to learn with people that are a lot smarter than me too, you know, so coaching isn't a one-way street you get to learn, you know, from each other. And so it's great to be able to learn from some leaders that have been able to hone their

skills in the corporate world for a really long time. And I've got a nonprofit now where, where, well, I'm part of, I say I'm, I'm, I'm part of a nonprofit now. And that's American Warrior Initiative.com. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yeah. So tell us a little bit about that. Well, I mean, so we were partnered with an amazing mortgage company, Fairway Mortgage. You spoke at their event. They're like, great group of people. And look, man, people don't realize how special that company truly is. And I mean it from a cultural leadership standpoint. They are a, they are not like a bank, you know.

They're not like Bank of America, Wells Fargo Chase, but they're the fourth or fifth largest mortgage company in the world precisely because everybody wants to work for them. Yeah, great. You know? Great attitude. They're just awesome. I mean, I just love them. I love them. And I've been working with them since, I've been working with them since the book came out, 2012.

I met the CEO, Steve Jacobson. That company had 638 people. Now the company has over 7,000 people. It's just awesome. And so Jake just basically told Louise Thakston, who is my co-founder, she said, look, you know, they served us. Now it's our turn to serve them, figure out a program where we can give back. Take this, make something out of it, Louise. And Louise did.

and she brought me on, and we've been doing it ever since, and give 100% over the proceeds and donations to veterans, and now we sort of pivoted to giving away service dogs to vets, and it's been awesome. It's been an amazing thing to be able to give back to people who have given everything. And then at some point along the way, you decided you're going to write more books. Yeah, yeah, most of my chagrin, yeah, I have told you about how the writing process is. You know, it's like...

You're a glutton for punishment, bro. It's like learning to ride a bicycle. without a seat while on fire. Yeah, you know, I did. You know, I did. So you wrote, the first one that you wrote after Outlaw was Man of War. And these are now novels. Yes, they're thrillers, yeah.

So I always wanted to, like, I'm from Pittsburgh. So, like, I'm a big Steelers fan. My protagonist, my hero's name is Eric Steele. And I also secretly, like, I had this brigade commander in Afghanistan in the 82nd Airborne. He came in his name is Colonel Stee-E-E-L-E. And the guy was like 6-8 massive. I'm like, you know what, man, if I ever, if I ever accomplished my dreams and start writing fiction, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to name my protagonist, Steele, because it works at a lot of different levels.

So I did. And, you know, I just, I just. And what's Eric Steele's background? So Eric Steele is a former Special Forces guy, former Green Beret, his special forces team gets overrun in Afghanistan. He's, he's one of two survivors, put in for the Medal of Honor. The award itself has stopped in its tracks, and he's recruited for a secret, uh, you know, government program called the Alpha Program. And the Alpha program, there's nine alphas at any given time in the world, each responsible for a different geographic area of the world. And it's based,

the alphas are basically the president's third option where, you know, all out war, diplomacy fails. The president sends in an alpha to kick ass and take names and fix a situation. And there's only nine of them. Eric Steele's the youngest, most talented operator. And so man of war throws Eric into a situation, It's my first book, Throws Eric and do it in a possible situation against somebody that's an impossible enemy. He ends up establishing himself and learning a very important lesson that most warriors aren't on the battlefields that no matter how hard you try, you can't save everybody, you know. Mostly the reason why I wanted to create this character is because I feel like, you know, our culture in this genre specifically is awash with like the anti-heroes, you know. Ragged edge. Yeah, you know, he drinks a lot, but he's got a heart of gold, you know, like that guy, you know.

And I just wanted to create a character who was good, who's good to the core of his being. And that good is exploited, right? In a number of different ways, bad guys finance sees upon it. They exploit that goodness. There's the story. They put him in impossible situations. You know, you choose between the Syrian woman being raped and the mission. What do you choose, right?

But the reason why I did this and I wanted to create this character is because he embodies the greatness and the heroism of what I, of the, of the, of the, of the men that I witness on the battlefield. These guys deserve, and I think our country, to a certain extent, deserves a mainstream fiction hero that embodies honor, integrity, selflessness, duty, love of country, and love of the preservation of innocent life, right? I think at the core of the American warrior, we are protectors and we are liberators, right? That's part of who we are, and that's who he is as well. And I think Eric Steele, you know, he's the biggest, fastest, strongest, smartest guy.

Oftentimes he can save the woman in Syria who's being raped and still accomplish the mission because he is who he is, right? But sometimes, as you know, in combat, like there are impossible situations, you know, where you have to choose very literally between human life and the mission. And sometimes as leaders, we have to make those calculations on a split second basis. And so Eric Steele is presented with those situations time and time again in these books. And the first book he is, he figures out he can't save everybody. And the second book, the theme is, you know, and themes are oftentimes like in the background. Maybe they're not consciously recognized as a reader of fiction. But the theme is, are you a man or are you a slave?

You know? And the villain that he faces in the book is like the bad version of himself that's been tasked out by the Russian government to find and kill and target enemies of Russia. And the villain that he faces, it's like sick and tired of being a slave. So he's just going to take the fight to everybody that he deems a king. And Eric Steele is sort of, it's the same thing, right? Like Eric Steele was a servant to the United States, and the difference is he's a servant, not a slave. And so that's the theme.

And, you know, I always try to pit Eric Steele up against villains that would be his greatest enemy. And again, not unlike situations that soldiers face in the battlefield all the time. So that's the one that's coming out. Yeah. All-out war comes out on September 3rd. Yeah.

Man of War came out last year. September 3rd. Yeah. Here's a little excerpt because sometimes I just get fired up to read a little I I you basically read half of Outlaw Patoon on the air and it was awesome and I'm like I want you to read all my audio books now No offense to R.C. Bray who's epic, but you know you got a thing going there. I think you should I think you could do it. So we're digging into this. This is all out war Swap. Steel dove behind the pujou and yanked the high power from his waistband. He crawled toward the engine block heart hammering in his chest at the realization that someone had just tried to kill him in broad daylight The Metropolitan Police didn't hide the fact that they installed cameras on every block.

They operated on the theory that if criminals knew they were going to be recorded, they might think twice before breaking the law. Whoever had taken a shot at him didn't give a shit. Because instead of running away, the shooter flicked the selector switch to full auto and opened up on Steele's hiding place. Fwap! Flap! The Pujo swayed under the onslaught. The car rocked on its hinges, the bullets blasting,

shaped holes through the aluminum skin as the shooter raked the car from stem to stern Steel's plan was to hit him on the reload but he never got the chance before the shooter ran through his first magazine a second opened up the bullets cut across the hood punching through the metal with the sound of rocks on a tin roof Steel judged that he had been under fire for less than 30 seconds, but in a gunfight time was subjective there you go You got a knack for this man. Yeah. Well, I like, you know, I started this whole thing off about talking about the way that time slows down. Yes.

And that's what I liked about this piece. It's like, yes, you, someone that's writing this that actually understands that, that understands what it's like to have. Bullets cut, you know, hitting the roof. Like, that's what I think makes these, that's where the power comes from in these things, right? You've got the character that's truly good. and you've got someone that's writing them that's been through these situations. Yeah, I hope.

I mean, I think people, I mean, people like these books so far. I'm writing a third one. There's going to be at least two more out. And, you know, I just feel like this country, we talk a lot about, we ask the question, does America understand the medal of her warrior sons, right? That's a question that I've asked myself since Outlawful Tien came out.

This character embodies all the greatest aspects of the warrior ethos that I witnessed in my soldiers on the battlefield. And all of these books, the whole reason I write him is to help answer that question. Does America understand the medal of her warrior sons, right? You know, writing nonfiction is one way, right, to do that. People can pick up outlaw, LaBatoon, they can read it, they can get a sense of what it was like on the battlefield, boots on the ground. A lot of people don't read nonfiction. And fiction is another way, another audience. it's another way to get those types of values in front of Americans to help them understand,

to help that bridge that cultural gap between veterans and warriors in society and people and citizens who reap the blessings of freedom on a day-to-day basis. It's all about reaching a wider audience. And I think these books give people an opportunity to do that. Yeah. No, well, that's, yeah, that's awesome. So we got the books. People will get these books.

They'll definitely get out Law Patoon. Like I said, I read a fraction of it today. You said I read half of it. I didn't even come close. But because there's so much more in there. And I'll tell you what, it was really hard for me to pick out what sections I wanted to read because so many sections, there's so much information there, not just about what happened in the experiences, but about leadership.

So, yeah, awesome books. and I think you're going to see some people trying to get a hold of them. What else? You got the American Warrior Initiative.com. Is there like, can you donate on that page? Is that possible? Yes, yes. And one of the things that our charity does is it gives you the opportunity to earmark your

donation. So if you want to donate for a service dog, pick a time and event that you want that money to go to. And when we award the service dog, you know that your money went to that dog. So we just want to give people a sense that if they want to donate to us and we're honored to have it. We want to make sure that people are getting the best bang for their buck, and we want people to feel like they're a part of it. And anything else on the horizon that we need to know about?

Well, no. Just my All Out War is coming out. And I think two weeks exactly, right? Just give the date, what, September 3rd. September 3rd. Oh, yeah. All out war is coming out September 3rd. Yeah.

You know, so I'm excited about that. You know, I'm on Instagram, official Sean Parnell. I'm on Twitter, Sean Parnell, USA. And for your speaking engaged? Sean official son Parnell dot co. Dot co this is a little trick yeah right so the co is the new thing Co's the new all the dot coms are taken so snatch up the dot coes while you can but I also own official Sean Parnell.com as well check but my website's official Sean Parnell

dot co co CEO yes and so yeah you can reach out to book me there too for speaking yes that is awesome I this I think we've covered a decent amount I think we're going on five hours five hours. This was awesome, man. You have now set the record for the longest podcast, All Out War. Speaking of All Out War, Echo Charles, you know that we are currently, you know, us collectively in the crew here, the kind of trooper zone that we're kind of within. Yeah. We're kind of conducting an all-out war on weakness. On weakness. Do you have any, you know, kind of recommendations on how we could press forward with the war on weakness?

Yeah, sure. What do you got? Well, a few things. Kind of hard to transition. You know, we go through this heavy stuff, which is heavy. And now we're going to talk about, I guess, some more lighthearted stuff. He's got a knife to your throat. Yeah. I'm sort of used to that.

Maybe I should say, we are five hours deep. Yeah. Maybe this is one of our more abbreviated, one of our more abbreviated, you know, scenarios. So, yeah, we can make it quick, but it's still important, though. Okay. So we're not going to. You see what I'm saying? Anyway, all right, we're against weakness.

All right, first step. Take Jiu-Jitsu if you haven't already. Jiu-Jitsu? I can do it, yeah, I did it in the Army. There you go. And he wrestled. Oh, yeah. In Pennsylvania.

So when you do Jiu-Jitsu, if you do Ghi, which we collectively recommend Gia and no ghee, you're going to need a ghee. What key do we get, origin? Origin Gie made in America. American cotton, American, threads all the way up to the gey boom yeah so not not got in from somewhere else and then american made no american made america made up boom origin geese kind of a big deal so yeah origin

main dot com if you ever want to come up we got a factory in main we're resurrecting manufacturing in america yes we are we have 50 people up there at the factory building the best geese we started with geese but guess what else we're making now jeans, t-shirts, sweatshirts, we're making everything. We're going to rebuild this country from the inside out. Watch. And in the meantime, if you want to support, you go to origin, main.com. Yeah, that's reading all this stuff.

And not to mention supplements, or should I say, to mention supplements. Yes, supplements. So, supplementation. Yeah, for physicality, if you will. And cognitive. Cognitive. Don't forget about that. So mental and physical.

Okay, what do we got? We got joint warfare. which joint warfare and krill oil kind of brothers and sisters as far as supplements go. If you, well, cousins. Cousins. Either way. They're related because they help support your joints, which in my opinion has kind of sorted itself out to be the most important supplement. We agree.

From the ground up. Boom. Keeps you in the game. Yeah, it keeps your joints good. Some cognitive enhanced discipline and discipline go. So we got that going on. We got milk. Additional protein.

Additional protein. What's your favorite flavor ice cream? Sean Parnell. Cookies and cream. Cookies and cream. 100%. Okay. We don't have cookies and cream.

Well, we got to get a remedy that situation. What's your second favorite ice cream flavor? Cookie dough? We don't have that either. Okay, chocolate. Chocolate? We need to get some cookies. We need some cookies.

We need some cookies. Do you like mint chocolate chip? I can do mint chocolate chip. Oh, that was a week. I can do it. Maybe milk isn't free. It's cool. Maybe milk isn't for me.

It could be for me. He could be for me. Chocolate. Yes, we do have chocolate. We have strawberry, which is amazing. We have peanut butter, which is equally amazing. Yes. Strawberry might be the most amazing.

And then we have mint chocolate chip, which is, see, this is what's nice. If you would have started a supplement company, guess what flavor you would have? Chocolate cookie cream dough, whatever you just said. Guess who started the supplement company? I did. So guess what we have. Number one, mint chocolate chip. That's my favorite flavor.

Flavor? Hell yeah. Number two. Peanut butter. What's my second favorite? Yes, that's number two. Number three, strawberry.

So we went right in the orders of things that I like. Now, since you're kind of on board with you. You created it in your image. If you're kind of on board with the program, we can work on some cookies

and cream. Of course, I'm on board. I mean, I feel like cookies and cream is a very mainstream idea and concept. It's a very mainstream taste. I would agree with that.

It just sort of maybe slipped under the radar, right? Because you like cookies and cream. Not going to buy it like actively. So maybe. So maybe not.

I would. It's odd that that Sean's like, oh, I can do mint chocolate chip. I can do it. Usually mint chocolate is either like, oh, man, I don't mess with the mint. That's just junk or that's my favorite. Usually it's really polar like that. Yeah, I feel like why go with mint chocolate chip when there are so many good chocolate-y-goodness tastes like chocolate, regular chocolate or cookies and cream or cookie dough? Okay.

Look, this may be not a topic we need to talk about right now because I'm starting to get a little bit, you know, frustrated at the whole situation here. People being anti-min chocolate chocolate channel. I know that is pretty psychotic in my opinion too. But I feel the same way about Sam. Let's go. So we get all that. We got jocco white tea. Also,

you've been drinking jocco white tea. This we know. I have. Drink like eight of them. Oh my God. It's amazing. I did. I drank 14 of them.

That's like 14,000 grams of caffeine. No. There's 60 grams per cup. So yeah. Plus the antioxidants. That's the thing that you felt kicking. Honestly. I can feel the ANA.

It's like a super soldier serum. Yes. Well, yeah. It's a good way to put it. So that's an orjumane.com if you want any of that stuff. Yeah. Also, Jocco has a store. It's called Jocco store.

And this is where you can get more rash cards for Jiu-Jitsu and for a lot. Like, I was looking on, I think it was Twitter. Anyway, somebody who's using it for like a shooting competition, rash card. For shooting competition for Jiu-Jitsu and for something else, too. So it's multi-purpose is what I'm saying. saying also t-shirts store.com t-shirts rash guards trucker hats discipline equals freedom beanies hoodies all that kind of stuff also subscribe to the podcast if you have not subscribe to it yet which is just absolutely crazy but as echo is proved to me sometimes it happens and don't forget that we also

have the warrior kid podcast you do warrior kid warier kid podcast I'd be perfect for that podcast because I'm basically I don't know what I want to be when I grow up yes you you could you could pretend to be the 10-year-old that you are. I am a 10-year-old. I have no issue. I could rock that podcast. The Warrior Kid podcast. And if you want to support the Warrior Kid podcast,

you can support a Warrior Kid, Aiden, who's making soap from goat milk, Irishoaks Ranch.com. Don't forget we have a YouTube channel. If you want to see Echo's legit videos, we also have psychological warfare. If you need a little spot, psychological spot on your life moments,

Weakness of weakness need to be overcome iTunes Google Play MP3 of all kinds Psychological Warfare the artist's name is Jocko Jocco Willing flipside canvas my brother Dakota Meyer makes things for you to hang on your wall some people call it art I call it things you hang on your wall and they say stuff that will keep you on the path so you can check that out Dakota's amazing and those flipside canvases are pretty cool they are awesome Yes, for sure. Yeah, 100%. Also, on it.

Onet.com slash jaco. This is where you can get workout gear. Some cool green supplements as well. A lot of good stuff on there. That's where I get pretty much, not pretty much, 100% my kettlebells. And I got rings, of course, too. Best workout equipment.

Onet.com slash jaco. And don't forget books. We got some books. We have Outlaw Patoon. We have Man of War and we have All Out War. Those are Sean's books. freaking get them I have a new book

that has been unleashed into the world It is called Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual It is available for pre-order right now You guys know the deal You want that first a dish And you know it You want to get that first a dish

Otherwise when you come to a muster In a year and you're like Hey can you sign this? If it's a first of dish I'll be like yeah absolutely bro first a dish Or if you You have second edition. I'll say, oh, cool, yeah, I'll sign it.

Cool. Whatever. Obviously, you weren't in the game. You weren't supporting. You weren't trying to help us out. So leadership strategy and tactics field manual. You can pre-order that right now. Way of the Warrior Kid.

Three, way the Warrior Kid two, and weigh the Warrior Kid. One, get your kids on the path. Get your neighbor's kids on the path. Your neighbors, look at your neighbor. He's out there not paying attention to his kids. He's watching the game instead of out there getting after it with his kids. Right? Don't let it happen.

You just get an old Amazon box. Put them in there and just put it on there. Like they just showed up. You have to be involved in the trajectory of the lives of your children. You have to be actively involved and engaged. Yes. And sometimes you see someone that doesn't have someone, right? There's no one there.

Maybe the dad's just working hard. That happens. Hey, I know what dad that works hard? This one. I was gone all the time. And I would have loved to have had these books when my kids were younger, but I didn't. So I wrote them.

So there you go. Way the Warrior Kid. Get the series. Also, we got the little kid. How was your youngest? Six. Six. Oh, yeah. We got Mikey and the Dragons for the little one. Is that a girl or a boy? Boy. Okay, cool. Yeah, Mikey and the Dragons. We'll get that going on. That's for the little bit younger, just a little bit younger than warrior kids. Kids. You can order that one as well. Discipline equals Freedom Field Manual. Overcoming Fear. That's what Mike and the Dragons is. Yep. It is indeed. Very helpful. Good. Some people say it's a kid's book. Other people say it's for everyone. Discipline goes freedom field manual the way to get after it as a grown human But that one gets given to like 15 16 year old kids

Yeah, that are just needing a little bit of or sometimes they're on the path but they want to stay on the path So yeah dismaligable field field field manual that audio is not on audible it's it's an album with tracks mp3 wherever you get them extreme ownership and the dichotomy leadership the first two books that I wrote with my brother They fabin and those are about taking All these principles that we talked about today, about combat and how they apply to leadership in the world. We got Eschalon Front. That's my leadership consultancy. And what we do is solve problems through leadership.

Go to Eschalonfront.com for details. EF online. This is where you can train your leadership in an interactive online situation because leadership training is not an in inoculation. You don't learn it in one shot. You got to study it. You got to understand the principles. Like Sean and I were talking about earlier, you've got to understand the principles. The only way you do that is by going through.

through them over and over again and getting put in scenarios where you have to make decisions as a leader. That's what happens in EF online. We got the muster. Chicago's done. Denver sold out, sorry. And then Sydney, Australia, that's once December 4th and 5th. That's the only one you have the opportunity to go to now. So if you want to come and you miss the other ones, come to Sydney, Australia. Go to Extreme Ownership.com for details. And we have EF Overwatch where we're taking proven leaders from spec ops and from combat aviation and placing them into companies in the civilian sector and since Communication is an important in the field you got to be able to communicate and in life you got to be able to communicate so if you want to communicate with us some more because five hours isn't enough to hang out with Echo and Sean and Jocco that just wasn't enough you need some more Sean is at official Sean Parnell.

Co.co. That's the thing. Yep. His Twitter is Sean Parnell USA his Instagram is official Sean Parnell his Facebook is official Sean Parnell for Echo and I we are also on Twitter on Instagram we're also on Dine Fruzen bikey echo is at echo Charles and I am at jockel Willink echo you've been very talkative today got anything else no I'm all talked down Sean any any closing thoughts Yeah, man, I'm just, it's a blessing to come back from Afghanistan. I think like anyone that's been the war and come home knows that every day you've got to wake up,

you got to earn it, every single breath, live a life worthy of the sacrifice of the people that you fought with over there. And part of that means like being there for your kids and thanking God that I was able to come back and have kids and be able to pass on that warrior generation and these types of mindsets to them. So I'm excited to get back to my kids and be a dad and do cool stuff with them, you know. Play some Pokemon. You know, I know you do that too, Jocko. Don't try to be tough. You can play Pokemon or you can teach him, you know, jiu-jitsu and how to shoot a bow and arrow.

I can do that too. Don't judge me with your judging eyes. Always judging. Always watching. Shoot the bow. Shoot the bow. But, A man, seriously, thanks for coming on. I know people have been trying to set this up over social media for a long time.

A long time. Years. I feel like it's been years. It has been years. I bet if we went back and did the research, it's probably been a couple years that people have been trying to get you to come on here. I've been just, you know, the door's been open and finally we were able to get you out here, which is awesome.

And thanks for your service. Thanks to outlaw platoon. Bravo Company. Second Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment of the famed 10th Mountain Division. Thanks to all you guys for your service and to the rest of our military members out there who face incredible challenges day in and day out. And no matter what comes their way, they look at it and they say, we got this. No worries. America.

When you're lying safely in your bed at night. And to our police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional. officers in border patrol and secret service and all the first responders out there you all have that same attitude on our home front that you got this so thank you for keeping us safe and to everyone else out there life can be rough and there are times that life can seem like sustained combat operations but in most cases there's no one trying to kill you there's no one assaulting you and your team with a wide array of devastating weapons looking to come and cut your head off.

But whatever you are facing, you can make it through, and the best way to do that is to do what Outlaw Platoon did. Take the fight to the enemy. Be default aggressive. Don't sit back and allow bad things to put you on your heels. Go on the offense. Counterattack aggressively and get after it.

And until next time, This is Sean Parnell and Echo and Jocko. Out.