Jocko Podcast - 223: Be Skilled, Capable, and Prepared to Take Care of Yourself and the People Around You. With Pat McNamara.

Episode Date: April 1, 2020

0:00:00 - Opening 0:07:06 - Pat McNamara.   2:14:59 - Final Thoughts. 2:21:03 - How to Stay on THE PATH. 2:39:07 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 223 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Modern combat is chaotic, intense, and shockingly destructive. In your first battle, you will experience the confusing and often terrifying sights, sounds, smells, and dangers of the battlefield. But you must learn to survive and win despite them. 1. You could face a fierce and relentless enemy. 2. You could be surrounded by destruction and death.

3. Your leaders and fellow soldiers may shout urgent commands and warnings. 4. Rounds might impact near you. 5. The air could be filled with the smell of explosives and propellant. 6. You might hear the screams of a wounded comrade. However, even in all this confusion and fear, remember that you are not alone. You are part of a well-trained team, backed by the most powerful combined arms force and the most modern technology in the world. You must keep faith with your fellow soldiers. Remember your training and do your duty to the best of your ability. If you do and you uphold your warrior ethos, you can win and you're return home with honor.

This is the soldiers field manual. It tells the soldier how to perform the combat skills needed to survive on the battlefield. All soldiers across branches and components must learn these basic skills. Non-commissioned officers must ensure that their soldiers receive training on and know these vital combat skills. So that right there is the opening introduction of the U.S. Army Field Manual 3-TAC 21.75, the warrior ethos and soldier combat skills. And after that intro, the Field Manual itself is just filled with these skills, vast skills that are the backbone of BIA. a good soldier things like this things like combat casualty care and casualty

evacuation how to work in the desert in the jungle in arctic conditions how to use cover concealment and camouflage how to prepare fighting positions fighting positions in urban environments fighting positions in rural environments immediate actions fire and movement fire movement on foot and fire movement in vehicles things like how to move effectively open areas, how to get past windows, how to maneuver around corners, how to enter a building, clear a room, how to conduct reconnaissance missions, how to shoot a variety of weapons, and not just shoot them, but how do you battle zero those weapons?

How do you use reflexive fire? What are your immediate actions on failure of your weapon systems? And of course, there's communications. You've got to learn a bunch of different radios and radio voice procedures. And then on top of that, you've got the classic survival, evasion, resistance, escape in the event that you get captured. What about chemical, biological, and radiological weapons? How do you face those? What are the decontamination and treatment procedures for all those?

What about mines? What about demolitions? What about breaching procedures? What about IEDs? How do you identify them? How do you find them? How do you disarm or destroy them? Those are some of the things you need to learn.

And on top of all that, what about your army values? What about the law of land warfare? The code of conduct? The soldiers creed and the warrior ethos. This manual is packed. And that is a lot to learn. a lot to track. And quite frankly, what that manual covers is the basics.

The fundamentals. That's like the starting point because there are countless skills beyond those fundamentals. And the longer that a soldier stays on task, the longer he stays operational, the more proficient he becomes at those fundamental skills and then moves on to advanced skills that have tighter standards and more detail and more modalities. And one thing about being a soldier is you never master it. There's too much. There's too many things to know, too many things to understand, too many things to practice, too many things to rehearse, too many things to exercise and too many things to execute.

To be truly good at these. And I'll tell you what, these skills, they're not only applicable to soldiers. They're all applicable to life. to life they're all useful in life and maybe it's because there's so much sometimes sometimes people sometimes soldiers sometimes service men and women they let those skills slide as time goes on they become softer they weaken but there are some soldiers and some people that continue to strive, that continue to push, that continue to try become faster and stronger and more skilled and more accurate and more lethal. And they never stop aspiring to be their best. And those, those are

the true sentinels of freedom who not only strive to be their best, but also pass on their knowledge to others. That's what they do with their lives. And it's an honor to have one of those sentinels with us here tonight. Retired Special Forces soldier, tactical shooting instructor in all-round highly skilled and capable combat veteran. Pat McNamara.

Pat? Brother, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity. Yeah, man, thanks for coming on. I know we linked up I forget how. You sent me a message. I sent you a message or something.

But you finally were able to come out here. And you know, you said, hey, you're going to be around. I'm like, I can make it happen. You know, the beauty of the interwebs, right? I meet some really great people. I mean, outstanding people with great character and all positive attributes. So, and when I meet them like you, for example, all I knew you through is through the interwebs. We've never met in person.

But you could siphon through the bullshit and tell whether or not somebody's legit and whether they're, you know, whether they're honorable person, whether they got good work ethic and all that shit. So the people I meet, I'm very fortunate to have met some great people because of the interwebs and you're one of them. So thank you so much for making this happen. So you and I got some things in common. One of them is we both got in the military pretty good.

quick. We also both grew up in New England. Yeah. So let's go right to the beginning. Cool. Where this started. You grew up in Connecticut. Yep. And were you a sport, were you an athlete? You know what? I started out

like my early tweens years. Kind of, I was an odd kid, man. I was an oddball. You know, I was probably my dad was probably disappointed, but he supported all my oddball shit that I wanted to do. I mean, I had all the sissy hobbies. Really? I was not an athlete.

I was, I was, I was, I was the kid who got picked on. No kidding. Yeah. I mean, I would ride a unicycle. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. There was a reason for it. And there was a time when I went through a metamorphosis. And I had, it was like a sink or swim type of thing. But, you know, I would, I ride a unicycle to school. I drew. I watched birds. I pick flowers. All that stuff. and yeah I was I was a big time sissy and then I had a window of opportunity to get tough and I had some mentors in my neighborhood who pointed me down a road and the window of opportunity was it was basically like survival because I had an older brother who tormented me. I mean, he was horrible person. And when he went to prison the first time, I was right at like 15 years old.

So, you know, as a teenager, you're growing. You have the capacity to really grow and be somebody. And I had neighbors and said, hey, man, what are you going to do with this time? You have this time. And I didn't even think of it as that. I had no idea what they were talking about. You know, you have this time to prepare. for his, you know, for him to come back home.

You have time. So, yeah, I started wrestling. That was the big thing. And the wrestling turned me around. And my first two years, I sucked. But my second two years, I was badass. My senior year, I could not be beaten because I fell in love with it. And I would go to the college during the summers and practice with the college students, that kind of thing.

And I was lifting weights. and running back and forth to work and stuff like that. So I was able to self-governed. I didn't need anybody to drive me because I saw the results. I saw it was happening. I saw the change. Got on a couple street fights. So that, you know, you learn whether or not you could cut the mustard in the neighborhood

based on, you know, who's picking a fight with you and what the results are. whether you're getting your ass beat with humility or you're kicking somebody's ass. Either way, you know, you're learning a lot about yourself. What'd you do in the street fights? Double leg, slam, round to the pound. Exactly. Double leg take down, you know, to a dump,

to a headlock, to a couple punches in the face. Yep. Exactly. Those were the, you know, they talk about, like, the good old days. Like, you know, in the good old days, we didn't use guns and knives. Whatever? Hey, in the good old days, it was just double-leg headlocked.

That's right. Double-leg? That's what a street fight was. There wasn't any of this, jujitsu or moit-tai. No, double-leg, headlock. Yeah. Punches to the face. I tell you, you had a real advantage if you knew a little bit of fight, you know, back then.

Because, you know, back then, I think fight training was, you know, taekwanda or stuff like that. You know, it was karate. Yeah. like Muay Thai and Jiu-Jitsu and stuff. So if you were wrestling, yeah, you had a big advantage on the street.

Yeah, there was a guy, when I was a new guy at Sielteam won, there was like a guy that had the reputation of being a fighter because he was some kind of karate guy or something like that. And this is the 90s, right? This isn't that long ago.

But it's before UFC won, so people kind of thought, well, you know, if you did karate, man, I don't mean, you know, And there was a little inter-platoon scrap between the karate kid, we'll say, and the kid that was a wrestler. Right. And a good wrestler, like a state champ wrestler. Yeah.

Probably Midwesterner or something. And he, you know, it was exactly what happened in the fight? The karate kid got in his karate stance. And the wrestler did a double-leg slam headlock punch. Right. And everyone's like, dang. And what's crazy is now that I'm thinking about it, even back then, it was kind of like, well, that must have just been. you know, a fluke

that the karate kid didn't do whatever a dim mock and kill him on the spot. So wrestling was huge huge for you. Yeah, big. Yeah, massive. So that really

that changed that changed me in every way, you know, both physically and mentally. It just and it's so funny because I talk a lot, a lot. I talk about it a lot with different special op guys. And one of the big common denominators is most of them

were wrestlers in high school, you know, or a really big percentage of them were wrestlers in high school. Because I think that's the one sport where even though you're on a team, you know, you're not relying on a team or you're representing a team and you're earning points for your team and you have to be a team player. But you have to be self-driven too. You know, you have, if you want to be the best, you have to think, well, I need to do a thousand reps of this thing. I need to get my grip strength better. I need better balance. I need to do more sprints.

I need, you know, to increase my shoulder strength, whatever it is. You know, you have to be very introspective, unlike, you know, because I played other sports, and there's some common ground with them, too. But with the wrestling, you know, you're mono-e-mona with another dude for, you know. or that six minutes in time. And man, that's a long, freaking six minutes if it goes six months. Oh, shit. You know what else is?

And there's another big thing, a big psychological thing. And my son just wrapped up his season and, you know what? The season didn't end how he wanted it to end. Yeah. And his coach, who's a great guy, came up to me. And he, you know, I was just standing there. You know, I was bummed out, but I'm not like super emotional about it. the thing but his coach comes up and says I said yeah it's a bad day and he goes yeah it's a bad day

to have a bad day and I said yeah and he goes wrestling very rarely ends the way you want it to yeah and if you think about that you know you go into a 64 man bracket there's one person that that day ends the way they wanted it to or two days and then guess what that person's going to the next tournament right and what are the chances that so really and when you get done with the season if you're the champion for the season, guess what? That means you've got another season coming up. And eventually, eventually you're not going to be happy with the outcome. Right.

That's what's going to happen. So what I love about it is, you know, especially like you're saying, your freshman sophomore year, you're just getting beat down. Yeah. And so many kids I see in the wrestling program, that first year, you know, if they're getting beat down because they've never wrestled before, they can't take it. Yeah, they're quit. And they quit.

But people that are tough and they look at themselves and say, well, I at least see how I can get myself. better. Yep. How did it work out when your brother got home? It turned out really, really well. I was upstairs at the top of the stairwell, and I was in the bathroom. I was taking a dump. Was he in juvie?

No, no, no. So he's older than you. He was state. Yeah, he went to the pen, state pen. I'll think about the name because you'll remember it. You'll know the name of the town and everything. It'll hit me. But he came upstairs and basically kicked the bathroom door open.

And I'm sitting down. I'm sitting down taking the dump row. That's like out of a movie. That's like the ultimate bully move. Yep, yep. And I'm intimidated and now I'm embarrassed too because I got my pants around my ankles. And I said, hey, get the hell out of here. And he turns and I could tell he's stoned out of his mind.

And he's got his fist in my face. You know, one of those, say I won't. Say I won't. And I pull him up, pants up, and I said, you won't. And I freaking just straight right, just straight overhand right. Bam! And it went almost through his face, and he went down the stairs. And then what did I do?

I followed him downstairs. He got up, double-leg take down, headlocked, and punching me. And my parents were sitting in the kitchen. And they crossed their legs and just watched it happen. They were like, it's about time this guy. This is up in comments right here, you know, this is karma. Yeah. They didn't do a thing.

So I got, you know, those blicks in and I told them goodbye and buggyed out the door because I was going out. And was that your senior year? That was my junior year. Yep. At what point did you start looking at the military? That year. Yep. I knew I, so, yeah, junior year, 16, 17 is when I knew I had to, I had to do that.

And I had no idea what anything was with the military. So it's funny because when I went to the recruiters, I didn't tell my dad, and I went to all the recruiters. I had no preference. It wasn't like I had allegiance because, you know, somebody's dad was in the Marine Corps forever or wore the Army colors or anything like that. I didn't care. I just wanted to be a tough guy. So I went to each one of the recruiters. And the vetting process was who could fast.

track me. Who could put me on a road to badassery the fastest? I wanted to fast track to bad assery. So at the time, the Army had the best answer because they had two programs. They had Rangers. And then they had the S-F baby program, 18 X-ray. So I signed up for that and I went home and told my dad. My dad was like, he was a little put off because I didn't tell him. He said, hey, we're going, we're going back there. but I'm bringing my lawyer because I don't want this guy to fuck you. And sure is shit, man, when I went back with the lawyer, he was doing some scrambling with the paperwork.

Yeah, he was changing some numbers or digits around or whatever. So I'm so glad that my dad hooked me up like that, you know, because it could have gone really bad. I mean, it mostly did. I mean, it's so funny. It's so funny because I look at that career and you have to be so lucky, you know, with us. And I tell all these guys who,

you know, contact me on the interwebs and stuff. They say, hey, I want to be a CEO. I want to be a force recount, all this stuff. And it's hard to explain to them the amount, not only how tenacious you have to be, but the amount of luck involved in that road. I say, guys, this is, it's a good road to take. It's a bumpy road. There's no shortcuts.

But it's a well, it's a road worth taking. But damn, man. I mean, because the amount of times I failed throughout my 22-year career, I could write a book just on failures, you know, on the amount of shit that I failed and had to go back and do again. Yeah. The injuries and the recoveries and the surgeries and another failure, another failure, another failure, another failure. And, damn, man. I mean, and it's easy. It's pretty easy to go, well, I failed that one.

So I'm probably just not cut out for that thing. But with most special ops guys, they don't stop at one thing. They don't, like, for instance, become Airborne Ranger and say, well, this is it. This is Pentecost. I'm peaking out here. I'm going to just accept this. I mean, it's a great career path, but most of them say, what's the next step? You know, what's the next step?

Let me go and see if I could, you know, go to Halo School. Let me go to Combat Dive School. Let me go to SF course. Let me try out for selection and go to the unit. You know, for most of them, they want to keep progressing and progressing and progressing. So the opportunity and the, not the opportunity, but the chance, the chances of failure become greater and greater because, you know, you're volunteering over and over and over. So whenever I talk to young kids and they want to be, you know, they have it, they have it in their mind. I want to be a seal.

I'm like, that's great. But just understand, you know, I'm all about it. And, you know, if you've got a good, if you got a good. But the hard part for me is to tell them there's a lot of luck involved. I thought you were going to say there's no shortcuts and there's no guarantees. That's it too. Yeah, just like that road. There's no shortcuts on that road.

Yep. Yep. That's why one thing that I pretty much, one thing I try not to do, is say, yep, you should do it. Right. Because, and the worst thing about the Navy and going for the SEAL teams is, look, if that's the kind of lifestyle you want to live,

do you want to carry a machine gun? That's great, right? If you don't make it in the SEAL teams, then you're not carrying a machine gun at all. Right. Hey, if you don't make it through SF or you don't make it as a Ranger, you don't make it to force recon,

you can still be a grunt, which is awesome. Right. And that's what you want to do. I wanted to be a grunt since I was born. Yeah. So when I joined the Navy, I never thought about that. I didn't even recognize that. I was too dumb.

But it's no guarantee. There's no shortcut. And man, yeah, it takes luck. You land wrong on a jump. You get hurt for in the basic seal training. There's something called rock portage where there's big waves. You're landing boats in these giant rocky area. And it's no fast.

It's too easy just to step off rock wave hits. Your knees blown out. Yeah. Two years of recovery. You put on weight. You're fat. You're out of shape. You go back.

You get stress fractures. You're done. That happens all the time. Yeah. It happens all the time. I was a tow jumper. My second jump. I was 18 years old.

18 years old. I was a freaking toe jumper. I got towed all the way across Fryer drop zone. Pull my bicep into my forearm, broke my ribs, dislocated shoulder, concussion. I mean, I was jacked up. And I had just joined. That was my first failure.

That was number one. And that set me back, bro. Yeah, that's... Getting in that airplane again? What number jump was that for you? Number two. So I still had three left or three or four, whatever it is, in jump school. So Toad Jumper is...

That's just a nightmare. Yeah. And they brief it all the time. I've never seen one. They brief it all the time. So talk us through... Talk us through being a towed jumper. Well, for, I mean, for people who don't know, you know, when you start out a jump career, that's how you start with static line.

So the static line is hooked to an inboard cable inside the aircraft. And when you jump out of the airplane, you hit the end of the static line and it deploys your shoot. It pulls a shoot out and subsequently, you know, the shoot inflates and you float to the ground straight down. It's a round shoot. There's not a lot of skill involved. Yeah. And the key part is that once that static line pulls the shoot out, it lets go. Right.

They're not connected. Right. So it just pulls the shoot out. The shoot is now inflated and the static line stays with the aircraft. That's the aircraft. Yep. So, and there's many different ways. Right.

That's what's supposed to happen. There's a lot of different ways you could become a tow jumper. One is it's a fault of the rigor. So the rigor did something and there's a knot somewhere within the, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, you know, the lines of the canopy or what have you. So those are pretty rare. Another more common one is a fall to the jumper. You know, so the jumper does something wrong.

You know, he doesn't hand it to the safety the right way, his static line, because as you're going down, you know, the aircraft toward the door, you've got the static line your hand and the last step before you exit is to hand it to the safety, the jump master. And he collects it up and he, you know, pushes him away from the jumpers. So it's all very well rehearsed and it's choreographed and there's a lot of theater too. It looks cool. So I must have just like chucked it at him and it got away from him and it went like under my reserve and around my arm. So I am not even halfway.

I'm at the beginning of the stick. Double door, C-130. I'm at the beginning of the stick. I go out and instant fire through my whole body, instant. I hit the end of the static line and I feel my whole body just jerk and go with the aircraft. I was lucky that the static line was under my reserve and not just around the arm. because that would you know my arm would just come off

bro you know but so it's under the reserve around the arm so there was some friction there with the static line around the equipment the rest of it was around my arm and I remember I had the whereabouts to look up the length of the static line

and I could see jumpers coming over the top of me but this wasn't now don't get me wrong this was not me beat I was scared shitless You know, I was looking up going, oh, my God. You know, this is, I was horrified. It was, you know, a moment of horror.

And over, over, over, I could see jumpers jumping over me. And I'm going, what in the hell? You know, the training said, you know, put your hands on your reserve and wait to get pulled in and all this stuff. And, and I'm not remembering it because I can't do this. I can't put my hands on reserve. Because your arm is too, Jack. Yeah. Oh, is your arm like tangled in the.

static line? Yep. Yep. Now, and most of the tension is around the reserve. But some, and I keep hitting the airplane. So thankfully, I hit. Just so everyone knows, because you're in 130, 140 mile an hour wind. Yep. That's what's tossing you around.

So I'm getting slammed up against the aircraft. And thankfully, I get slammed hard enough and it comes loose. So I, you know, fall end of the static line, boom, shoot deploys. Had that not happened, there was no way. I would have had to wearabouts to pull my reserve. No freaking way, because I was already, you know, shocky. You know, the body is amazing. You know, when you reach, you know, pain level 10, the body would compensate, you know,

and says, let's take care of you and put you into some shock here. So, you know, so you don't feel that bad. But I remember being very, very uncomfortable under canopy, and I was groaning and moaning, just, you know, just moaning and groaning. And I was all the way at the end of friar. supposed to be like way up at the leading edge. I was all the way at the end. I mean right like at the wood line. And I hit the ground and I land on that side. Boom! Right on those ribs and all that soft shit right on that arm. Now to add insult to injury, I'm laying there and I'm going,

you know, I'm just an 18 year old punky kid, bro. You know, I've done nothing but basic training at AIT. To add insult to injury, I'm laying there on the the ground and a breeze comes in, my shoot inflates. My shoot inflates and it starts dragging me across Friar Drop Zone. And I'm getting drug, boom, bo, boom. And I can hear the black hats of the instructors out there would stand on these platforms with bullhorns. And they were, you know, placed throughout this massive, what's Friar Drop Zone? I'm like a two-minute drop zone or something.

It's gigantic. It's massive. And I could hear one of these Black Cat instructors yelling at me. Get up leg. You over there getting drug. release one of your canopy canopy release assemblies now leg and I'm going

oh my God I better do what he says because I'm going to get in trouble so I do that I reach up and pop pop one of my cable loop type canopy release assemblies and

and I'm scared because I think I'm going to get in trouble you know because I'm hurt and I didn't get permission to get hurt this is the first time I was ever injured injured injured in my life

you know real injury I packed all my shit up you know I packed all that crap up into that kit bag threw it on my back and I remember being really really scared because there was no signal from my head to my arm you know there was no transmission

to make it move to make it work and then I remember feeling my face and feeling blood that was superficial but you know I hit the cut was superficial but I hit hard you know against the aircraft boom boom boom boom over and over. So I got all my shit and I pack it up

and I bring it all into the turning area and the black hats are scanning the crowd because they know that somebody's fucked up. They saw it and they're scanning the crowd and I'm going, oh my God, and a buddy comes up to me. He goes, hey bro, you look bad because I was, I guess, just ashen white, you know,

and I'm dry heavey and stuff. And I look at my arm and he could see that it was the old school with BDUs, like Gen 1 BDUs, I had rope burns around. And I go, yeah, man, I'm hurt really bad. I don't feel good. And he said, let me help you with that. And he unbutting my blouse and he looked and that's when I threw up because now I'm looking

at this arm and it wasn't open, but it was like translucent, the skin and there was no bicep. And he kept pulling it down and boom, there it was in my forearm. You know, that bice. And so the black hats see that and they come running over. Were you the guy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the medevac already took off with some dude with a broken femur.

The bird already took off. So they had to bus me back on one of these bluebird bus, school buses, all the way to Martin Army Hospital. And then to add more insult to injury, this is 1983. So there's a bunch of dudes in there with Grenada injuries, like real jump injuries. You know, and the hospitals fill with these dudes, man, with Rangers and guys from 82nd who have like real combat jump injuries. and I'm here with this toe jumper school 45th company duffel bag drag you know injury and I was like oh my god this sucks so bad that's the beginning of I mean I had but but there was a lot of times like that you know in my like I said I could write a book on on on how many times I have failed but they're funny story I try to make it I try to make it interesting and funny how did you just to rewind a little bit what did you do to get ready? What did you know about special forces training?

And what did you do to get ready prior to going in? Well, I didn't have, I had, oh, prior to going in the, oh, yeah, so I was wrestling, I was lifting weights. I was doing a lot of hiking, you know, like camping and stuff like that. And is that because you knew what company was part of it? Yep, I knew that they were woods men and stuff like that. I had a buddy who was, he was, I was a boy scout. I had a buddy who was an Eagle Scout and knew all the mountaineering.

stuff. He was really good. And we would go up and do ropes and rappelling and all that. You know, also good for fear management when you're a kid. You know, rappelling off the side of a cliff is great stuff to help compartmentalize those, you know, fears of heights and things like that. But I did a lot of woods running, you know, and just, I think for me it was therapeutic and it was more about mental preparation than physical preparation. Physically, I was pretty freaking strong. I was I was very fit. I was a very fit teenager you know in my

latter teen years, 17, 18 years old. I was very self-driven. I wanted to be fit. I saw that, you know, that I looked cool too, you know? And that's a freaking motivator, bro. When you're 17 and 18 and when you got a physique,

it's like, yep, I need to work out more because damn, this shit looks good, brother. Getting jacked, yep. Yeah, now when you got in, what was the shock to your system, like day two of boot camp? So regular boot camp, that was scary as hell. I love it how, you know, it's all theater.

But you don't know that. No, you have no idea. But here's the thing, too. Day two, it was actual day two. See, they had the rules weren't in place yet in 1983 where there came a point where drill sergeants couldn't physically abuse you. Yeah, they couldn't hit you, yeah. That point hadn't happened yet. And I watched a drill sergeant right hook or a dude who made a move at him in formation.

You know, one of my peers, private nothing, E-Zero. And he was at parade rest and the drill sergeant was yelling at him. And they were both size for size. You know, they both looked like badasses. I remember looking at this punky kid in this drill center. They both looked like badasses. And the kid, you know, made a jump, boom, and wham out of nowhere. I mean, hook right to the freaking jaw, timber.

Drop. Boom. Just dropped. And I went, holy, that was the scariest thing I ever saw. I never seen that in my life before, you know, like that. I mean, I saw some street fights. But that, you know, mono-e-mono, that fearless guy, and that hook was so freaking fast.

And then seeing that guy just timber, whooosh, was, yeah, I was pretty scared. I know that when people listen to the podcast and they'll send me a message and be like, hey, I just joined, I just joined the Army, I just joined the Marine Corps, I just joined the Navy. And I always say, listen, the first two weeks, you're saying thank you right now,

the first two weeks you're going to be, like, hating me. You're going to wish you never listen to this podcast. because it's such a shock to your system to have every freedom that you have as a human being, every sense of individuality and every sense of privacy, which is like some of the three primary things that we value, they're all gone.

They're gone. Stripped away. It's a great culture shock. I love the way they do it, you know. I love it. The culture shock is real, you know. And if you're not used to it, you know, just some punky kid who is,

badass on the wrestling team and then you you know then your heads get shaved off and then you look the same as everybody else and then you know you're sleep deprived sleep deprived what is that you know and you have the time limit to eat and all you know and then the constant freaking yelling and screaming in your face

yeah they I think they do they did well with the infantry basic training when I went in as I could recall it now I say kudos to those guys who were able to run like that. I mean, once again, all theater, you know, when I look back, if I were to go right now through it, I'm like, yeah, whatever, I'll play your game. I know you're not going to do anything to me. It's just going to suck. That's all. I'm thinking, though, 83, too, you had a bunch

of Vietnam guys still. Never mind. Still have, not only, Grenada. Yeah. Damn, you guys had a lot of, I mean, I still had non-n guys in when I got to the teams, but, you know, it had been 20 years. Right. So there was a lot of guys that retired at 20. A lot of guys that just got out after whatever they did two or three tours in Vietnam. But for you in 83, man, it was just calm. They were, they were, in matter of fact, even when I went to the SF course, they were, they were thick. Oh, hell with that. Vietnam vets going through the SF course.

Oh, going through it. Dang. Yeah, they were thick. And then when I got to a team in first group, you know, my team started was a 173 guy, you know, in Vietnam. And they were, they were a dime a dozen. I mean, you had all of the command were Vietnam vets. If they were NCOs, you know, they were Vietnam vets. If they were E7s and above, they were all Vietnam vets.

So how long did it take you to recover from the tow jumper scenario? The tow jumper happened in October, and I finished jump school a couple months later in end of February. So you recovered and then went back to jump school? No, no, that's when I ended jump school. Yes, I recovered. finished jump school end of February ish something like that. That's a pretty quick recovery. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you had to get bicep surgery, right? Yep, yep. And it was a mess because I split the bicep in half. It wasn't like it separated from the tended. It split the bicep in half. So they had to salvage it. So it was about as big as the way it explains me as a big as round as a pencil. So you can imagine the amount of strength that you lose, you know.

And you don't know how much you rely on a bicep when it's, when it has to work in compound. with all the muscles, for instance, doing pull-ups. Because when I got to the Q-course, so now you're starting all the freaking screaming and yelling and sleep deprivation and food deprivation all over again. All over. You just finished it, but now you're doing more of it.

Now you're back to beginning. So you went straight from Jump School to Q-course? Yep. Matter of fact, but, yep, right to, and I started the Q-course on my 19th birthday. Yep. March 5th, yesterday was my birthday. March 5th to 1984. I started the Q course.

And March 4th. And in Can't recall, first days, when they weren't screaming and yell at you, you were doing classes, patrolling, and land nav, and survival, and all this stuff. And you were able to get a hot A, one hot meal a day,

if you could do 10 pull-ups with your kid on and climb the rope with your kid on. And most everybody was doing that. I wasn't doing it because I had no bicep. And now this hurt my pride because I'm fit, you know. I mean, I was a pull-up master. But I just finished all these months in the hospital, too. I hadn't done any PT, nothing, you know.

So I had to get back into shape while I was getting back into shape. You know, during the training process, I had to get into shape. Because I was getting those hot rations. And I did. It took a while, but I got those things. And how long is a Q-course? For me, it was a long time. Some of it depends on what your M-OS is, like your second phase.

And I don't know how they run it now as far as like phases go. So there's a first phase, which is all the basic skills. Your land nav, your survival, you're patrolling, all your repelling, all that stuff, you know. and getting yelled at. You know, the first phase just sucks. Just a big suck fest. And there's classes in between sucking. Second phase depends on what your specialty is.

Right, right. And you were Echo, right? Well, I started as weapons guy. Oh, okay. Yep. So I went to the Q courses weapons. I had later reclassed as an Echo as a communicator. Yeah.

And then a third phase, which is, you know, big field exercise. Yep. doing like your Fids and your UW and all that. The traditional special forces tasks. So, but yeah, I failed out of first phase. And it was, I failed first, I failed survival in first phase. Now, I was an SF baby. Keep in mind.

And the senior guys did not dig that there were privates going through the Q course. There was some animosity there, bro. They weren't digging that shit at all. They were like keepers of the crypt, you know. Survival was cool, and I don't think they run it the same way anymore. I'm not even sure they do it all, but back then it was six days. You got no food.

They send you, they drop you off in an area of like Uori National Forest, and they give you one ration for those six days, and it's either a live chicken or a live rabbit. Now, they teach you prior to, you know, you learn all the, field craft stuff and everything, you know, how to make fire, how to kill stuff, all this stuff. And then within those six days, you have a list of 22 things you have to accomplish. And a lot of them aren't easy. You know, you've got to build this massive signal.

You got to build a shelter. You got to keep a fire going 24-7. You got to find water. You got to filter water. You know, just a lot of things. But I'm going to try to cut this one just a little short. But I was thriving and surviving. I was kicking ass.

Because I did a lot of it as a kid running around the woods, fishing and stuff like that. So I was crushing it. And I found a pond that was within the confines of my, because they told you, you know, here is where you are. You could only move within this radius. You know, you can't go. I forget what it was. But within the confines of my boundary, I found a little pond. It was right on the edge of it.

Well, where there's pond, people fish. where people fish, people throw trash and sure shit, I found a little camping spot and I found trash and I was licking like yodel wrappers and stuff. I found little remnants of chocolate and I found

fishing line in the tree, in the trees because guys were cast and wheeh, you know, so I climbed these trees and pull, and meticulously pulled out all these nice long strings of good fishing line, bobber hooks, all this stuff. And as I'm looking at,

around this campsite, I see a beer can sitting up on a log. And I go over, I feel it, and I go, oh, man, there's a freaking beer. There's something in here. I'm smelling it. So I cut the top open with my knife, and sure enough, you know, it's like two-thirds full.

You know, beer, and there's bugs on it, and I chug-a-lug-lug this thing. Then I go fishing, and I catch a stringer-load of these massive bluegills. A stringer-load. I mean, like, sustenance. Like, I'm going to get full tonight.

Now, when I went back to my campsite, you know, priorities work start over again, get your fire going, make sure, you know, everything's squared away because the tax or the instructors come by every night to check on you. Make sure you're alive. And they read your log because you got to log what you did during the day. And he's looking at my stringer fish and I got some smoking, you know. And he's like, what in the hell? I said, yeah, I got all these fish and blah, blah, blah. And I found that worms are when you're hungry, they are good.

And if you cook them, they're just food. Yeah, they're just, not just food. You know, you cook them in a little bit of water in your canteen cup. There's nothing freaking gross about them and they are good. So I was chowing down, not only on the worms, but all this fish. And I was smoking it. I hadn't he killed my chicken yet. This is like day three.

Chicken just walked. I got him tied up with a little piece of the gutted 550 cord. He just walked around. Yeah, he's like my buddy. But that was part of the task. So I had to kill him eventually because that was one on the checklist. But I was saving him for a rainy day. But the instructor's reading my log.

And he goes, what's this here about a beer? And I go, oh, yeah, yeah. So I found it, blah, blah, blah. And this chicken shit motherfucker pulls out his wallet and pulls out a card. And he goes, you have the right to remain silent. anything you say can he read me my rights bro because you know why because i was drinking beer on duty dude this is survival bro he was pissed that i was surviving so that was and you were a private right and it was a private so that was the 10 points so you have there was this point system

and i already lost a bunch of points just doing dumb ass shit but that was my last 10 points i had to go I had to read they allowed me to recycle because I I had and this is that last thing you're doing and first first face sucks man it sucks it sucks it sucks I remember you know like I'm patrolling being so cold and sleep deprived deprived that I pissed myself you know on like 33% security I mean and so now I have to do this all over again all first face but that that was the story of my life in the military and that's the kind of thing though like you were saying earlier that's the kind of thing that gets people People's heads. Oh, right. Because they go, you know what? I'm not, you know, they say, yeah, I'm not doing all this again. I made it this far. Now you're going to tell me we're going to do all that again.

It's not, you guys are stupid. I don't even want to be a part of this group of people that are assholes. No, it's not happening. Yeah. They get in your head for sure. It was very easy. When I left Camp McCall and went back to Fort Bragg and got hot, you know, chow-haul food in me in a shower to go, yeah, this is, this is comfort here.

This is where I want to stay. You know, there's that point where you could accept, you know, being mediocre where I could see it. And I was like, no fucking way, man. I want that so bad. I want that green beret so bad. I really want that. And they are giving me the opportunity. Because they didn't have to.

They could have said, fuck you. They're giving it to me. Hell. Yeah, man. I took that shit. Oh, man. I did the same thing with Combat Dio School. And when did you go to Combat Dive School?

Was that when you were already at a group? Yeah, so I was in first group. Before we get there, so what was the rest of, you know? The Q-course? Yeah, the rest of the Q-course. Did you have to do language back then? Nope, back then, no language. We did that when we got to group.

Got it. Yep. So the rest of it just kind of, it sucked because you needed some experience. You needed to know how to write an operations order, and you need to know what, you know, five-point tenancy plan was and pace report and, Okoka and all those acronyms. You know, as a private, you don't have any of that.

Guys who were coming and they had, you know, 80-second airborne background or Rangers. I mean, they were actually squared away squad leaders. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At a minimum. They knew the Ranger Handbook, you know, by heart inside out. I knew none of that shit. None of it, none of it.

So thankfully, there was these staff sergeants in E-7s who saw me and went, there's something about you. And they kind of took on the responsibility's mentor, and I jumped on it. I hung out with those guys. You know, these guys were like First Ranger Battalion, you know, 82nd Airborne. I mean, they were hardened infantry dudes for like six years already.

And they knew all that shit, all of it. Because there was no way. Without them, there's no way I would have made it. No freaking way. You just don't have the freaking sense. And you've got to know there comes a time when you're going through training like that where you've got to know, you know what, who am I going to align myself with? Who is it that I'm going to align myself with?

And I can't look like a shithead. I've got to make sure that I'm never late, light out of uniform. Because otherwise, these squared away soldiers, they're not going to want me to hang out with them. If I'm just some piece of shit who's literally strap hanging on to them, I want them to want me to hang out with them. So I made that happen by, you know, being, uh, work ethic, you know, volunteering for the shit duties out in the field, that kind of thing. Sure.

Because nobody wants to volunteer. You know, when you're on patrol, nobody wants to volunteer. When you're patrolling and somebody says, hey, we need to build this or, uh, go on this reconnaissance. It's like, oh, but I could stay here in a patrol base. So I volunteer for every one of those things. But, you know, I learned a lot on those, too, because I'm with some infantry badass dude, some grunt. And, you know, he's teaching me along the way, just OJT.

So, I mean, I made it by the skin of my teeth, I would say, you know, that training. I did not graduate as an honor graduate or anything like that. But, you know, down the road, I did very well at different schools. but uh well it's like that thing where you know you get the kids in school that got held back a year right you know and they they do a lot better right i mean obviously you know when you're that young and i was the same way and listen when i was 18 and it's just like i look back now and i'm like well i'm same thing like okay i'm glad i made it through because there was guys that were a little older and you just think man they had a they just knew more they were physically more developed

than i was and you know you just just try and hang on man hang on Yeah, let me just snap link to you, man. Yep, I got a little bit of line here. That's another thing is in basic seal training, there's, you don't learn, you basically don't learn anything. Right. It's just six months of just suck. Just, this is just going to suck. You don't really, you don't go on.

I mean, like I say, you don't go on patrol. You go on some patrols, you know, you go through the land warfare phase, which is six weeks, and you go on a, you know, you go on long humps and you do these little missions, but it's, it's, you know, it's, you go on long haul stuff. but it's not, it's not anything. You're not actually learning anything. You're just having to suck it up. It's a good way to trim the fat, though. You really wants to be here because SF, now they have, you know, like a selection and assessment process.

Back then, it was called pre-phase. So it was just a couple weeks of just beat down. That's it. It was PT four times a day and, you know, three hours of sleep a night. Yeah. For a couple. And there was no rhyme of reason to it. There was nothing.

There was not a, I don't think there was a single, piece of hip pocket training. You know, it was just formation, run, push-ups, sit-ups, get up, get down, roll over, go clean this, clean that, pick up those pine cones, PT again.

Just, yeah, just a beat down. But it was a good way to trim the fat. For sure. Guys were like, fuck this. Oh, man. So you graduate, you get through, and then where did you go from that? I went to first group out of Fort Lewis, Washington.

The Arctic jungle. Yep. We used to go up there and trade. Right. It's freaking awesome. Arctic jungle, really. Yeah. South Rania training area, you know, that's like a jungle.

And if Bigfoot exists, that's where he lives. 100%. That's where he lives, man. Holy crap, man. And so you check in, so what did you do when you checked in? Did you go to an A team? Right out of the gate? I went right to an A team.

And, man, talk about being intimidated all over again. I'm the only private on this team. You know, team's, Sardons, Vietnam vet. I mean, the team commander was badass. There was another Vietnam vet, and every one of these dudes were from Ranger Battalion. Not even 82nd. They were all Rangers, all of them.

And then me. Yeah, me. No ass at. I have nothing to offer. What am I? I'm a cherry weapons dude on a freaking A team, just a cherry. Who could PT his ass off? Yeah.

That was it. you know, I could PT my ass off and I could volunteer for all the shit duties and make sure that every, you know, all my kid is squared away and that, and that I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you know, and I'm gonna stay out of trouble.

So you've been in the Army for what, like two years at this point? No, yeah, yeah, yeah, if that, year and a half. A year and a half. And the other guy's been in the Army for 10 years. Oh, right, 12 years, six years, nine years. And you're the only guy. That's it.

Yep, yep. It was, oh my God. And they're nom vets. Yes, right. I was the new guy so many times. This is like 85 or something like that? Yeah. No, before, this is 84 when I went to first school.

84. Dang. I got there. And 84. Beginning to 85. The cool thing, too, is I got opportunity just like that. Boom, boom, boom. Do you want to go to this school?

That's going. I was like, hell yes. Semi, you know, if you're asking me, then, yeah, the answer is yes. I want to do all of the things. Yeah, all of them. I don't want to just ride it out and accept media. You know and be just be another dude. I want to be top on that totem pole So my Battalion Sutter Major was famous Vietnam vet like Donald J. Taylor but highly decorated

He saw me one morning and I was running through the battalion area and he goes private Mac come here and he looked at a member Jack Palance, the actor? He's kind of like Jack Palancy, you know. Had that scowl on his face. I go, yes, our major, one over snapped, parade rest. He goes, I'm having a surprise inspection of the barracks this morning, and I want you to be my recorder. I'm like, I'm going.

My room is fucked up, bro. Yeah, it's jacked. Well, the thing is, like, that morning, I got a call from Greyhound, because I shipped all my stuff, Greyhound, Because back then, you know, it was like $15 anywhere in the country. So I had shipped from Fort Bragg to Fort Lewis, all my duffel bags. And my team started to say, go pick your shit up at Greyhound.

I went and got it, brought it back to my room, dumped it all over the freaking room. And then right after accountability formation at like 0-9 or whatever, that's when he grabbed me. And I'm going, oh, my God. I go, Roger, that's our major. When do you want to start? He goes, you got something to write on, something to write with. I said, yes, yes, Armand. There he goes, let's start right now.

And my room, we did three, four, we lived in the old, it was those World War II barracks, you know, World War II, the white freaking, the raised, they got the big, yeah, crawl space underneath of them. And I swear mine was the last room to get inspected. Last building, last room. And he's been ransacking shit. I mean, dumping drawers and knocking over beds. You know, there was something. an askew with somebody's room, he was just ransacking. And look for clues or booty, you know.

Look for paraphernalia. He got to mine, opened up that door, and there's shit everywhere. And he goes, who in the fuck's room is this? And he looks at the name tag in the door, and he looks at me, and he kind of smiles. And he opens this. This is how clever, no, wit, you know, wit. I like, I appreciate wit when guys have wit. And this is how witty those dudes are

He opened up the first drawer Let it hit the floor Bam and shit just freaking jumps out of it And in that drawer I had three Seven, six two rounds You couldn't have ammo in the barracks And I had $200 in cash

You couldn't have that amount of cash in the barracks either And he picks up the money And he picks up the bullets And he walks over to me And he looks at the money He goes, Is this a bribe for whoever finds these? And he drops And he just hate it

haymaker right to the bread basket. Wham! I mean, hard. I'd double over. But that wall-to-wall counseling back then, I would much rather have that than Article 15. For sure. I mean, but my shit was wrapped so tight after that.

I mean, I never, ever, ever fucked up again. I mean, I thought I was squared away before that. Nope. I was on it like a bonnet. You know, I was talking about this the other day, like the It sounds like you're going through the same thing. One thing that was awesome for me when I joined the Navy is what I wanted to do,

what I really just wanted to do is just like be a good seal. Yeah. And like whatever I could do to try and be a good seal. And when that's your goal, man, it's like your whole life is pretty good because like we're trying to stay in shape. You're trying to have your gear ready. You're trying to be squared away. Like that's what you're trying to be a good teammate.

You're trying to volunteer for stuff. It's such a. But it's, you know, when you hear there's a lot of the people run around now, myself, including, included saying like, hey, you've got to have a mission. You've got to be, you know, driving towards them. You got to meaning is found in responsibility, Jordan Peterson, right? Right, right. Well, for me, it's like, oh, guess how lucky I was.

I was a total knucklehead kid. And I had an aim. My aim was this broad thing of like, hey, I'm going to try and be a good seal. Right. Like, if that's what you're trying to do, man, it just, it puts you on a path. Right. You know, put you on a good path. And it sounds like pretty similar for you, getting on a good path.

Hey, I want to be a good special forces soldier. And when you screw something up, you tighten up even more. Yep. And, you know, and they were always giving me opportunity to improve myself. And I never let one of those opportunities pass. I mean, do you want to go like combat dives goes? Like, hell yeah, that's another one I failed, by the way. How did you fail to combat dives course?

Well, here's the thing. I knew nothing about it. Nothing. I had no idea what that's, I thought I was going to like die for conch shells in Key West or something. No idea, none. No pre-scuba, which is a prerequisite. Okay. Just that, hey, Pat Mac, Private Mac, you're fit.

Were you a water guy at all? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm strong in the water, and I was on a water team, a scout swim team. Okay. In first group. So a lot of surface swimming, you know, just dragging a ruck, surface swim. I went to combat dive school and once again, you know, everybody's screaming at you, you're PT until you're freaking, you know, I got an embellical hernia. We peat teeth, so I got an embellical hernia.

But water is the great equalizer. It is indeed. There is no doubt about it. And so when they started having us doing, like the PT, I was like, all right, this sucks, this sucks. And then, you know, you have a couple classes and then right to the pool and everybody's screaming at you and you're trying to get your gear in as fast as possible. And, you know, you got these twin 80s on your back and the second stage is stuffed

into your BC and you're not breathing of stuff. It's just all weight, 20 pound weight belt. Mount the gunwale, prepared into the water, enter the water. And then terror, you know, with the crossovers. So the crossover thing to me blew my mind. Talk about, you know, humility, how to make somebody humble. You know, how to suck the freaking life right out of you. Explain crossover.

So in this particular pool, you know, it was a, what's an Olympic swimming pool? I think it's 50 by 25? Yeah, it's pretty wide. Yeah, it's probably 50 by 25. Yeah, so it's like 25. And this pool was nice, it was 18 feet too deep. So you've got guys on each side. of the gun on each side of the pool.

So, and your chest to back, you're just stacked up. And you got a mask on, and you got your buoyancy compensator, you got your twin 80s, you got a 20-pound weight belt. You got air in those tanks. You're just not breathing it. That regulator stuffed in your BC. The instructor yell out, prepare to cross over, crossover. So one, both sides go under. water and the objective is to make it to the other side.

One side goes shallow, one side goes deep. And you come up and you get a few puffs before they say, prepare to cross over, cross over. It ain't enough time, especially if you had no pre-scove it. You haven't experienced this. And then you do it again and again and again. And people start dropping like flies. And what the rules.

When they're dropping, is it quitting? Yeah, sometimes with me, for example, it wasn't necessarily, I didn't say I quit. I refused to get off the wall because it was a shock because I already had a shallow water blackout. So I already had a shallow water blackout. And with the shallow water blackout, it's basically, once again, the human body is cool because it won't let you drown unless you want to drown. Unless you inhale water, you're going to pass out before that happens. So when you hold your breath long enough, you just pass out. And they're schooled at this shit.

They know because it happens to people all the time. So they go down, they freaking bring you up. And usually as soon as you come back up and they slap you on the surface, you're revived. You're coming out of it. And then it takes you a while. You know, you're like, holy shit, that was scary. And then they ask you once you're revived, they give you some oxygen. Do you want to get back in the water?

The answer for me was, yes, I do. And then I had another one. And the next day during crossovers, I had that other one. They said, do you want to get back in the water? Yes, I do another crossover, and I couldn't get off the wall. And the rule was they tell you three times and you're out, get off the wall, Mr. And they want you to succeed. They want it.

They want you to. They want you to, I'm telling you, that's the first one. I'm going to give you another one. Mr. Get off my wall. It's not get off my wall, get off my wall, get off my wall. They want you to want this. Yeah, because you're a fellow SF guy. Right, right.

Yeah, they want you to want this. So, and super, super professional. Cadre. So they gave me the third one and it didn't happen. I was froze down. I was stuck to it. But that's another one that I avenged. I went back.

I got pre-scuba and I fucking killed that school. Not only did I kill it, but I was volunteering for shit. For instance, I had a buddy who during ship bottom search. So you're, that's some scary shit, you know, shit bottom search. Because your back is on the freaking deck, man. You feel your twin-eastern. 80s in the muck in that and and and you're you're basically wanding with your hand the bottom of this boat this ship and you could feel that ship rising and sinking just a little bit just a little bit

just so it's a couple inches but what happened to my buddy of mine is there was a type of salentorate type of jellyfish that was on the ship itself and when he was washing basically washing the ship They went down his blouse into his shorts, and he got a freaking, he got like stung by jellyfish all the way from his chest, all the way his ball sack. So it was medical emergency up on short. This is a funny thing. When we got him on shore, he's going, he's burning up, you know, it's jellyfish. And so here's a grown man. And this is one time where you don't question this shit, where a grown man is ripping his clothes open.

He's going, piss on my face, piss on my face. Piss on my dick, piss. And we're all trying to, you know, we're all shrunk up because we're frozen. And we got our dicks in our hands and we're like five dudes pissing on one guy. You know, he's pissing on him. Well, he had a really bad reaction, and he started throwing up. And he failed the next day's subsurface swim, 1,500 subsurface swim. But he gets to make it up on a Saturday.

And we had that Saturday off. and they asked for volunteers. Somebody got to be a swim buddy. Somebody got to be a swim buddy. And I freaking volunteered. And this guy was bad. He was way more badass than I was. So I was a little nervous because I didn't want to slow him down.

And we mined the guttle went and boom. He got the surface, got his bearings. He gave me a freaking, you know, the go-down signal. And we start finning and I am struggling to keep. up with him and I'm on his tether you know I'm like oh he can't feel I can't I have to keep up with this dude and he is an absolute cyborg and that was the hardest I ever worked in my life because now I'm not working for me I'm working for somebody else and I can't let this dude down you know it's like oh my god but he crushed it he crushed it yeah what was the

time space between you failing dive school and then going back and one year okay so this is like oh no no no six months that was six months yeah six months one year was four selection. Were you guys, were you guys, were you guys going on deployments at this time? Yes. Okay. Yeah. And where were you guys deploying to? For us in first group, it was Southeast Asia, Thailand, Malaysia, those kind of things. And it's Cold War. Right. Yep. Cold War, Fid stuff, peacetime army. Yep. Did you have to learn a language at this point? Yeah, I was pretty good at Thai. I didn't do, it was a condensed course, like a three. month or. You know, so you learn all the survival skills and all that. But, yeah. And then, then where did you go when you, how long did you stay there for?

How long did you stay at first group? Well, like three and a half years. And then I got recruited by some dude. I got, he had a list of 10 of 10 names on this, on this sheet in this folder. And company Sarremajors told us where we had to go to this meet. and he's some dude. He's in civilian clothes and he's got long hair. And he's, it's so vague what he's explaining to us.

He goes, yeah, it's a Cold War job and it's in Europe. I kind of felt like Will Smith, a men in black when he's going, now what are we doing here again? Well, we're looking for the best or the best or the best. You know, that kind of shit. I had no idea. But I knew it was something bigger than what I was doing currently. So once again, opportunity knocked.

I friggin't jump down that shit, man. And what we were doing with that is we were like building networks for double agents working in Berlin. So before that, I went and got German language as well. But that was a cool job because it was some real cloak and dagger shit, you know. There's some books written about it now that are pretty cool. Did you go over there like undercover? No, that one, no. Okay.

There was different times when I did. We had it like, it was soft cover and you had to have for that one, you have to have cover for action. for status, you know, why you hear in this country besides, you know, I'm just some military nug. Right. Because we had, you know, track suits, leather jackets, mullets, you know, all that freaking looking like Eastern Euro trash, body odor, smoking cigarettes. That was cool.

How long to do that gig for it? I did that for about a year and a half. And then I got recruited by some other dude. he came and he was looking he had one name on his list and it was mine well because I had there was certain things

they were looking for it was a very the skill set was very particular he had to be good at the language you had to be good at like driving and there was certain different motor skills

you know all these tests anyway I met the quota I met the data that he was looking for and now this guy's in uniform but he's an SF guy and I said there's another SF job here. He goes, yeah, man. He goes, we're spying on the Soviet Army in Soviet East Germany.

I said, get the fuck out of here. I said, I never heard of this. He says, no, there's only seven slots, seven SF slots, seven. So I jumped on that one. So that was more schools. I had to go to Wippet, Warsaw Pek ID School in England, more driving schools, get my language. because now I'm working in East Germany,

their second language ain't English. You know what I'm talking about. I mean, you know, and I did that for about two years. That was cool as shit. And once again, you're going over there as an Army dude. On this one, I was over as an Army dude. The cover for action, cover for status on that one

is we were liaison to the Soviet Army. They all knew what the hell we were doing. It was paper thin, man. The cover was paper thin. and it was all cat and mouse. They knew it. They issued us. And they're doing it back to us, obviously.

They were doing it back to us in West Germany. We were way more aggressive. I think at the time, 95% of the intelligence on the Soviet army was coming from those units. So in East Germany, the U.S. was doing it, the French and the Brits. And we would all rotate sectors. And it was scary. It was scary gig. Because the Soviets reserved the right to kill you.

They issued you maps, and on these maps, they had these yellow areas, and they were called PRAs, permanently restricted areas. And you couldn't go in those areas. Well, that's where all the good shit was. You know, all the freaking KGB comms and all the nuke stuff. So we probe those things. And, oh, man, it was so, the cover was paper thin, how we were doing stuff was, you know, You were going over with two guys. One of the guys was an SF dude.

The other was an officer who was a Russian Fayo or something like that or an intel ween. No tactical skills whatsoever. I mean, I remember sitting down and go. When you say you'd go over, does that mean you'd go from West Berlin to East Berlin to East Germany, into East Germany. Okay. Across the Glynica Broca, and we had a Soviet credentials, and we would go to the, like the consulate or what was, something like that,

and deliver mail. So that was how we got in. And we did it all the time. It was, you know, several times a week. Yeah. And then when, as soon as you cross the bridge and you deliver your mail, you were, you stayed in country now for about three days. And you did your mission.

And you had. you know a list of tasks. Objectives, right? You had your essential task lists and your objective. What would be like a task that you'd be? Oh, one of them would be there is, because satellite footage still existed. So what's going on in Kotbus? There's a big military exercise.

What we need is just pictures of the vehicles and unit affiliation. See who is there. unit affiliation because satellites can't get unit affiliation but you know we could get up close and take all the pictures of all the vehicles and the vins uh get unit affiliation another one might have been railways were a big one railways you know what's coming in from the check side polish side what is coming into falconburg into the train station and all that shit was tarped but we we were experts in tarpology too we could read the piece of equipment under a tarp even a variant, bro.

I'm talking like the beater 80 pb to a regular to a beater 70, you know? Yeah, we even know the variance under tarp. It was,

it was good shit. That was a fun-ass freaking job. Scary as hell. Scary as hell. Because we're so paper thin. Here's the other job we had. Because I imagine you're carrying a camera with you or you carry like a

telephoto cameras or you carry like little clandestine cameras. No, no, no. We're traveling in a, Mercedes-Golendavagan, because we're not undercover traveling, because we're a liaison to Soviet arm. So we're in an OD-Green, Mercedes-Gelendivoggin, so like a Mercedes-Gie. But it's souped up, man.

It was very, very high-speed shit in a low-speed world. You know, we had a dashboard with toggle switches where you could control, for instance. As soon as you went over the bridge, it was an SOP. Turn off the switch number one because that killed the horn, because you don't want to have a horn AD. There was like a one switch where you, another one, you turn off the brake lights. No, the license plate illuminator.

Okay. Yep. But you had a brake light disabler. You had even disable one side. So from a distance you look like a motorcycle, you know, all that stuff. And then, so it was a two-seater in the back was a big sheet of ethophone with holes cut. And each hole filled a Nikon lens. And each lens was attached to an F-1 body.

bro, every freaking one of them. Yep, so you just reached back, boom, 500 mirror. Chiquin, chikin, chagin, chagin, chagin, chagin, chagin. Yep, you just went to town. And then we had video cameras mounted, like basically where the visors are with the remote on the dash. So pretty, it was a high-speed shit in a low-speed world. For sure. Yeah, it was fun.

Yeah, you are pumped. Especially if you got a big hit because it was competition with the other tour guides. We were called tour. tour, tour guys. So, you know, who could get the

biggest hit? Like, I got, I got a, SA-24 nuke. Damn. Yeah, SA-24 nuke in the town

was called Beteritz. And we heard that it might be coming in. And, you know, so we hung out

and I was, oh, I was with a square-of-way officer at the time, too. He was, he had been to

Ranger's school. He wasn't a ranger, but he'd been to Ranger's school, and he was, he got a scholarship West Point scholarship for football.

So he's a fit dude too. So I was with this dude. I was fired up, man. And we were going after this SA 24. And we ended up, it's a long story. I'm just going to cut it short. We were hiding behind a hay bale. The landowner came out.

He smashes the front of our vehicle. Because we're not, we're trespassing. We explain this is common. You're communist, bro. You don't own. this shit. This is Soviet land. But he apologizes, invites us to his house.

His house is right on the tracks. We parked the vehicle in the backyard, orient the cameras, check out the orientation and everything, have a camera with us at the ready, because they don't know what we're doing. We're just fucking off in his field, you know, as Americans. They serve as tea and coffee.

Train comes. We get the whole video footage. We get all the stills. We get all the freaking numbers on it and we're sitting in this dude's backyard. Yeah. Yep. So that was a big, that was a big hit.

But yeah, that was a fun job because I got chased by all kind of shit, like T-80. SS-21. Oh, man. And the thing about Soviet kids are so much of it.

It's so big, you know? I mean, it's a massive. Like, there was this one called Ptoon triple striped, Petun Triple Stripe. 3. PTF. PTF.

Yeah. It's like a, it's a tracked pontoon that takes tanks across the rivers. Got it. You know, it's just, it's massive. It's like the bronosaurus of the kit world. We have nothing that big, you know, and that moves that fast. And their BMP ones are like the velociraptors of the kit world. You know, they're just, I mean, it's not, it's all in a horrible state of repair.

But if you got a shitload of it, something's going to work. Well, that's cool that you were doing real stuff. stuff in the 80s because most of the guys at that time weren't doing anything. Yeah. I was, you know what? I was so fortunate. I never, one of the things I'm careful is I always, I always make sure I tell people that I was very fortunate, that I was very lucky that I had the best mentors and I never ever rest of my laurels, you know. I never go, well, fuck back then, I was a badass.

I'm a badass tomorrow. I don't need the rest of my laurels. I hate those guys. Yeah. You know, this is what I did yesterday. And I don't reflect upon it a lot, but it's interesting.

Yeah. It's an interesting, it's, it, I had an interest, it was an interesting career. Yeah, and like as I read

some of the stuff that you don't, I kind of piece together, not just what's like out there, but, you know, I kind of piece together what I know about, you know, so I have a little bit more in depth.

I can fill in some holes. Yep. And that's what got me thinking about, you know, when I was open up talking about, like, soldier skills. Oh,

right. I just thinking about all, the different things that you did and how the variety in your career. And I know like when you I mean I know you went to some kind of camera school and you went to some identification infield developing. All that stuff. And I'm like, oh yeah, he did all that. And then he did scuba and then he did, you know, like everything that you've done. That's why I was asking about languages like that now you got Thai, you got, you got, you got like, you know, it's skills. Yeah. And there's tough. And I'm scratching the surface. Yeah. Exactly. I was so lucky.

You know, I was, because it's not that I'm, I was, you know, I'm not. You know, I'm not like some stellar super soldier, I was very lucky, and I always made sure that when Opportunity Knocked at answer the door, and that, man, that paid off, big time. And then if I failed something, I wouldn't say, ah, fuck it, man, that ain't for me.

I'm like, nope, I got to avenge that shit. Because I won't be defeated. That defeated me? No, there's no way. I'm going back and kicking that ass. Damn. So what was next? What was the next after all the Europeans?

Once I was there through reunification. That had to be crazy, man. That was cool. That was cool shit. So I was there through reunification. So, you know, the wall came down to 89, reunification 91. So I was there during that whole thing. But now my job is drying up.

And I'm having to train the Bundesnachdienst. It's like a German FBI. I'm pretty sure I got that, right? It's been a long time since I accessed that database. But so I have to. to train them and, you know, we're handing over that job because they just have to see the withdrawal now and all that. And I don't want any part of that.

So the next step was to go to, you know, try to get my foot in the door and use the sock. And so I went. I got a slot to go to selection. Day freaking one, I brink my ankle. How'd you break your ankle? So on the first day, there's a, so no more yelling and screaming. Yeah. There's no more at.

You know, you're just taking instructions from a chalkboard, and you're making sure you're not late, late out of uniform. And you're getting food, too. It's just, now it's all big boy rules. You know, it's a totally different game. It's a totally different test. Totally, completely different, you know, because it tests resolve and whether or not you have heart.

And if you're capable of deductive reasoning, and if you are resolute, and if you have a, um, Yeah, besides deductive There's another term I'll think of it here in a second But so day one there's a I won't disclose too much of it Just because I don't want to ruin it for people who may go in the future

But there's a physical movement you know It's a movement and it's at night With a rock on it's nothing hard And I think it's there kind of as a like a litmus test You know maybe to shake out patrol Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're on your own. You're doing this thing on your own, but it's at night.

Now, you're on dirt roads because you don't know, they haven't given you any training yet. So you're on dirt roads, and there's people periodically to guide you along the way. And you even have a flashlight. So it's nothing, you know, it's nothing crazy. It is just there to trim the fat, and it does a good job at it. Because it'll tell whether or not you're there for the right reasons. That'll tell the cadre. But I'm coming down a hill and whenever you have the opportunity, you know, you double time downhills just to make up time.

And I roll an ankle and I roll it so bad that I hear a crack. And I knew it was the ankle, you know, the sprain cracking, but I felt bone in my shin too. And man, you know, it's the worst feeling. You know, when, for those of us who have had spray night, it's a horrible feeling and a sprain is worse than a break. I swear to God, it's worse than a break. There's no doubt about it. I've done so many of them. I've torn so much shit in my body that, man, I'd rather be broken than torn.

Well, the big difference is when you break a bone, you put it back together, you put a cast on it. It heals up. It's actually stronger than it was. You tear a ligament. That thing is never the same. Never. Yep. If it even heals.

Yep. So you hammer the shit out of your ankle. Yeah. And I make it through this first movement. and I think just I just make the time. I don't know what the time is. And then I end up walking on it for another week and a half. I'm going over these mountains in West Virginia.

But there came a point where I say, you know what, this is a big boys game. And they know I'm hurt because I went to see a dock the next day and my ankles, you know, like a football. And they gave me some, whatever, some Ranger candy, some cam, buffered aspirin or something like that. and they gave me an ace rap. That's it.

But they knew I'm jacked up. And I thought, you know what? These guys, they're going to think I'm retarded. They're going to think I'm stupid. That I'm, you know, that I'm. So I made it, I made a, I wasn't, I was making no ground. I was getting weaker by the day. So I sat by a dirt road, waited for a caddry car to come.

And I said, hey, I am voluntary, I am withdrawing voluntarily. It was a hard pill to swallow. But the thing is, I had to do that. And the guy said, hey, as long as you're not cheating yourself, I said, nope, I am not. And they invited me to come back. Well, because they knew that I was jacked up.

If I volunteered, if I wasn't jacked up, there was no way. You quit something like that. There is no way. But they knew that I was jacked up because I actually went and saw the dock, and I said, hey, can you give me something for this? And he was like,

what if you just don't make the times Would they have said, all right, you failed, you're out? Well, I... Which one of those two is... I didn't get to that point yet. I didn't get to the stress phase of this course, you know? So it was just all the training, the training... The, I forget what it's called, but like the training...

Yeah, the training phase. It wasn't the graded portion yet. So there was no... There was no maximum time. Right. You could have taken whatever, hours and hours and hours. But I felt that I was getting weaker and weaker and weaker every day. So, yeah, they invited me to come back.

And I took every bit of a year. What I did, too, is I made a huge gamble. I was in Germany, and I volunteered to go to SWIC, Special Warfare Center, to be an instructor. Four-year commitment. I volunteered to go to that, to get me to Fort Bragg, to get me closer. And did you also figure, like, if I'm there, and all I'm doing is teaching, I can get in good shape, and recover and all that? Exactly.

Yeah, yep. But if I didn't make selection, I would have been stuck in SWIC for four years, too. So I knew it was a gamble, but I said, it's going to get me there, and it's going to get me strong. I'm not going to have to go anywhere. I'm not going to, you know, like, yeah, it's a very light duty. And I worked out like a man-possessed. I took it. I had a new kind of a perspective and a new strategy with the training.

I went very low impact. So I did a lot of bicycling, like in the tiny sprocket, a lot of stair climbing, stuff like that, a lot of like 40 repetition squats, that kind of thing. Because I already had a taste of it now. Were you worried about like being able to hump though?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I did that. I humped, but I didn't do a lot of it. I didn't do a lot of breakdown. What I did is I found a, there was a massive helipad on Fort Bragg right by where I was working.

So it's an elevated chunk of ground. And it's elevated, you know, on all sides at an angle. And I would do laps around that. Because now I'm walking on a traverse, on an angle. So I got all that friction, you know, and working my angles, and I would do lap. And it was probably 400 yards around. And I would, every day I'd go over there and I would do lap after lap, after lap,

and turn around lap after lap, after lap, and turn around and do the same thing until my feet burnt. because I wanted strong ankles and I wanted tough, tough, tough feet. Because I already had some blisters when I went the first time. That second time, I didn't have a fucking blister. I had a hot spot on the last exercise. I had one hot spot. Yeah, bro, I crushed it.

I crushed it next time. I mean, I destroyed it. I mean, I had some bad days, but when I went back, man, I freaking, I really, I tore into it. So what year is this now that you go back and you make it? 91, 92 when I went back through. Yep. 92. So I'm thinking Gulf War was in 91.

Yeah, Gulf War just finished. I was still doing the Soviet stuff when people were doing the Gulf War. Uh-huh. Yeah. Was that driving you crazy? Nah, because I was doing stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I was working, you know, and yeah.

Nah, I was happy. I was in boot camp, or no, I was just after boot camp during the first Gulf War. Yep. And I remember watching the news and they said they were expecting U.S. 40,000 casualties in the first 48 hours or something like that. And I was like, oh, it's so hot. It's so on. It's going to be so on. I'm going to get fast-tracked.

They're going to put me as a freaking doorgunner, like a knob. Yeah. I was like they're going to need people to replace, man. That's what's going to happen. So you get done. And so now you're there and everything's kind of leveled up. You're training freaking just like all the time. Yeah, well, you know, after selection,

I had to go through six months of OTC. And you're on the bubble during that time. I mean, that's six months, and there's no break in that six months. I mean, and you're on the freaking bubble, bro. Man, I love that the way they reserved the right to fire your stinking ass at any freaking second for anything. And that went, my whole, I was at the unit for 13 years.

And, I mean, there were stellar dudes, you know, 10 years in who, that little mistake, boom. But you want to work in a place like that. You know, you want to. You want to be a part of that where, dude. And I remember there were guys who were great dudes who would have, like, I had this one friend who had an ND. He was by himself. And he went and turned himself in.

I was like, holy shit. And was that it? He's gone? Yeah. But with NDs, there were certain things that you were, they'd send you. packing for a year and you were you were able to get a re-look certain things uh negligent discharge okay yeah yeah uh oops yeah yeah yeah yeah and they they didn't happen often but when you're constantly around guns you're constantly doing shit all you need is a momentary lapse of reason and that's it we are

human beings and we are capable of momentary lapse of reason and they they happen to the best dudes I knew, man. The best dudes I knew. So you, A, D, N, D. St. this is the same thing. Yeah, they just changed the verbiage like, I don't know, a decade and a half ago. There are no accidents.

It's negligent. I don't know. There's something. That's where it came from. I never thought. I never thought about that fact. Yeah, yeah. Because I, I've been on the range enough where I've seen, where I know that shit actually

does happen. I mean, I've got some great stories that are actual A-Ds. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like, round's cooking off. Not like a, um, a guy dropping his backpack and he's got like an ALS holster on, car key goes into the holster and fulcrums up, boom as he's dropping his backpack. Burghuz, you know, shit like that. I've seen a bunch of things like that.

I've seen guys with, uh, like in the summertime out in the desert. Oh, cook off. Yeah. And they're like, like I remember we were new guys and one of the guys with me, he's shooting and all of a sudden, you know, he's kind of, uh, we're done. We're kind of. debriefing all of a sudden, crack. And he literally just held up his weapon.

He was like, I didn't touch anything. I didn't talk unsafe. He's like, there was another funny story. Jason Gardner told me this story. They're debriefing. And this guy, they're sitting there debriefing. They're doing kill house stuff. They're debriefing.

And all of a sudden, like, the junior officer cracks off around at the feet of like the debrief group. And he said, he like looked at the gun. And he looks at the group and he goes, he was. he was decocking it meaning he had like an out of body experience and explained himself in the third person making an excuse for himself

it's like the funniest thing man I gotta have Jason Gardner because my buddy Jason who's master chief and he's been on the podcast a couple times but he always tells everything in like a monotone voice so he goes yeah so he cracks off around right at the feet of our of our group and then he shakingly looks at everyone

and says he was decocking it Oh, shit. Oh, my God. Kill me. So as you're doing this, what other skills are you now picking up? I mean, you aren't. It's the 90s.

Yeah, I got to think about this. You're at a place where there's money and there's time. Yep. Yep. And there's a mission. Yep. Let me think about it. First up, more driving.

I mean, I've been through seven driving courses. one of them was the Gary Simic motorcross school. Well, we had dirt bikes, you know, and it's a great mobility device, but you need training on that thing. So when I was a team sergeant on a mobility team, I said, I want the best training. I want a motocross, you know, supercross school. But so driving training, I mean, more water stuff, water, water. So riverine stuff. You know what was cool?

I just thought about that. The dunk training, like up in grotton thing? Yeah. Yep, I did that. But schools, let me think here. The helen dunker. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my God, there's so freaking much of it.

Oh, so the demo was the big thing with the unit, you know, but special, specializing in that. Were you like a breacher? Yeah, but everybody is a breacher at some point. You know, when you're an operator, you're all, you're a breacher at some point. You know, you come on to a team as an assistant, and then you work up to a breacher. But then the amount of weapons, too, you know, so not just cruiser stuff, but like in a tank. And, you know, it's like, holy crap, because there's always something new emerging. You can't just lug around a goose off, you know, all the time, because more stuff is emerging.

What other kind of thing? It just went on and on and on and on. I mean, it never, the wheels on the bus went round and freaking round. And the amount of helo stuff that we did, you know, and a lot of different environmental training. So, you know, when we did winter training, it was hardcore winter training. When we did desert training, hardcore desert. We did mountains, you know, all that stuff. And then so a lot of environmental stuff.

I mean, yeah, I wish I wish I, wish I, I, wish I, It's tasked with a homework assignment prior to. So I could have written those things down. But it's cool because it's cool. Because I forget about how much shit that I've learned. The amount of shit that I've forgotten could probably, you know, fill volumes. But every once in a while I'll go, oh, yeah. Like Rebecca and I watch a TV show.

I go, oh, yeah, I've done that. She goes, no, you have. And I go, yeah, I have. I've done that. Yeah, trust me, I've done that. Yeah. And you're shooting just insane. All the time.

Yeah. Yep, all the time. And then not only that, but what was cool is we were encouraged to compete, you know, on national level with the shooting stuff. So I'm not just talking action shooting like Ipsic, but I also did national match, you know, like bullseye stuff. Yeah, I competed in the all-army small arms championship, too, in 2004 right before I retired. So I was an E-9, and the unit sent me down there as like a recruiting trip. And best competition I ever went to. Now, they did preface it with, hey, you know, you got to win this thing, too.

Now, no freaking, I tell you, that was not an easy, I did, but it wasn't an easy task. Because you got like 250 competitors. And you got these, the Army Marksmanship guys. I was going to say, the Army marksmanship guys who do that. Right. That's their job. You got Ranger snipers, 82nd snipers. Because when you show up to that type of competition, you all look the same.

Everybody's same haircut, same uniform. Same M16 A2 iron sights, same sidearm, same ammo. Damn. Yeah, same ammo. Everything's the same. It's like stock car racing. Exactly. Bingo, just like that.

So no mechanical advantage with anything. Nothing. And then you start this week-long competition. You know, in the first several days, it's all national match. Rifle at 500 yards, iron sights. Grand, you're shooting, you know, 77 Green Sierra match, Black Hills. You're shooting good ammo. So you're really, you're able to group with these, with these rifles.

But after the rifle portion, I was sitting good. I was, you know, like out of 250 people, I was probably like 225. But when the pistol portion came up, I crushed everybody. So it was, because thankfully it was a combined aggregate. So I was able to, yeah, I was able to, who, who I did not want to go back to you and say, yeah, I came in third or something like that. I got beat by a E4 from Division. Where were you when September 11th kicked off? So at that time, I was an OTC instructor.

So operator-trainer's course instructor. I was on the range teaching our OTC students, CQB. One guy had a piece of equipment go down. I said, I'll go get it for you. Just give me that. And I'll go de-ex it for you. So I drive back down to the main buildings, go in, And the guy from Supply is watching the TV and one of the planes had already hit.

And I said, what happened there? He goes, ah, some plane hit one of the World Trade Center towers. And I go, oh, was it accident? He goes, oh, it looks like it to me. Because at the time, that's what it was. And plus people, you couldn't grasp the gravity of how big those buildings are. You know, they thought it was a Cessna. I completely thought it was a Cessna.

Yeah. That's how everybody thought Because those billies are gigantic So we're both watching it And then I saw live The second one go in And we both just Dude when you when you watch that shit

Happened Now I didn't see it on the news It's a repeat I watched it live And I heard the news The announcer go Oh oh boy Oh boy oh oh all right

Nope this is no accident You know and I went Holy fuck So I got this piece of kit Buggy down range And we did an ad Admin Hall brought everybody back into the Chow Hall, big TV's on so they'd get kind of an update and then brought them back to the shoot house to run CQB. How long did it take from there before you got over to Iraq?

Man, I was so bummed out, bro. Because you were an instructor. I was an instructor. Not only that, but they asked me to do another six months on top of my two-year stay because there was a course that they were putting together for somebody else. and they wanted me to build this course and I'm going, oh my God, squadrons are already on their second deployment, bro. And this is the crazy thing.

Second or third deployment. So it's funny because when I get over there, I remember the first night, I'm with this dude I put through selection and OTC. He's a staff sergeant. And I'm an E9 and he goes, oh, Mac, it's so cool that I'm doing hits with you here. I said, yeah, bro, and tonight you're in charge of me.

He goes, huh? I said, how many hits you got in country? He goes, 125. I said, well, I got zero, bro. Yeah. Goose egg. So when you went over, you went over, you were telling me earlier. Like you went over as like an ops position or something?

Yeah. Initially, I went over as a, in an ops position with the, with, and it's a funny thing. We didn't even touch on this one. I went over to work with the units, support, support squadrons. So I was working with all These guys with no training And they're going outside of the green zone And all that to get resupply

To get freaking They're going, they're making biap runs To get diesel, you know Going down Route Irish Yeah bro and soft skin hummers You know because we were Nothing was up armored yet And so I'm driving with them

Scarcest I've ever been in my life Going with cooks to get freaking food I'm one man security detail I got comms AR our M4 Mags And I'm I'm out there flapping.

I'm one-man security detail for dudes who have zero training. They got guns and stuff too. But I know that has... That... That stay scared these shit out of me. The amount of freaking rounds that the support guys were taking, and I'm going, go, go, go. You know, because mobility is survivability. I'm like, dudes, first lesson, it's hard to shoot a moving target.

You were not these other we're not driving 15 miles an hour Fuck that as fast as these vehicles could go Change lanes under bridges you know that kind of stuff All that old school shit I mean Yeah that scared a hell out of me And then I would do a couple hits with the working squadron But when I got back

And between those I built a course called CSE, Combat Skills course It was a two week course for all the support element and it was bad they loved it for sure they freaking loved it they were because you start with BRM basic rifle marksmanship you know and then movement with a rifle and then security positions working barricades driving and then you know react to freaking iades you know all this stuff so uh reaction contact moved to from all that stuff so we did all just two weeks of non-stop balls to the wall, basic training, combat skills training.

And the fulfillment I got out of that was ridiculous. I loved doing that so much. The job was hard. It was freaking sucked. But, you know, these cooks and log guys, you know, seeing them freaking rip rounds and shoot AT-4s and stuff. And then when I go back to Iraq, I'm walking around. We got a hit.

It's kind of vanilla. And the cool thing was, too, when no matter how vanilla the freaking hit was, guys were treating it as if it were, you know, HVT, you know, high value target. I was like, hell yeah. But there was a couple vanilla hits where I'd go and get my cooks and say, hey, you guys want to come out with me.

They were like, really? I said, yeah, man. And I put them on, you know, security position with a SAW or a MAG-58. But dude, they're in fucking combat, bro. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the cooks even got to freaking wha-wom. Oh, he got to let it rip. I had my radio men, my radio men from my tactical operation center, right?

And he was the guy that kind of ran things. And one night we were going on off. It was pretty close to base, you know, kind of a no-brainer. And I needed, but we had a bunch of people to coordinate with. And I said, hey, man, you know, can you come out with me tonight? And, you know, just man the radio. And he gets the big eyes. Right.

Because, you know, hey, let's face it. I mean, even though I'm saying it's no big deal, man, there was guys getting wounded and killed every single day. So even though I thought it was no big deal, his eyes got real big. And he's like, he's like, yes, sir. And so we get out and we did, by this point, this was 06, we had armored home vs. And we get on target. And, you know, I'm out.

We got multiple targets going down. And I'm the GFC. So I'm kind of conducting and seeing what's going on. And I walk over it. and he's in the Hummer. And I go over and I kind of like crack the door open. I was like, hey man, you want to come out and, you know, like, you know, I'll show you what's up, what's going on. Right on.

And he's like, I'm good to go right here. I was like, you know what those sights and sounds at the bathroom? I was like, hey, it's all good, man. You just chill. But I mean, he was a great guy. He did all kinds of good work for me. But, you know, we do that with the support people because it's, they just, they don't get good training. Right.

And so. They're normally not super comfortable rolling out. I had a CD too who was this giant black dude, awesome guy named Biggie. And yeah, Biggie. He was awesome, but we took him on a couple where we had work to do. We had work for the CBs to do at some locations. And man, you know, seeing him, talk about big. He turned from Biggie just to Big Eyes, man.

He was awesome. And one time we got hit, we got hit with, we got hit with Mark. orders in the camp and they blew up our big water tank and so he was just you know he was a CB which CBs are known for you know acquiring things so he went out in the next few hours and acquired a brand new like giant water tank we're talking you know I don't know how many but as big as this room that we're sitting yeah a giant he brings back another one on a crane and and Peterson yeah it all filled up with water and you know I said hey man hey man hey I go, hey, Chief, that's awesome, man.

Really appreciate it. Appreciate you, you know, taking care of us. He goes, man, I'll do whatever I got to do to help you guys, as long as there ain't no more boom boom in the camp. Yes, yes. By the way, Biggie, I saw Biggie warming up with 315 on bench, warming up for like 10 reps. Yeah, that's legit.

Biggie wasn't playing around. Yeah. Yeah. And so the second time when you went back and you guys are doing these hits, so now what year is that? 05? Yeah, 05. So things escalated a lot. Right before I retired, right?

Yeah, yeah. But things escalated a lot between 04 and 05. Yep. Yep. I guess somewhere of 04, we're starting to get gnarly. Right. 05. And are you guys are going out hitting targets, reload.

I mean. Yeah, a lot of times like recock right there on the spot. So battlefield interrogation. All right, this guy knows so-and-so. Let's go freaking split the force and go check these dudes out. And then bam, police them up. A lot of cool, like, police work. You know, snatching do, I tell people, like people who don't know, you know, when you're trained

and when you live in that kind of unit, killing a dude isn't very hard. Snatching up a dude requires a lot of freaking work, you know, especially. with like, let's say plausible deniability or no trace, that kind of thing. So I love that kind of stuff. To me, that was a lot of fun. It was interesting, you know, snatching dudes up out of their beds and crap like that.

But it was, the op temple was really high. And what I appreciated was being basically like a cherry. You know, I was a private E9. That's probably the only place in the world, in the military, where you have the opportunity to do that. be an E9 door kicker. I mean, I had this one night, because it was like my third night going into Fallujah on my own little bird.

I was following in a team, and we were, you know, landing rooftops. And the third night in a row, they had me on their planning board as Task Force math. It was killing. You know what they were doing? They were giving me an opportunity to make up ground because they had been getting some, and I'd been left freaking back. So they were like, yeah, we're going to, you know, we're going to let. T.F. Mac coming in hot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was cool as shit. But seeing all the level at which dudes operated, seeing that, because I was almost from like an outside perspective, you know, looking around going, holy fuck, man, this is pro. This is badass. Well, I think the whole U.S. military, obviously. This goes without saying, but the, just the experience, I mean, I always tell people they're

always a little bit surprised, but, you know, I didn't shoot my weapon at the enemy for 13 years in the SEAL team, 13 years of, and I think I locked my, locked and loaded my weapon prior to that, like three times all on a stupid, like I was kind of fired up because we were doing security for something. Right. And I got to lock and load my weapon. I was kind of pumped. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But then, but it wasn't until 13 years. years, but the amount of combat that we have had now in the U.S. military, repetition after repetition after repetition. And one thing I noticed is like on my first deployment, which was 03, we, you know, we were good at doing, you know, building takedowns and we do room clearance. And we were, we were good at it. By the time I went back in 06, man, everybody was, everyone could, you know, everyone could just, there was no factor.

It was like, hey, oh, you want to take down this building? Cool. we got this. It was it had brought everybody up to a much better level. And I always, I think about this now all the time, just the experience that we have now, you know, a mission that would have seemed like a huge deal in 1996. Right. You wouldn't even, it wouldn't even crack the bump on a radar of like, that was cool. Right. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Not even close. Yeah. It was. So the amount of experience that we've gained and, and, and, you know, even, even when I'd watch new platoons come in to relieve us.

And, like, occasionally I'd be in that spot, like, looking at my task unit, looking at one of my patoons moving down the street. And you just see and you go, man, these guys are so good. I mean, everybody's moving. It's like weapons trained everywhere. It's so efficient. Then you see, like, a new troop coming in,

and you look at them, and you go, they'll clean it up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you can tell by his demeanor, you know, by his, just the body language alone, you know, you just the silhouette, you know who that guy is just by a silhouette, yeah. For sure. When you, uh, so now it's, you do, you knock out a couple deployments. What, what makes you decide to get out? What makes you decide to retire?

I had, uh, some of it was, and I don't mind talking about this because it's good lesson learned shit. A lot of it was because of domestic messiness. I had little kids at home and they had a, they weren't being brought up right. I needed to be there for him. I had already lost, you start to think when you lose buddies that are close to you, you start to, you know, reflect. And you start to be very objective and you exercise introspection and you go, dude, man, if that's me, I don't really care.

You know, I'm just some dude, but I'm going to leave my kids dry because they don't have the other, their other half sucks. You know, their mom at the time really sucked. So I got out because I had little kids and they needed me because they didn't have the other half of that. The other half sucked bad. And it was a, it was a, because of, um, the problem stem from, it's big pharma shit, you know, prescription meds. It's not a drug problem if it's, you know, prescription meds. That freaking big farmer, bro. They, that shit pisses me off.

But, so I watched the deterioration of a human being over, you know, a long time. Big farmer. And she freaking just sucked. So, but I had to, I had to do it. Yeah. And, you know, initially. I thought this is a great idea, but man, it wasn't long before I ran into just a feeling horrible about myself and missing the hell out of it.

What was the time span between you made the decision that you're going to retire and like when you retired? I made the decision the first time I pushed to Iraq. I said I'm at the 22 year mark because I was E9. I needed to stay in grade for three years. and complete the academy to keep E9 on my retirement ID card kind of thing. So I wanted to make sure that I retired with that stuff.

So, yeah, I made that decision, got the academy right before I retired. I think I did the academy and retired two days later. Something like that. And then you retire. What was your plan when you retired? I had no plan. There you go. Zero.

Check. But I got hired job offers like yeah I got hired prior to retiring there you go Couple months so that becomes the plan yep and the thing is that's a low hanging fruit I don't recommend that people that low hanging fruit shit man you know working for the man Fuck that and this is but oh five oh five so contracting is still oh yeah good money yep yeah This is before the market was flooded return to another shit hole yep the reason I got out was to be there for my kids. So I didn't want to, you know,

make a shit ton of money and deploy again for freaking 90 days without the big green machine at my six. For sure. Because now I lost some buddies doing contracting stuff too. And it was just killing me, bro.

It was killing me. Oh, my God. So what was the job that you go? So what did you start doing to get out? It was basically doing what I'm doing now-ish, but for a corporation. I was doing the instruction thing and I was building this unit called the AWG,

Asymmetric Warfare Group. Yep. Yep, I was building them. You sent some people over to me in Ramadi. Yeah, I was training them up. The other thing I was doing was I built a course called Cat C, Combat Application Training Course. And we were training big army. I recruited a couple other guys, a couple guys like me, retired unit guys.

And we were training Big Army. a five-day course. And I loved when we first started it, we were doing, training First Brigade, 80-second Airborne invasion. Fourth Brigade, Fourth Brigade. Fourth Brigade, we stood up for a little while. And I love that these guys were so badass.

You know, that there were E-4s with two deployments. For sure. And with combat wounds and stuff like that. Yeah. By the way, two deployments that were 13 months each. Yes. Right, right. Yeah.

And they were so badass, and their soldier skills were, you know, so far, past than what I had seen in like the 90s or something. So that was once again very fulfilling. You know, running these guys hard, getting them really good training and making them focus on the fundamental, fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals being expert at the basics. You know, that still is my thing.

But that was our thing when we were training the CATC program, expert on the basics and fundamentals. So that was fun. I did that for a few years. and then I got laid off. What the fuck does that mean? You don't know. You have no,

when you're a career military guy and then you're working for, you know, a company that does government contracting shit and is all retired military, you're not even thinking job security. That's not even, that's not a part of your thought process. You don't go bed at night and say,

oh, I hope I don't get fired tomorrow. You don't think that. You don't think it. So laid off things, and I didn't even see the rating on the wall, because I'm dumb about corporate America. I don't know any of that stuff. So the company got bought out, and they started to, you know, cut corners, trim the fat,

pinch pennies, all that stuff. And I was thinking, oh, yeah, got to do it. You know, got to cut those corners, got to pinch those pennies. I wasn't thinking about me. I cost money to that. And they laid me off with a phone call, man. Phone call. You know, not even face-to-face.

And the feeling, because I was already down at that time, I was really bummed out. I was in a dark, dark place. I was going through depression. I was freaking drinking on the job. Not on the range, but I would bring like a jack and coke to work in a big Coca-Cola bottle and stuff like that.

I was hating life. I was miserable. And that's what? You got your, I guess she's your ex-wife now. She's dragging things down. Yeah, no support whatsoever. Disconnected from your former teammates that you spent your entire life with.

Has no. concept about that stuff and not only disconnected from that, but disconnected from reality because of like prescription meds and stuff. So no connection between the neuroreceptors. Just dark space. Every once in a while, target of opportunity, you know, a moment of clarity. But all that shit sucked bad. And then getting laid off, you know, on top of it. It was like, holy fucking then the other half saying, oh, just get a job with another company. And I'm like, fuck that, man. I want to do something else. So I called three guys who own companies.

All good friends of mine, all ex-unit guys, and they all said the same thing. Yep, I will get you back. I will get you work if you need it. But, dude, man, do it yourself. You have the ability to do this. So they all gave me permission to be my own guy. Best thing that ever could happen to me,

because that was 10 years ago. And I generated my company, T-Max, and it just freaking detonated after that. It went bat shit. I mean, there's absent flows. It's scary you run in your own business, you know? There's absent flows. And I, you know, like, you're ripped off by a promoter.

I had to go through the sequestration, 2013, all that deficit spending bullshit, where I had all government contracts up for the year. And then that light switch went out in January. No money. None. At the same time, I'm going through divorce, you know. And, dude, that was hard. That was hard.

But that was good. It was freaking odd. It was so good. Those kind of lessons learned, you know, you'd be. really grow as a human being based on how you come out of a bad situation like that. You know, how, how, for me, it was making lemonade out of lemons. And trying to rekindle my past, trying to remember who I was, what I'm here for, what my purpose is, and then I had to give myself meaning, you know, I needed to be, there needed to be a

reason for me to get up every freaking day. A new mission. Yeah, every day. New Mish. Yep. Because that's what, especially special op guys, not just military guys, but special op guys. They need that purpose. They need that mission.

So without meaning, without purpose, you, you could falter. You could short circuit yourself. You could, you know, start slipping into dark places. And you were slipping there. Dude, I almost capitulated. I was close, bro. I mean, I was dark. I was at the bottom.

And then it was a, it was, it was, it was, it would last for years. I lived in the bonus room above my garage for five years. I lived in the bonus room above my garage. I wasn't a drunkard, but I was drinking all day. So nobody knew it, you know, that I was, that I was medicating. Nobody knew it because I would just, all day long, all day long. Probably, you know, 11 o'clock in the morning, start. And, uh, I had no.

No, I mean, I would go to work, I would get jobs, and I was faking it. I was faking the, you know, get you some bad mag, go, you know, all that. I was just faking the Mac show, just faking it. Nobody knew where I was. Nobody had any idea. Because I had no, I wasn't like hanging out. I had no close friends or anything like that. My kids were my close friends.

And they were my kind of my sanctuary or my escape, you know, hanging out with them. Are you still working out? At that time, not. very much. I mean, I'm getting by because everything that I did, my now ex, thought it was because I was having an affair. So there's no

other explanation for me working out other than wanting to fuck somebody. There's no explanation. Everything that I did was because it's an affair. And I had in her mind, I mean, it was bad when I say, yeah, my ex is crazy. They go, oh, I know what you're talking about. Oh, yeah, yeah.

I say, no, man, I'm not talking bitch or cunt. I'm talking legit crazy. I had a girlfriend, imaginary girlfriend, living in her closet for four years. Her name was Skeeter. Damn. I would come home and the cops would be at my house. And she had taken all the light switch panels off

and showing the cops that there are blue washers because I'm bugging the house. You know, stuff like that. I would come home for four. I remember doing this one trip for 24th SDS, you know, CCTV guys, badass dudes. Four days. training I was wiped out man I was smoked and I was coming back from it was up by a

moyak you know yeah so for me it was like a five-hour drive and I am I'm back in my drive with a truck and I'm looking at your rear mirror and all my shit is in the driveway it's all in the drive-way and she's sitting on a stool she's going through like my tackle box you know and all my tools and it's all just a everything she's looking for clues or something you know that was that was the I remember that night that was strut of broken camels back. And she called the cops that night. Cops came.

And they said, hey, can you stay somewhere else? I go, yep, absolutely. Because there have been a hotel that I'd been going to. And it was just a mile down the road. Next day, one of the cops calls me, and he says, can I talk to you? So I said, where you at? He says, I'm at your house. I drive there.

He goes, hey, I ran into your wife in the village. She's freaking doped out of her mind. He said, brother. he knew who I was, where I came from and stuff like that. Very nice guy. He goes, you need to take radical steps and you need to get the fuck out of here. I know you're in it for the kids. Kids are resilient.

They will be able to handle us, but you need to get the fuck out. And I was going, oh, man, I was broke down. Because nobody at that, until that, nobody, I realized. I felt that I was all alone in the world, that I was going through the shit, you know, that nobody had any idea. The cops had seen it because they've been there many times. But that night, I get jacked up again. And I'm with my sweet son, James, and I'm talking to him.

And I remember telling him. How old is he at this point? He's probably, let me see, 13. What, he's seven. Okay. And I said, James, I don't just love you. I am in love with you. And he started crying.

That really meant something to him, you know. It really meant something. And then I realized, fuck, man, this kid really digs me, you know. He really freaking digs me. So he falls asleep. I take him to bed and I go back up into my bonus room. And I realize that I need to make a change now. This has to happen now.

So that hole that I was looking at that I was almost capitulated to, you know, at the bottom of the hole. It was like an epiphany where, I'm not letting this bitch bury me. I will not be defeated. I am not buried. I have been planted. You know,

it was this moment of clarity I had. I put out my running shoes and put my iPod. Yeah, iPod out my headphones. Put out some shorts and I said, all right, set an alarm clock. I'm going to go for a run tomorrow. No plan. Just let me go clear my head.

Got up full of piss and vinegar. putting the shit on and I ran and I'm not a ground pounder I like a sprint I like running but I ran for about an hour and a half it's non-stop I just kept running around town you know got back in my driveway I'm starving and I look at the house and I'm going oh this is the house where dreams going to die I don't want to go inside so I stay in my driveway I work out for like another two hours just up and down I had some dumbbells in the bullet bar and I just work out for like another two hours. I mean,

to the point of like incapacitation. But that was it. That was my rebirth thinking, there's no way I'm going to be defeated by this. There's no way. And I am not buried. I have been planted. But that was the beginning of a whole.

And then with the cop coming the day before and saying, get the fuck out. So that day I got the fuck out. Grabbed your shit and left? Yeah, it was just 500 yards away. I found a condo. Because I didn't want to be far from my house. kiddies. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So it was like 500 yards as the crow flies. And just, you know,

I didn't need things. I needed my guns and some tools and that kind of stuff. And packed up what I, what I could and just freaking bugged. Yeah. And started that arduous process of domestic messiness had lasted for a long time with me because I was trying to get custody too at the time. And trying to do that in North Carolina is like pulling freaking teeth. Yeah, in any ease. You need, there got to a point where I was going, the cop said, go see the magistrate. I went to the magistrate. Magistrate, pleaded my case, magistrate says you need to call mobile crisis management.

Call mobile crisis management. And they say, you need to talk to her shrink. I go to the shrink. They won't talk to me. They say, go tell the police. So set me in a big circle. So I finally talked mobile crisis management into, they said, we're voluntary. They have to voluntarily commit themselves.

I said, can you at least talk to her? So they talked to her. They came out and said, yes. Paranoid and delusion. No doubt. I said, so what does it take? She goes, there has to be basically, In the state, something horrible has to happen first.

Like, let me set the house on fire. Let me drown a kid, that kind of thing. Then, okay. Now it's okay. You got, yeah, it's, I said, are you fucking shit in me? This is how it works? I said, you're basically, that's what those are my words. I said, basically what you're telling me is something horrible happens happened first.

And they said, yep, that's exactly what I'm telling you. Something horrible has to happen first. As you look back at this. Like from your perspective right now Because a lot of guys that A lot of veterans Got a guys that have gotten out And a lot of guys, you know

I mean they have a rough time with it Is there Advice Straight up When a guy's looking at the abyss When a guy's thinking everything sucks When a guy's thinking They lost their job

Their wife's acting crazy Whatever all these things pile up Is there advice that you have For guys that get in that situation What I always tell people Is like you need to find a new mission That's what you need to do That's exactly what I, either mission or I say purpose or meaning.

And meaning could be volunteering somewhere. It could be going to the gym. You know, same. It's all semantics. But you have to have purpose and meaning. You have to find those things. So one of the things, this is a funny, this, I volunteer every day. I have five guys I train at my gym.

It's gratis. I do a volunteer. voluntarily. But they're relying on me to show up. So it's a gift. They always say, thanks, bro, man, because I'm changing their lives.

These are guys I know. They work in the community. It's my mechanic, the owner of my pub, these kind of things. But, you know, I'm changing their lives. But the other thing I tell them is,

bro, thank you because, you know, you're getting me here. You're getting me here. You're keeping me on my programming and you're giving me purpose and meaning. I'm still going to probably freaking get some anyway because that's who I am.

But, you know, you're keeping me on schedule, keeping me on track, that kind of thing. So thank you. But yeah, you got to have that, you know, a new mission statement. Purpose and meaning, you've got to have those things, especially guys who've been in for a long, freaking time. And sometimes it pisses me off because I'll have guys ask for advice and they'll say, yeah, I'm in a dark spot. You know, I have a loving wife and kids who love me. and I want to tell him, bro, fuck you. You know what?

Because I had to do that shit without that, with hate, with disdain. And that's your reason right there, man. That's your mission. You got a wife who freaking digs the hell out of you and supports everything you do. You know, that's your queen, bro. Lay out the freaking carpet. Your mission is to make her coffee and cook for her or clean your house or whatever it is. I don't know.

Make a lot of money so she's comfortable. Yeah, I don't know. And then what was it as your business grew? Like what was some things that kind of accelerated your business? I think the big thing is I don't, all my eggs aren't in one basket. That's a big one. Because that business is good. But I've been hit before by like sequestration and stuff like that.

It could be a ammo crisis or whatever because basically my business. is, you know, shooting combat marksmanship, close quarter battle, those kind of things. That works well. That runs well because I have my own brand of training methodology and, you know, it can't be replicated. We're all teaching basically the same thing. It's just that how do you deliver that? You know, what is your delivery platform? How do you relate?

Because that's what people are buying. I mean, you could teach somebody to squeeze a trigger the same way I can, but how do you deliver that message. And then, you know, what words do you use and, and what demonstrations can you put together and how is this important or why? So that business goes good. And then I just, I keep putting, jamming shit into the pipeline. You know, I mean, I still don't want to, man, when opportunity knocks, I'm like, yep, I'm snatching that up. I'm doing that. I'm, yeah, Oh, man. And it's been a double-edged sword because the last couple years I've got really smoked.

So this year I cut back on courses and I'm going to work more out of like home, do more mentoring and coaching, like online stuff and, you know, selling more product, that kind of thing. What kind of products you're selling? Well, you know, I got the bands. The get you some bands. And those are, you know, every once in a while get them in stock. and it's not something I have a constant flow of because I have to order them. They have to be made.

I've got a sling ding, you know, that's for an AR. It's kind of like a modular monopon. I got books. I got a... What kind of product do I have? Not a lot. Oh, I have like a store, you know, T-shirts and stuff like that. Yeah, in case somebody wants to get you some.

Yep. That's one of the T-shirts. Get you some. That's one of them. Get your blaze off song. Get you blaze. on. And you do.

When you, when you, like I've seen some of your stuff where you've got like, Blaze Ops, 45s. Right. Oh, right. Yeah. Are those like, um, available? Well, those, every once in a while to do a collaboration. Got it.

With a guy, you know, and so I did one with, um. Because I know someone that needs a blaze. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a total. That was a lot. It was 25. Only 25 of those were made. We got to do another run.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm collaborating right now with another company to do a, different one. So it's it's very fledgling right now. It's in its infancy. But but I've done a, like a knife, you know, a knife by one company. I've done three different guns, different gun companies working on another one right now. It's just good. Collab, you know, build partnerships with companies. For sure. Yep. Sometimes they work well. Sometimes they do not. Yeah. There's not everybody out there is uh there's some there's some slimy motherfuckers out there there is indeed yeah uh i mean look dude it's been it's been over two hours yep uh

but so all this stuff that you're doing right now you're getting after you got you got um Tmax tmax tmax inc dot com yep that's where people go to hook up with your training which i looked at your schedule you said you're not doing as much yeah road your calendar's yeah yeah i mean it's not much more than two courses a month though. Yep. For the year. But you do them in different locations.

Yes. People can go on there. You know, and what I was going to say was you're like, hey, look, you know, people can shoot and there's, you know, thousands and thousands of guys that are really good with pistol. And then you kind of mentioned, but, you know, it's a methodology. But also, look, I instruct too, man. I teach leadership all the time. That's what I do.

And there's a bunch of people that teach leadership. Yep. There's a communication skill set that you have where what you can do is convey the message properly that so people actually absorb it right that's the important part I like to say that you know the big thing about teaching is you have to be the right person is going to say the right thing to the right person at the right time it's important to know what to say but more important to know what not to say and the message has to be palatable too and then you know it has to resonate with uh resonate and be relevant but yeah man it's I love doing that I love the teaching thing

um and and those courses are for everybody yes yep I do Open enrollment course. So I get the full gamut of people. I think most of them are sold out this year. I think the only one open, I have a women's course and a beginner's course. I've never taught either. Right on.

Where's the beginner's course? Because Echo Charles is signing up. They're both in North Carolina. Flying to North Carolina, Echo Charles. I'll bring my party mix. All right. All right. So we got TMAX, Inc.com.

Then you also have combat strength. Right. Training. Conditius combat strength training dot com. Yep. Which is where and you got, look, one of the reasons I didn't talk a bunch about this is because you got awesome videos online. You talk about what you're doing.

You show what you're doing. Right. You got those courses. Clearly you're based on. And I hate to use the word functional. Right. Because everyone used it overused. Right.

But if go and look at your stuff, what you're doing, you can see clearly these are drills, skills, conditioning based on. being able to function in a wide variety of environments, critical situations. Yeah, the functional thing is overused and abused. I'll say it's exercise for the real world, maybe. I think that what we do, what I put together, it's all about life-saving or ass kicking. You know, those are essentially it. And I put a lot of free information out there on my Insta-Shus on my Instagram.

Yeah. You know, yeah, so that T-Max Inc. Insta. And the workout stuff that I put on there, it's not about hubris or gloating. It's about, hey, this is a power day example because guys will buy my programming. And if they run out of curriculum or ideas,

they could just go back and say, all right, power day, strength, speed, and quickness. All right, yeah, those are good ideas. Yeah, so, man, it's a great freaking platform. And that's what I use it for, information. Yeah, yeah. So those are the two. Tmax Inc.com.

You got Combat Strength Training.com. You got a Facebook, which is TMAX, Inc. You got your Instagram. Would you say Insta shizzle? No Melody, homie. He calls it The Gram. I don't even call it that. Capital T, capital G, the gram.

And yours, you do all kinds of. The other thing you do, you talk about theirs, which is awesome, is you give people a little heads up on, you know, you are your own prediction. to Dale. Sunday Sentinel sermons, yep. So teaching people, hey, man, there's just some things to think about. Yep.

And everybody could use those things. Right. Because the world is not a happy, peaceful place all the time. Right. Yep. And it's really easy to lose track of those. Echo, you got anything? And I got my YouTube channel too, Pat Mac YouTube channel.

Oh, yeah. And those are great shooting drills. You got all kinds of stuff. It pisses me off every time I see it because I know you're like either at your gym, at your house, at your range. And I, of course, live in California in a city. Yes. So, the only, you know, luckily I get to shoot my bow, but I'm not cracking off rounds

out my back door. I can promise you that. Every time I see you climbing a fast rope and cracking off rounds, I get so pissed. I'm like, well, I'm moving to North Carolina. Come on. Free America. What do you got to echo? Anything?

Oh, your bicep, like, what's the status on? It's good. I mean, you know, like, if you were to look at me, arm-to-arm comparison, in one smaller than the other, and there's a big scar on, you know. Well, you said it tore on the muscle. So did you have surgery? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it was very freaking meatball surgery. Army Bay. Yes. You were an 18-year-old private. They gave that to like a new guy doctor. They're like, hey, we got one for you. They're, I mean, the scar is normally. It's all cheloid.

It's like that wide, you know. And, yeah, it's, yeah. But it's fine. It's fine. It tore both of his, he tore each of his. Oh, damn, yeah, yeah. Did you have them operated on? Yeah, yeah.

The tendon, though. Right, the tendon, yeah. Yeah, that's different, though. Yep. Yeah. But it works, though. You're working. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, all my surgeries, because I've had a bunch of them. Yeah. Everything's good, man. I'm feeling pretty good. But I attribute that to how I train and I take care of myself. So I work out pretty freaking smart. A little more tentative now because I'm 55 freaking years old. So.

You know, I'm a little more tentative when it comes to like mixing it up, grappling, you know, that kind of thing. I don't need to get jacked up while I'm training. It's called fitness, not brokenness. I got my own, the other thing is I got my own podcast. Right on University of Badassery. That's right. Yeah, that's cool with CJ. And what's CJ's deal?

He's the metal motivator. So he used to be a preacher. Yeah. So we've got a pretty good dynamic because he's got a gift of all. I mean, that guy could jack his jaws and he makes religion cool too. But he's like a metal head, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. His moniker online is the metal motivator.

Right on. Yeah, yeah. It's funny as hell better. And how often do you guys put out that podcast? Not often enough, like once, month and a half, something like that. Yeah. But it's fun. It's all upbeat, you know.

Yeah, positive messaging and stuff like that. Right on, man. Right on. Anything else? Do we miss anything? No, bro. I just really, I appreciate the opportunity to be sitting here with you. And like I said, man, the interweb is a cool place if you use it right.

You know, if you use that thing right, it's a great platform that can help others. And then I get to meet guys like you, you know. And you think you, it's like, dude, I already freaking know you because the interweb. It's the same feeling I get every time. Right. Right. Yeah. Well, hey, man, thanks for coming on.

Glad you came out to California Right up You know, thanks for your 22 years on the grind Cool, thank you You know, taking that, taking us as a nation From the Cold War through to the War on Terror You know, if it wasn't for guys like you that that kept those skills up during all that time That we wouldn't have been ready for you know what we faced on the battlefield

So thanks for your service, brother Rock and roll That's what I'm talking about Thank you, sir Right on And with that Pat Mac has left the building. And we are here.

Should be, hopefully, let's just say, enthusiastic about improving our skill sets in life. Agree. In all aspects. Yes. Sometimes it might be hard to figure out of all these skill sets, where am I going to put my focus? How do I prioritize and execute selecting proper

skill sets to improve on. What do you recommend, Echo Charles? Well, I recommend Jiu-Jitsu, obviously. But interestingly, right? So Pat Mack, he's over here jumping at all opportunities to improve his skill sets. Every training scenario he was offered jumped on it. Yep. Then what you wind up with?

A lot of skill sets. Yep. Very good. So many skill sets that you kind of forget you have them until the moment comes. And you're like, oh, you know, I can do that or I did that. Yeah, it's true. So, don't let... Forget what skill sets you have

until it's time to disarm a Bulgarian landmine. You're like, I went to school for that. Pat Mac coming in hot. So don't let Jiu-Jitsu not be one of those skills. Yes. I'm saying? You know, we didn't even talk about the fighting skills with Pat Mac for some reason. Yeah.

Because he's, you know, he does stand-up, he does the jiu-jitsu. His gym is primarily an MMA gym, actually. So, anyways, we, including Pat Mac, agree. What is one skill set that you can utilize just about everywhere? The jih Tzitsu. It's true. So when we train jih Tzu, we need a jih Tzu ghi if we're doing ghi, which we recommend doing ghi, so we are, in fact, doing ghee.

So get an origin ghi. That's the answer. Best gie factually in the world. Many options. Quality. Arguably luxury. Arguably. Oh.

Is that kind of a, is that a problem for me? I don't know. When I put on my rift ghee, am I kind of. You're in the lap of luxury. Dang. For sure.

It does feel that way when you put on a rift guy. Very luxurious. Yes, sir. Nonetheless, it's functional as well. True. More importantly.

And just so happens to be made in America. Yeah. That's not to just so happens. It's made in America through the determination. Yeah. The determination of the people of America. On purpose.

It's not happenstance. Straight up on purpose. There was people that said it couldn't be done, by the way. Pete Roberts told all those people, really? Yeah, yeah. Watch this. I'm just going to see about that one on that one. And it's cool to make geese in America.

Unfortunately, it's not cool that you can't wear your gear. ghee all the time. Yeah. You know, I guess that's not cool. Right? That's not cool. I mean, I guess you, let me rephrase that. You could wear your ghee all the time, but you might get some funny looks at the supermarket.

So, have you ever worn your ghee outside the gym? Yeah. The gymnasium. Yeah, so one time actually may, no, one time where I was up later than my lovely wife. I didn't want to go in the room and like disturb her, maybe wake her up or something like

to go get a jacket. It was kind of cold. So I went to put on a jacket. I was wondering how you got a Gey on. I needed a jacket scenario is what's going on. But I didn't want to disturb. So I'm like looking around for just, I don't know anything.

I didn't want to put a blanking on myself while I'm on the computer. It seemed kind of, I don't know. I mean, I guess I could have. But it kind of's not functional. You know, you don't get in the way when you're typing. You got to readjail.

Anyway, I find the riff geet. I put it on. It worked. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. So that, there, I was there sitting there wearing my gie top outside of the gym. And what we were wearing, were you wearing pants joggers? No, no, I don't.

Shorts. I probably was not wearing shorts if it was cold. Good point. That's not a good point for me, though, because I wear shorts when it's cold all the time. Yeah. But your legs don't get cold, right? That is true. You know, your legs are.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't remember, but I think it was pants of some sort. All right. Nonetheless, yes. we're getting origin geese. Yes. And because you can't wear a ghee, unless you're Echo Charles in your house,

don't want to wake up your wife. Most of the time, you don't want to wear a ghee around. If you need pants, guess what you can get, jeans. Origin jeans. Origin jeans,

which are also made 100% in America. And we just released the second version of the genes, which are, the first version was called the factory genes. They're a heavy weight heavier weight. I guess technically be a medium weight, but we have now launched the Delta 68 genes which are lightweight Yeah, people ask are they what is the word flexible is that the word? Yeah Flexible stretch stretch. Yes, they are. They're there's there's there's they're made to move. Yeah, you can do a full deep squat workout in your jeans. They're not jaguar You know what jaggings are?

No They're leggings, but jeans Oh, no, no, they just look like jeans But they're leggings Oh, so they're not jaggings Yeah, kind of a violation of like Humanity with that Hey, you're the one who said the stretch

You said the word stretch, not me, you So unless we gotta clarify So Delta 68 genes have some give in them Let's just say that has some give in them They allow you to move some freedom of movement You're into a high kick or something like this, fine, right? You're good.

Okay, boom, there you go. Delta 68 jeans are in the house, as it were. Also joggers. Comfortable joggers. For people that wear joggers. In the event of you wearing joggers, boom, or jamein.com. That's where you get this stuff.

Also supplements. Jocko. Our supplements important. They are important. And again, not to split it, and not to get put you to, sharp of a point on it

but it depends what kind of supplements true true I recommend that you put supplements that allow you to get after it at the top of your list i.e. joint warfare yes sir i.e. krill oil

super krill super krill keep your joints in the game if your joints aren't in the game you're not in the game straight up yep discipline discipline go Discipline go

Pills, discipline go In a can You're going to need more protein Guess what You might as well get a protein That tastes like dessert You don't have to punish yourself With protein

Remember those days? Back If you wanted extra protein It was a punishment It was a punishment Yeah if you wanted the good one Like you could get the can You know how like mega male mass

5,000 I don't know if you ever had this No one in the big In the big It was 5,000 Yeah it's in a big like Dog food bag, it's a huge thing, but it tasted pretty good, but I'm fairly searching. There is like straight up sugar and all the stuff.

And maybe like technically I might add some protein in there. But it was like 5,000 calories or something like this. Yeah, it was just, you see what I'm saying. So, Molk, you don't need to drink that junk anymore. Now you can drink milk. Mint, strawberry, mint, strawberry, vanilla, chocolate, and peanut butter. Peanut butter. Yeah.

Good stuff. Danu also got Warrior Kid Mulk. You can hook that up for your children. Why would you give your children poison? No reason. Give them milk. I'll tell you the reason, man.

Short term versus long term. It's everything. Everything can be broken down and short term versus long term. So you can give your kids poison, as it were, or these supremely unhealthy items

for short-term gain. To keep them quiet. to keep them from complaining to put a temporary smile on their face. You know why you do it? I don't even think that's the case, man. I just think you don't know. You just don't know.

Now, yes, you're right. You go, okay, hey, I got this strawberry drink beverage. It's going to keep my kid quiet, make them happy. You don't even know that there's an option that there's something that could keep them quiet, make them happy, and make them stronger. Yeah. And smarter and better.

Yeah, so you know how like you'll or we, whatever? We'll discuss that really most things, pretty much everything in life can be broken down into short term and long term like battles, right? Most of the time. By most, I don't know really what I mean by most, but we'll just say most of the time. Usually if you choose short term, it's at the expense of the long term. Usually. There are exceptions. Every once in a while you get something that fulfills both short term and long term.

Sushi, in my opinion. wore your kid milk that's another exception short term gains short term pleasure long term not only satisfaction

but long term gains and by the way you can get all this stuff including Jocko White Tea at the vitamin shop or you can get everything that we just talked about at origin

Maine the state M-A-I-N-E dot com It's true also Jocko's store it's called Jocko Store and this is where you can

get your very own t-shirts your very own rash guard more rash guards more representative of this path that we're all on hats hoodies i don't know if i said hoodies already but they're on there some women's stuff on there too real good stuff good way to support and more importantly good way to represent yeah it's a good bona fides when you're out in the field oh big time you're just in the airport you're representing and all of a sudden someone goes they give you that Yep, the nod. They give you the knot. And we know if something goes down,

we know at least one person we can count on over there with the bonafetes. It's true. Got that diff course shirt on you. Like, hey, this guy's got my back. Yeah, he's in the game he knows. Put up the flag. Fully. Also, subscribe to the podcast.

If you haven't already on your iTunes or Stitcher, wherever you listen to it, it's a good benefit to subscribe, right? You get the episode right in your, I don't know if you call it the inbox or what, but you get it on your phone. And also don't forget that we have the grounded podcast. It's true.

And the Warrior Kid podcast. And don't forget, if you're, if you like the Warrior Kid idea, can support one warrior kid named Aden who makes soap at Irish Oaks Ranch.com. Do we have it up on our site yet?

currently we're finalizing some stuff but I did get my sample of the killer soap and very good approved big time right it actually smells kind of good too yeah yeah yeah yeah the one of these flowery ones which I dig it here's the thing I'm not mad at flowery soaps I am okay I dig it I fully dig it but I am not in fact every once in a while I appreciate a little

maybe not necessarily flowery but you know like a like a Irish like a you know like a refreshing you see what I'm saying Nonetheless, the killer soap has a scent to it's mild, but an approved scent to it. Well, it's tea tree oil. Yeah. But is it a tea tree oil? No, well, it has tea oil. But what it actually smells like to me is mint.

Like a, like a, it's just, and it's this, what about the visual effect? Yeah, see, yeah, that's cool. It's a black soap. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's so awesome. Yeah, yeah, it's good. And you know what that soap is called? Killer soap.

Killer soap. Killer soap. Help you get rid of little. nasties that are crawling on you. Yeah. And the other thing it helps you do

is it just goes ahead and it will help you stay clean. That's good. That's a good thing to be helped with for sure. Also,

we have a YouTube channel. Pretty much you have a YouTube channel. No, no, no. It's the we. You're on the YouTube channel. In fact, bro, let's face it. You're on the YouTube channel. It's your YouTube channel.

Well, that's ours. I'm on this sometimes. If it's my YouTube channel then what is it called jaco podcast oh okay I guess that kind of does make it mine it's totally yours and you know you can see the video video version of this podcast you want to see what Pat Mac looks like if you don't know already yeah let's face it a lot of us newer Eddie what he looked like you're saying but if you didn't or you want to see more whatever whatever you can see it on the YouTube channel also X some excerpts on there if

you're interested in that which is kind of cool we've talked about it before fire Explosions. Okay. Psychological warfare, if you need a little psychological... Hitter. You can check that out on all MP3 platforms, me giving you a little boost, a little spot, a little psychological spot to get over the moment of weakness. Flipsidecanvass.com, my brother Dakota Meyer.

Got all kinds of cool graphical representations of the path. You can check that out If you want to hang up something on your wall That says discipline equals freedom Or you want to hang up the warrior kid code You can find it there Got a bunch of books The latest is called leadership strategy and tactics

Field Manual Appreciate everyone Hooking that up And now what I see is people posting That they bought 14 of them For every person on their team And I'm going to tell you You get every person on your team

Moving in that direction Your team is going to rock and roll So check that one out for the kids out there We got way the warrior kid one two and three And we got for the littler kids Mikey and the dragons Get those books get them for even if you even if it's like your neighbor kid Look is your life gonna be better if your neighbor kid turns out to be a Loser turns out to be a drug addict turns out to be a

Non-contributing member of society do you want that kid living next door? No you want a warrior kid living next door Why not get your The neighborhood kids on the warrior kid path Get them all the book Get them liking the dragon so they can overcome fear Let's let's change the culture of America And make kids warriors I don't think that's too I don't think that's too much to ask

No man it's not Discipline goes freedom field manual There's a book that you get for Yourself for people that you know that you want to help them Help yourself to have more discipline. Because if you have more discipline, guess what you're going to end up with? More freedom.

Hence, discipline equals freedom. Field manual. How to get after it. And then there's extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership, which are leadership books for you, your team, your business, your life. Check those out. We also have echelon front, which is a leadership consultancy, where what we do is solve problems through leadership.

That's what we do. Go to Eschlonfront.com for details. We've worked with companies of all sizes all over the world, and that's what we do. So check that out. We have EF Online, which is a way to train the principles that we teach at Eschalonfront, train them in your company, in your business, in your life, online, interactive, engaging. Check that at EFonline.com. We have the muster.

which is our leadership event, leadership seminar, leadership gathering, and that this year is in Orlando. It is in Phoenix, Arizona, and it is in Dallas, Texas. Every one that we've done is sold out, and these are going to sell out too. So if you want to come,

go to Extreme Ownership.com for details and to register. And of course, we also have EF. Overwatch and EF Legion, which is where we are taking military personnel that understand the principles leadership that we talk about all the time taking them and employing those leadership principles in the civilian sector. So go to EF.Overwatch.com for executive leadership. Go to EF. Legion for frontline leadership. And again, if you want to check out Pat Mac, he has T-Maxink.com.

And he also has combat strength training.com. He's also on Facebook, T-Max, Inc, and Instagram T-Max, Inc. If you want to check out someone that's getting fired up with Blaze Ops. Check that out. And if you want to hear more from Echo and me, but we're also on the interwebs on Twitter and on Instagram and on Los. Froschboka. Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jaka Willink.

And thanks once again to Pat McNamara for coming on, sharing his wisdom, sharing his experience. And more importantly than that, thanks to Pat Mack for his service and sacrifice, holding the line, continuing to pass on knowledge to make people in every walk of life better. And the same, of course, goes out. to all vets and all of our uniformed soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines out there training and fighting to keep us safe and free into our police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and Border Patrol and Secret

Service. Thanks for your service as well, which also keeps us safe. Thank you for what you do. and to everyone else out there, listen, make yourself capable. Improve your skills. Be ready. Be prepared. Be able to take care of yourself and the people around you. And the way you do that is to go out there every single day and get after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko.

Out.