Jocko Podcast - 291: Are You Prepared? Stack The Deck In Your Favor. Army Special Forces Soldier, Mike Glover

Episode Date: July 21, 2021

0:00:00 - Opening0:06:00 - Mike Glover, Army Infantryman and Special Forces Soldier.3:29:10 - Final thoughts.3:34:07 - How to stay on THE PATH.3:50:31 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 291 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces, but in less traditional roles. Men risking their lives not as combatants, but as instructors or advisors, or as symbols of our nation's commitments. The fact that the United States is not directly at war in these areas in no way diminishes the skill and the courage that will be required. the service to our country which is rendered or the pain of the casualties which are suffered To cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you you may hold a position of command with our special forces

Forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional Forces which are growing in number and importance and significance for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this the nuclear age or to to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation. Korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the Second World War. Men have fought and died in Malaya, Greece, the Philippines, Algeria, and Cuba, and Cyprus, and almost continuously on the Indo-Chinese Peninsula. No nuclear weapons have been fired. No massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate.

This is another type of war. New in its intensity, ancient in its origin. War by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins. War by ambush instead of by combat, by infiltration instead of aggression. Seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what has strangely been called wars of liberation, to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved. It preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts.

It requires in those situations where we must counter it. And these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us. us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved a whole new kind of strategy a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training and that right there was an excerpt from a speech by john f kennedy to the 1962 graduating class of west point the united states military academy and that same year he also released a message to the u.s army and that message read to the United States Army. Another military dimension, guerrilla warfare, has necessarily been added to the American profession of arms.

The literal translation of guerrilla warfare, a little war, is hardly applicable to this ancient, but at the same time, modern threat. I note that the army has several terms which describe the various facets of the country. current struggle, wars of subversion, covert aggression, and in broad professional terms, special warfare or unconventional warfare. By whatever name, this militant challenge to freedom calls for an improvement and enlargement of our own development of techniques and tactics, communications, and logistics to meet this threat. The mission of our armed forces, and especially the army today, is to master these skills and techniques and to be able to to help those who have the will to help themselves.

Pure military skill is not enough. A full spectrum of military, paramilitary, and civil action must be blended to produce success. The enemy uses economic and political warfare, propaganda, and naked military aggression in an endless combination to oppose a free choice of government and suppress the rights of the individual by terror, by subversion, and by force of arms. To win in this struggle, our officers and men must understand and combine the political, economic, and civil actions with skilled military efforts in the execution of this mission. The Green Beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence, a badge of courage, a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom. I know the United States Army will live up to its reputation for imagination, resourcefulness, and spirit as we meet this challenge.

Signed, John F. Kennedy. So the Green Berets, the U.S. Army Special Forces were formed for this new type of warfare. Well, I guess as JFK said, knew in its intensity, but ancient in its origin. And today, almost 60 years since JFK made these statements. There's a new generation of soldiers that have trained incessantly to fight this new type of warfare. And we're honored to have one of those soldiers here tonight with us to share some of his experiences. He served in the U.S. Army Special Forces, worked as a contractor for some government agencies, and has continued to hone his skills and teach others through his company, Fieldcraft,

survival. His name is Mike Glover. Mike, thanks for coming out, man. Thanks for having me on. It's an honor. Happy to be here. Green Berets. Green berets. The deal. We're kind of a big deal. I don't know if you knew that. Yeah. You know, obviously, the SEAL community gets quite a bit of, you know,

flack because we're like, I guess for lack of a better word, kind of popular. right now. Yes. But people seem to forget there was the Green Beret movie way before. And then I was thinking about the actual Delta Force movie

the other day, which was way before anybody knew anything about the SEAL team. So anyways, let's get to it, man. Let's go back to the beginning. Let's go back to how you grew up, where you're from.

What turned you into you? Ooh, conception in Korea, actually. Conceived in Korea. Conceived in Korea. Even in Korea. My dad was a Joe, an Army kid, child. What do you do? So he had two MOSs. He was a 95 Bravo, which is a military police officer and a filled artillery guy. What years was he in? Late 70s into the mid 80s. Okay. His stint was. Did he go to NOM? He didn't. He was in high school during Vietnam. And then by time he got out, the war had been fought. It was over. but he got stationed in Korea at some point.

Yeah, I got stationed in Korea and met my beautiful mother at a very young age. She was 18 years old. And then they had me at 19. Wait, how old was he? 25, 24. And just living his best life, doing the Army thing. We actually moved to California, to Fort Ord, California, where I was born in Monterey. It looks like a zombie apocalypse there now.

the actual base for Ord. It looks like a Sim shoot house. Did it get shut down? It did. They shut down all the buildings, condemned them, but it's still open. Like you could drive through it publicly, so there's no gates.

And stationed in Germany for a period of time with my dad as a young child. And then parents separated. So got to come to Daytona Beach, Florida, where I was basically raised. Going with who? Who'd you go with mom or dad? I went with dad.

Mom didn't speak in English, met a guy in Germany, winded up getting back over to the U.S. where I spent time between Florida and North Carolina, splitting the difference growing up. Were you looking at the Army, like, good deal? Were you around the Army all the time when you were a little bit older? Yeah, it's like us. You know, we live these civilian lives now,

but there's always this evidence that we served in some capacity. So I saw that evidence as a child. My dad had, you know, the dog tags, the pictures, the military gear. I remember playing with his TA 50, his old military gear, his mess kit and all of his LBE and all the old stuff that we had, the webbing. And I just kind of knew growing up in that environment that I was going to be in the military. His brother was a career Navy guy. So I was, you know, growing up with Charlie Sheen and Navy Seals.

Chuck Norse and Delta fours and kind of immersed in that and decided at a very young age. I mean, man, as young as I can remember, that's all I wanted to do was do the military. Yeah, that's the same with me. I always say people like, when did you make that decision? I'm like, I don't know because I just remember wanting to wear camouflage uniforms as a little kid. Yeah, that's what I remember. But you were mostly growing up in Daytona Beach? Yeah, Daytona Beach.

And then splitting the difference between North Carolina. My mom actually settled right outside of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which I would spend a lot of time. What year were you born? 80. So you're growing up. So now this is like the 90s. Yeah, yeah.

It's weird. I'm sitting here talking to you. And for some reason in my mind, I'm thinking I'm talking to like an older person. Yeah. And I'm thinking in my mind like, oh, it was the 50s. I don't know why I'm thinking that. JFK, that's why. I guess because, yeah, I just read JFK.

So I'm thinking, oh, yeah, this is the 50s. And then I started thinking to myself, wait a second. This is like I was already in the Navy when you were a freaking teenager or whatever. So you're growing up in the 90s. 90s. What year did you go in the Navy? 1990. 90.

Okay. Yeah. It was 10. Yeah. It was 10. Wow. Now I feel young all of a sudden. Yeah.

Yeah. So what are you doing in Daytona Beach? What's the scene down there? Oh, man. Are you in the water? Are you surfing? Are you listening to? Yeah.

What are you listening to? No, I mean, my dad jokes and says that it was a part. fish because I was always in the water. I mean, I remember training. I wanted to be a Navy Sill when I first started thinking about the military. My uncle was very pro-Navy. Obviously, my dad was pro-Army. And I remember jumping and diving into pools and doing underwater UDT challenges, like tying knots. You know, there was no discovery channel or there was no representation mainstream of what Navy Seals did. It was UDT, it was Charlie Sheena Navy Sills. So I wanted to do that, but I grew up in the water, outdoor,

fishing. I grew up on a boat. I mean, I think I was out. We probably fish four days a week. What was your dad's civilian job? So he immediately transfer from the military and worked for the Department of Corrections for the state of Florida. So he started doing corrections at an early age right out of the military, which transitioned his retirement benefits, a whole bunch of cool stuff for him. And that's all I remember him doing. And then are you, is he live, is there another, like, did he get remarried or something? Who's taking care of you when he's at work? Yeah, I mean, man, if I could reflect on that time period, I think I did a lot of taking care of myself. But I was super independent.

I was an only child. So it was just me. You know, so growing up, I had a good imagination. It was very responsible as a kid. I don't remember getting in trouble. I wasn't into bars. Wasn't into weed, all the typical things that kids are into. I remember doing con-op, like concept of the operation plans in Briece as a 10-year-old.

I had a toy MP5 and planning ops getting Guccied out and geared up and then doing these like low-vis operations at night. And then even A. I didn't even know what an AAR was in after action review. I would come back and like, let's talk about it. Like weird stuff. Who's we? Like all my friends. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. I was just that kid. Yeah. I was that kid. Hey, did you, what about the fact that your parents got divorced? Did you have like animosity towards your dad or towards your mom or were you just, did you just kind of? Because, you know, when divorce happens at a young age, sometimes kids can't understand it.

And it makes them, you know, I guess have some kind of animosity towards one parent or the other. Sounds like you were pretty, maybe you kind of, because you can also, when you get older, you go, yeah, you know what, they just, you know, they did this when they were a little too young or they didn't get along or they weren't quite a good fit. And I get it and we're going to carry on.

Yeah, that was me, man. I just never had a, I never developed animosity for any of my parents based on the things they weren't potentially doing right. I don't know if it was because I was taught not to judge people and even my family and the circumstance I was in. What I looked at, it was a very adaptive opportunity for me to go to different places, meet different family members, and then have these cool experiences. I mean, I grew up in North Carolina with my cousins running the streets, playing war, shooting BB guns. And then I come back to Florida.

Then I was hanging out with my dad, fishing outdoors on the beach in the water. And so I had a really good childhood. Despite the problem that was separation, which eventually at the age of 12, winded up moving back to my mom's, taking advantage of opportunities there. What were the opportunities there? So when I went,

so my, obviously my mom and dad are in kind of like cahoots in competition with each other because they want to have me, you know? And so I'm going back and forth, getting spoiled in separate ways. But I remember actually on a summer of like when I was 12 or 13, my mom trying to convince me that, hey, you know, your dad just met a new woman, which he did, which was going to be my stepmom. She had three kids at the time. And then it's an allocation of resources, right?

When you have three new children in the home, you don't get taken care of like you used to. And so I was like, yeah, maybe I want to give my mom a chance and live with my mom. And it's a good situation. So I just said, Dad, I'm just going to live my mom. And he was, I remember painful. he was bummed out. I don't think I've ever heard my dad cry or saw him cry.

And I think he was crying on the phone when I told him that. And it created a divide because I was his only baby boy. But he had children to take care of. He had a newborn with the woman that he was with. And I knew he had this life,

this vertical he had to concentrate on. So I live with my mom. And then, you know, in North Carolina, and she wasn't wealthy at all. She was an entrepreneur, small business beauty salon. We were struggling. I thought it was going to be like,

oh, this is cool because my mom buys me crap all the time. My dad never buys me stuff. And so I went into that opportunity and realized, hey, I mean, me and my mom were going to have to fend for ourselves. Was she with another guy at this point? She was.

She was with my stepdad. Eventually met my stepdad at 15. She had a boyfriend at the time named Alex. He was a good dude that she had met in Germany, had brought her over. But she was trying to find her way. I mean, I don't even think, and this is, this is,

honest reflection, I don't think I had shoes until I was like 14. Like I had flip-flops. It was like she didn't have a car until I was 15 because she couldn't afford a car. So we didn't have a lot of things that were basics because she was grinding as an entrepreneur. But that taught me more about life moving forward, being adaptive and eventually becoming a military leader. I think a lot of those experiences come from that. You know, you said, first of all, it's pretty amazing how you were kind of detached, able to not be emotional about these decisions and stuff as a kid.

You also said, hey, I was taught not to judge people. Who taught you that? I grew up as a Baptist, and I wasn't, like, I'm not a super religious person. I never have been, but I've questioned. I remember crying as a kid when I was in my bed trying to think about what the next step was for people. Like, what happens when you die? I remember, I remember this thought because it stuck with me. I said to myself in my head, I said, wait a minute, if God's Jesus' father, then who's God's

father? And there's this void in my brain. I'm like, oh, my God, I can't figure this out. And I remember being distraught. And so religion kind of brought that together for me. So I grew up like a Christian non-denominational and was taught a lot of values that way. Also, my dad's a military-minded guy. So discipline, integrity, honor, all those things were instilled at me a young age too.

And then at what point did you, because you were in the water all the time, and it seems like that would be a good call to go in the Navy and try and go in the SEAL teams. What made you make the decision to go in the Army instead? Yeah, good question. I never been asked that, but specifically I know the exact moment. I was on the steps of my grandma's house in Daytona Beach. and my uncle, who was still active Navy, had just come back from being on the water and the fleet. And I was talking to him about being a Navy SEAL.

And he said, listen, I know you're torn between the two. Do you want to be a Green Beret? Do you want to be a Navy SEAL? And for a kid, it's like, it's a choice, but you don't realize the progress that you have to go through. And so I'm like, so what happens if I fail? If I go to Selection and go to Buds, If I fail, what happens?

He goes, you're mopping a deck forever. He goes, and then he told me about the whole recruiting me. He actually tried out for buds and didn't make it when he was young in the Navy. And he said, hey, there's a whole bunch of guys I served with that didn't make it. That fill all the slots in the Navy that nobody else wants to do. And I'm like, so what happens if I'm in the Army? And then my dad was there to educate me. He says, listen, you could be an airborne ranger.

You pass ranger school. You go to selection. You don't make it. you're still an airborne ranger. Combat arms. And I'm like, well, I just want to be in the fight. And I made the decision right there in that moment. It was like, okay, let me see the path that leads me to be a special forces guy.

When I was 10 years old, I made a bet with my dad that I was going to be a green beret. Damn. Bet him an MP5. Bet him an MP5 SD. Did he pay up? No, I had to buy it myself. I had to buy myself. He could buy me a Phoenix Arms 22 right now.

the fact that what what the fact that you were able to calculate that is incredible when I I was freaking you know what was I think I was 18 when I joined but I might have been 17 on the MEPs program anyways I was young but I was older than you were at age 10 yeah and I didn't even figure out that hey that that thing never came into mind what if you don't make it yeah which is a stupid thing to be thinking because there's an 80% attrition rate in buds and it's totally, it's the worst. I mean, look, here's what's the worst. If you join the Navy because you want to be a mechanic

or you want to be a work on aviation equipment, that's awesome. The Navy's freaking a great place to get those kind of jobs that are sort of like industrial blue collar jobs. The Navy's freaking awesome for that. You want to, like I said, you want to be a diesel mechanic. Bro, go join the Navy. You'll get awesome experience of that.

You want to learn about communication systems. technical stuff, the Navy's great. But the type of person that wants to be a seal doesn't want to do those kind of things at all, at least as far as I can tell. So, but that's what you're gonna end up as. And so it's really a bad deal if you don't make it. It's not gonna be fun.

What's worse, too, you train up for that job before you used to, right? You used to train up for that job. Yeah. So then what's a good thing is you see how much that job potentially sucks. Yeah. So when you go into Buds,

that's your motivation. I don't want to go back to that thing, that vocational thing. No, it's, it's, and the other thing that's, that's really good about the Army and the Marine Corps is,

you get all this fundamental basic infantry, small unit training before you go to special operations training. So in the, in the, in the, seal teams, you don't have that. You don't have this sort of base of knowledge of fundamental small

unit tactics like you have in the Army and the Marine Corps. So how old are you when you enlist? 17. Yeah, I joined when I was 17. And go to boot camp, got what you expected? Yeah, I went to infantry boot camp, went to Sand Hill, became an 11 Bravo. I actually signed up to be an airborne ranger, an option 40 contract, which is known as the option to go to Ranger Battalion. Oh, so that means you're going to a battalion.

Yeah, I was, so I was set to go to battalion. But what I signed up for as an MOS was called 11 X-ray. And 11 x-ray is similar to the 18x-ray, where the S-ray. where the X stands for they fill the gap. They decide what they want to make you. So back in the day, it's not like this now, but back in the day, there was four different specialties in the infantry, 11 Bravo, Charlie, Delta, and Mike.

Or not Mike, not Delta, but Mike, and hotel. So if you were 11 Bravo, infantrymen. If you're a Charlie, mortarman. If you're a Mike, heavy-willed mechanized vehicles. If you're a hotel, heavy armor, like riding on Humvees. So basically an infantryman with different skill sets. Well, when I got there, the way they selected us and grouped us was based on where we were standing. So they said, hey, you guys in a group, you're going to be bravos.

You mean like literally standing. Literally where you were standing in your class rank or anything like that, just where you're standing. Where you were lumped together. And so they're like, you lump. You're going to be a Bravo, you know, and they made the MOSs. Well, they made me an 11 hotel. And so I'm like, okay, so I'm an infantry guy that drives and Humvee, shoots 50 cows and tow missiles.

Cool, let's do this. At the end of basic training where they transition you and they go to AIT where you get your advanced training, they're supposed to have a RIP brief, a Ranger indoctrination program brief. So the RIP instructor comes and I'm like, what's going on here? Like he's not talking to us. He's talking to the Bravos and the Charlie's. Like, why isn't he talking to us? us don't even think anything about it because I'm like I'm a E1 I don't you have a rank right

and so no no foot to stand on so we go through the training and at the end they go hey Mike you're going to Fort Lewis Washington to an infantry unit and I'm like I have a ranger contract airborne ranger contract so they look at my MOS to go no you're a hotel range of Italian doesn't have hotels I'm like what like what do you mean they don't have hotels and like you should have told us before you went to AIT I'm like I'm a private I'd I think I tried to say something, but you guys ignored me. So luckily for me, my uncle was a sergeant major in the 18th Airborne Corps, big division of airborne infantry units.

So I call him during my little break, and I'm like, this is what happened. So he gets this, you know, long story short, he gets this connection where this old guard recruiter comes in. And I'm in a room, like similar to this. And they're like, I know your uncle, I'm going to hook you up. Like literally the guy says it to me is a E5. And he's the recruiter for the old guard, the third infantry regiment, right? I don't even know what the hell the old guard is. I'm like, okay, what do I got to do?

And a civilian comes in and he looks at my orders. He says, give me your orders. And he looks at it. And my MOS says 11 hotel. He literally takes a pen and scratches that 11 hotel, writes 11 Bravo and then signs his initials. Boom. And instant 11 Bravo. And I'm like, oh.

And I'm like, okay, so am I going to a battalion? He goes, well, first, we can't do that. we have to send you to the old guard because that's part of this deal. When we send you the old guard because you could only be 11 Bravo going the old guard, we're going to send you there and then you could put a 4187. Everybody back in the day, even kind of now says, yeah, 4187 is the way that you migrate and do whatever you want to do. Not true.

So I get the old guard, no idea what the old guard is. And long story short, they're their ceremonial unit of the U.S. military. They do all the full honor funerals, the state dignitary. Terry escorts, all the stuff I did not want to do. I had to take advantage of my time. This is pre-GWAT. So I'm like... So we're talking what?

97. 97. 97. So I get there and, you know, luckily for my circumstance, my uncle is very well known in these units. He served as a platoon sergeant, does a storm. He's just a popular character in the infantry in these particular units. And the old guard for infantry guys is like a break.

You go to Korea, you go to the 82nd, and then you go to the old guard to take a break. So I get there, E1, don't know anything, and I realize it's not the place that I want to be, but I have to take advantage of my time. So I head on a trajectory to focus on setting myself up for success to be the best version of special forces that I could be. And so that's where that journey began.

Was anyone telling you what to do? Was anyone talking to you about it? Was anyone telling you about selection or what you need to get? ready for anything like that were you reading about it so i was so books or have been a big part of my life since the origins of where i wanted to be in the military you know the marcinco books the you know the the the marine sniper um all these books john plaster macbysog john striker's stories all these stories i was digesting and absorbing i even stole in basic training a book called commandos that was a paperback book from the drill sergeant's pole table hall while I was doing

KP where I was cleaning crap up and because I was like I wanted digest this I was like hiding doing that stuff and so I had an understanding of what it took in discipline but I had no idea because I didn't get any intel as I got into the infantry I maximize my time I trained up for ranger school I went to ranger school as an 18 year old pfc a private first class. I went to airborne school. How hard does it get a billet to Ranger's goal as an 18-year-old? Almost impossible.

How do you get it? So there's a, there's tryouts. Most infantry units run what's called pre-ranger. And people think, hey, you raise your hand, you get a slot. That's not true. For a battalion, it's a requirement, so they get the majority of the slots. If you're a regular infantry unit, you get slots based on order of merit. So they have an OML list.

And if you earn it, they'll give you a slot. and then you're on the list, and then you just trick all your way to the top. So I tried out for it. About 30 of us tried out for us, and only three of us got slots and I was a young PFC. What's the trial based on?

Freaking PT test and weapons assembly or something? Well, it's harder than Ranger School. So it's about a week, right? So in a week, it's like, how much crap can we put together in a week to crush these kids to see who's most likely to succeed? Because these units have the reputation on the line.

If the third infantry regiment sends five dudes to Rainer School and nobody passes, it reflects poorly on the regiment. So when I showed up, it was a ruck sack. It was a, you know, a ruck march 12 miles in time. It was land navigation. It was a common core task. It was patrolling. The number one thing that's going to make you successful isn't your physical fitness in Rainer School. It's your ability to lead.

And so as a young 18-year-old at the time, I'm navigating this. problem set. It's like, hey, PFC Glebore, give a Warno, give a con op. And I'm like, oh, like I have to brief this. So planning and then executing that raid was a reflection of your probability of success in Rainer School. So it's successful. And you're a PFC and there's 30 people try out and you get selected. I got selected. I was one of one of three that got selected. We went to Randar School. I was actually the only one of the three that went all the way through without recycling and in my infantry company the only people ranger qualified was me as a pfc and my first sergeant who was a senior uh e8 in the army so it was back then it was rare i was rare to have a ranger

tab on your uniform how was ranger school kicking the balls kicking the balls um fear was the thing that i had to overcome it was the most difficult thing that i had to overcome i remember like the night before Ranger School. Fear, I'm assuming fear of failure. Fear of failure. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, you have no perspective. You just have these stories.

You know, my squad leader had been to Ranger's School before, so he was feeding me information, which almost makes it worse, right? Like, you got to be aware of this, and you're trying to live with that solution in mind, and you're getting hit with all these other random jabs in the face. I showed up, and I'm super physically fit. And I remember getting my, I had a low body fat, high physical fitness score. And when I got there, I realized very quickly it wasn't about that. It was a, that's a, the Ranger assessment part of Ranger School is relatively easy.

I mean, we're talking eight minute mile pace, five miles, 40 minutes. We're talking about basic push-ups, sit-ups, and running and pull-ups and basic stuff. Really quickly, you start deteriorating because you're not eating. you're averaging about one MRI a day when I went during wintertime and you're averaging about three and a half hours of sleep those difficulties for a dude I mean I went to Rainer School

even as an 18 year old at 200 pounds all the guys that were meatheads that were big dudes suffered the most because you need protein to feed muscle and when you're not getting that your body starts deteriorating and it's painful how much weight did you lose 30 pounds 30 pounds Yeah, that's good times.

That's another thing. Man, I might have taken the gamble. You know, they're like, hey, listen, Jocko, you might end up on a ship somewhere. But if you go to Ranger School, guaranteed you're not eating. I'd have been like, hmm, let me think about that one. I'll roll the dice. Yeah. That's another ball game.

That's the thing about buds. The thing about buds, you're getting fed, man. Yeah. And it's all you can eat. That's huge. That's huge. It's beautiful. Yeah.

They just want you jacked. That's huge. But the thing is, Ranger School, like you said, Ranger School is really the premier leadership school for the Army. It is, yeah. You're running operations. You're filling a different role, basically every operation. Sometimes you're the leader. Sometimes you're a freaking machine gunner.

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, when I went to Ranger School, as a very young kid, I didn't know what to expect. and then it's sink or swim. You either step up to the plate and you're prepared to be, look, the characteristics of being successful in a rancher school aren't that difficult,

but being a clear, concise, decisive leader under stress is super important. And for, you know, comparably to all my peers, which weren't peers, I'm talking about second lieutenants that just graduated IOPC, infantry officer basic course, Navy SEALs, green berets. These are guys that I highly respect. So it was a whole plethora, like a melting pot, of a whole bunch of different backgrounds. And I realized when you took away food,

when you took away sleep, when you broke everybody down, we were on this equal plane. And so the very minimal characteristics that you needed to be successful and to shine were not that difficult. And so I saw people sink and I saw people succeed because they swam.

Those people that sunk were just, they couldn't make decisions. And then when they got stressed, which they'd never been tested in stress, they couldn't do basic skill sets right. So Ranger School, they give you the formula. And here's the con-op. Here's the five-paragraph op order. Here's how you execute a rate. Just follow that step by step and you'll be successful.

And I realized how analytic that was. And so I just needed to get through and check the block and get it done. And I saw a lot of people sink that I highly respected because they started falling apart. I mean, I saw guys who were beef, beefy dudes who were jacked, who were strong, and they were getting broken down the most because they couldn't handle the deprivation of sleep and food. And when I saw that as a young man, as a young leader, it changed my entire perspective on life. Like it reprioritized the hierarchy of things that I thought were important. And I'm like, that's not important. Like eating and sleeping in the field to be able to conduct an operation are now the new priorities for me taking care of my guys.

So I came out of that as a very young leader who wasn't even a, I was an informal leader. I wasn't even a designated leader. And that shaped me to become the leader that I would become. When you say people that would have trouble were people that were having a hard time making a decision, like what would they be having a hard time making a decision? Like, hey, there's a where are we going to put this Overwatch position or where we're going to set up the base element? Like those kind of decisions? Yeah, everything from technical to very cognitive decisions that had to be made in adapting to change. rapidly. So in Ranger's school, you get a set mission, which is based off your con-up that you

plan. It's a deliberate mission set, contingency-based mission set. You go in the field with that, and then after that, it's all fragos. It's fragmentation orders of the missions changing. We're doing this. And mostly it had to do with the adaptability of adapting to rapid change. Hey, guys, this just happened. Now you have to adapt. What are you going to do? I have no idea. And it was probably a lack of glucose in the brain. It was a lack of sleep. I mean, I had guys, that broke down and like just quit. Because when you get to that state where you can't function mentally,

what's going to get you through that? And typically it's grit, it's resolve, it's digging deep, and some of those guys never found that. And even though they were tested and they had an opportunity, they never found it. So when we came out of the field,

the greatest thing about Randar School is you're judged by your peers. You write down on a piece of paper. At the, like the second you come out of the field, field. You're smoked out of your mind. They put you in a classroom. They sit you down with a piece of paper and they say write down a person you want to go to war with and write down a person you leave behind. And that's that's super impactful for a young man being told that they would be left behind by the majority of their peers. That's I mean it's super impactful because it's like hey man

adapt change do some self-reflection or fail and just be that guy. for the rest of your life. That right there set the precedents for everything moving forward. And in Ranger School, one of the ways that you get dropped is by getting peered out, right? Where they, if you get ranked the lowest guy X number of times, then the instructors are like, yeah, this guy is not the guy that we want. If you get peered and it's becoming a routine out of the field, you'll immediately get recycled. So a recycle isn't just like going back to the beginning of that phase.

It's potentially going back to the beginning of Rainer School. So now you're talking about when I went to range school, 70 plus days, it was a couple months, three different phases when I went. Darby, which is in the Fort Benning and Sandhill, DeLanaga, which is in the mountains, and then at Eggland, which is in the swamps. So if you get recycled, you potentially will go back to the phase or go back to the very beginning. I mean, I interviewed a woman, Lisa Jaster, who was one of the first females to go through Rainier School. She failed every phase. She got to the last phase and failed. And they said, you failed.

So here's your options. You could knock that. Like, it was a weird thing. Like knock out these push-ups because we get to assess if you're physically fit to go ahead and go forward. If you don't knock them out and you can't meet that standard right now, you're done. But we're going to recycle you to the very beginning. So she was in range school for like a year. Like sustained combat operations and sleep and food deprived for like a year.

And I can't imagine, but that was your options. It's either, again, it's either sink or swim. You have an opportunity to succeed and change the way you look at yourself, which I think is the most impactful, that they give you that opportunity or continue to be that guy and then just get shit-canned. Are they helping people out by, let's say you get graded low? Is an instructor going to come over to you and say, like, hey, listen, here's what's going on. You're really indecisive.

You need to start thinking through these things. The reason I'm asking you this is because, like in basic seal training, First of all, you're not doing anything really tactical, but second of all, there's no real, hey, bro, here's the mistake that you're making. Whereas the kind of training that I ran, which is like the advanced training, like the training that we do with platoons before they're on deployment, right? I mean, that's all I'm doing is being like, hey, man, you can't be, you can't be sitting there being indecisive. You need to figure out what call you're going to make. You need to at least give your guys some direction. Like, I'm constantly doing that to these guys.

Is that happening at Ranger school or is it more like, yeah, you know what, this guy ain't got it? Yeah, I mean, the reality is they know if you're not going to make it. Your peers know, the students know. There's guys who are made for war and there's guys who aren't made for war. And one of the things that I think is important about the Ranger tab and the experience is you're creating combat leaders represented by a tab. Now, now we don't wear tabs necessarily all over the place because we're in different uniforms. but when you saw that tab,

you understood that guy was capable as a leader in combat. And it told a lot. So a lot of the times, especially with the officers who come out at IOC, their brand new 22-year-old second-lieutenants, they'll give them the opportunity.

And they'll say, hey, these are the fixes. Fix this. If you don't fix it, you're going to fail. You report to your first duty station as an infantry officer without a ranger tab. Forget about it. Your career field for the, you might as well just get out.

For a young, like PFCs that I was for specialists or even young NCOs, not commission officers, you have an opportunity. They'll give you some feedback and they expect to see you take that opportunity. You might not get another opportunity based on the cycle of getting patrols, which just means they're going to recycle. And you'll get another chance a month and a half later because that's how long it takes to get through it again. What's the attrition rate at Rangers goal?

It's pretty high. It's about 80%. Really? Yeah, it's about 80%. So you get you get done with it. Now you must have a pretty freaking good reputation. What do you do? Are you 19 yet? I'm 19.

19. You graduated from that. So what's next? So my uncle when I'm there was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier. He was there as a guard. He was a platoon sergeant before my time. And when I'm there, I put it at 4187 to go to a range of retirement. It doesn't get accepted.

They're like, no. a Ranger tab, which I thought was a prerequisite to get a 41 and 7. They're like, no, we don't need the numbers. And in 98, they didn't need the numbers, 99. And so I talked to my uncle, I'm like, what are you what are my options here? Like, I'm ready to be in the fight, which there wasn't a fight. And that's probably the reason why I didn't get 4187 approved. They're like, he's like, go try out for the tomb.

And at the time, and still at that unit, the tomb of the end of the end of the end of the soldier was the most difficult, it's probably the most difficult thing I've ever done in my life, to be honest. Selections and special operations comparatively were a walk in the park compared to what that was. I went there. The Army's been guarding the Tomb of the Unknowns since the 50s. It's been around since the interment of the World War I Unknown. And it was an honor. It was something that was going to build me and set me up for success leading into potentially battalion or special forces. And so I took the opportunity.

I went and tried out. How long is the tryout? So you typically do a two-week tryout. It's called T-D-Y. They T-D-Y you to the tomb. You do a whole bunch of assessments. And then they go, you're good enough or you're not to continue to select and try.

And that's a seven-in-a-nine-month process. If you're smart, seven months. If you're not so smart, nine months. So it took me like 10 months. So it took me a long time to get I earned my tomb identification badge, but the process is almost a year. And then what's that job entail?

I mean, obviously we know what it looks like from the outside, guarding the tomb, but what's it look like from the inside? It's a suckfest, man. It's a suck fest. I mean, it's the most difficult thing I've done, but the most honorable responsibility I've been given in the military.

So the Tomb of the Unknown soldiers have been guarded by the Army since the 40s, and they guard. the tomb 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And that rotation takes place in three release based on height. First being the tall, second being the mid-guides and third being the shortest, minimum six feet tall. And then you rotate basically a firefighter schedule day on, day off, day on, day off, day on, day on, and four days off all year round. You know your schedule for three years in advance. And you typically guard, if you're a guard, you have your badge during the summertime, seven walks a day,

30 minute walks with a 7 minute guard change And then about two to four hours of guard rotations at night At night we don't do it in ceremony uniform It's typically class I think bees at the time or BDUs And it's a roving patrol your job is simply to guard the tomb of the unknown soldier from desecration or disrespect And we do that snow sleet heat doesn't matter the weather It's just being done What makes it so challenging to?

get through the, is it just like microscopic inspections of your uniforms and your hair and your freaking nose hairs and your hair here, your hairs and stuff like that? Yeah, it's the attention to detail. Line six of the Citadel's Creed states, my standard will remain perfection. And so you build this culture around

paying attention to every single facet of your military uniform, even your life, even your personal life, of being squared away. So I did that job and, you know, painful to be a new guy doing that job, but inspections of your uniform every single day, if not by the hour,

they have a culture where you earn a walk. You don't just get a walk. You have to earn that walk. So you have to earn it by understanding knowledge. You have to verbatim memorized 28 pages of knowledge about the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the history of Arlington National Cemetery because you're a representative. You're like, you can go down to do a tomb guard walk in front of 3,000 people, come inside the quarters change and go out three minutes later and communicate the tomb of the unknowns and what it represents to the U.S. military. So it's a, it's a diplomatic position, not just a guard wearing a uniform walking back and forth. And so I remember the, my first walk was in front of 3,000 people at 12 o'clock noon. CNN, Fox News, cameras were in my face. I remember hearing standing at

Port Arms, hearing the bandette rattle on my weapon. Because you were freaking nervous? Because I was nervous. I was standing in for, I mean, I'm looking through aviator glasses that are in my peripheral and see people like inches from me just staring at me and every movement during the guard change has to be perfect. And it's intimidating. But it's a sharp learning curve. And again, it's a huge opportunity for me. So the training program or the selection program that you're talking about, that that's 10 months long. Are you working during that time? Are you doing any guarding or no? You're doing all the guard walks where there's nobody watching you. Early morning, late afternoon, and everything at night.

I even did what's called a vigil because I wanted to get the hell away from the guys. I didn't want to get hazed and abused. I did vigils where I would work all day. And so I'm helping prep the guards uniforms doing early morning, late afternoon walks. And then at night, I'm taking when the cemetery closes at 7 p.m. until seven in the morning standing guard for 12 hours straight no sleep and guarding

just to get away from the guys. I was like breaking records of doing I was like doing 21 vigils back to back. So what the hell was going on with the guys that was so bad? Was it just freaking all in your shit all day long? So the tomb of the unknown soldier the actual badge is the least awarded badge

in the US military besides the astronauts badge because they're not a diamond dozen. military. So the Tomb Guard badge is very much protected by the Tim Guard badge protectors. And so they don't want the right guys there or the wrong guys there. They want the right guys. And they want to make sure you earn it. And I did. And back then, you know, hazing. We come from the military where hazing was normal. I mean, if you weren't hazed, you didn't feel like you were loved. Like I got my EIB, my airborne wings, my halo wings punched into my chest. Every rink punched in my collarbone, into the bone.

And that was just the universe we evolved in. That was very much the case. Everything from running through the cemetery, trying to find, you know, inscriptions of specific people, getting smoked to death, low crawling across, you know, face down in the lawn,

you know, getting smoked. Just routine hazing to make sure, hey, this is a, we're testing to evaluate, you constantly if you want to be here. And it's something that I guess is handed down in tradition. What's the award ceremony like when you finally get the badge? Not that big of a deal.

I mean, it's pretty, I just saw a picture of it. I have a small 4x picture of it. And the third relief, or the third infantry regiment commander comes down in 06. And he pins your badge on you in the morning. And typically you've worked the whole night. You take your badge test, which is a series of specific test. including changing the guard at noon, reading verbatim the 28 pages of knowledge

with no errors being perfect and a written test, all kinds of stuff. And then you get your badge pinned. And I'm badge 470 out of probably about almost 600 badges today. Then how long did you have that job for? Not long. I did it for about a year and a half afterwards. And then...

So for a year and a half after you went through nine months, of this shit. Yeah. They're like, okay, and this is what you're doing. That's your job. That's your job. How did you like it?

So I loved the honor and the duty. But it's not what I wanted to do in the military. Man, I, you know, one thing we had to do is maintain our common core skill sets. So we would come out of the field and those three days down, we do med training. We do raids, patrolling. We had to maintain all these things.

So you get the infantry experience. as a part-time position representing the Army in a full-time position. And it's not what I sign up for. I mean, I was trying to be the best that I could be. Be all you could be was the motto back then. But it's not what I signed up for.

And then 9-11 changed everything for me in that situation. But where were you stationed when 9-11 went down? So I was, so I got out of the Army my first rotation of four years. September 3rd of 01 was my E.T. State, get out of Army date. I transitioned into the National Guard

because I was going to college and was a squad leader in the infantry. What was your plan? At federal Bureau of Investigation, HRT. I was like, if there's no war, if I can't get into battalion, I'm going to get my college degree and I'm going to go,

I'm going to be a sniper in HRT. And that was, my, my sights were set on that. And when 9-11 happened, it was a week after my ETS. And how old are you now? 21. So you're 21 years old.

You get out on September 3rd? September 3rd is when I left the Army. Okay. So then what do you do? So September 11th comes. Now you're freaking, you got to be going berserk. I'm freaking out.

Like when September 11th happened, I was in the National Guard, and I knew the nasty guard was going to get mobilized. And I'm like, I'm not going to war with these dudes. No offense to the National Guard, but I'm like, I'm not going to war with these dudes. I immediate, like I was at college in the cafeteria, in Fable near Fort Bragg, North Carolina,

when this happened, I went home and threw my battle dress uniform in the washer and started packing my stuff, because I'm like, we're going to war, this is it. And immediately I started making phone calls, and they're like, you ain't doing nothing, man. Nothing's going on with us right now. Stand by to stand by. And I'm like,

I have to make moves. So I started reaching out to recruiters and very rapidly got back in the military and went straight to selection. Went straight to green bracelet. Was it hard to get to go straight to selection? There must have been lines out the door at that point. Impossible.

I was a 20-year-old D-5. I mean, I made Sergeant at 20 years old, Airborne Ranger qualified with a Tomb Guard badge, and when I showed up to the recruiter, he looked at me like I was a 16-year-old kid who wanted to play Army. And I was like, is this not a thing? And at that time, they hadn't even worked out

this whole thing where guys who were prior servers come back in and serve. And I'm like, dude, I just got out last week. And he's like, sorry, man, you've got to start over. And so I'm duck walking barefoot with a whole bunch of teenagers Trying to get back in the Army Oh, because you had to go back through like the recruiting process or whatever? Very beginning.

I mean, I didn't have to go to basic AIT. I had a Ranger Tab, so I didn't have to do any of that stuff. But I had to go back through the Army and processing system called 30th AG From the beginning. I mean, I'm duck walking. I actually went to the recruiting station, which is called MEPs, is where they didn't process you in military uniform. And I remember they brought us in the room

and everybody stripped down. And guys are looking at me in, I'm battle dress uniform stripping down and they're like, what is this dude doing? Like, isn't he a recruiter? Like, what is happening? And I'm, you know, in my boxer briefs like everybody else, duck walking,

doing all my little drills to get back in the army. And then you go straight to selection from there. So I went through a program, basically an 18 X-ray program. And I had to try out where special operations preparation course. They evaluate like they did a meeting in a ranger school and said,

hey, is this kid, is there a probability that he's going to be successful? Let's evaluate him in Land Nav, let's ruck him, let's PT him. And if he's good, we'll give him a slot. So that's prep, you just said? Prep.

It's basically the preparation for giving guys slots to go to selection, because they just don't want to throw you into selection and have you fail. They're setting you up for success. And so I quickly evaluate. waited and they're like hey the steed's ready let's send him now how long is that little evaluation a week okay yeah it's not straightforward and then you go to selection and selection

this initial selection is only a few weeks long right um went out to selection it was 21 22 days yeah a few weeks and this is just sort of um weeding people out yeah and seeing and making sure you want to be there yeah i mean at the time you had to have and you had to have three years in the Army. So you're talking about experience, typically NCOs, not commission officers, or junior listed guys who have experienced in the military. And you show up, it's a week of assessment, land nav, all these gates to make sure that you're good to go. And then it's team week. It's basically a little mini version of Hell Week. And then they do the long range movement. The long range movement is what gets everybody. It's the land navigation leading into a long

range movement where they assess your ability as an individual to learn a skill set and then in the wood line alone execute that skill set to be successful and that skill set is just land naf land yeah it's our tritter it's like you guys is water we use land and um hey can you hump for a long period of time duration day night and keep moving and can you find your points and just like the water there's a lot of people who can't you know it's just crazy I mean it's it to me it's like walking there's very primal and a lot of people fail yeah yeah you put that rucksack on it's not quite walking anymore yes yeah it sucks the life out of you for sure what about the first i've always found like the first 17 minutes with a ruck on i'm always like oh yeah i remember this shit yeah where your body starts to warm

up and everything hurts and then you start moving i i've always been a good rucker that's always been my strength and so i'd never had a hard time with ruck and my feet were hard my back was good so I didn't have a difficult time with selection but what I saw is a lot of guys weren't prepared for that level and duration of movement

and it just broke them down. What are you doing a day? In that selection where you did what a week of rucking what do you think you're doing a day? On average 6 to 10 kilometers per movement per gate so you know it depends like you start that whole entire process

Here's the philosophy behind it is we're going to start moving you and get you on your feet. And then we'll give you an 18-mile or a 20. I think the average is a 20-something plus miler. And so you're broke when you start. And then we'll move you for a long period of time and see, it's all a test on preparation, by the way. It has nothing to do with the actual assessment. It has everything to measure whether or not you've prepared in advance. And so what they want is the guys who've prepared in advance.

And so at one point for the long range movement, which is 30, probably 30 plus miles over a period of 24, 48 hours, you're nonstop moving. And if you bed down for a period of time and you sit down to eat chow and rack out and you're not timing yourself appropriately, you just fail. And so you have to meet these gates, but it's all on your own. And that jacks up people's minds. When somebody comes into a room and writes down exactly where you've got to be what you know, you got to be in and what time you're moving. That independence and setting off with no destination of mine, hey, students, I want you to get ready, get your ruck on, you're going to move until we tell you to stop.

That immediately destroys people's mindset out the gate because they're like, what do you mean? So they go out the gate, they start sprinting and they don't pace themselves and they burn themselves out. Or they're so insecure with the circumstance, they impose, they self-induce all the stress, and then they quit. and you're like, you're self-selecting because you don't have the

the exact parameters of what you're going to be doing. That's how war is. I mean, war is, hey, we might be flexing all night. We might be flexing all year. Who knows? And that uncertainty in a lot of people breaks people down. And they ring out or whatever.

What do they do? How do you quit in selection? So in selection, in periods of time, you go back to your barracks. And when I went to selection, it was a piece of plywood. no pillow and you have a bunk that has no pad, nothing, nothing comfortable.

You go to sleep in the morning and you'll wake up and half of your entire crew that you went to bed with is gone. And you're like, what? And so what people are doing is getting up, they're leaving, knocking on the hut and there's self-selecting. Like literally saying, I'm done. I'm out. You have to voluntarily withdraw in order, and have a conversation in order to check on a selection. Yeah, there's something I've always found about being out in the field and humping specifically. There's two things that come to mind.

And I've been talking about this lately from just like a leadership perspective. And just my own personal mindset is I'm very aware of time. I'm very aware of time. I can always feel time creeping up on me. I can always feel time like people think, oh, we'll be able to make it. We can rest a little longer. And I always had that sense that, actually, no, we're not going to make it. In fact, we need to leave now if we're going to make it.

Or we're sitting there trying to come up with a plan. I say, you know what, we need to start moving forward. We can't spend any more time plan. It's time to go. I always had that sense of time. And I still do. And it's almost a level of paranoia. It's something that always is in the front of my heads-up display, right?

My heads-up display is always going, hey, wait, check your time, check your time, check your time. But that reminds me of being out on patrols where they're, Total dick dragger patrols where you're carrying a shit ton of weight and you're going really far and You still got to get to the target on time and and the The intrinsic motivation that it takes because once you sit down you take that load off and you see the guys all freaking Sitting in a crappy perimeter and just there they'll sit there they'll sit there Indefinitely like like you take a platoon out and and and they've gotten their they've been crushed for a five, six, seven hour patrol, they won't get up

unless you're like, hey, boys, we got to go. And if you don't do that, if somebody doesn't do that, somebody doesn't say, hey, guys, it's time to get up and go. There's no, there will be no movement will happen. They'll, they'll not hit that target. They'll be, hey, we couldn't make the target. That's what will happen. People accept that. Like, yeah, you know what? And, and so having that having that intrinsic will to say look at your watch and go, you know what? We said 10 minute break. It's been nine minutes. Hey boys, get ready to roll. That's a big deal. That's a big deal. Yeah. I think part of the, you know, like you say, discipline is freedom. Part of that freedom is control that you have, self-control. If you understand what you have to do to be disciplined

to make gates, to meet time hacks, then you have control. You're offensive. You're thinking proactively. And a lot of guys don't have the discipline to do that. It's it's, it's, it's, a real crazy to see that something so simple, a task, so common core can weed the masses and evaluate who's going to succeed with a combination of aptitude and discipline versus who's not. Yeah. And like you just said, what it really boils down to is when you're tired, when you're sore, and when you don't know how much longer this is going to last, do you have what it takes to put your ruck back on, stand up, and start walking again. That's it.

Yeah. You wouldn't think it's something that, that freaking simple. So simple. So primal, too. So you get through selection, and then you hit the Q course? Hit the Q course as an 18 Bravo, Special Forces weapons guy, going to third Special Forces group. Any highlights out of the Q course?

No, I think, you know, in the, lead in talking about JFK and the representation of how we wanted to establish this irregular and unconventional means of warfare. I learned that truly from the long duration that I was in the Q course. I went to Robin Sage merely weeks after Robin Sage, after that experience. I was living that training in Afghanistan and a remote fire base. So Robin Sage, which is an exercise basically living unconventional warfare in an environment which is Rockingham, North Carolina, the surrounding area where all the civilians are subcontractors and bought into this whole thing, this elaborate scenario was so impactful for me. I mean, it's crazy.

Yeah. So just to give a little background on this. So the mission of the Green Berets of special forces is to go out and work with indigenous forces, get them trained up, get them organized so that they can fight by themselves or with very little guidance from the from the special forces and eventually with no guidance at all that's the that's the mission so the the you guys do this big exercise it's sort of is it like the final exercise that you do yeah pretty much yeah and it's called robin sage and you go out and you have quote indigenous forces which is really just the local populace inside this town and you have to train them and you have to work with them and You have to get information from them and set up targets in the whole nine yards

because that's what the primary mission of special forces is to go do that. Yeah, it's by way through. It's foreign internal defense. It's been newly coined counterterrorism foreign internal defense based on the wars that we're in now. But it's the idea of you have to build relationships and rapport with indigenous people with forces. You just can't go and do deliberate actions only. You know, SR, DA, HR, those things are complementary to a strategic plan. The strategy is we have to win the hearts and minds.

So when I went to Robin Sage, you had West Pointers, like junior West Pointers. We had role players from the military that are interweaved in this scenario where you can't just go into this circumstance and treat them with a military mind. You have to break bread with them. You have to drink tea with them. You have to learn about their family and build this relationship. because you have to trust these guys on target. And so that's what I really took away from Robin Sage

was this opportunity to learn and grow and culture and then build that relationship, which meant we're building a bond where we could fight side by side and the with portion of it and find and fix and finish these bad guys together empowering the host nation that we're doing warfare with. That's super important because of the translation of going into,

to war was exactly that with the circumstance with Afghanistan at the time. And, you know, like I, one of the scenarios I built conduit in a chicken coop and a chicken house for six hours with this guy. And I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, dude, what's going? Like, what are we doing right now? Are we just, are we actually just doing a tasking and just hooking this dude up because it's, we got tasks to do this? And then at the end of that six hours, we heard a noise.

And I'm like, it's all coming together. We ran in the woods, put our M4s together out of our backpack, and ambushed these two dudes who were interrogating and bullying this farmer. And I'm like, this is so awesome. I mean, it's the long, it's a long burn, but it was so awesome as an experience. And then you, so you get done with QC, anything else in Q-Course stands out? Not survival school. I mean, survival school got my ass handed to me.

I mean, it's the first time that I, I mean. How long is the survival school? It's pretty long. I mean, it's probably a few weeks. weeks when I went through was like escape like a survival block. Yeah, it's Sear C, the high risk C version, which you guys have gone through. And then, you know, you escape, you evade, and then you go into the RTL and just get your ass handed to you. And, and again, you learned very rapidly that we're not all created equal

in our capacity to deal with stress. And I dealt fine with it. I mean, I grew up fighting. I grew up in martial arts. I grew up doing all these things, which set me up for success there to go, hey man, this is an exercise, learn from this experience. Wait, what martial arts did you grow up in? Nynjitsu. Straight up Nynjitsu.

Who wants some? Dude, my first instructors were all green berets at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who opened a ninjitsu school, active and former SF guys. And it was gangster. We were doing stuff. Like my mom once.

Wait, did you have them shoes? with the toe cut out. Oh, yeah. Oh, look at you. You're like, hell, yeah. Shurikins, I had all the, friekin throatas. Yeah, you were just getting it.

It was crazy. I was wondering who was buying all that stuff out of the back of freaking, oh, black belt magazine. I had the catalog. It was, it was, it was, I had all the red knives, all the, it was crazy. It was a, it was a cool experience

because my guys that were the instructors were all green berets. And so they, like you do, like a lot of guys with our experiences do, try to impart those experiences and impact on young people. And so they were doing the same with me. So I felt like I was mentored by these green berets.

Once I went to do a class, and my mom dropped me off, and for my mom to be paying for this course is a big deal. She dropped me off, and she saw the instructor put me in front of a mirror. And she came back an hour and 10 minutes later, and I was still standing in front of the mirror. And she was pissed off because she's like,

I'm paying for my son. Why are you doing? Why are you only having them stand there? It's like it's an assessment and I stared at myself for an hour in meditation. I'm like what the hell. I learned a lot about myself in that hour. It's crazy. All right.

So back to back to did you did wait before we go there? Did you guys fight each other in ninja to school? A lot. It was aggressive. A lot of dudes got hurt. It was just I think it was a lot before. What years was this? 93, 94.

I don't see UFC is just coming out. Yeah. People were, this is during the revolution. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It was a lot of, I mean, there were jujit. I mean, ninjitsu has, in this Japanese form, has a lot of traditional jujitsu type moves on the ground, but it's not ground game.

It's like a move. Yes. It's a singular move. It's a singular move. That's the problem. That is the problem. That's an inherent problem with that. And so I learned a lot about discipline from that experience, but it made me harder.

So when I went to survival school, I was just, prepped, man. That was good. And it wasn't a difficult thing, but I saw dudes fall apart. And when I went to survival school, it was the last thing that you did in the Q course. If you failed, you failed everything. You just spent two years of your life training to be a green bray and they let dudes go. How many people fail that? We'd have a couple per class. I mean, it was, it was common to have a couple per class that would self-select and they'd be like, I'm done. You're like, you just did two years training. What's making them quit? The stress, man. Well, it's stressful. Well, I mean, getting a, like, even just a hood, like people aren't used to taking, if you, if you don't grow up in those martial arts, if you don't grow up in impact sports and not used to making contact, when that hood comes off your head and you get slapped by dudes hands who are like pickle fingers, McGee, and he slaps your face and you can't do anything, that starts breaking you down. And by, you know, day two of that experience, you know, laying naked in your cell, flex cuff in a box.

a lot of guys self-select. I thought it was, I was into claustrophobia. I like being in small places. I hid, I slept, and I was like, this is awesome. Just keep me into this box. Man, I got slapped so hard when I got captured at Sears School. It surprised me. Yeah.

Like, it was, I mean, this guy is freaking out of nowhere. The hood comes off. I'm standing up against a wall. It's out in the middle of the woods and they have like a wall. And I think it's almost like a Hollywood wood wall where it when you get pushed into it it kind of gives a little bit yeah yeah so he pushed me into it once and like whatever i must have had some kind of punk ass freaking smirk on my face like whatever and this dude did not like it at all and he cracked me i mean i'm talking as hard as a human

being can i mean i've been punched in the face it was like that but his hand happened to be open and i i got the little uh got the little flash and i was like oh damn this is real i was like yeah and And believe me, that was, that was number one because he followed that one up. Yeah, but I, like you, I can't imagine that that would have made me quit. But I guess if someone's not used to, you know, maybe scrapping and whatnot. That's it. It's not a lot of people quit.

Not really for them. Yeah, I had, well, the interesting thing in the psychology was you're playing, you have to be resistant, right? The whole game is you're resistant. I remember we were building in the sand a sick. that represented the communist, you know, scenario. And we were building the sickle, and half of us were sabotaging the sickle, so guys would make it.

And I remember I had a guy who I highly respected, he was a platoon sergeant in the infantry, had gone through training with me. I was scooting all the stuff out after they were building it, knocking it over, and he turned around and he walked to me, goes, what are you doing? I'm like, what do you mean when I'm doing?

I'm like, dude, I, like, worked an hour on that. I'm like, wait a minute, you realize that we're supposed to be subverting this whole circumstance. Like you're not supposed to actually be making this. And he's like, oh. And he was in the scenario, man. Freaking bridge on the river Kwai. Oh, dude, it was insane. Some of these guys were like the headlights.

I mean, it was, they had the deer in the headlights look. And they thought for real they were in the back country of Vietnam. I mean, it was, it was crazy. It was crazy to see. But cool, cool experience. Dang, get, go ahead. What kind of claustrophobia stuff did they? A lot of it was, um, this, this guy right here is kind of claustrophobic.

Yeah, we've been working with them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exposure is the way to deal with that. But it's, they had, I mean, it was, it was very, um, tight secluded spaces where you couldn't sit down on your butt and you couldn't stand up all the way. So you're in an uncomfortable stress position. And then they would close the box on you and turn off the lights. Um, and then they play the music.

like crying babies, all kinds of different stuff. And a lot of people, they would transfer you into different boxes based on your fear. So if they saw the fear coming out of you, they were exploiting that fear. They're like, oh, this dude in a big box is getting scary. Let's put them in a small box. And so it varied from small boxes to big boxes,

but that jacked up a lot of people. I mean, it was significant. And then how long do you have to stay in there? So a long time. You lose track of time because you're sleep deprived. Here's one story. Thinking I was a smart guy, I was like, similarly, I have to piss right now, but I had to piss really bad. And so I'm like, if I piss in this box, they're going to hook me up.

I can't piss in this box. So this is my, I'm thinking logically, I think. And I'm like, this is completely logical. Wait, so hook me up is a bad thing. Like, like pull me out of the thing and slap my face off my face. And I'm like, look, I'll piss in my boot. And then I'll take it outside and we're in the gravel. I'll dump the piss off.

Forgetting about this whole thing called displacement, right? I pee in my boot. I take off my boot. You don't have socks. You're naked. Get these bare pajamas on. I fill my boot with piss. And then I'm like, okay, I got it in here.

I feel good. It's not all over the thing. And then I put my foot back in the boot. Damn. And then it goes everywhere. And I'm like, and then immediately, cursed me like that was a horrible idea and so I'm standing in piss and then my foot my naked foot is covered in piss and I'm like dude that did not work out I had a plan that was not how

I thought I was going to execute it was horrible man yeah it's funny because as you were thinking about that or you were talking about that and then when you asked that question echo you know there's some look I don't know if this is some um you know just straight up Sam Harris meditation type scenario, but you get your brain where you just aren't there anymore. You're just like, cool, you want to put me in the box? Cool. And you're sitting there and you're thinking about freaking whatever, Kentucky fried chicken and lemonade and you're just in a totally different world.

And you don't know if it's been an hour or five hours. And you're getting slapped. It's like, cool, whatever. Like whatever they're going to do to you, you just sort of, and it's the same thing what we were talking earlier about hump and a rock. It's like, okay, look, there's just, I'm not, the pain is there, but it's like somewhere else. Like, it's almost like you're watching it happen and you kind of can be like,

yeah, whatever. Hey, keep going. Yeah, completely. You're, you're sedated, man. You're just going with the flow. It's similarly to, I think about when you accept at some point when you're in water that you're just going to pass out and you accept that. You're like, I'm okay with that.

That bridging that gap and just accepting it is the first part in being successful in that environment and then you like you create your new happy place where you're like man as long as I'm in my head and I have this space that I'm comfortable with I'm good you could do whatever you want yeah yeah if you are present in the shit that you're going through yeah that's got a suck I can't even I can barely even relate to it because I think eventually you just get good at being like okay cool whatever that's what we're doing cool whatever I can't it's got a real that's what that's you know what that when I start thinking about what makes someone quit it's because they're present in that shit that's going down.

They're actually in it. And not only they in it, they're looking at the future going. It's just more shit in the future. So, oh, this is horrible. And forget it. I'm going to ring out. Yeah. It's that fear response.

It's the contemplation of impending doom. You're just thinking about the next thing that's coming. And then your whole life is all these little small progresses of like, doomsday, doomsday. It's like, dude, I'm on the beach drinking a pinocalada, eating a piece of chicken right now. I'm living my best life in my head, and I'm good. You must have learned some of that, the tomb situation,

because that stuff doesn't sound fun to me. I would rather go through Sears School 20 times right now than do uniform inspections. I would rather do that as well. I would take the tomb taught me about self-awareness and being present within my own mind and developing this relationship with the conscious voice in my head, but also like this passive observer,

this person who's kind of observing the narration of the voice in my head and sitting back and like measuring all these inputs. Because when you're standing still for 21 seconds at a time before you take 21 steps, repeating at times an hour for a long walk during the winter hours, times four to six walks a day, you have to get real good at being comfortable with yourself.

Is there a facing movement in there? There is. So it's, you face Washington, D.C., 21 seconds. Face down the mat, 21 seconds, walk 21 steps and repeat for the entire duration. And it's one hour? One hour and seven minutes with the walk and the guard change. How often would you be in total autopilot where you'd get done and be like, oh, that was...

Constantly. Jack. Constantly. You know that it's referred to as the flow state? You're completely in a flow state because you're... What I like about you, you're talking about time. Time has always been an important metric. In fact, we should probably look at it more closely

because that relationship with time, I think, sets and establishes these gates and disciplines for your whole life, the structure of your life, right? When I was a tomb guard, one thing that you had a train to do is count 21 seconds exactly, and then turn into face for 21 seconds and get this rhythmed and cadence down. But when you got into that flow state,

it was unconscious. So now I'm just on autopilot and I'm in a meditative state. There's times that I came off the mat after an hour walk and feeling like the best I've ever felt, like super calm, super relaxed, super focused. And like I was doing meditation

in my own headspace. That translated throughout all of the uncomfortable, even experiences and gunfights and everything else I did in my life, created a structure in my head for being comfortable in my own head in physical stress in my environment. Sometimes when I do jiu-jitsu,

I don't really know what happened for the last hour. Yeah. Like I'm just like, how did you get that? And I don't remember getting anything. And I remember early on in my seal career, like entering a room and shooting some targets and then all of a sudden be like, wait a second, there I put my weapon on safety,

and not wanting to draw any attention to myself because I don't want anyone to see that. I don't have my weapon. but my weapon was on safe. And I did it without, and then, you know, did it absolutely without thinking about it. And that was pretty early, you know?

And eventually you're just like doing this like a freaking robot that's just executing. Yeah, that high level, I mean, it's theta and alpha and these wavelengths of like this neurological consciousness. When you're in that alpha state and you're taking that information, it's similar to like when you're in a shower

or on a drive and all these thoughts come to you, this creativity comes to you. Those things happen in that flow state because you're streaming information. And that's when you're most, I think when you're at your best, right? It's when you're flowing in CQB and everything comes together and you're like,

what just happened? Like we were just objective secure in 17 seconds. How did that happen? I barely remember anything, but I was so conscious because you're in that alpha state of flow. It's an amazing state to be in. And I think very rare for people to find

these days with the distractions they have. You wrap up the Q course. The last thing you do is Robin Sage, working with, you know, role-playing in Ditch. And then you said you're almost immediately in Afghanistan. Right out the gate, deploy with Third Special Forces Group on a Mountain Team, and then do nine months in Afghanistan a remote firebase, just right off the gate, right off the gate, during Operation Red Wing.

My company was involved in Red Wings. When I got to a team, it was the traditional Green Beret mission. We're going to put you in a remote firebase on the, border of Afghanistan and Pakistan as an 18 Bravo at 150 Afghan soldiers that weren't even soldiers this is before Afghan National Army was even stood up and solidified especially in our region of a Nuristan province and we trained assisted and advise these guys made them Afghan special forces guys and started conducting operations in Nuristan what kind of operations were you conducting

movement to contact. We did SR, Special Reconnaissance. We did DA, a lot of training, and a lot of getting attacked. I mean, we got attacked every other day

in the remote location that we're in. We're the furthest northern firebase beyond J-bad, beyond Asadabad, in a firebase called Nare, right on the border, surrounded by the Hindu Kush. I mean, we were at the bottom of that bowl.

So rockets and direct attacks almost every other day. And so we did a lot of direct, you know, react to contact, immediate action drills and a lot of patrols. I mean, we drove up and down one MSR that went to paracout and, you know, eventually ended up in Chitral, Pakistan and conducted a whole bunch of air ops and ground ops in that area. Was this like a traditional ODA team of 10 or 12 guys? 12 guys with a small contingent of civil affairs for a period of time,

one combat controller, and a fire base two hours from air and JABAD. So as remote as you can get. I mean, we were self-sustained. I learned a lot even fast-forwarding with how I teach survival and sustaining oneself and what we call just homestead as we teach it. about how you have to take care of yourself because you don't have the opportunity

in those remote circumstances to depend on any kind of assets. I mean, a snowstorm in that area would shut us down for a week at a time where we get no air support. No air support, no CASs, no resupply, no Medivac platforms. So we are solely dependent on the men

and their skill sets that they have based on their experiences. That's freaking sketchy. It was the Wild West. The greatest time I had in SF to be honest. We didn't have a flagpole. We had simple 5Ws

for a con-up submissions. It was a good time. And did you realize that while you were doing it? I did. I had the introspect. I mean, I remember when I showed up and we landed at

$10,000 plus feet of elevation and I was pissing mellow yellow. I mean, I was like, dude, this is insane. And I look, I remember standing in the middle of my firebase. We were along Konaar River, very small base.

I mean, I could throw a football and hit every gate. I remember looking around going, well, this is my home for almost a year. Get comfortable with this because this is how it's going to be. And immediately transforming and using those cultural tactics and building relationships, but getting comfortable with time. Because I didn't know when we were going to get out.

I didn't know if we were going to survive. We lost a lot of guys. That rotation, Operation Red Wing had happened. So there was a whole bunch of cert. circumstances that happened during that trip where I'm like, dude, this might be it. I mean, this is a pretty hot circumstance. Are you going to get out of this? Stop thinking about that.

It's like the character in Bander Brothers, the officer who said, you know, who's basically is walking dead, just accept the fact that you're going to be killed. I had those kind of moments going, this is it, man. We're focused on the mission. And it changed a lot of how I, what I assumed at war in practice and how it executed in real life. A lot of it was theory and confidence. concepts and didn't necessarily translate what I discovered.

What was the delta between the two? The biggest thing was my relationship in the ODA was teaching tactics and creating a base defense plan. And so the doctrine told me to do specific things that didn't work in our environment. So you had a base defense plan, for example, where I would exercise my guys and say, hey, I want you to hit the walls, hit the roof, be prepared for that direct attack. Well, that's the dumbest tactic when you're receiving one. 107 millimeter rockets that have a kill radius of 100 yards.

And so you put dudes on the roof, which I did myself on the first direct attack, got on the roof with a 240 machine gun. And I'm like, dude, what am I? And I'm getting, and we, a 107 screamed over me, my 18 Charlie, my engineer, and impacted a fuel blivet behind us and exploded. And I'm like, what am I doing? And also, in practice, you could immediate action to death what it's like to react to contact with small arms.

But how do you react to contact when it's a 107 millimeter rocket, when it's an 81 millimeter mortar? All of the things that you prepare for change rapidly when that kind of ordinance and munitions and firepower come to bear completely changes everything.

So I'm like, oh, this isn't like running through the wood line in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. This is a little bit different. And so that changed my perspective on a doctrinal, conventional answer and solution. versus being creative and coming up with new ways and tactics as you evolve at the speed of war.

Did you guys have any counter battery or anything like that? None. Did you have mortars? I had one 20 millimeter motors. I mean, nightly that I would go out and we'd be dropping on point of origin sites, on poo sites. But that's all we had. The biggest weapon systems we had were munitions and caches that we found and caches that we found. where we took them and turned them around on bad guys.

We bought a Mark 21, 107 millimeter pod. We get one rocket from the bad guy. The sit rep would read ODA 366-6mm response with 57-107-millimeter rockets. 106 millimeter recordless rifles. We had mounted to ATVs. We had RPGs that we carried with us in backpacks, and we were using Chinese-made 120s

to respond and react to contact. So it was truly, I think, a significant green beret fire base mission. You ever seen the movie Heat before? Yeah. This makes me think about, this is the second time I've thought about in recent times, but you know, like,

the cop is telling, the cop is saying, hey, you can make mistakes, or no, I can make mistakes, it doesn't matter if I catch you or not. Like, I'm going to go home at night. Yeah. You make one mistake,

it's game over. Yeah. And that's what I think of, you know, the enemy in that situation, they don't have to take very big risks at all. They can lob shit at you from wherever, and they just have to get lucky one time to get a guy. Yeah. Yeah.

And you've got to be vigilant all the time, and you've got to keep your guard up all the time. And even if you keep your guard up all the time, you're still just exposed just by the nature of the fact that you're in a valley surrounded by indirect fire or direct fire in terms of rockets. Yeah. Yeah.

Our strategy in that Firebase was a test bed for creativity. We built a mosque. Like I physically build a mosque with my hands. My ODA, brick by brick, helped build a mosque. Why? Because we wanted to build rapport with having a place of worship inside of our firebase for Afghans, but it also deterred indirect fire because no terrorists wanted to be responsible for dropping a mosque in the middle. of an American firebase.

Like we had to think outside the box. And we truly were set up almost for failure in that circumstance, but every firebase had to hold its territory. Before VSO, where village stabilization operations, where you're setting up in the actual village, the idea of firebases derived from obviously from Vietnam era, from John Strachan Meyer era of, hey, let's go out, set out these bases and establish a presence. And so we were present and the bad guys knew about it. And it was a sharp learning curve, steep learning curve to say the least.

Where are you getting food from? Typically, initially we were flying it in until we started getting creative. We built a bread house where we were making footbread, Afghan footbread in the middle of our firebase. Then we started procuring goats and sheep and then slaughtering them and eating them and then rice. And we were getting supplies from Pakistan. because it was right across the border and bringing it in to make actually good mills versus the Mermite child that was garbage.

It was disgusting. Did you take any casualties from all those attacks? Yeah, I mean, we've had wounded in action. We killed in action on our company. We, you know, during the mid-range, which was, we just had the anniversary of Operation Red Wings, which was the 28th of June. We got hit up for that mission task with that.

Camp Vance, which was in Bogram, kind of assembled the quick reaction force that eventually went out and lost one of the birds, the MH-47s that were shot down. So we did QRF for that, did some big operations in what coat you valley near Barakout, and took casualties. We lost to MH-47 during that trip. Pretty expensive bird.

But it was overall as a good trip I mean our fire bases were successful in disrupting the enemy But we just started over man The detriment to Warfare is this vicious cycle And when you take a playbook and you plan the playbook But you don't put in the same continuity pieces To establish a long-term relationship

You just start the vicious cycle all over again Every detachment commander Every team sergeant wants their mark in history on that battleground and it doesn't do well long term in warfare which is obviously where the point we're at today I mean pulling out of Afghanistan what'd you do during Red Wing

you were on the recovery op so two of my companies in Asadabad and Jabad south of us got tasked to actually do the rescue of Marcus Atrelle so good buddy of my Kent was the Ground Force commander for that. Two ODAs and then the Rangers went in with some intermittent special operations guys. We got told because of our proximity to the actual site, crash site, to hold fast.

They sent Chinooks to us to be the QRF for the other group. And then the rest of our company, all the other ODAs did the body recovery with battalion. So the whole company was involved in some way. But I sat on an airfield for the entire operation, not doing much. So your leadership lessons on that deployment were, you know, you got to think, you can't follow the doctrine all the time. Yeah. Look, green berets are known to be unconventional and irregular warfare experts and thinking outside the box, this idea of, hey, you're not still and you're acquiring these creative tasks to bear that benefit you on the ground is. This is what I learned about.

I actually learned that, you know, being in a remote firebase in Afghanistan with minimal to no resources at all, you had to come up with solutions. So I learned about establishing problem sets coming up with creative solutions and the path to execution for those, which is a formula that I used in, you know, eight combat rotations later. And you're running a company of 150 Afghans. Yep, yeah, I ran, so I was the, when I went, I was the only Bravo. Typically, you run a junior and a senior. I would have been the junior because I was a young staff sergeant. My senior had surgery, so he couldn't show up until later on in the deployment. My team started came to me like on the first day and he said, hey, there's a formation outside with your guys.

I'm like, my guys. Like, yeah, you got 150 Afghans out there. You're the commander. And I'm like, what? I'm like, Roger that. I go outside. I'm like, guys, let's, let me give you. in brief. We're going to do assessments. I give them the plan. And I have to build rapport with

these dudes. These dudes are looking at me like I'm a child. And I was. I mean, I was a 25 year old child. So they challenged me immediately. One of the guys says to me, Mike, they want to know if you're a good shooter. And I said, well, what does that assessment look like? You know, well, what they like to do, and I'm like, okay, so this has been done before. What they like to do is take a piece of bubble gum rapper and they delaminated it and they put a one inch square at 25 yards on the target and they said whoever gets closer whoever's closer wins but then you earn our respect i'm like did you guys watch a movie man is this like is this the thing because i don't i don't remember seeing this anywhere and like it's it's part of their traditional like okay cool so we get in the prone and i said so it's rifle

it's rifle it's rifle AK 47 so but no red dot iron sights and i don't even know the point of aim or impact on this gun there's no dope on Oh, it's a random AK. Random AK. So I say to the guy, I said, this is the same weapon that you shoot at the circus, at the little red star. Exactly.

Exactly. Notching the star out of the County Fair. So he sits down and he's a well-respected, Neustan. These guys look like me. I mean, I look like I belong in that tribe. And they're all Chinese-influenced. And so they all got the Asian eyes.

And so rapport initially right off the bat is like accepted, but I have to prove myself. So this guy gets down the prone And he takes a shot And we go up and inspect it And he's like an inch off of the pasty So I'm thinking in my head He's holding it

And he's shooting it But he's a little bit high And at 25 yards flashed a bang Not much change at muzzle velocity At 25 yards So I'm thinking Let me just aim at the base of this thing So I put my

I lollipop this one inch pasty And I break a shot And it goes through The piece And I try to contain my excitement because I'm like yeah and I want to be like yeah what's up but I knew it was part of the this whole story this journey so I go up there and they they bust out and they're like yeah my god and they're so excited and from that moment it's like I was their commander and we have this

relationship where I train them every single day I broke bread with them every single day and it was a beautiful thing man I felt like I had a company worth of valuable human beings who would lay down their life. And when I found out later, and this is, this is in hindsight looking back and talking to different guys, when I left, I had those Afghan commandos. I handed them over to another ODA. When third group came back in, they rotated in and there was a guy by the name of Rob, I can't remember, Rob something. I can't remember his name. It's horrible. I can't remember his name. And he rotated in with him as the 18 Bravo. So when he gets in that position, He starts grooming these guys and they're telling stories of that circumstance.

So as this evolves later in the war, I find out that one of the guys that we had from third group that was killed posthumously in a gun fight running uphill with a machine gun, gets killed, earns the Medal of Honor and dies fighting side by side with these same guys. In fact, some of those guys that I trained were killed in that. action where a third group guy won the medal, earned the Medal of Honor, sacrificed his life, but those Afghans died on that same hilltop running uphill against an enemy machine gun nested position. And I'm like, dude, I mean, you know, you look for all the light and darkness. And I'm like, man, that means the world to me that maybe I had an impact on these men that stood side by side and fought uphill and that that truly meant a lot and so those guys um you earn their respect you operate with them but when I left him it was I felt like the end of the world and you know

you talk to guys like John Strachar Meyer that's a common theme it's something that we're not very good at in fact we're pretty horrible at and now of course you must be kind of sick to your stomach seeing that we're pulling out and those guys will either be rounded up and killed or they'll join the Taliban because that's what they got to do to stay alive? More likely all the intel has been leaked already. They already know who they are and they have their target deck built. And right now, I mean, if you look at all the different places, especially the remote places of Afghanistan,

which is very tribal, very geographically regionally, they're already taken over. I mean, they'll have the estimates from the experts is in the next six months, Bogram and Kenar will fall to the Taliban. if not sooner because there was a formal agreement, a diplomatic agreement, that means they're supposed to take over in some capacity anyway,

but what that means to the rest of the men that we fought off all over the country, all these guys will be rolled up and more likely executed, which is a, it's a damn shame. Yes, hearing some reports that the Taliban would go to, you know, some of these villages or whatever and send a note into the police chief and say, hey man, yeah, it's over.

you can get on board or we're going to kill you and kill your family. And the police chief or whatever local Afghan leaders, like, Roger that, you know, I'm on board. And that's that. Yeah. Those guys, just like in Iraq, just like I've experienced in Yemen, in Pakistan, in Africa, it's a vicious cycle that doesn't stop. And we don't learn those lessons.

But I don't know the answer. I don't know the solution. I mean, making them citizens. and taking the fighting force that's the most capable human beings there and doing that? I don't know what the answer is, but it's a horrible thing

that I know is transpire likely right now. So you get done with that deployment? Yeah, get done with Afghanistan, immediately come back and go to Sephardic, which is our version of Advanced CQB, Hase's Rescue, to be aligned with the DA company. You know, when I work with the Seals in 06-07, all the latter rotations,

It was mostly with a company called the commander in extremist force, which has now been renamed the Crisis Response Force, which has been recoined a deep underground unit for tunnels and stuff. So get part of that unit, which our focus is DA, SR, HR, and get through Sephardic, no problems, and get immediately reassigned to the commanders in extremist force, which is hopping on a plane the next, month to go down range.

How long were you home for? Four months. Home for four months. And how long was that deployment to Afghanistan? Nine months total. Yeah. So nine months, get back, do Sephardic for two months, and then got about a month and a half before we burn out for Iraq for Baghdad.

Have you like gotten married or anything at this point? Yeah. I actually got about that. I actually got married right before this rotation. Okay. And in a courthouse, my grandmother, passed away at that same time period, didn't get a lot of time to have any kind of anything with the family,

and then we were turning and burning for Iraq. Four months home, and now what's this deployment? So this is now your first deployment to Iraq? First deployment to Iraq, yeah. Going down range and CT is the... And this is 06. 06, yeah. And so you ended up working in Baghdad?

In Baghdad. Yeah, Baghdad International Airport. Yeah. We were at Camp, not Camp, man, it's Area 4. Okay. Yeah, so we staged at Area 4. Had a couple of mission sets, you know, working with Iraqi counterterrorism forces, working with task force as a unilateral force,

and then working with the ERU, which is the emergency response unit, the equivalent of the FBI HART that prosecutes targets in Iraq. Iraqi. That's an Iraqi unit. Iraqis. Just for everybody to know. Yeah.

So the ICTF is an Iraqi unit. they are an Iraqi unit, the ER, was it ERU? Yeah, EURU is an Iraqi unit and then occasionally given support to some American units that are out there doing hits. Yeah, almost acting like the Mike Force until, you know, the Mike Force strike unit until we get there and we started doing joint operations with NavSoft and then the SIF.

So it's like a couple guys from my SIF company, which was B23, the third group SIF, working hand in hand with six or seven guys from a Silbatun. And we would go out. And at the time, they weren't doing operations with Americans because a company, a contracted company was training them, but they weren't advising them, but they weren't doing counterterrorism operations. So we actually took over and started doing the first counterterrorism operations

with them side by side using our assets to bear, but doing the true CT for an internal defense mission. So you're rolling out hitting targets. Hitting targets. Every night. It's basically what this book. smashing targets every night. I mean, our PDSS, our pre-deployment site survey,

we got in a gunfight and killed dudes in our PDSS. So we were like, it's going to be a hot year. And that was a year you were there as well. Yeah, I was over in Ramada. You guys were down in Baghdad, and you were working alongside some of the guys I was with. Well, that I knew over there. Just basically nightly ops.

Reverse cycle nightly ops. We had a cycle of red amber green. You're training dudes. Even if you're training dudes, you're probably gunning on trucks or acting as a machine gunner on halves on helicopters or assaults. But every single night we're prosecuting targets, sometimes two, three targets a night, depending on what was going on. So we had a target deck. Everybody else in Task Force had a target deck. And at the time, which was in transition for the big surge, we were prosecuting at the time Shia-based targets.

And so Mokthal Soder and his network of shitheads we were going after every night. Were you working mostly in and around Baghdad or all over the country? Pretty much all over the country. I mean, we halved with Navy assets flying us out the 60s. We were using Pavelo or the 53 or we used in Task Force 160th. So Little Bird's 60s, depending on what was going on. It was all over, all over. And what was your specific job?

on this deployment. So I was, I was an assaulter. I mean, in the SIF, I was an assaulter, I was a breacher. I actually was deployed with, at the time, Jeremy Wise. Jeremy Wise was a young East Coast Base Sill team member who wound up getting killed with the CIA as a global response staff officer. He posthumously was awarded the CIA star.

And we were both breaches together. So every night we did breaches. we did unilateral pieces of our op. So a couple Americans like me and another SIF guy and like three or five seals would go out and do our piece. We'd hit one building. And then the Iraqis we were with would hit another building. So unilateral salters is basically what we were.

It's radically different deployment than what you did in Afghanistan. I mean like not even the same freaking ballpark. Insane. Completely different. I try to use some of the, you know, the similarities where we were training them in the back end. But these guys, if you saw them operating when they're kid,

you would think they're Americans. Like competent, assaulters, snipers, Americans. Yeah, and they had all American gear and weapons because I was telling you, I went over on PDSS and because we were going to go. Actually, if that would have happened, I would have been co-located with you and we would have been running the same op.

We would already know each other. We'd be bros. Yeah, we'd have rolled together. Yeah, we'd have rolled out. But we ended up not going there. We ended up going to Ramadi and said, but yeah, the ICTF and the ERU had like, American issued weapons. They had Night Vision, had everything.

Everything. They had everything. Yeah, they had everything. And they were well trained. Well trained. They had to be the best trained and most reliable Iraqi soldiers by a landslide. Yeah. The combination of the Iraqi counterterrorism force, which we pulled out of Iraq and a Jordan and isolated train, and the ERU that turned into the Emergency Response Battalion were the highest paid, trained, experienced units that eventually took ISIS. These same guys, I lost probably half my fighting force that I worked with over the years against the fight against ISIS in 2014 when we pulled our guys out, and those dudes went to war. I mean, they went to Missoull, they went to Baghdad, they went to Kurdistan, they were fighting in their bill.

They were probably with close air support, meaning the J-TAC piece, were the sole reasons that ISIS doesn't exist in Iraq today. So it was a long road ahead of them. We were just in the beginning stages of it. What did you prefer for the deployment? What did you like doing better? Man, that's a tough question. So different. So different, right?

But in the things that I enjoyed, like overlanding across Afghanistan in the Wild West with not a lot of oversight and just winging it and learning a lot of lessons in that versus that deliberate like land on the X, fast rope on top of the building, and kill bad guys. I enjoy them both. I mean, if I could overland to an objective and fast rope on top of it,

that whole culmination, it'd be perfect, man. I love both of them. And then how long was this deployment to Baghdad? Six months. Yeah. So we were doing six month rotations. Did you guys take any casualties on that deployment?

We did. We took every deployment that we wanted to have taken. We wanted up losing a team guy. So we were working with joint task force, which included Tier 1 units and the Rangers and us and the Navy. You guys were taking casualties. There was EFPs that were affecting guys, gunfights. We took a casualty. One of my guys in my troop was killed.

That rotation, Tung Nguyen was killed. And then a ton of purple hearts, dudes getting in gun fights. It was an active year. was was tongue the first guy that you lost that was in your actual element yeah and that was on my team and my troop first first did um didn't know him great i mean i knew him i was a new guy there but one of the most respected members of that unit i mean he was the guy on the pdss with his long gun who wound up killing like three bad dudes on a pdss i mean who goes td y and kills a few dudes comes back after, you know, getting Intel.

I'm like, you got some intel on target. You know, he was that kind of guy. Vietnamese descent too, so me and him were the only Asians in that group. And he took, he took, he took his job serious. And when he saw me come into the company, he took me under his wing.

And he tried to take care of me. He experienced a salter, belonged to C-1-1, which is the first group, SIF, and did a whole bunch of operations in the Philippines, all over South East. Asia and just a highly respected dude. I mean, just a great guy. And when in how deep into deployment

was that? Man, right out the gate. I mean, it was only a couple months in. We still had four months of that rotation. And then at the end of our rotation was the surge. So we got super hot, super active. Probably some of the closest experiences to death I had in that in that rotation for me personally. From gun fights, from IEDs? Now gun fights. I mean, I was on a, a rooftop in Sauter City once in a sniper overwatch position for a hostage rescue, got pinned down to the roof.

I had a big army sniper team that was with me. That one and a half hour gunfight, small arms, RPGs, water rounds, all in the same gunfight, all on our position. I'll never forget.

I was like, you know, laying on the roof trying to keep my head flat and staying in the fight because we had a retreat option. We could have went down in the, into the building, into the third story that we were on. And I looked over and my buddy Chris, because there's only two of us with a big army sniper unit,

was laying underneath the satellite dish. And we're three stories high. So we're above most of the city, but they're still second and third story buildings inside Sonner City. And he's getting this satellite dish disintegrated over his ass, a couple feet over his butt. And I'm like, oh, these guys are close. They have us dialed in.

And then I looked up in the sky because something caught my attention. I looked up and there was RPGs air bursting above us. And I'm like, this is not good. So we basically started wheylaying bad guys that were squirting into the objective, like trying to infill on containment, and that were breaking contact out of the objective and all black, mighty militia dudes, black pajama kind of guys. And a lot of it was command and control because,

We had CAS. I had control. I had comms with a close air support F-16 that was above us. And we were trying to relay and report all the information, but we were having comms problems. So what lulled that fight, you know, in the long story of it, what lulled that fight was an F-16, because I marked a VS17 panel in the middle of that roof,

came out of its rotation, its orbit, and over 500 feet above our building did a pass and pop fliers. I thought he was going to do a gun run and kill us all because we lost comms. So I popped that Vs 17 and I looked up and he started banking it in and I'm like, I yelled at my combo guy and I'm like, do we have any comms? And he came down and ran the perimeter road, which I think was, used to call it home base where at the base of the leg of Sauter City from home base to third base. He ran that entire road at 500 feet, turned his wind.

You could almost see his face and pop flares. And it lulled the gunfight enough for us to get out, break contact into Bradley's and break contact. Yeah. We killed, I mean, total, during that op, over 100 dudes and got a shutdown for like a month on a solder city. Came a big, I mean, tanks were, tanks were destroying buildings five feet in front of them. Because they were, I mean, they were just getting smashed with RPGs and everything else. Pretty, pretty gnarly gunfight. And that was the, that was the end of your deployment.

in 06? About mid-rotation, that was. That was about mid-rotation. Good times. Then you come back. Do another work-up? Instant work-up, getting ready for a new deployment,

and then we go down range. 0-7's different beast, the height of al-Qaeda. On the tail end of that rotation, the surge begins, the Sunni strategy. They start the sons of Iraq. They start empowering Sunnis.

You know, there's a war, going on between the Sunnis and Shias. And typically it's like, you know, Dick Sauter City versus everybody else in the country. And now the Sunnis are getting supported by the U.S. So we're going to war with Iran-backed Shias. And we get into that rotation. And our task force does a couple of things. They have a mission set where they go, hey, you guys are going to go and do bilateral operations,

working with indigenous guys like ICTF, like ERU. like we talked about. But there's another component our mission set where we work with J-Soc at Joint Task Force. So we were under Joint Task Force

conducting counterterrorism operations hunting HVTs on a deck for J-Soc as part of one of their action arms that whole entire rotation and it was epic. It was one of my best rotations. So this is now 07,

you're back over there? 07, Iraq, yeah. In Baghdad again? Yeah, we're at Fernandez, MSS Fernandez, named after a unit guy that was killed. And you're doing, and you're doing one hit, you're working with the Indig, one night, and then two nights later,

you get a package from J-Soc, and you're going out and hit that target. So we divided our troops. Oh, okay. So my troops just doing unilateral ops. We're just killing that guys. Langer on the X every night, just killing dudes. Yeah, it was great.

Yeah. That was... How big is your... unit that you're working with. So our troop is about 20 plus guys. And at the time, I'm a sniper now. So I'd moved over to the sniper section. So I'm a sniper team supporting to assault teams for hits every single night.

So my job specifically was containment. So setting, establishing containment, a lot of building climbing, that rotation. A lot of Overwatch killing squatters running out of buildings, killing bad guys, trying to get to the fight. and it was like the gloves are off. I mean, the strategy that we got passed down and rules of engagement were kill them all. I mean, that's what we were doing. And so it was an epic rotation.

We had a lot of HVTs, a lot of foreign fighters, a lot of gun fights, a lot of casualties on our side, and a lot of dead bad guys. Were you guys mostly taking vehicles? Were you doing helicopters all the time? Most of it was halfs, was helicopter assaults with Little Birds and M.860s. So all Blackhawks and Little Birds.

I think pretty much every night it was that. I don't remember too many ground assaults. A couple here and there in strikers. If we had to go to Sauter City, we took tanks that would lead the way into Sauter City, suck up all the EFPs. We call them Team Rock. They would get blown up for us. God bless them.

Yeah, even to the point where these guys would get blown up, they'd pull over the side of the road. and we just bypass. They were just the breach point. And they were the hammer we were going through and hitting our surgical targets. And it was a great rotation, man. We lost a guy.

One of our team guys, Justin Monski was killed, stepped on a pressure plate IED. We had about, in my company, we had about 15 Purple Hearts. So a lot of dudes injured, shot, blown up. And we killed a lot of bad guys. I mean, it was a good trip for killing bad guys. How are these, what's your position as far as leadership inside the company here? So I'm a two IC, so I'm right behind my cell leader as a new sniper.

So I do with my cell leader at the time, Jason tells me to do. And most of my role is because I was pretty lean and a good climber, me and a couple of the other guys were on the climbing team. And so if we had a containment set, we hit a building, we use ladders or even building climb, traverse ladders from building to building and set containment from a high position, we called high team, to be able to contain the objective from top down while the assaulters hit a deliberate target set. So traditional countdowns, 5, 4, 3, 2, breach goes off at 2 and then we hit the target.

And you're doing an op-a-night, basically? Sometimes every other. Yeah, sometimes a couple. Yeah. A lot of this time period was taking advantage of SSC. There was an emphasis on sensitive site exploitation, doing a lot of post analysis on the objective, a lot of tactical interrogation to lend itself

to taking advantage of the opportunity on a target and flexing to other targets to take down networks. So it was super aggressive. A combination of 2-2, S-A-S, Ranger Battalion, CAG, Us, and Dev. Five action arms under task four sixteen and this is Stanley McChrystal's big project, right? His His his big machine of war What it was was one of the most significant I think most significant

Strategies in the war especially of attrition of taking out bad guys As you're you talked about you're losing some guys now How's how's your How are you guys handling that? So the reason I ask this question is because somebody's going to be listening to this in 10 years or 17 years or 23 years and we're going to be in a situation where there hasn't been any casualties in a long time and all of a sudden someone's going out and doing what soldiers do and they're going to take casualties. And I know when I took my first casualties and had lost my first guys, there was no one that was telling me like, hey, here's what you've got to think about. Not just from a, look, we get the protocol of, hey, here's the book that we're going to follow. Here's the calls we got to make.

But now you've got a bunch of guys that just lost one of their best friends. And what are you going to do about that? How did you guys go about it? Great question. A lot of responses that are doctrinal would have guys stand down, have a moments, if not days of morning, a process. I remember when we lost tongue in 06, our immediate strategy at the tactical level. So you're talking cell leaders and troops aren't majors, said, listen, we're not waiting. We're hitting targets tonight.

And we got aggressive. And we went out in 06 and 07, we had a vindiction, vindication board. this vindication board was filled with team guys that we lost and there was dozens of them on one side and when you killed a bad guy because you took that call sign patch and then you know if it was Tony Yost

who was a third group team start and was killed you would carry T.Y on your left shoulder under your call sign patch and if you killed a bad guy and you were successful on your mission you'd come back and you put it on the vindicated side and we had all the pictures of the guys that were killed on that, and every night we'd fill that board and cycle them back and forth

because we understood that getting killed was a part of the job. Comparatively, and you know this, you're very schooled in this history of warfare, including the Vietnam War, where thousands, 60 plus thousand Americans were killed, sometimes hundreds in certain battles were killed. entire Mac V-Sog teams taken off the planet. They accepted that risk.

So when we lost guys in our community, there was no warning. There wasn't time no more. We get back on helicopters. I remember something that really stands out to me from the 07 trip. We lost 2-2 S-A-S guys. They were killed on target,

and there was two or three of them that were killed. The Task Force commander had us come outside, and the 2-2-SAS commander briefed five different task units. and he spoke to warfare and he spoke to the importance of understanding the fight we're in, how this works, and getting back in the fight. It was a 10-minute spill. And we're all sitting there in kit with guns in our specific units. And at the end of the speech, he gives a hand-in-arm signal and all the little birds and all the 60s spin up.

And we load five different task forces up in little birds and MH60s and fly away and smash bad guys. that whole experience was what the task force was. Depending on what unit you were, you might have that experience. But if you're on task force, that was the experience every night. We accepted that risk. We lost guys. And then we got back in the fight because we had no time to more.

It wasn't a time for morning. That's same strategy I had. Yeah. Got to get your shit back on, get your gear back on, go back out and do what you're supposed to do. Yeah. do what your boys would want you to do. Exactly.

Yeah. Any good leadership lessons or any leadership lessons from that deployment that stand out? The biggest one is, I'll say his name now because he's retired. He was the commander that we worked under. His name was Tom D. Tom D. Tomaso. It was a platoon leader in Black Hawk Down as a young ranger. At the time was a CAG commander. And he was our commander.

When we got to that country, we had gotten use to the way that we did business, breaching, blowing every door, shooting bad guys in the face. And he briefed us and he said, man, we're gonna start this new tactic this year. And it's called callouts. And we laughed, we joked. It was comical to us.

We even wrote Drew cartoons about how comical this whole tactic was. So let me get this straight. You want us to go to a building, land little birds offset, surreptitiously approach and then knock, essentially knock and call them out. Yes, that's what we want you to do.

So the whole time we're like, this is ridiculous. This is insane. Until we hit a foreign safe house that had Libyan foreign fighters. And in the war in Iraq, positions two and four out of the top four guys killed on the battlefield that were killing Americans, formidable foes, were from Libya, two and four. Number one was Saudi Arabia. Number two was Libya. out of these foreign fighters They were training in the Green Mountains of Libya

They had gear that was comparable to ours A solo boots, sun-toe watches Chess rigs, suicide vest Proper guns with red dot optics And all the tactics to bear We hit a foreign safe house offset on infill Which was about a 4K 2 to 4K offset Which is offsetting

away from the objective so you don't get compromised. We get compromised by a early warning position. Our little bird attack helicopter kills six dudes run off the bat on infill. Birds get straight. The bird I'm in, the 60 I'm in, feet hanging off the 60 takes incoming rounds in between us and the chalk in front of us. We land, we make movement, we think there's a couple foreign fighters, there's 13. And they're all suicide invested out.

You know, long story short, I have a dog, saved my life, a cag dog, but the name of Vinny, been a suicide bomber 15 meters in front of me, sacrifice his life for mine. We get into the house, we kill everybody, we establish SSC after objective secure, and realize they have P-KM machine guns barricaded in sandbagged positions, a threshold deep away from the reach point. If we'd have breached that, like every target set we'd breached prior,

we would all die. We would have got, the first assault element would have been zipped up. They would have broke contact out of the back, and we'd been fighting for our lives. We were fighting for our lives

in containment. We had offset containment, called them out, and we were in a hand-to-hand range. So you did end up doing containment and doing a call-out on them? We did, yeah. We did exactly what he trained us to do.

And even in that, I mean, I threw six hand grenades on the other side of a berm in direct engagement in contact with the enemy. I mean, the hand grenades I was throwing with my teammate were landing in bad guys' laps on the other side of the berm.

These dudes were ready to get it on. We decimated the target with 105s from a specter gunship. We recovered Vinnie's body. And then we dropped a J-dam on it on Exville and daylight. And we got back, you know, Vinny was covered

in an American flag. The whole task was, there was there to salute us and we're you know we got blood on our shoes some dudes are injured and we're like this makes sense and I realized from that experience don't be in a rush to die so many guys want to get on the X and they want to do this thing called kicking in doors and shoot back guys in the face but they don't understand the tactics and techniques procedures evolve every single day at the speed of war. And it was the realization where I had the coolest guy,

because he's the coolest commander, the coolest unit, telling us something that didn't seem cool, and then that realization coming home and going, damn, okay, now we've got to change tactics. We've got to think outside the box. We can't conform to convention and to routine and think it's going to be the right solution every single time because times change.

And that was a huge impact on my career moving forward. Yeah, I went through a similar transition in 03, 04, where we were breaching every door. And we ended up hurting some people, you know, and sometimes not the right people. And we started getting some pressure. Like, hey, you can't just keep doing this. And so, well, if you're not going to explosively breach, then that leaves you mechanically breaching. If you're mechanically breaching, well, now you're sitting there with the Huli swinging at a door. And now you're really exposed.

So why not just take a step back and say, hey, get the turp on the horn and tell these guys to come out. And now we kind of know what we're dealing with. And yeah, as you can imagine, the pushback I got was, you know, pretty strong from the guys. Because they're thinking we're giving up this tactical advantage. We should explosively breach every time. And I was getting pressure from my boss. And what I realized is if it makes sense to explosively breach, awesome we will do it and I told my boss if it makes sense for us to expose to

breach we're gonna do it and if we don't need to we won't and if we call out as appropriate we'll call it as appropriate so right there's three courses of action which for the first few months I was there there was one course of action and how long is it take the enemy to figure that out and and like you're saying by what was this now this is 07 of course they'd figured out oh we can put a barricaded sandbagged position two rooms deep you know on the main breach point and we'll have a field day Yeah, it was their MO.

I mean, look, guys often think about warfare, and they think the opposing side are these shadows and these entities and these paper targets. These are creative human beings who aren't conformed to convention. They don't have doctrinal time hacks and requirements that they have to abide by. They wake up, they use their imagination. And sometimes that imagination trumps the fighting force

conventional tactic that you bring to bear and you got to adapt you got to be malleable yeah I mean even the idea of what we ended up calling combat clearance and I don't know if you guys called a combat clearance but like hey we're going to open the door and we're going to look inside like hey I'm not why would I run in there yeah and are there times we got to run in there absolutely we're getting shot at in the hallway I'm going to get into this room we're getting shot out in the street we're going to bust this door and we're going to get in this building that's what's going to happen but if we're safe in the street and it's secure and we open this door or we breach this door, what do we run and in for there? What do we running in? Why would we do that?

So again, that was another thing that was contrary to everything that, not everything I had learned, but to the bulk of what I had learned, which is, hey, speed, violence of action. Like, we're going to get, when that door opens, we're going in. And I get it. There's plenty of times where that's the appropriate behavior. Absolutely. There's also times where that's not the appropriate behavior. And it's difficult to overcome what you know, I always feel like what, you look what the first thing you learned is what you kind of um you prefer right whatever you learn first whatever methodology you learn when you're a new guy you think that's the way it is and it can be hard to overcome that barrier and there's a bias there's a there's an actual bias around that i forget

with the name of the bias but there's a cognitive bias around whatever oh anchoring so whatever you learn first whatever piece of information you get first that's kind of what you anchor to yeah so it can be difficult to overcome and say hey wait a second does this really make sense and believe me i mean i i met that stiff resistance with a lot of guys along the way. And what I tried not to do was be like, you don't know or this doesn't. I'd be like, okay, well, let's talk through it. You know, and actually, I'll tell you what, let's break out some ammunition and let's give it a shot.

Why don't you show me how it works out when you go rushing into this room when you don't know what's in there. And there's no reason to rush in there. Look, if you're getting shot out in the hallway, I get it. But if you're not, man, what are we doing? Yeah, yeah. Don't be in a rush to die. So that was a freaking savage deployment then

It was it was epic And once again You knew it at the time I mean every night you're loaded up birds gone This is as good as it's ever gonna get Yeah I had Multiple conversations with guys in the team room In the kit room getting loaded out

Like it doesn't get any better than this guys Remember every single moment of this Because you'll never get this again How old were you? 26, 7. So that's your third deployment though. So you knew it. Yeah, I know.

Yeah. And you got to relish in it. I was comfortable and more. That was, that was, I was getting, I was fixing mistakes I was making and honing this craft. And I was getting pretty good at it. And, you know, there was opportunities inside of my unit to do whatever. whatever I wanted to do. And I took all those opportunities. And it was a great playing field for creativity. And we did a lot of cool stuff, man. It was amazing. It was a, that task force,

Crystal's task force was awesome. Colonel or Sergeant Major, Command Sergeant Major, Nacey, was the unit SERT major at the time. And I remember we had a team patch and a brief. And our team patch had some skulls on it and it was like one of those you know badass like punish her skull deals right and i'm thinking sarma adorn ace is going to see this and he's going to be pissed so during a brief we're doing a brief right before we loaded helicopters and he looks at it and i see him side-eye one of the patches and the patch says killed them all on the patch and he kind of side-eyes it and i'm like oh shit And I go to my cell leader. I'm like, Jason, dude, he's side-eyed in that patch.

We're screwed. And this is the unit sergeant major. And so he comes over and he says, hey, whose patches are these? And Jason steps forward. And he pulls him in the hall. They come with me. And he goes, let me see that patch. And he pulls it off his shoulder.

And I see this go down in the hallway. I'm like, oh, dude, this dude is like Jason's going home. Like, we're not doing this up. and he hands in the patch and Sar Major reaches inside of his pocket and pulls out a handful of J-Soc coins that's a task force and has all the numbers. It's a skull.

On the backside it says something like operating at the speed of war and he hands in the coins. He goes, this is the coolest patch of ever seen. And he slaps it on his arm and he walks out. I'm like, Dad did not go the way I thought I was going to go. I was like, we're in the right place. This is where.

it's at right now. Yeah, and this is where you lose people. I mean, mentally lose people. Yeah. Because if you're not, if you, if you, if you don't know what we're talking about, if this sounds like hyper aggressive or crazy or whatever, what you're forgetting is that the whole object of war is to kill the bad guys. That's the, that's what we're doing. That's the purpose. I remember I heard a story. I read some new story and it was, I think it was a Marine unit and they were talking about the fact that this Marine unit had like a scoreboard on the wall of number of bad guys killed and each one of them was like a K bar, like a little K bar was drawn up there. And the tone of this article was just disturbed by this. Can you believe that this was U.S.

Marine Corps unit, and I think it's a Marine Corps unit, who had these, you know, was keeping score of the number of enemy that they killed and proudly displayed a K-bar knife. And I was just thinking, man, what, what do you think we're doing over there? Yeah. What do you think we're doing over there? Now, where you've got to be careful is, is, well, for one thing, you've got to be careful because you got to protect your guys. And if you get them in that mindset, they can go too far with it.

Of course, you've also got to be careful because you're not building good relations with civilians or reporters or the public, at least part of the public, because part of the public goes, what are you doing? What do you mean kill them all? So it's a touchy thing. It's a touchy subject.

And yet the entire purpose of a military unit is to kill the bad guys. And man, I said this the other day somewhere and people were like freaking out about it. And I'm like, well, no, I mean, I understand you've got supply people, but what are those supply people?

people supplying. They're supplying bullets so that the frontline guys get. What about the people that are, you know, collecting intelligence? Well, they're collecting intelligence so the frontline guys can go kill people. Like everyone, that's what we're here for. That's what we're here for. There's no other thing. And sure, are there humanitarian missions? Yes. Are we going to try and win hearts and minds? Yes. All those things. All those things are secondary. The fact that a military, the military is to kill bad guys. Are they here to protect and defend? Yes, absolutely. How do they protect and defend? Kill bad guys. that's it so you wrap up that deployment

wrap up that deployment and then start doing advanced training I mean I have a lot of catching up to do so because you've done for back to back to back deployments yes yeah and every break every month or every day of break is get more honed you know

like you need to get more trained I think that year in between those rotations I went to sniper school, I went to Freefall School, I went to J-TAC school, all to, again, become an asset, more of an asset on my team.

So I went to Special Forces Snipers' course. How long is this Special Forces Snipers' School? A couple months. It's pretty long. I think it's two and a half months. A little bit of technical, a lot of tactical, a lot of long gun. But it's evolved over time. Rangers go to that same school.

Cag snipers go to that same school. school and special forces sift snipers go to that school as well um great experience learned a lot i think out of those out of that break what i learned most um was a difficulty of close air support i was one of the few guys that got picked up and tasked to go to the school and i'm like i'm going to so tac with so tech and special operations terminal air control school i'm like dude i don't want to go to so tech they're like look if you're a sniper and you're doing sniper operations you want to keep the team small, somebody has to have that skill set. So you can draw bombs.

I'm like, well, that makes sense. All right. Does that mean I'm tethered to a radio? Likely. But it means you'll kill more bad guys. I'm all about that. So they sent me to... One of the most difficult schools I've been to is SOTAC, by the way.

How long is that school? A few weeks, I think three weeks. A couple weeks of ground and then an air week where you call live fire and all different aircrafts and platforms. Only school I've almost failed. Really? I was blade. about it.

The technical aspects of speaking big military language, like Lat Long. I mean, I could speak MGRS in Braille. Like I'm good at MGRS. But then they said Lat Long and I'm like, what the hell is Lat Long? So the Air Force controllers that I went to, they're like, you don't know what Lat long? I'm like, dude, I've never even heard the term. Like, what's Lat long? Like, I have to learn this.

Like, it's all that long because you have to communicate to the aviators. And they speak Lat long. I'm like, oh no. And so I was, you know, doing the homework late at night. I was a senior E7. I was a class leader and I was blade running. I almost failed that course. So I was this close.

And I think the Air Force dudes there, they didn't want to see me pass. They were a little stoked. They're like, oh, this senior SF guy. This dude's, he's blade running. Damn, savages, bro. Yeah, they wanted to see me fail out. I passed, though. And I got my close air support certification.

And then rotated back into 08, another war. And what are you doing this last time in 08? So 08, I was a troop advisor for the ICTF. The Iraqi counterterrorism force was born and bred by the SIF companies, A15 and B23. Fifth group SIF and third group SIF pulled these guys into Jordan, isolated them, trained them, and then infiltrated back into the country, smashing bad guys. and the ICTF, the young operators of the ICTF, they don't get bricks.

They don't get a red cycle, right? They stay in warfare, and they, through the culminative years of war, got the most experience, and were some of the most experienced operators I've ever served with. So I advised a whole troop, and at the time we were downsizing American forces.

So me, a Navy EOD guy, a Camo guy, maybe a Camo guy, and then a troop full of ICTF spanking targets. What time in 2008 were you there? The entire summer, so probably March, April timeframe until six months into it, almost to Christmas.

And this is smashing targets. We are calling them true bilateral operations, right? And we're trying to work ourselves out of a job. A lot of guys were bummed out by it. Things were getting political in 08. I was signing shooter statements. If I was admitting that I was killing bad guys, which we stopped doing.

I mean, we stopped admitting we were killing bad guys because at that time, if you killed a guy, you've heard a shooter statement, and it went to the DOJ in Iraq. I actually remember one time I came back from an op and my commander, my company commander comes to me, he goes, hey, Mike, you're good to go back out on ops. I was like, I just got back from an op.

Sir, what are you talking about? Oh, you're being investigated for that last shooting you had. I'm like, what? What do you mean investigated? Like, well, yeah, they had to do a trial process and they took it to trial. They did the shooter statement with witnesses and everything else. And then you're good. I'm like, what?

I went to my team start. I'm like, dude, what is going on? We're going on trial and through paperwork. And then we're shut down from operations. He's like, yeah, it's part of the climate. I'm like, uh. And it's, it's, it's. It's one of the first times in leading,

because I was leading an entire troop of ICTF, that I started getting affected by the political climate. All the other times I've been insulated by cell leaders, team sergeants, good leadership, who knew that they just keep all that shit away from the guys and let them do their job. And it's the first time it started trickling down and I'm like, oh, oh, wow.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking about that when you were talking about your 07 deployment. I mean, you're looking. your focus was 100% on your job. That's it. And the people above you in the chain of command. And that was a superlative, supportive chain of command as well.

And so you weren't dealing with any of this other crap. None. All of a sudden you show up in 08 and you find out you're under investigation. Super political. Yeah. Super political. So did you, uh, you just kept doing ops backed off a little bit? Did you back off a little bit?

So the ops weren't as it aggressive? Like I remember telling my new guys, because I was a cell leader at the time and a troop advisor. I remember telling my new SIF guys, bro, it's about to be on. Get your stuff ready. Bring the thumper,

plenty of 40 mic, we're about to kill some bad guys. And we went to Sauter City, and it was crickets. And I'm like, this isn't normal. I was like, dude, it's going to happen. We're going to ambush, EFPs, nothing. And I'm like, what is going?

We got back. I'm like, no, dude. That was probably, just random. We're going to get back into it and we're going to go kill. And they went out again and I'm like, there's nothing happened. What is going on?

And because of the, at the times, the Sunnis and the Shias were doing a ceasefire. And any time they killed Americans, they would pay for it politically. They started pulling back and just, just isolating, building their infrastructure and their castles and not being aggressive.

But all, the things that we were hitting were dry holes. We got in a few gun fights, killed a few dudes, but it was not what I expected it to be. And it was the transition of what became, I think, the transition out of that fight. Yeah, I know one of my buddies took over my task unit and went into Sauter City with snipers in, I want to say it was June of 08. And they killed all kinds bad guys and they did about four to six weeks of operations there and the freaking um the shakes there kind of were like all right we're good we're we're good we don't we don't need any more of this yeah and they made that truce and stuff yeah um and you know the way

I looked at it was like they'd been doing operations for so long like the the the the the the body army and stuff out of solder city and they would take so few casualties yeah I mean they go out set off in the FP and kill an American or two or what you know go lobby and like I said they don't really have to they don't have to win every time like it doesn't matter they're going to go back and they'll attack again tomorrow night or the next night and but then once they started taking some massive casualties yeah like I think we've had enough for this yeah it was pretty bad I remember that time period um so I was a sniper at the time so in between my troop being up I did stay behind sniper operations and we actually took from what I

understand we took one of the missions that you guys had. You guys were doing daylight overwatch for the guys who were building the tea barriers around Sauter City. And you guys killed a whole bunch of people. When we came in, they switched it to night ops and we couldn't kill anybody. Like I sat on a rooftop for like days and weeks going, where the hell all the bad guys? And guys were joking like the Navy killed them all. Like where are they? They're like they're not coming out. They all gave up. Once you did reverse ops, that tax. It worked because they were getting smoked in daylight. And so I think Chris Kyle at one point had that up.

And so I remember we remember hearing about his name and some of the guys and like, oh, do they have a high body count? We were so excited. And we infill day one. It was like crickets. And I'm like, what is? And they had a drone. I remember seeing a drone overhead. And they were low flying this drone during the building of this wall and the completion of it.

I'm like, no wonder there's no bad. Like all the bad guys hear this drone on purpose. as a tactic that we applied, but they're all keeping their head down and we couldn't kill any of them. And I was like, oh, this sucks. But the stay behind stuff was fun. Yeah, that was a big kind of, when I was in Ramada,

it was the same thing. Like the bad guys were, they knew not to come out at night. Now, 90, whatever, probably 97% of the bad guys that got killed by my tasking it were in the daytime. Yeah. The other 3% were at night, because they knew if they came out at night,

it was a bad deal for them. Free fire. So they came out in the day and it's the same thing that those guys did in Sauter City That's another so it's another deployment another six months this deployment Yeah and going out hitting targets but it's definitely more mellow on this deployment Yeah, it was more of a leadership role and troop advising the sergeant major because I was acting as the ground force commander for every op So I started learning a lot about processes you know like before I was just a nug assalter.

I was called a ghost assaulter, just there doing my little narrow piece of the pie. Now I had to step back and get the big picture. I had to control air assets. I had to flex to different targets. I had to strategize on the fly with my troops aren't major deploying his troops. And we had a whole bunch of incidents

like where me and the EOD guy, the Navy EOD guy, are hitting targets by herself because they're hitting a building. We get Intel. I don't have enough time to flex that whole troop. we have to do it. So we go inside of houses by herself. And it was fun, man.

We had a blast. It was cool because we had the leash off. And even though it wasn't as active, I mean, we were doing, I remember we had an intel from a soccer field that they had a couple handsets that correlated to the soccer field. And I was like, all right,

we got to get the soccer field. So I said, hey, guys, we're going to move to the soccer field. So we started walking. I'm like, I need you guys to move out. And they wouldn't move out. I grabbed the EOD guy. We sprinted to the soccer field. as we ran around the block, we were an ambient streetlight,

the group of guys were meeting and they were in the middle of the soccer field, the middle of the night, like two in the morning, they see us, and we're sprinting across an open field trying to shoot like 10 dudes who move in 10 different directions, and we miss everybody. And when we get back, everybody in the jock and the talk is laughing,

because they're like, dude, that was the best shit we've ever seen. Because we saw you guys break contact from the main element, and they're like, screw it. And you start sprinting, but they all went to in different directions. So we couldn't track any of them and we're running and shooting and we're standing there in the field like,

damn it. That was our opportunity. It was good times, man. Wrap up that deployment. Then what's next? So I get back and I go to CAG and I'm in CAG in a technical reconnaissance role

and I go back to Iraq and to Balad. And I run, because of my reconnaissance background is how I got recruited in. I run a joint, interagency task force of interagency organizations with JASAC to do

reconnaissance over the entire country of Iraq. I was undercover as a lieutenant colonel so I was an OIC, young OIC, nobody believed it. But put it in that position to C2 and control all the things that were going on for reconnaissance assets in the country. Now in Balad at that time period, because everything was downsizing,

including the base of below. So what year is this now? 0-9. Yeah, so stuff's really slowing down. Really slowing down. In fact, the reason they brought me in is because reconnaissance is obviously another way we get involved

without involving packs on the ground, people on the ground. So we still had to have eyes on, but we had to use technical means of reconnaissance, and that just depend on dudes and hides sites. In fact, during that time period, there was a restriction of one or two Americans per target, and you had to stay in containment.

So if you're moving to a bad guy place, you leave behind the Americans, they'd stay on containment with the vehicles, indigenous force would hit the objective, come back, and then you'd roll out. And so at that time, working the joint interagency, I didn't feel like I was missing out on much. I felt like I had a broader role to fill in that capacity.

And you're just overseeing all this reconnaissance elements? That's what you're saying? All of it. And I had daily VTCs with Siltim Command, NavSov, mostly, which was the main effort, by the way. There wasn't a lot of SF guys in the country at that time. So I had daily VTCs with the Navy and supported their operations and technical reconnaissance means, tagging, tracking, locating, all the sexy stuff for technical recon for the entire country. And that was based on the fact that you had sniper experience. Yeah, I got recruited.

I got recruited. I went to selection all successful. And then my background, my entire life, my background in special operations was mapped for that field of expertise. In the transition, coming back from 08 to 09, I went to J. Sox's technical reconnaissance course, which was like six months, a pretty intense course. And learned a whole new world of operations that I didn't even know existed. I know a little bit, but when I went to that course, I was like, whoa. Now, this is some cool shit. So I did that for task force, for J-Soc for my 09 rotation. And then what happened after that?

Gat back and then got with another squadron. And at that time, we hadn't been in Iraq since we killed Sarkawi. The task force hasn't been in Iraq, really since, I mean, intermittently, we owned Iraq. but Afghanistan we completely gave up. So I wasn't on the ball in Afghanistan because we were too busy in Iraq. And then all of a sudden we had a change of heart. The Al-Qaeda was on the run. We didn't even know this thing called ISIS existed.

And we decided to do a surge as an organization to Afghanistan. And I was on the first thing smoking. So my first real good deployment with that organization, with a special missions unit was in Afghanistan. And when we got there, the Rangers on the battle space, Colonel Corrilla was in charge, and we were the red-headed stepchildren.

And I was like, what? How was an SMU, the stepchildren? Like, when I got there, I was taking showers with bottles of water in an open field. And I'm like, this is the premier CT unit on the planet. And I'm doing this. And they're like, dude, we have to,

we're building everything from scratch. So we set up shots. stopped there and started targeting bad guys. And the first two months was prep, and then the second two months was killing bad guys. And we did a lot of it. That second 60 days of that four-month rotation, I saw more bad guys killed in a two-month period than anything that I experienced before. And it was because of the assets that we brought to bear.

Good rotation, though. And you were still overseeing Reki at this point? Yeah. I was that squadron's reconnaissance NCO, which just specialized in recon. So everything from OPs to technical

Recky to interagency, like even controlling aircraft for ISR. And it was an active trip. I mean, we lost a dog, we had guys shot, we had guys blown up, a lot of active operations during that period

of time. It was amazing to see the talent and you can't really get an idea or understanding of that talent and capability when you focus on individuals. But when you see it come together in a single combat operation where everybody's so efficient and effective, you really see the benefit of the selection process, the training process, and the support mechanisms that make that unit the most elite unit in the world. Yeah, you know, you hear like the, sports analogies of like, well, you know, it's like a professional sports team, but these are like

the champions, right? These are the NFL freaking Super Bowl winners that, you know, you see the Super Bowl guy that like, whatever, gets his right arm massaged so that he can, whatever. And this other guy's doing speed drills with the first four meters of his sprint and he's going to work with a specialist that's going to get him even a little bit, you know, one millisecond faster. And then they're getting and their helmets dialed in so that they can have comms in there. And they got this, they got all, like this 100% pure focus for every individual to be as good as they possibly can.

And then you put that team together, and every one of those individuals is 100% focused on being as good as they possibly can with all the support they could possibly want. And this is what you end up with. Just freaking the best. Yeah, it's the big leagues for sure. And what I realized in that unit,

even being a very competent shooter, a respected member of Special Forces and being a PT stud at the time that there was men above me and beyond me that I'd never catch up with that were just so talented and I was like it was humbling and I'm like well I'm not the most elite dude I thought I was

I woke up and went dude I'm crushing it and then I see the talent pool over there and realized there's this thing this machine and like you said before these guys aren't trained to be diplomats, to be fit experts. They're trained to kill bad guys. And they're the best at it. I mean, the Navy version and the Army version,

they're the best at it in the world. And it was a humbling and honorable experience of being part of that. So what came after that? So at a very young age, actually at the age of 29, I made E8. How's your wife handling all this, by the way? She's good. She's a champ at the time. I don't she's not married to me now.

So it didn't last. But she's handling it well, man. I mean, I mean, look, she, her perspective was if I was happy doing what I loved, that was my moment in time. And she would support me. Do you have any kids? No kids. No kids.

None. So it was easy for us, right? She was busy getting our nursing degree. Phenomenal woman, just, just handling business and grinding. And then when I came back, she was my support. and made sure, because you knew I was coming back, and in that unit especially, those boys don't have any downtime.

It doesn't exist. Even when you're down, you're not down. You're up on a call cycle for being able to quick respond, or you're in a down cycle and you're training. You're always gone. I was gone more than any part of my career in that organization. So when I made the E8 list, I made it on the black side.

There's a black list. And the black list is just, it's not advertised. And I was the, just to give it, I don't know the exact numbers, but for that year, it was something like 160 guys were promoted. I was 159.7 on the black list because the black list is like you're like an intermittent number

that's not advertised. I was the last guy on the black side, which includes the Navy that was promoted to E8, which means I was the last guy to get picked up. and I was 29 years old as an E8. As an E8. E8. And so I, you know, it was mainly because of the combat experience I had.

And then in E7 school, which is for us, it's called A-Nock. I won the Leadership Award. And so those two things set me up to get promoted that fast. But I wasn't prepared in my operational career to go, you're an E8? What's next? So if I stayed in that unit, then I would have just been what I was, you know. in that unit you're not

what's called blue chips you don't get blue chips because you have experience you could be a 20 year special operations guy when you show up to that unit day one you earn your blue chips one day at a time and so me starting

I would start from zero leaving the unit and going anywhere I could have gone I'm a team sergeant I'm a god in the special operations right and it's the job that you want because you're controlling and operating with your ODA, with your detachment. I had no, look, I wanted to go back, but I was like, if I go back, they'll put me on a regular

ODA and not meaning that in a derogatory way, but just not a SIF company, not a specialized company. Randomly, a gentleman by the name of Command Sergeant Major Bob Irby, who's a legend in Social Forces Command, communicates to me that he heard. heard I made a EA and he heard about my experience and he wanted to recruit me to stand up a new criff, a new commander's response force for the continent of Africa. We didn't have one because we were so busy fighting in the Middle East, we didn't have one. Jay Sock approved that and long story short, I stood up a siff as a plank holder from scratch. We went into a company in 10th group,

me and another guy from the unit stood it up from scratch, had full power to train any thing we wanted to with our guys, reconnaissance guys, and build this unit from zero. As we built the unit, we got vetted and validated, and then Benghazi kicked off, which by our benefit, wind up being in Africa. So did you deploy immediately? I deployed immediately. I was the first team to deploy for that unit to Benghazi, to Libya. This is after the September 12th attacks?

Yeah, September 11 and 12 attacks in 12 in 2012. during our train-up, we literally get tasked to go to Libya, we start developing intel, and then Benghazi kicks off. And when that happened, I was actually in a special missions unit compound doing cross-KLE briefs with Libya,

and then this thing happens. And then a few weeks later, I'm in Tripoli, Libya, building out a counterterrorism force going after Abu Qatala, the guy responsible for it. Did you run? We didn't run.

any of those ops though, did we? So, one, we didn't do anything about it, right? It was a big, 13 hours in Boghazi is kind of reflective of that understanding. But we had the opportunity to kill Abu Qatala in about 60 to 90 days.

There were other use of sock elements with us, and they positively identify that dude in a short period of time. I was there in the meeting when we proposed it to the country team, which included the ambassador, Sharj, Alexander Pope who was appointed and he denied it.

He said the political climate won't allow us to do this. The representative from Ysasaq, senior E8, stood up and almost detonated. I mean, he detonated in a very tactful way. But that was the climate we were dealing with. It was so politically charged, they wouldn't allow us to do anything. For six months, I was in that country fighting to kill bad guys, to do our job as the commander's response force, but also representing you Sasak.

And they wouldn't let us do anything. It was horrible. It was the worst political military experience that I faced. So what did you do when you got home from that? That had to leave a bad taste in your mouth. What did? Three weeks after I got back, I was out of the Army.

I dropped my paperwork as a senior E8. With how many years in? At the time, 16. 16 years. When I was down range, I got recruited by the CIA. And I was going to take a job call, paramilitary operations officer, which is a, you can go in US or CIA.gov and apply for it.

Mike Spann was one of the first casualties of the global war on terror in September 11th, and he was actually a paramilitary operations officer. I wanted to be Mike Span. I had, I had just finished my college degree, which took me 15 years to accomplish, which is a prerequisite for government service and federal federal government. And I decided at that point, I wanted to to step aside and work for this agency because I saw the good things they were doing. At the time, after I got back and out processed very rapidly, where people were like, my troop and the main element wasn't even home yet, and I was already out processed. My independence was July 4th of that year of 2013 and immediately started contracting.

Went straight back to Libya. I was in Libya on terminal leave back in Libya as a civilian. And then started contracting with the agency for the next two and a half years. While at the same time in a reserve component of special operations and where I was a team sergeant in Texas, then made Sergeant Major in Texas. And so I was contracting, deploying with interagency, coming home, and then deploying again.

Deploying again. Yeah. Put on my uniform, jump on a plane. I mean, one time I came back from Yemen, a week later, I was back in Niger Africa with a Sartre major uniform on, doing a counterterrorism staff operation or staff exercise that turned into an operation, came back, put on my civilians, and then went back to Yemen. So I was just in a cycle of it.

Give us a little bit of a brief on what you're doing as a, what your job was as a contractor. So honestly, it's nothing sexy. I was babysitting case officers. I mean, my job was to protect them overseas. I was outside of what people would normally refer to as industrial contractor, so I actually work directly for the agency and babysat case officers and protected them. When you're a case officer and you come out of school, you get a 500-pound head.

Lots of experience in training, but it's all concepts. when they go overseas, we only have enough time to repair the biggest and brightest minds on the planet to do what they do. And so we are the shield that protects these guys to do their job. And at the time that I applaud,

you had a minimum experience of six years in special operations, and you had to shoot your ass off. And when I showed up for this job, I vetted, it's a shooting call. You shoot and you meet the standard or you leave. My class, we had probably 10, 10 dudes that are senior level dudes, operators in the most elite units, half of them probably went home because of the shooting qualls.

You're competing for a six-fee-year job also, so the pressure is high, and the shooting standards are the hardest shooting standards I've seen. Apparently in federal government, because you're a federal law enforcement instructor after you get through this experience, it's the toughest federal law enforcement qual. That's informal. It's not actually doctrine. And when I went down range with that organization, I was confident that even me and my riding partner typically were seals, that with our little Glock 17P shooters and our waistband, that we could do some work,

enough to fight back to our vehicle or back to the machine gun in our vehicle and do some work. But it also taught me about what these, interagentcies and these brave men and women do every day, which is they put it on the line. Like you don't have a QRF Ranger Battalion element in MH47s prepared to come rescue your ass. It's just you. And I'm like, dude, you guys do this? Like, yeah, we've been doing this since the beginning.

I'm like, what? This driving around randomly doing your thing and like, that's all? Like, what's the nearest task force? Oh, they're about three hours away. Okay, so we're out on her own. That changed everything for me. I mean, that changed everything I thought in that I potentially knew about singleton operations and low-vis operations. We think low-vis, our guys thought low-vis was like putting a shem-g on, you know, and hiding their chest carrier or plate carrier underneath their dress, their man-dress.

It's not, it's a, it's a new game. It was crazy. So you do that for two and a half years. Two and a half years. Yeah. And did you, so you, you originally wanted to. actually be in the CIA, not a contractor. Were you continuing to try and pursue the job

of actually being a member? Yeah, I wanted to be a staffer. I wanted to be a Blue Badger. I wanted to be a full-time employee. And I had a change of heart when I was in Yemen. Yemen was super political. The Houthis, the political climate, all these things that were transpiring

was doing what I didn't think was possible in that interagency, which was debilitating their ability to do their job. And I saw great guys that were on operational side, on the operational side that were getting stagnated. And I couldn't believe it. I actually, I remember thinking to myself on one rotation, like, this doesn't happen to these guys.

There's no way. These dudes, there's no way these guys are getting, there's got to be something going on, cloak and dagger. And it wasn't. because the oversight of how the interagency, the IC works in the intelligence community, with well over 17 agencies now, there's so much directorate national level oversight and micromanagement that can't do their jobs. And so I had, my whole thing with the getting out of the military was if I can't kill bad guys,

I don't belong here. So I left because I went to an organization which I thought we're still killing bad guys. and they still were in some capacity but where I was in the situation I was in they weren't and I went dude I have to have a change of heart here I have to figure something out because the war for me is over

there's no more killing I mean eventually ISIS pop their heads up and there was a whole new cycle of killing that I missed which I wish I was part of but I had to make a decision to get out yeah and then that was it that was it I was in Pakistan

and I made that decision I brainstormed. My riding partner, who was a seal, his brother was a dev-grew guy that was killed on a raid, trying to rescue a hostage in Africa. And he's one of my best friends. And I said, hey, man, I want to start a business. He's like, well, what's brainstorm? And we had course of action development, man.

We sat down after work and mapped out some plans and many conversations over dinner trying to figure out what I could do. And, you know, with our background and expertise, the obvious route is a tactical something, right? But I didn't want to do that, man. I saw these dudes who were getting out and they were dealing with all the backlash of coming out and saying, hey, I'm this guy. Because at the time, I didn't have any social media. And I'm like, dude, I don't want to be a tactical kind of guy. I want to do something kind of different. And I wrote down survival.

and primitive survival is what most people would think about when they think about survival. But I said, what if there's this niche in developing like this modern survival take on preparedness of training citizens,

not just military and law enforcement, but citizens to be better prepared in their culture. What year is this? This is 2015. Damn, so you were ahead of the curve. Yeah, yeah. This is 15.

And I'm like, there's something here. And I wrote a mission statement. I did a con-op. I wrote a whole. five paragraph op order on the whole business plan and resigned from my position with interagency came home talked to my command sergeant major as a sergeant major was an op sergeant major at the time and said hey man I'm thinking about doing this and he goes dude like you haven't like there's nothing going on it's like we're about to activate the entire unit and you'll be a staff sergeant major

sitting in a talk for a year in Afghanistan there's nothing going on do do what you want to do I said, how hard is it for me to resign? He goes, I will type the paperwork. That's how easy it is. And then I'll just send it to you and you sign it. For your position and your rank, you don't have to do anything, but technically resign. And you'll go into IRR status inactive ready reserve, and that's it. And I remember I did that.

And the next day, I was like, holy crap. Like, I just cut the biggest symbolical cord known to man in the history of man. and now out here flapping and I have to make it makes it happen. And are you still married at this point? I'm not. I'm three years removed

or two years removed from a divorce and but you're not, you don't have to take care of anyone but yourself. It's just me. Yeah. So it's kind of like a little bit of big umbellicle cord,

but I mean, let's face it, you're going to be able to, you know, give me a ground pad. Yeah. I'm winging it, man. I'm, I think I probably was living in a ground, like a pad. Like I was probably on an air mattress instead of a ban in place.

But I was smart with my money because they call it the thousand air club because you're making $1,000 a day and you're bank rolling. Most guys go home, blow it on Harleys and trucks and come back and start the vicious cycle again. But I took that money, I think it was 25K, and invested it and started my business. What was the first move? the first move was education. I had no idea. Educating yourself.

Educating myself. I had no idea about marketing about, like I have a degree in Homeland Security. What's that going to translate to? Not much in my new field of expertise. So I took my business plan, started doing, trying to build fidelity on the correlation between a concept and then the execution of that concept, trying to use historical data. And it was none. There was no good case studies or exam. of businesses in that genre that weren't very narrow in their field.

Primitive survival. Yeah, sure, you could find 100 business plans. They all suck and they're not doing very well. But what is this cultural thing of like this genre of call preparedness where mindset, self-awareness, technical training, you know, all the things that we did in our culture and purpose in special operations, how does that translate to citizens and how do you scale verticals in business? That was intense for me. It's something I still learned today, five years later with 40 plus employees. I'm like, dude, I'm still learning.

I'm trying to figure the shit out. What was the first move that you made then in terms of, like what's the first gig that you did? So the first gig was tactical training because I could make a revenue stream. So I'm like, wait, I figure out like 12 to 24 people, $500 a slot, pistol carbine, let's make some revenue. Then I built the website.

Then I started marketing. social media for me was brand new. And I think at the time was new for people to see special operations guys doing it. I know at the time there was only a handful of us doing that. And people were like, oh, and they gravitated towards us. I remember Tim Kennedy, I was his boss. Tim Kennedy was an MMA fighter, successful entrepreneur. I was his boss at the time.

And I'm like, dude, how are you doing this? He plugged me on his social media. I got 10,000 followers. And I'm like, this is how it works. this network building, that's how easy it was. And so I started building it. I design a survival kit. As a contractor, I went to the luxury of doing the interagency direct contract position.

I can go to any training I want to. And they sent me to a whole bunch of high-speed schools, including a survival school where they had high-speed contractors who developed this like zip lock bag theory. There's this guy right now who works for Kevin Estella. He's in the field right now, day two. doing a 72-hour zip-lock bag challenge on Phil Crowe Survival on our Instagram,

and we're updating it. And the idea is, if you're in a foreign country, that's semi-permissive, non-permissive, the worst-case scenario for you is it loses its sovereignty. A coup happens, and now you're on your own.

The first star in the 50s that was applied to the CIA board was a guy who escaped and evaded from China and got killed in Tibet by a random security guy, shot in the chest with one round with like a 32 British pistol revolver. That's a thing and there's dangers of it. So the idea is like a Ziploc bag is the things that you can carry on your person, your physical body. So I took that and I literally in the course went, everything you guys put in this bag, how did you guys come up with it?

Well, we did R&D, like the best things that we could put in the bag and you're going to live out of it for 72 hours, which happens to be an appropriate amount of time to escape of, And then carry the appropriate amount of stuff in reconnaissance, like not overbearing. And I said, I'm going to take everything in these bags and I'm going to turn into a survival kit and sell it. And he's like, dude, you should do that. Like, hell yeah, I'm doing it. And so our first survival kit, I sold like a thousand on day one of that kit.

And I was like, there's something here. There's a product thing here. There's a training thing here. There's these revenue streams that I'm seeing. And we built it from very small. diversified and build up all the verticals one one by one so you sell a thousand of these survival kits almost instantly instantly so now so now your theory is correct there's demand there is demand I'm creating a new demand signal but

there's demand that that starts off what year is that six the very beginning of 16 the very beginning of 16 so five years ago you get the word out you sell a thousand of these kits. And so, well, then what's the next move? Now you know there's a market. You start developing shit. What's next? Well, I think part of it was I have to develop a culture here.

Like there's a, there's this thing that exists that I'm trying to redefine. Most people who think, or I've seen us on the surface even, think that we're a primitive survival company because survival was synonymous with primitive survival, like rubbing sticks together in the woods. And so I'm not a big fan of that. I'm not an expert at that. There's guys that are talented at that. I hire those guys now.

But that's not me. I'm the guy who understands that, you know, 20 operators can go out and deliberately hit the worst case scenario and come out on top. And so in my hypothesis, like, why is that happening? Why do intentionally men put themselves in harm's way to kill the bad guy and why statistically do they come out on top? And so if you start looking out and laying out all the reasons why, it's not because of one widget, one school. It's because the culture they're immersed in. It's they all got selected

together. They trained together. They pay attention to all the details. They do contingency-based planning. They have service support. They do course of action development. They rehearse. They pay attention to their equipment and everything they do. And ultimately, they're conscious to their culture, their world. They're here right now paying attention to what they are doing. And when I look at citizens and everything that's happening in our world that we never learn the lesson from. We're completely complacent in freedom as a benefit of freedom

because we're comfortable and routine. And that happens to be our MO as Americans, which is beneficial, right? That you live in sovereign societies, you get all the luxuries and freedoms of all the men who go out to war and do this thing. But what is it to the detriment? Well, if you look at statistics,

and this is what I did. This is the greatest start point is doing this research. I started realizing there's no understanding of what this even means. There's one guy that I found, there's a couple guys, but one guy significantly by the name of John Leach who did a study on survival psychology. He asked a question, why do people live and why do people die, specifically in catastrophes? He has this theory based on this case study analysis of mostly natural disasters, some of them manmade, that there's a breakdown of about 1080, 10% of the population happens to be making the right decision and they survive 80% probably broken in half 50-50 make sometimes the right decision sometimes they're wrong and then 10% are the bottom

of the barrel they're they're like the guy who runs this is in a survival situation of some kind this is a catastrophe a disaster so all of the things coming together typically associated with compressed timeline high intensity stress so The bottom 10% is the bottom of the barrel. And children happen to be in that bottom 10%. And so the question is, why are some people at the top 10 and why are people at the bottom 10? And how do we get the people who are at the bottom, even children, and to the top 10?

And that was the premise of my business in answering that question. We need to figure out why people die. What is their background and experience? what mistakes they made and how can we put them in a bracket and a 10% bracket to make sure they survived. That was the question that had to be answered. That's where it started. And then you started looking at, okay, what did you find? What did you find as far as a curriculum that you put together that moves people from the bottom 10? We're getting killed to the top 10. The most impactful thing that I found, which I see a lot of correlation in whether it's

discovery or just dissemination of your books and all the information that you're doing is self-awareness breeds situational awareness, right? So there's this lack of awareness. There's really a lack of understanding. The analogy I like to use is, you know, I have a land cruiser. I'm a big fan of land cruisers. So I take my land cruiser, which is a 94 land cruiser, which is FCG80, if you're a land cruiser nerd, head gasket problems are notorious for these things. They overheat their head gasket blows and then it's catastrophic. So the question is, when you're driving down the road and you see smoke, how do you address smoke? Most people see smoke and they go, oh crap, smoke, let me pull over, right? I'll call AAA. So they have a dependence

on something else, an institution, an insurance company, whatever it may be. And so they don't source, sole source the solution. Another course of action is you keep driving because you don't understand what's happening. So you just push through. And you think that pushing through, hey, because it's only 10 minutes away from home, is the answer. So you saw the smoke. You didn't have a answer. There's a void, darkness in the back of your head. So you just do something random. It's randomized behavior. You drive, you get home, and before you get home, when you get down in your street, your car catastrophically implodes. You hear a pop. You hear noise. It starts the buck. You pull it over the side of the road, you lift the hood,

and you realize you have a blown engine, right? That analogy is representative of people's brains and the understanding of the brain. So a lot of things that happen to us in our lives, mostly affected by stressors, which happens to be a catastrophe, by the way. A stressor is just either low grade or high grade catastrophe. We take in stress, we start filling these things,

and then we don't know how to control it. We don't know how to diagnose it. We don't understand mechanical processes. And then so we ignore it until it becomes catastrophic. So now you're in the vehicle accident. And your only role is to do certain technical things to help the person who's burning alive. But you don't know how to do it. Why?

Because you don't understand how to break glass. You don't understand the fortitude that's required to push past the pain and break the glass. or maybe if you understood technically that you could just crack off this wire antenna and slap it, that you could shadow the glass. Or if you even had more forethought, maybe you carry a tool like a breaching axe, a winkler, a breaching axe, and you smash the window. But then you let that person burn to the ground. Hopefully it's not a family member.

Hopefully it's not you. But this happens. And this little thing happens to everybody in some kind of circumstance. And what I tell people is if it hasn't happened, it's bound to happen. The difference between us and our experiences and civilians is that we've seen the detriment of not following these basic processes and the understanding of what take places when you don't understand them. So what I want to do is lend these processes and understanding so people can self-diagnose, be aware of what's happening sympathetically, parasympathetically, and then give them more awareness. So when they see smoke, they go, oh, that's not smoke at all. That's water vapor.

That's coming from our radiator. Oh, I'm going to pull over. I'm going to let the car idle and sit. I'm going to let it cool down. Oh, I carry gloves and a rag in the back of my car. I'm going to pop the radiator cap. Oh, I realized, because I looked in the reservoir, there's nothing in the reservoir. I carry coolant because I have a 94 and it eats coolant.

I get coolant, put it back in it, top it off, sit it, let it idle. Everything seems fine, and I'm on my way, and I just survived. That whole thing is not done in a very tactful and intelligent. way and I think we need to change that. So it requires processes, it requires progressive learning, it requires a lot of different paths that haven't been created, which is the, which is the business challenge because it's easy to articulate it to do a podcast, to do a book, all those things, but to create a progressive path for civilians who are disinterested in the first place, it's the best, in my opinion, business problem to have because it lends itself

to a new challenge, which I'm all about. So what do the courses look like? How to let's say you just sold me and I'm like hell yeah, I'm in the game I'm freaking jaco the whatever insurance salesman and you just sold me. What do I do? There's three progressive paths to this. The first path is Phil Kraussurrival. Philcrows Survival.com.

It's the website. It's physical training. It's like physical things that you can do. It's gunfighter pistol, gunfighter carbine. It's first aid tactical combat casualty care. This is via a website. Via a website. So you're, for instance, on a video explaining to me how to put a tourniquet on my kid.

This component is you physically come to our training. Okay. So there's a difference. So you said website, but then you said physical. So you go on the website. You sign up for the training, right? And then the in-person physical training is one component of it. That training includes equipment, augmentation and equipment.

Look, we're not the, we don't own the monopoly on medical gear. but I will sell you the best medical gear that's made. North American Rescue, the same cat seven tourniquets or cat turnicates that we used, we've seen them save lives. So we sell tourniquets, survival kits, all the augmentation for enabling people to be better prepared. That's Philcraft's survival. The second component is progressive learning. You have to be able to learn progressively at a start point and understand the path.

I realize that deficiency years into this whole thing. Because people go, oh, I train gunfighter pistol. next? And I'm like, Godfighter Pistol 2? And they're like, well, outside of that, what's next? Like, well, I need a holistic path to this. So we hired a girl, her name's Amber, stay-at-home mom, nurse, somebody who understands LMS systems. We actually teamed up with Osmore, which is a learning management-based system. The same thing we did with online learning, for your master's for my bachelors where we take an online learning approach to get people involved, including families. So you can go online. You could sign up on we the prepared.com and sign up for an LMS component

that includes like stop the bleed. So you take a class where you receive a tourniquet, you apply that tourniquet, and you have an interactive experience virtually. It's online learning, but it's for the preparedness minded. It's for people who, you know, who don't have the time or money to, you know, to fly from North Carolina to Utah to take a physical class in person. So there's a progressive learning path that touches all the fields that we break down to what's called pillars of preparedness, which I can go over, of how we disseminate this information so people can understand it. The last component to that is what I've realized that preparedness is,

is it's this thing that brings people together that's not super toxic. Like everybody can get, if you're a liberal in San Francisco or conservative in rural Montana, you can get on board that you need this idea of preparedness to make you better prepared for the worst case scenario. Generally speaking. So when I have classes in person or online, I see this community building built based off of this one thing that's not segregating people or that doesn't have toxic underlying things about it, right? It's not fringe. So we started American contingency, which is a community-based program where if we educate people to be better prepared, what's next? What happens when you get around people that you like because you're thinking about the same considerations? Like, I want to take care of my family.

I want to protect myself. How can you interoperate? Well, there's a bigger picture, right? The breakdown of the family unit, breakdown of communities. When me and you grew up, we knew our neighbors. We knew our neighbors, friends, and family. Now if you see your neighbor and he's checking his mail, you're like, you're like, who's that guy?

Like, why is he looking at me? Like, that's her neighbor, man. Like, what are you doing? Like, for the first time in history, you could be in an apartment complex with thousands of people in a vertical and not know one person and be disinterested in knowing anybody. But what do you do when you have to band together because a hurricane just destroyed the infrastructure of your town. Well, American Contenancy, we actually have a members.

Dot American Contendency.com that allows people to group and network. We have hundreds of groups that are interoperating now, that are like-minded, that train together, that work together, that build assets and their capabilities together, and then they break bread together, which is building relationships. So in every tier, and this just happened, which, you know, look, I think the, the most impactful thing that you've done in your career and your life is what you're showing in what you do and your actions outside of the military, right? It's somebody for me as a young entrepreneur, I look at you and go, these are the right things. Writing a book in publication

that exposes your ideology and your thinking to impact young people who don't have anything to lean on and purpose is the most impactful thing that a human being could do, especially from our backgrounds. So I said, I'm going to do pillars of preparedness, teach this thing, let me get a book deal. Nobody wants to touch me. For years, they thought I was fringe. I mean, I've been called everything from right-wing extremists, which is bizarre because I'm half Asian, to, you know, neo-Nazi, to all this weird stuff because I'm talking about this idea of being prepared. just two weeks ago, I signed a book deal with a major publisher that vetted me for two years, which means they just paid attention about writing a book on preparedness.

And I'm like, that's huge for me. One, to be able to impact somebody via the written word, which I grew up with, is impactful. But two, a publisher that published Michelle Obama and also Jordan Peterson on both sides of the spectrum is taking a change. chance on me. And I'm allowed, I'm humbled by the opportunity, allowed to have the opportunity to pass this word and mainstream to people who might be thinking about this but don't know how to contextualize it is a sign to me that this is making sense to people. Like, it's a hard genre because it's spread so thin. But the time and the place that we live in our society right now where people's cell phones, their virtual realities are more important and significant than their

actual reality at the detriment to their physical and mental health and wellness. It needs, we need to be bringing this to bear in conversations to get people involved in something outside of their cell phone. So it's my mission, but it's become something so different than I thought it was going to become as far as scaling a business vertical. Let me tell you what I think. This is what I think is very cool. And I was wondering if you would get there just from what you've seen so far to what my perspective is.

And what my perspective is, is your sort of like what everything you just said to me is the tip of the iceberg, actually. It's just the tip of the iceberg. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. If you look at, for me, Jiu-Jitsu. Jiu jitsu for me was a huge component of my life, not because I learned how to fight, not because I got in good physical condition, but because I learned a new way of thinking.

And I started to understand the world from a different perspective. And I started to see correlations between jiu-jitsu, combat, tactics, leadership, interacting with other human beings, the way I approached problems, the way I thought. Jiu-jitsu became a way of thinking. And it's actually, I can't say it's jiu-jitsu is that way of thinking. because it's everything combined.

It turns and translates into this sort of just the way of thinking for me. Well, when I start thinking about being prepared, about handling situations, about reacting to emergency situations, about handling contingencies, all those things you can learn for the specific genre. of actually applying to a survival situation, just like you can learn an arm lock for actually applying to a grappling situation. But guess what? You can take that mindset and you can apply to everything that you do.

So you can take what you're teaching about thinking through a problem, about foresight, about preparing for a certain scenario and the contingencies around that. You can actually apply that, not just to how you're gonna handle a fire or an earth, or a civil unrest, but how are you going to handle a business situation that you're in?

How are you going to handle an interaction with someone in your own family? It's not a hostile interaction, but it's an interaction that you need to think through. So the way that you're talking about preparedness, and I've told this to people before, they're like, well, you know, how good do you have to get at Jiu-Jitsu? Like, I mean, at a certain point, you're a blue belt, you're 225 pounds, Jocco. So you're okay. You can handle yourself in a self-defense situation. Yeah, absolutely I can.

What about shooting? Well, what are the chances, Jocko, that you're going to get into a gunfight? You're 49 years old. You know, you've got a wife and kids. You live in a nice area. What are the chances you're getting in a gunfight? Why do you need to be training? Why do you need to be?

Why should I be training? People ask me, why should I work with a firearm? Well, let me tell you why. because yeah, you have this narrow chance that for whatever reason somebody enters your house or you're in a situation, somebody tries to steal your car or hurt you or whatever where you've got to use your firearm. The chances of that, let's face it, they're tiny. But guess what you get? Guess what you get from practicing and art like shooting. You learn how to control your breathing. You learn how to detach. You learn how to refocus after you throw a shot and still take the next clean shot

without worrying about what just happened. You learn how to calm, you calm yourself down. You learn how to associate or disassociate from problems that are happening right in front of you. So there's applications to the art of shooting a weapon that you can apply to everything you can do. There's applications for what you learn in jiu-jitsu that apply to everything you do. There's applications to, if I went to one of your courses and you taught me how to, what I should put together for a go bag for a car. Here's what you should think through.

Cool. I can promise you. I'm going to use that. I'm going to put a go bag in my car. I'm going to put together a good one. But guess what else I'm going to do? I'm going to think about a contingency for my business and what we can do as a business to prepare for a certain contingency.

What do I need to prepare? What do I need to think through as a leader to be ready? So you're talking about a narrow, when you talk about this mindset of preparedness, you're talking about a pretty narrow thing. How am I going to survive a situation? To me, it's applicable to everything that a human being does. And why does a special operations guy

when there's a, you know, an earthquake or a flood or a car accident? Part of it, part of the reason that they survive is, hey, they know what to do. They know how to break a windshield. They know what to do in that specific technique. They technically know what to do. But part of it is, number one, they've been under pressure before. And number two, they know how to think through the problem that they're facing.

So what you're teaching isn't only applicable to survival. It's actually applicable to everything. And that, to me, is it should broaden your audience to everybody. And I like the fact that you said, you know, there's a certain alignment with what you're doing. The alignment is, you know, we run one with businesses sometimes, if you go higher up enough the alignment ladder in a business, you know, you might want to do something one way, I want to do something a different way. Ultimately, I say, hey, listen, do we want to take care of our clients?

Yes. Do we want to make some money? Yes, we do. Do we want to take care of the people on our team? Yes, we do. So we're going to be aligned there. Like there's no one, you're not going to, if you and I earn business together, you You know, say, well, actually, I don't want to make any money.

Or actually, no, I want to screw over our clients. Or actually, no, I don't want to take care of our team. You're not going to say that. And if you did say that, we're not working together. But 99% of the time you go to any business, you can go to a point where you're aligned, where you and I are thinking the same, hey, listen, we want to take care of our clients, we want to take care of our team, we want to make some money. We can agree with that.

What you just said, I don't care where you're from. I don't care where you're from. You take, what did you say, a liberal in San Francisco? or a freaking redneck in Montana. And you pull them into a room and say, do you want to be able to take care of your family? What are they going to say? They're going to say yes.

Do you want to be able to handle yourself in a pressure situation? They're going to say yes. Do you want to be able to take care of yourself? They're going to say yes. So there's an alignment that's inherent in what you're teaching that absolutely will bring people together, but it'll make them better not just because they're able to survive. It'll teach them a way of thinking

that will progress them in every. aspect of their life. And that's why I think it's even more powerful than what you're saying, because I could take some company executives and send them to one of your courses. And yes, it's a cool benefit that they're going to learn about survival, just like I run a program where we take civilians, we teach them how to do a room clearance. We teach them how to move between buildings, right? This is a, this is a 45-minute session, right? How to clear a room and how to move from building to building in a group. That's what we teach them.

Then we say, okay, here's your mission. And we start giving them missions. Now, what do they learn about clearing buildings? Doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all. But what do they learn about leadership? What do they learn about thinking under pressure? What do they learn about how to get people to move in the right direction?

What do they learn about being able to detach and take a step back and not get caught up in the firefight? We use laser attack, not get caught up in their laser gun and freaking out about that. So we take people and put. them through this tactical training, not so that they can become great tacticians, but so that they can lead better. So what you're doing, hey, listen, it's great you put people through some training that they learn survival skills.

But to me, even higher up the hierarchy of benefits is that they learn a way of thinking. That's going to benefit them in every aspect of their life. I think that's badass. Yeah. Yeah, I appreciate it. The lessons learned that we've found is exactly that, that most often people aren't exposed. They have limited exposure.

So when they have the opportunity to do something like, you know, a five-day experience, like we have, you know, we do corporate training, we do, we've done it, I've consulted for Oracle and some other companies. It's not about, like you said, the technical experience. The bottom line is they're not going to learn enough reps to build that technical expertise unless that's on their own. but the life lessons they learned and taking it back and processing stress, like you said,

is so important and valuable. I think what's happening with this introduction of technology in our lives is it's limiting our ability to be exposed. So one of the advice is that I give for people who are like, how do I change my mindset? You know, a lot of people say mindset, mindset, mindset, what the hell does that mean? In our field of expertise, it has to do with resilience, your ability to be. bounce back. Your ability once suppressed to bounce back and to be stronger, to thrive instead of just survive and get by. So when we expose people to new challenges, it doesn't have to be extreme.

You could just, I mean, we have extreme versions of this. We do Seer School. We have a civilian Seer school, which is fun to run. But those guys will come back from that experience, from a five-day Seer experience, survival, escape, resist, evade. And they'll go, this is the most impactful thing I've ever done in my life. And I'm like, really? And I'm like, okay, let me reflect on my impactful experiences. Oh yeah, Ranger School. When I was in Ranger School and I'm exposed and I'm vulnerable. It's impactful because it's something different. And we understand this obviously about even single celled organisms. If you're exposed to trauma, that is the first stage in growth because no growth takes place without exposure to trauma.

And so whatever that form factor is, getting pummeled on the mats and jujitsu, you are learning as you go. You're breaking to build. And so what's fascinating about this whole movement that I think is preparedness is that it's positive. There's not a lot of negative things that take place in preparing people to be prepared for that worst case scenario. You see a lot of positive impacts on community with law enforcement, with

relationships with people's understanding. And for me, getting all this collective of information and making sense of it and being able to clearly disseminate that is the biggest challenge. But it's the funnest thing about the business. I mean, the LMS, for example, of creating this idea that you could learn online and you can learn about these life-saving things. The naysayers came out and said, why would you teach somebody how to apply a tourniquet online? Like, don't you think that's kind of like a, it's high in liability and it's neglectful. I'm like, dude, you could build a rocket ship inside of your garage off a YouTube video. So I think I think I could teach somebody how to stop the bleed with a technical tourniquet applied to their body to help them survive.

And so I'm fascinated by it. It's my passion, obviously, but I think you're right. I think, especially when it comes to leadership, there's a breakdown in our societies with guys not willing to get off the bench and do anything for themselves. I was doing a podcast with Pete Blaber. It was a former CAG commander, wrote the mission, The Man and Me, and just wrote part two of that,

which is the common sense way. And one of the things he talks about is this idea of collaboration. And when you collaborate with somebody, when you have communication and you have reciprocation, then you create the environment of us willing to learn from each other. But you also give people the comment, to stand up in their own communities and do something about it.

I don't care if it's not their community. Like, yeah, you want to run for city council, that's great. You don't, and you just want to stand up and get off your ass for your family, or even for yourself. You're fat, you're sloppy, you're lazy, and you can make a change inside yourself because you come to that realization. That's good. For me, there's no revenue generated there.

It could be a podcast. It could be one-way dissemination. That impact is priceless. It's worth everything in the world. So what are people going to do if they want to get in the game with you? So they go to they go to fieldcraftsurvival.com? That's it. I mean, Philcraft Survival, look, we're all over the map on fieldcraft survival.

We've got a podcast. We've got the website. We could port you to the we thatprepared.com, which is the LMS or members. com. The start point is start like in this experience, listening to the long form versions for free. from YouTube, from podcast, and start developing an understanding of what you want. And then, you know, it's all over the map on,

like on Instagram, Philcraft Survival. My personal is mike.a.glover. But every day I'm living this. One thing I haven't detracted from is consistency. I might be making wrong with business decisions. I might be jacked up in many ways, but one thing I could never be criticized for is consistency. So I wake up every single day with this on my mind.

and in the last six years that I started this venture, I don't think I've had one day off, and that's okay. Because my grind is this purpose, and selfishly, I don't know if this is a tactic. Maybe it's done when we're unaware of it, but I've built a thing around me that felt and feels like the team life that I had, the culture that I came from. And I get the feeling in it in here,

and in your gym, and the people that I've met, and in a similar experience, I'm doing the same thing on my end in a parallel, but also synergistic universe. Is there any mistakes that you made from a business perspective that were close to catastrophic?

Have you screwed up anything really bad? Do they all just kind of little learn as you go? Kind of learn as you go. I think early on, I almost made a mistake early on where I was told in the diversification of all the things I was doing, it was too much.

And I get that. If you looked at me, even today, I mean, there's a lot of things we got going on. But at the time, all the verticals were spread so thin that nothing was gaining traction. And so I was told, find one vertical, one thing, one kit, one training session, and double down on that. Create one little tiny vertical scale that you can make revenue from and then diversify. And I said, no, I can't do that. I said because this whole thing that's prepared in this is very diversified in the first place. I can't teach mindset without teaching physical training.

I can't teach physical training without an understanding of a mobility platform into your life. So we have to do everything at once. And so doing that was challenging because it almost broke me. I mean, literally it broke me. Like I lived in my business with my girlfriend for four months. And we literally lived in a warehouse for four months and showered. It didn't even have a shower. It had a pump shower that we camped with.

That was our living circumstance. hands. But you make those sacrifices in business. And then all of a sudden, everything's scaled at once. And then you're like, oh, okay, so this is the place to be now. So now it's about tactics and, you know, developing the right flow, supply chain issues, all these things that everybody's dealing with in business. It's a, it's a train wreck, but I wouldn't trade it for the world. And where are you based out of? So right now, we're in Heber City, Utah, headquarters is there. We're standing up. Kevin Owens, a former sniper teammate in mine, who's unilaterally running

Phil Craft NC He's standing that up And then Raul Martinez My training director Has 20 subcontractors That teach all over the U.S. He's standing up in Arizona near Phoenix

North Anthem, Arizona, which is north of Phoenix. So we're standing up these small little verticals. Evan Hafer, who's a buddy of mine, owns black, Iql coffee, has given me the opportunity to sell in a display

about the size of this table. Philcraft survival swag and gear that we sell for equipment. And that will be in every black rifle coffee. It's in two right now, being four next week, being hopefully in a thousand when he's competing with Starbucks. But yeah, we're all over the map, man. That's freaking awesome. Well, hey, man, I think we've been going for, I don't know,

will you get four hours yet? I don't know. Three and a half, something like that. I don't want to take up too much more of your time, and I know you got a little plane to catch. Echo. Echo Charles, you got anything? I do not.

Thanks for coming. Good to meet you. Nice meeting you too, man. No questions from Echo Charles. Not today. We covered it all. One podcast, we were talking about living off the land. And, you know, I was a radio man in my enlisted days.

So I was always traveling light and, you know, carry like no food, just water, batteries in the radio. and then we were talking about whatever was, we were talking about the Civil War and how those guys were just, they would live off the land, right? And Echo chimed in the fact that, you know, he had also, he could also live off the land. Not exactly.

So he was saying, you know, if he's going to L.A. for a couple days, it doesn't need to pack a lot. Yeah. Because worst case scenario, live off the land. You didn't bring a toothbrush? Cool. Roll into Walmart.

Yeah. Roll into a wall. greens you get a toothbrush. Wow, that's what I'm talking about. Urban survival. That's freaking herbal surviving, man. So I'm surprised you didn't ask about like what the best, you know, store was to get toothbrushes at.

CVS, man. You CVS, man. They're pretty good system. Whatever, Brett, conceptually, it was the same thing. See what I'm saying? Instead of packing a big bag or whatever, like you live off the land. Yeah. Urban spraw.

That's an urban sprawl. It's an urban land. It's the same thing. Yeah, yeah. It's an ecosystem. It's an ecosystem. Let the environment provide. That's it. Right.

Yeah. There you go. Right on. Sounds good. Mike, any closing thoughts? No, I just want to just take a second and just say thank you for the opportunity. I will say, just like I say on a lot of podcasts with guys of your caliber and your background, that you're doing something that I wish a lot of guys with our background would do,

which is get off the bench and take a stand and commit to this burden of responsibility. What you're doing is growing a business, but what you're also doing is impacting young people's lives and every walk of life to do something with their lives. That's purpose, that's different than anything else that's a structure and business plan. This is an impact on culture. I think from, you know, as far back as we could record,

every major battle that's been fought, those men came from war and affected popular culture, whether it was cutting, you know, P-51 Mustangs, making hot rods, chopping Harleys, have an extreme impact, there is a burden of responsibility of men like you and me that need to step up and accept that reality. The John Plasters, the John Stryker-Myers of the world are the ones who affected my life

and me stepping up and doing something about it. I'm not talking about just military service. I'm talking about doing something impactful for your life. And this, the books, the business, that's the vertical in revenue. That's what scales the hierarchy and grows, but the impact it transcends across society. And without you, without your abilities to stay in it and stay committed,

we wouldn't be affecting popular culture like we are. And I think you're leading away in that way. I'm humbled to have been on this podcast and to have the opportunity to speak to your audience, but I just want to let you know that personally. it's a big deal and you're doing it. You did it in military service. To me, we come from similar lines.

That's not the greatest impact. The greatest impact is what you're doing right now. So I appreciate it. Well, thanks. I appreciate it. I'm not sure I'm all that you've made me out to be, but when I look at what you did in the past and freaking just talking about your deployments,

I mean, not even, there's not even any words to describe. And I know that you sit there and think of the back of your head of like, you know guys that did 12 more deployments compared to your whatever, five or six. And I think that's the feeling we all have all the time. And you even said it today. You found out, I found out there's someone and not just someone, but there's a bunch of people way better than we are at that job. And God bless them for going out there and getting after it. And that being said, what you did to hold the line, what you did to carry the torch, appreciate it.

and then back at you once again what you're doing right now. You know, I think what you're doing right now is going to have a huge impact and is having a huge impact, getting people's mindsets straight in a time when mindsets are all over the map. Seeing you do that, that's impressive.

And I hope you keep doing it, brother. Thanks, brother. We'll do. Right on. And with that, Mike Glover has left the building. Appreciate Mike coming on. freaking great story a lot of incredible stuff

and what we're doing right now is awesome talking about preparedness talking about being ready it seems like we should start fundamentally there's one area we can start to be ready today echo Charles what do you think there's always ways to be ready be more ready

I think that's self-evaluation part was kind of critical. I mean, it wasn't surprising. Like, oh, you know, like, but it was a good, like, kind of reminder. It's like that is like one of those answers that lies like right below the surface that you already know is there. But it's not always revealed. It's self-reflect. Evaluate, where are we, you know?

You would think that's obvious, but it's not. It's not obvious. A lot of people go through life without evaluation, evaluating where they're at, where they can improve, what they could do better. Yeah, it's true. And I'd say this before where it's in a way. way, depends on how you look at it, it's a good problem to have. It means a lot of our problems are solved. You know, if you're not worried about this or that happening,

that just means that it's not happening very often, you know, kind of a thing, which is a good thing. Solved problems tends to be a good thing. Tends to. Okay. Anyway, so we got to be careful about that kind of stuff. So we do want to keep ourselves ready, strong, healthy. You won't have to exercise. strength every single day, aside from in the gym.

See what I'm saying? Like you doing 20 reps squats, right? Like the results, the reason you do that. That reason is not going to be demonstrated, displayed, put into play every single day in real life. You're not going to. I guess maybe conceptually it might, but no, it won't. But there's a bigger purpose here.

Is what I'm saying? It's to stay ready, realistically, as ready as you possibly can. And all these different elements. So while we're on this path of readiness, capability, health, mental and physical, we might need some supplementation. Good news is Jocko has supplementation called Jock Fuel. So let's start with Discipline Go. RTD cans.

it is the new era of energy drinks actual energy drinks yeah Mike Glover said something real simple but real true he's like it I like that it's healthy you don't have to worry about poisoning yourself

anymore so I'm paraphrasing that last part but it's true though and it you know I said before two where yeah sometimes I'm gonna drink two of those in a row sometimes three I did drink two of them just now yeah

in a row You don't have to, there's no back end price anymore. It's like, oh, wait, I'm actually technically, physically. I'm not worried about becoming a type two diabetic this afternoon. Correct. I didn't just drink 72 grams of sugar or whatever. No, no. I had monk fruit, which is technically good for you.

Yeah, that was a good point. You made this off air, by the way, where you're like, yeah, you know, there's five calories and some of the new ones that's 15 calories because it comes from food. Yeah, yeah. The sweetener comes from food, not some chemical. that shouldn't be in your body. Yeah. They can't provide any kind of calories.

Between 5 and 10 calories per can. Why is that? Like you just said, because it's not chemicals. You know it has zero calories? A chemical. That's what has zero calories. What has some calories? Monkfruit has some calories.

Five. Yeah. So it's one of those deals, man. Like I said, the new era of energy drinks. You can drink some energy drinks. There's your energy drink. Great there on the path. 100% too.

It's not like a deal. It's like, well, you know, put something in there to preserve it. Partial, it's not partial path. 100% on the path. 100%. No deviation. So, yes, you can get these. There's new flavors out, by the way.

You're going to have to check them out yourself. Very impactful, exciting flavors as far as flavors go. Anyway, you can get them at Wawa if you're in the area that you have Wawa. You can get them at vitamin chop. By the way, talking about flavors, what I find interesting is some, families of beverages, they kind of all taste the same. They might have a different label on it or a different name. This stuff tastes legitimately different.

Like you might have one and be like, this is the best thing I've ever tasted. You might have another one not like it. Try a different one. Because there's definitely more variation in flavor with these flavors than there is with a normal company, a normal drink, who's just like, look, they know what the flavor profile is to get people addicted. So they put a bunch of sugar in there. Name it something.

And cool, they're moving forward. We're not doing that. We're giving you legit flavor profiles. Yeah. With different tastes. It's a good point for sure. Keep your mind open.

Also, you can get them at origin USA.com. Also, as far as supplementation goes, we have stuff for your joints, super cruel oils, and joint warfare. Also for immunity, vitamin D3 and Cold War.

Also, If you need additional protein if you want additional protein or if you want dessert And or you want dessert boom I had one last night not to go too deep into it The the peanut butter no yeah one peanut butter that's a win that a total win and it's not like I was like let me just choose the I just grabbed anyone and it happened to be that So I'm like cool I went kind of hard though. I don't recommend this all the time I put some chocolate chips in there On accident put too many. Not that, not way too many, but too many. And then banana.

This kind of disqualifies everything you're saying. A little bit, huh? You can't just add chocolate chips and be like, oh, it tastes is really good. You added chocolate chips, bro. But it was like almost too sweet, I think, because of the additional chocolate chips. Yeah. I ponder the whole thing. Don't get it wrong.

You're still very, very good. You know what you do? You know those, the dark chocolate chunks? You can buy dark chocolate You know whatever percentage Put that in there That would have been perfect Even if I accidentally put too much

Okay, anyway There's other flavors as well So don't you know Don't slack on that either way Whatever flavor you like Mulk additional protein Another clean deal It's not like some sugar-filled deal

It is once you put Freaking chocolate chips in it You know It's gonna depend on the level Of what it's wrong with you Like dark chocolate I think you turn into Pete Roberts with the freaking

sugar cubes under your tongue. It was just one of those things. You know, it happens sometimes. Look, I don't put chocolate chips in there. It tastes freaking delicious. Yeah, totally does. So, there you go. Get some milk.

Get some, get what you need. Yeah. JoccoFuel.com. And by the way, this is important. Important. Oh, just this is important. I don't know. I'm going to say something that is important.

The thing that's important is if you want to get you, if you want to get free shipping, get a subscription. If you subscribe, you get free shipping. We know we're competing with some, large, maybe even the largest of organizations in the world that are shipping stuff for free. No big deal. We're shipping for free too.

Subscribe. We got you. Yep, it's true. Also, I mentioned origin USA.com. This is where you can get American made denim, American made, Jiu Jitsu, Rashgarts. So basically, apparel for work, apparel for Jiu-Soo, and then everywhere in between. Basically, apparel for life. for the whole

life includes Jiu-Jitsu The whole gig 100% origin USA.com Again, all made in America from the ingredients or materials not ingredients The materials all the way

to the end product Boom, all made in America So you're supporting yourself You're supporting America as well Also Joco the store Win win win big time Also Jock's the store

called Jocco store.com And this is where you can get Rashgarts, T-shirts trucker hats right the flex fit hats hoodies all this good cool stuff representing the path discipline equals freedom good

when things are going bad there's always some good it comes from it iconic video words from my man right here then the last you want to represent that that's so you can get the shirts on jaco store so is it the video that's iconic or is it the words

I don't know I didn't evaluate it kind of seems like both I guess technically So you're saying you made an iconic video is what I'm hearing. Either way. Either way, we have a subscription situation as well for shirts. Designs a little bit different. Iconic design that you're making? Well, you know, that's a subject for debate, I think.

But people do seem to like them. You know, you want a cool new shirt every month. High quality, by the way. Boom, you can subscribe to that. It's called the Shirt Locker. You can get it on Jocco Store. Also, subscribe to this podcast if you haven't already. Leave a review if you're in the mood.

That's kind of cool. Yeah, that's cool. Also, we have Jocko unraveling, which I do with my brother, D.C., grounded podcast, Warrior Kid podcast. You can also join the underground, jaco underground.com. We have alternative podcasts. We're going into some pretty cool subjects on there. Look, we made that in the event that there's problems in,

the in the podcast realm and people start trying to block or erase or put inject average all this stuff that they could do if that gets out of hand which it could we will make adjustments and we'll be on jocco underground.com if you want to support that you can sign up you can subscribe it's $8.18 a month and then you can listen to all these alternative additional podcasts that we're making And we're gonna do other cool stuff that we haven't really even Started yet but we got cool ideas That will come out. We have a YouTube channel subscribe to that if you want to see the videos that I am the assistant director of and The videos that sometimes I am in them which is kind of cool that I do the do role

I both assistant direct and I and you're the talent. Yeah, both Either way. Yeah, that it is true. We do have YouTube channel video version. Does it make you mad when you're when you're directing a video and then I give a little suggestion and it kind of makes a big difference because you always seem

a little bit frustrated by that. You always seem like a little bit frustrated and you kind of the good thing I'll say you're humble enough to be like you do the shot whatever the adjustment is but then I feel like it I feel like you have a hard

I think those nights you don't sleep as good as you do if you come in and you got the shots. Well, a wise man once told me, and when I say once, I mean plenty of times, that as a leader, I need to always,

my goal should be to do your team member's idea, not your own idea. So from a leadership perspective, you do a good job of going like, yeah, hey good,

that sounds like a good shot. We'll do that shot. I like it a lot. That's good. Even if it's an 80% solution. Even if the shot's an 80% solution. What I'm, asking you so from a leadership I'm giving you an you know an A minus you know

yeah but what I'm saying is when you go home at night and the little demons start to knock at the door and you wonder you wonder why the assistant director had to come up with that shot yeah had to say hey let me give you a little little help sure like what happens do you it makes me happy that you know we were able we were able to I can effectively come up with a viable idea. You want to know why you got the A minus? Because I can see it in your face. I can see it your face.

I can see the frustration when you don't come up with the shot. When you have to take advice from the A.D. When you have to take advice from the A.D. Yep, that's when I realize. He's a little frustrated. I can see it in your face. I can see it in your eyes. I can kind of feel it too.

Yeah, well, I'll give you credit. It's still an A. Because you still do your best to get the good shot. I haven't had you sabotage a shot yet and said, yeah, you know, it actually doesn't work. But I can see that it's frustrating. Yeah, well, you keep talking to me with that incandescendant tone. I'm about to go C plus on you pretty soon. Check.

Either way. Anyway, psychological warfare. If you don't know what that is, it's an album with tracks, Jocko, talking to you through your ears. But why and how to get past moments of weakness, even if he imposed those weaknesses. is on you himself. As the case may or may not be sometimes. Check. Hey, Dakota Myers got a company called Flipside Canvas.

Flipside Canvas.com. You can get cool stuff to hang on your wall. I got a bunch of books. I got a new book coming out. It's called Final Spin. It's a, we're not sure what to call it. It does tell a story. Parts of it are not written normal.

It's a strange story. There's some interesting characters in there. Literature or something. Maybe literature, maybe poetry, maybe a transcript. We're not sure what it's called. It's a new form of writing. If you want to check it out, it's called Final Spin. Pre-order it so that the publisher knows to print a bunch of copies.

Leadership Strategy and Tactics, Field Manual, the Code, Evaluation, the Protocol, discipline, equals freedom, field manual. Way the Warrior Kid. One, two, and three, and four. Then we have Mikey and the Drum. Dragons. We got a bout faced by Hackworth. We got extreme ownership and the dichotomy leadership that I wrote with my brother Lafab and who I also have a leadership consulting problem if a leadership consulting company where we sound problems through leadership. Go to eschlamfront.com

for details on that. We have Extreme Ownership Academy, Extreme Ownership.com where we have virtual learning and live virtual learning. Leadership is not an inoculate. you get a shot. Now you know it. No, you got to go to the gym every day, the leadership gym. Come and get it. Next live event is the muster in Phoenix,

August 17th and 18th, and then Las Vegas, October 28th and 29th. We've sold all these out. Go to Extreme Ownership.com. Click on events, get registered. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families,

you want to help Gold Star. families check out mark lee's mom mama lee she's got a charity organization and if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to america's mighty warriors dot org and if you want if you want more of my colorless chronicleings or you need more of echoes inane interjections you can find us on the interwebs on twitter on instagram on facebook echoes at equitral i am at jock and wling mike Mike Glover's on Twitter, Mike A. Glover 1 on Instagram, mike.a.glover. And then, of course, he's got fieldcraft survival and fieldcraftsurvival.com.

Check his stuff out. Lots of great information. And, well, thanks to Mike once again for coming on for sharing your experiences and knowledge, Mike. It's awesome. Even more thanks for your service. For taking the fight to the enemy, which you most certainly did worldwide, freaking outstanding. Thank you. And to all our military personnel that are right now out there taking the fight to the enemy,

thank you for what you're doing every day to preserve our way of life. And the same goes to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service. And all first responders, thank you for preserving our safety here at home. then everyone else out there let me ask you a question are you ready are you ready for contingencies are you ready to maneuver if you have to are you ready to save your friends your family yourself are you ready well you should be we all should be so get your mike glover on train plan prepare by going out there every day and getting after it.

And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko. Out.