Jocko Podcast - 347: To Accomplish The Impossible, We Must Decide. With Nick Lavery, Green Beret and Wounded Warrior.

Episode Date: August 17, 2022

Grew up in Boston. 2007 Army Basic Training. Green Beret, Nick Lavery.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 347 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Simply put, Warren officer, Nick Lavery is a warrior's warrior. Nick selflessly and repeatedly risked his life for his nation, his comrades in arms, and most importantly, he accomplished what our nation needed him to do every time he left our shores. Nick is a hero in the truest sense. Nick's chosen profession requires an immersion into some of the nation's most difficult challenges,

often in demanding, complex, and especially uncertain environments. To answer the nation's call, we seek men and women who have the tenacity to achieve the impossible and the resiliency to do it again and again. Nick Lavery's story is truly an exemplar of that. And that right there is an excerpt from a book. The book is called Objective Secure, and the book is actually written by Nick Lavery. And the words in that excerpt were spoken by Lieutenant General Francis Baudet, who was the commander of U.S. Army Special Operations. and the speech was given when Nick received an award for his service in special operations.

And I think anyone that hears Nick's story will agree that Nick is exactly what the general said. He is a warrior who can absolutely accomplish the impossible. And it is an honor to have Nick with us here tonight to talk us through his experiences and share some of his lessons. learned. Nick, thanks for coming down, man. Thanks for having me. I wanted to read a really quick intro so we could start talking, man. Yeah, man, let's do it. That's where I'm at.

Yeah, freaking insane. Your life's been kind of crazy thus far, and we'll get into that. Let's start from the beginning. Normally, when you've spoken nine words, everyone knows where you're from. Pretty quick, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Boston Mass, as well. I claim home. I guess more accurately, though, is I'm a nomad of Massachusetts. You know,

I moved every 12 to 18 months as a kid all the way up until eventually I got to college. And that's because your what, your parents were just moving around? Yeah, a lot of it was financially related. You know, both my parents, they had me and my youngest sister real young, so struggling as young parents and trying to just grind it out with, Also, my father trying to pursue his passion in life, trying to figure out what that is and then go after it while he's got, you know, two young kids. He needs to feed. How old was he when he handed him?

And how old was your mom? 20. And my mother was 22. That's like old school. Yeah. My sister's two years younger than me. So, you know, they do what they had to do. And, you know, I love him and respect them for it.

But that part of the story, that movement is deeply rooted. in a lot of what we're going to get into here today. Like those experiences, particularly me struggling socially, struggling to make friends and keep friends and being the new kid in school every year. In today's world, what's known as bullying, you know, back then wasn't as looked at as it is today. So my resiliency started from the time that I, you know,

was five years old and went to kindergarten. That thing, man, we were just talking about bullying yesterday as a matter of fact. Because it is, we were talking about, like everyone gets bullied, right? Well, at least back in the day when I grew up and you grew up, when Echo grew up, we all got bullied. That was going to happen. Because no matter what, when you're 10, there's going to be a 12-year-old that's bigger than you. And when you're 12, there's going to be a 14-year-old that's bigger than you.

And when I got bullied and pushed around and shoved in the lockers and all those things, I kind of was just like, that's it. To me, it was just sort of the way things went. Like, oh, yeah, well, I'm smaller right now, and I'm going to get knocked around a bit. because I'm smaller. I didn't think of it was that big of a deal. I don't know. It didn't like hit me in some big emotional way. I don't know.

Am I dumb? No, you're just you, bro. You're just you. I definitely struggle with it more so than you did. Eventually I became conditioned to it, though, which, you know, took a few years. Then it became normal for me. I wasn't as,

as understanding of it as the way you just put it, but I just, my mind was conditioned to deal with the pain and discomfort and embarrassment. So the effect was less and less and less overtime. Early on, you know, coming home with tears in my eyes just about every day of school, you know, and my parents are doing their best to kind of mentor me and be like, you know, you're going to be good and just giving me some guidance. But then, you know, eight months later, I'm in a new location and it starts all over again. I guess I never had that too

because I basically grew up in the same town with the same people all the time everybody knew who I was and knew who my sisters were whatever so I didn't have to go into some new environment so never really experienced that yeah it was tough but I look back now of course

extremely grateful for that because a lot of people they asked a lot of the questions how'd you do this how'd you do that I don't typically just dive straight into into that portion of the story but if I extract this thing all the way down, that's deeply seated in that.

Is there anything that you remember, do you remember like one kid? Do you remember, you know, I wrote a book about bullying. There's a bully in there named Kenny Williams, you know, who's just bullying. Do you remember any specific, like, things that happened where it really left the mark? I'd say the most, the clearest memory comes back was a kid who was maybe two years older to me and he you know he would beat on me just about every day and one day got dropped off the bus he gave me an exceptionally good beating this particular day so normally i come home i wouldn't be like visibly beat up and i would i would hide it from my parents i wouldn't let them know how

often i was getting like beat on because i even as a young person i oh i felt bad for them because they're struggling and they're grinding it out i didn't want to add to their stress like we're getting kicked out of this house, we're moving to another house. Like, they're working their balls off. I could see that as a young person. So I would hide it. One particular day, there was no, there was no hiding it, right? So I was, like, busted up pretty good, walked in. And, you know, my father got home from work a little later.

And the kid lived just down the street from us. So he grabbed me and, like, drug me down the street. And I'm begging him. Like, no, no, let's not do this. You're going to make it worse. Let's not do this. I thought I was in, I don't know, third grade. So I was probably, I don't know, seven or eight-ish.

I'm like, Dad, no, no, no, we're doing this. You know, knocks on the door. And this kid, you know, his parents weren't all that put together. You know, father answers the door. Hippy-looking dude, but like big, hairy, hairy big mustache, you know. Shirtless answers the door. And he and my father had some words where it almost went physical between the two of them, right on this dude's doorstep, you know.

And the kid I was dealing with is behind his father. And he's now, he's yelling at me. about how I'm going to get it worse and I'm like this is not working out for anybody ironically though however it did I do remember that it did tone down after that so it reached the precipice of confrontation but it did kind of level things off a little bit

yeah that's a little bit crazy you know that's what the dad wants to do right yeah echo Charles that was a real strong affirmative over there did your dad get into it back you up no no but I don't know I'm thinking like Every time like I hear a bully story, yeah, you know, I have kids now they're small. But if I, you know, you imagine them coming home with visible damage.

Oh, yeah, you want to go over there and kill everybody. Like whoever was even a part of it. We had a kid, we had a guy at this gym. And he worked here. And he did sales. And but, you know, he's kind of, you know, like a loud mouth, you know. Always poking fun. Always, you know, that kind of guy.

And he did jih Tzu. He did a brown belt, you know. And he used to roll with my son. And he would kind of like bully my son. You know, when my son was a little kid, he'd like, you know, maybe slap him around a little bit on the mats, you know, maybe give the nuggies, right? The nuggies. And I remember one day when my kid was maybe like 10 or 11 years old, we're leaving the gym. And I didn't like paying any mind to it.

You know, he would just get abused or whatever, bullied, whatever. whatever while I was training or something by you know he's trying to train and this guy would grab him up and one day we're walking out and and my son goes hey dad and I go hey what's up and he goes do you think that guy he's like do you think he'll be here when I'm like 20 and I was like I don't know but I could see he's plotting wow I mean he's plotting on this dude so that guy doesn't work here anymore so he's probably going to get away with it but that's the kind of thing where you think like that left a mark yeah on my kid like oh when the time comes I'm going to train and I'm going to work and I'm going to be bigger and stronger that guy I'm come back when I'm 20.

How old was he when it happened? It was probably like I mean this happened for years I mean we've had this gym since he was since my son was like five oh wow so this could have happened anywhere between the ages of five and 15, you know. So he was forecasting. Yeah. Like a decade down the road. But this was when my son was like 10. He was thinking, hey, he was, yes, he was forecasting.

By the time I'm 20, that guy's going to be old and I'm going to be ready. In my prime. I think he is about 20 now. He's coming. That clock is ticking. I'm going to go to the book here, give you a little childhood background here. When I was around nine years old, my parents bought. me a dumbbell set. It had pairs of three, five, and eight pounders. I began constantly working

out in my bedroom. Eventually, I got to an age when I could join a gym. No matter where I was living at the time, I would scout out a nearby place to train, oftentimes miles away. I would ride my bike there and back. The progress wasn't what I had hoped for. Neither did it have much of an effect on my social life. But the desire to be big and strong remained. I caught the bug. Mother nature eventually blessed me with a growth spurt, shooting me up over six feet five, and my consistent work in the weight room paid off. I introduced different combat sports and martial arts into my life. I was no longer picked on. And as my social skills also developed, I was no longer without friends. So you started getting after it. Yeah. I don't know that connection. I don't know if that

was a pre-planned segue with Yostom, but that's, I mean, that's perfect. Yeah. Because I, I, I don't know, I didn't have a specific dude in mind that I was targeting a decade down the road. It was really everybody I was targeting. But the grind began then in order to build up the confidence that I wanted and needed. And so when did you start wrestling? High school. Yeah, wrestled high school for my first three years up until my senior year, which is when football became the only sport that I would play.

head coach, head football coach, was also the athletic director of the program. So I started getting looked at to play football my junior year by college scouts, so come senior year. He's like, no, no, no, all you're doing, you're in the weight room, it's football. You can run with the track team to help you with your speed and conditioning,

but you are football 24-7. And you were down for the cause on that, right? Absolutely. Yeah. That became my primary sport earlier than high school, and then I saw it as a way to go to college because I was not an academic by any stretch. You weren't talk about doing the bare minimum

just to be able to stay eligible to play sports. That was me, man. So that was my only route to college. So I was cool with that adjustment. When did you grow? I was a peanut most of my life growing up. I was a massive baby. I was born.

I was 12 pounds, nine ounces as a baby. And my mother, It's not a baby, bro. That's like a small child. I set the record at the hospital, which has since closed, so I own that forever. And my mother's, you know, she's a hippie, and she wanted to have this natural birth process. And the doctor's like, no, no, no, no, no. You don't understand.

Like, we have to go in and remove this human from you because he will split you in half. So that's the route I took. And I was massive as a baby. And then I became really, really small. Like, I wrestled at 1-23, you know, my freshman year. So little. I was maybe 5, 5, 5, 6. Little guy.

Damn. It wasn't until, I think it was between my sophomore and junior year of high school that I hit this massive growth spurt. And I shot up like six inches over a summer. And my joints were all achy. And I had Oz Goods is what it was called. I'm not sure I still called that. Okay, so I had that going and I was gangly and awkward

because I had gotten so tall. Came back my junior year and my football, all my coaches were like, what do we even do with you now? you know, because you're growing so tall. But between that time and then the time I graduated those two years was when I shot up, you know, like over a foot over the course of two years. That's insane. It was wild, man.

And it was even, it was stranger because my birthday, September 1st, which is coming up here pretty soon. I went to school early. So everyone in my class was a year ahead of me. So I started college, for example, at 17 years old, was my freshman year of college. So I was already like a year behind everybody in terms of my maturity and my puberty development. So even my buddies, once I had them, their voices are dropping. They're getting hair in new places. And I'm still this little squeaky mouse, right?

You know, trying to lift my eight-pound dumbbell set so I could stay, you know, one of the cool kids. So I was real late to the game with all that stuff. Yeah, that's why parents hold their kids back. That's a big deal, man. Holding the kids back so they're little dominators. In wrestling, that's like the way. That's the way, you know, at least in California, kids are getting, kids are like 23. They're senior year, you know.

It's like football in Texas. Oh, yeah. It's the same thing. Freaking crazy. You see these scenes in high school with full-blown beards, like men, right? He's not kids, man. These are men. Yeah.

So you must have started to like just completely shine in football because you get huge. I didn't get huge, like, body mass. wise until I was in college. So by the time I graduated my senior year, you know, I was a strong safety, but I got so tall that the scouts started looking at me for linebacker in college. They're like, you're eventually going to fill out that frame. We just need to maintain your speed and stack on some muscle mass to go along with your now new height that you have. So I was recruited to play linebacker and then the muscle mass really came around, you know, sophomore year of college. I spent my class. my first year in that summer just with the strength coaches and the nutritionists all within the

program that we had at the school, learning how to eat, learning how to train. And that's when I really filled out my frame. So my sophomore year of college, you know, I was eventually around like 225, 2.30. Whereas if I was born in Texas or if my father had half a brain and he had done what he should have done, right, I would have been more than likely D1, full ride playing on Sundays today. I'd weigh him for my current lifestyle. Did they put you on like a straight up just dirty bulk? Is that the proper term?

One of them. Dirty. I mean, I imagine if you showed up to me and you're a freshman in college and you weigh whatever, 185 pounds, I'm like, cool. Deadlift, squat, and just eat. Did they put you on that? Like you said nutritionist, I thought the nutritionist at that point would be dominoes.

Just eat everything. Just eat everything. No, it wasn't. It was more. dialed in. I had a regimented meal plan that I would just show up to the cafeteria and just give them my name and then they would give me the food. But it wasn't just like pizza and like hot pockets and shit. It was like real food. It was just a lot of it. There was a basketball player named Manute Bowle who played for the University of Bridgeport. He came from Africa and he was seven,

10 or something crazy. And when he got here, he weighed, you know, like some tiny amount. And I read some article that they were like, hey, they were just pizza and beer. Like, we just need this guy to eat everything he can to just get a little bit bigger because he was too skinny. Yeah, that it's weird. I mean, we're in the generation where they know a lot about nutrition nowadays. Where even in our college where if they would have guys gain weight, it would be good food. In fact, yeah, we had a program called Training Table where all the football players would go and they'd eat separate and it would be different food. And it's all like good food.

There's no pizza. There's no that kind. It's like chicken, vegetables. Potatoes. Yeah. A lot of potatoes. But that was really where I began learning about nutrition. And then I was seeing the effects as it pertained to me on the field.

And that was where I really fell in love with training and fitness. And, you know, continuing that through today. That was the foundation of that knowledge was at that point. And then so how did it go? How to go in the football college career? It was good. You know, I played D2 at UMS and UMS Lowell. And, you know, my first freshman year, you know, didn't get really any playing time.

I was still kind of grown and developing. Sophominee, I started playing a little bit. And then junior year I was starting. I say junior year because that's the way we normally break it down. But for me, it was like more like my sophomore year 2.0, you know, because I wasn't in line with the credits I needed to stay on track to graduate in four years. Yes. But my second or third year of playing ball, my third year in college, was when I was on a field. And then my fourth year, I took a pretty nasty injury to my back. And that ended my season

a little early. That was your senior year? So what year was that? That had been 2004, 2005. Okay. So where were you in, what were you doing when September 11th happened? That was my sophomore year Yeah Sophomore year or my second year of school Was 9-11 Were you Is that what focused you

Maybe thinking about being in the military Yeah I mean that was certainly the The tipping point for me Was that I started looking at it in high school Around my freshman sophomore year And no direction I skipped school one day

I went downtown Boston And I met with a Marine Corps recruiter And I said I think I want to be a Marine And he's like perfect finish high school and come back and we got you we got you bro i'm like great so i had like kind of an idea because i hated school i liked athletics but i was tiny there was no future enough for me i wanted to again i wanted to be respected i wanted to be feared in a lot of way because i lived my life in fear most of the time and the marine corps was the route to give me what i needed he's like

cool graduate high school come back did you take your number or anything i don't think so it might be too far outside their window because they got to get their quotas and all that. At the same time, like when you walk in there, it's like going on to a car dealership, like they're ready to take you. But I guess if you were like 13, he's like, come back when you graduate. Yeah, I don't remember any exchange of information. The only thing that detracted me from going that route was football, was athletics. So went to college, you know, kind of plan B.

And then sophomore year was, yeah, that was 9-11. And then at that point, I struggled to stay. in school because I was really angry and I wanted to be part of the response to that. I struggled to stay in school, listen to some, you know, family and friends and mentors and decided to stay in and grind out the rest of my degree and then look at options to come in. What did you get your degree in? Criminology. And then you, so you know you're graduating. What did you say you graduated? 2005?

I graduated in 2007. Oh, no kidding. So yeah, you know, normally if you go to college for seven years, they call you a doctor. Me, it's just Nick still. So, you know, a lot of different academic probations and having to redo semesters, you know, it made it easy for me to be eligible for football because it's played in the fall. So all I needed to do was maintain, I think it was nine credits, like three classes, and just not fail any of them. If I could fill all the rest of my classes after the season was over, and I didn't care.

And that was the route I took, right? I'm mature. I didn't care, you know? I look back now and I'm like, man, what if I just applied myself? And now I enjoy reading and learning and studying. But back then I didn't care. So, yeah, 2007 was when I finally received my degree. And then...

When did you talk to a recruiter? So now did you still look at the Marine Corps? Or how'd that go? I looked at the Navy. Oh, okay. Graduated college. The war was still going on. Now Iraq is kicked off as well.

So Afghanistan, Iraq are both surgeons. It was prime for someone to go in and get some. And I'm like, yep, here we go. So maybe it was a week after I graduated college. I went downtown Boston. And in the same building, they had three branches. They had the Navy, the Marines, and the Army, and three separate offices.

And I went into the Navy office first, and I said, I want to be a seal. You know, I knew I wanted to be in special operations. I wanted to be right at the front of the army. the fight and the SEALs comes to mind really fast today as then of being the ultimate badass warrior. So I walk in and say, I want to be a SEAL. And he said, perfect.

Let's get you enlisted in the Navy. And then you can request to go to Buds and go that route. And I said, okay, thank you. And I left. And I went and talked to the Marine Corps recruiter and I got the same answer. When I went and talked to the Army, I got a different answer. They said, we have this program called the Special Forces recruit, contract. Adoption known as an 18 x-ray, which I'm sure you're familiar with gets you straight into the Army special forces. You bypass the conventional army assuming you make it all the way through.

The Navy recruits a the Navy brings in a lot of people that want to be seals that aren't going to be seals. I mean a lot of people and it's it's interesting that you were able to identify that that what they were offering you wasn't what you actually wanted. And there is a, there are programs. I'm surprised, like there are programs that you get like a contract to go, at least get a shot at Buds. Those things do exist. When I came in, that's what I did.

It was at the time, it was called the Die Fairer program. I have no idea what that means. But it was like, you are guaranteed an opportunity to take the test to go to Buds. And I was like, yeah, cool, sign me up. But it sounds like that guy was,

didn't even have that much to offer you. No, no. And I mean, if he had chances out, things would look a little different right now because I would have taken it. Yeah. Because that was my goal. I want to be a seal. Boom. If he had said, hey, man, we got this option right here.

We'll get you into buds within the first six months, whatever, some kind of guarantee. Yeah. I probably would have signed it right there and then. Yeah. Man, that's weird. I wonder what was up with that. And then the Marine Corps, same thing. The Marine Corps used to be like, hey, you join the Marines.

And you don't even get any kind of sleet. You're going to join the Marines. We'll give you a job. That's the way the Marine Corps. It's better now. Yeah. But the Army has had that 18 X-ray program has been freaking goldmine for them. Yeah.

It kicked off, you know, originally back in the day. And then it went away for a while and they turned it back on in 2002, you know, post-9-11. When the ODA was getting requested to do a whole bunch of stuff, like we need to get more quality candidates. Let's stop this program back up again. Yeah. I don't know if you've heard some of the SOG guys. A lot of those SOG guys were off the street straight into SF.

and they'll defend the 18 x-ray. They're like, we're all eight, we're basically 18 x-ray. Because they just came right in and went in and went to Nam and got after it. So that's what happened. So you end up, did you even think about an officer program or was that just not happening? I mean,

it sounds like your grades were stellar. Grades were not stellar. It was often to me, it was brought up to me by my recruiter. But the X-ray, 18 X-ray contracts, not an option for offices. So Ed immediately wiped that off the table for me. Also, my interpretation of what offices do back then was a little off.

There's some truth to it, but in my mind then, officers strictly sat behind a desk and enlisted guys were the actual guys that worked. And I wanted to be a worker. I wanted to get my hands dirty and everything else dirty. I wanted to get into it. I'm like, I don't want to be the guy telling the guy to do the thing. I want to be the guy doing the thing. And soft, that's obviously not the case.

but because the X-ray option didn't exist for O's, that automatically made it a non-option for me. Would your parents think of this? My father essentially tried to ground me when I brought this to his attention. How old were you? I was 24. 24, a lot of life experience, graduated college,

and I called them up, you know, because I had done my homework. I didn't sign the X-ray contract right there and any of that. I went home, I said, thank you. I didn't know what Green Berets did. I'd seen, you know, Rambo and John Wayne, but I didn't know what an SFODA does, what a Greenberg really does.

So I did some homework. I was drawn to the mission. I was really attracted by the timeline. That's what ultimately made me pull the trigger. But once I did my homework, made my decision, I don't think I'd sign the contract yet, but I call my father and I said, hey, dad, I'm going to, there's what I'm going to do.

And he's like, no, you're not. And I'm like, listen, dude, I love you. You're my best friend in the world. I'm not asking you, commission. I'm 24, you know. But, you know, as a new father now, my kids are also are also young. I can put myself in his shoes, right? He sees the news. He sees what's going on. He knows where I'm trying to go. And he's just scared for me, which is fine. But they were both totally against it to begin with. Now, you described your mom as a hippie. Is that like classic definition of a hippie?

She's a free spirit. Yeah, she's a free spirit. She's got her stones and she's got her crystals in the bedroom. She's got her dreams. She's got a dream catch. She's got her. She's got a dream catch you over to bed. Got some incense burning. Okay. She's in there. Yeah, man. She's in there.

She must have been really freaking out. Yeah. Less than my father. My father's much more, like, rigid and objective and scientific. My mother was still kind of like, well, you need to, you know, you need to choose your own journey kind of thing. Oh, day. Right.

But I'd rather you not do that, but like, you need to be who you need to be kind of thing. Okay. We'll take it. I remember I just came home and told my parents. Yeah, I just enlisted the Navy, you know. And my dad just looks at me, he goes, you're going to hate it. He said, you don't, you hate authority and you don't listen to anybody. And I said, I'm going to be in the SEAL teams.

It's a team. You don't know nothing, old man. Do you come from a military family background? My grandfather was in the Army. My dad's dad was in the Army for 20 years. My dad got kicked out of ROTC, and he says that the military gene skips a generation, because my dad's not a very militaristic dude. But I was a rebellious kid, so my dad was just looking.

But they were both like, cool, you know, get out of here. That's probably the best thing that could happen as you go in the military instead of staying around here causing trouble being an idiot, which I was doing a good job of. So rolled out and that was that. But I just came home and told them I did it. So they were, I think they were overall, they were like, this is probably a really good thing that this idiot's getting out of here, getting off the payroll. Anyways, right.

Let's jump back to the book here real quick. August 13th, 2007 was my first day in the United States Army. It began at the 30th adjutant general reception battalion located in Fort Benning, Georgia. This is the first location U.S. Army Basic Training recruits arrived prior to the actual start of basic training. Its purpose is to receive prepare and train personnel for what lies ahead. While I am sure we were given some classes, the only things I recalled during my time at the 30th, We're doing paperwork, eating our three meals a day, and waiting, a lot of waiting, most of which was spent standing in formation. We stood in formation for hours each day.

While in formation waiting for what seemed like an eternity, we would sound off with several mantras. The soldiers creed, the army song, and the warrior ethos are a few that come to mind. At any point, a drill sergeant, a member of the command, or any soldier in the formation would simply yell, the warrior ethos. Then the entire formation of soldiers would sound off with that mantra. This served two purposes. One, it killed time, even if it was only 30 seconds of time. It gave us something to do. Two, it ingrained these mantras into our heads.

Basic training is the Army's method to break down an individual into human clay in order to then be remolded into a soldier. The same goes for other branches of the military. The verbalization of mantras is part of that process. The warrior ethos was one of them. The warrior ethos has four tenets. one, I will always place the mission first. Two, I will never accept defeat.

Three, I will never quit. Four, I will never leave a fallen comrade. So it's welcome to boot camp. How'd you feel about boot camp when you got there? It was annoying more than anything else. I mean, I was physically in phenomenal shape. So physically, it was relatively easy. How long was it between when you enlisted and when you left?

Maybe three, four months. Were you, did you shift your training to be ready for, oh yeah, drastically. Hump and rocks and. Yeah, so because I finished playing football around 2004, 2005. What did you weigh when you got done? What was your max weight? Playing ball, I would usually start the season around 250,

and I'd end up usually around like 240 by the end of the season. So I was done playing ball, still had more college left, and I just wanted to see how big and strong I could get. I didn't need to be quite as athletic as I needed to be as a football player. So I got more into strong man and power lifting type stuff. I was doing a little bit of boxing, a little bit of light wrestling, but it was mostly just like, let's get big and strong. Which worked for me because what I was doing professionally was like VIP security and nightclub security.

So, you know, all my bosses liked, you know, a big, yoked up dude and a suit at the front door. So, you know, it helped me with what I was doing for work. And I enjoyed the training. So by the time I decided to, by the time I decided to, by time I was. I graduated college decided I was going to enlist, I was close to 300 pounds. Damn. Yeah. I mean, I was doing like 12,000 calories a day.

I mean, it was just crazy. So there's no way I was in a condition to go to basic training. Does it take effort for you to eat 12,000 calories in the day? Yeah. It was hard. It's work. Yeah, I really disliked it. I'm like choking down, you know, chicken breast and dry potatoes with a gallon of water.

You know, my strength coach is like, hey, this is what's going to take. You know, if you want an 800-pound deadlift, this is what you got to do. So I decided to enlist, and, you know, I'm huge. So you're a 300-pound bouncer? Yeah. Did you ever get a test as a bouncer that you had any trouble with? No, not really. Not at that point, man.

I mean, I can just imagine your 6'5-300 pounds. You wrestled. Like, you must have been a real quick peacemaker in these scenarios. Yeah. At that point, man, you know, I was so comfortable with losing fights, although it had been a couple of years since that had happened. At that point, I'm the biggest guy in the room. I've been boxing since I was a kid wrestling, you know,

some different martial arts. Like, I was well-equipped to handle problems. Did you train jih Tzu yet? No, jih Tzu didn't come on until I got into S-F, actually. Did you know how to choke people? Did you know like a, did you know like the sleeper hold? Yeah, I knew basic stuff. Yeah, I knew basics.

I knew basic stuff. Like as a bouncer, you occasionally had to put somebody to sleep. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. And, you know, I wasn't the most mature bouncer until I got a little older. You know, some of the places I worked, some of the people I work for, their methodology was let's make, let's punish this person so that they don't think, or no one else thinks to act a fool in my place again. Jack.

Which I enjoyed. I look back with, you know, some regret, hurting some people that probably didn't need to be hurt. that way. But I mean, that's just the nature of the business I was in the way I went about doing it. So, big boy. Yeah, so you're 300 pounds or almost 300 pounds when you enlist. When I decide that the military is definitely going to happen. And by the time that I signed the contract and then my report date was like four months or so after that point was when I started my training program. It was about a 16 week program I did. Where did you get that program? Did you create it? I was working with a strength coach. Same coach I worked with.

today actually one of them that I've been working with them now you know close to 15 years he's so he put it together for me and obviously it was a wild shift from flipping tires and moving atlas stones to you know running rucking dynamic crossfit style circuit training so I sliced myself down over about 16 weeks from you know 295 to about 2 45 about 50 pounds or so came off which 245-6-5 is a big person right but I was just died because I had so much mass on that I just sliced everything off. So by the time I showed up day one, I don't think this is in the book. This is no shit.

This is day one of boot camp? Of basic training. Yeah, you're just a savage. I'm a 24-year-old, 6'4-5, 20-40-pound diced dude. And I'm surrounded by a lot of, you know, 17, 18-year-old children who have never left a house before. And, you know, you get your ass smoked, right? of course for the first several hours when you get there.

After maybe four or five hours are just doing push-ups and flutter kicks and sit-ups, I'm like pumped up. My muscles are like full. And then they do their tattoo inspection. So they strip you down into your underwear and they just go person to person to person. And I don't think they're really searching for tattoos.

I think they just want to see like your physique and like expose you and just make you feel uncomfortable. So all three drill sergeants are like surrounding you when you're standing there in your underwear, and they're just like looking you up and down and just, like, getting into your head. Well, the tattoos I have on me, this is Latin for strength and honor.

I didn't have a lot of these other tats on me at the time. So these stuck out, and they look at me and they're like, what's your deal? And I'm like, I don't know how to answer this question, you know? Like, why are you here? And I thought they were messing with me. In retrospect, I talked to these guys later.

They're like, we thought you were like an actual, like government project that was going on like you were created in a lab or something like they didn't know what my deal was because and then they asked me about the tattoos and I say it says it says strengthen on them and then they look up at the wall and it's engraved in the wall above the whiteboard it says strengthen on it so now their wheels are really spinning like I'm some kind of an implant you're from the movie soldier bro yeah and I didn't pick up on all this at the time and eventually our head drill instructor later on that evening came over to me and he's like no really man like did someone send you here and i'm like i can't i don't know i don't know what's happening right now

dude i'm trying to play the game but i don't know what game we're playing right now so it was more it was more uh i say it was more annoying and frustrated because i was babysitting kids and i was putting charge of my of my platoon on day one like you're the guy we're all going to leave for the night you're going to make sure that everyone that's in their beds right now are going to stay in their beds So I was literally chasing kids Like down the stairwell That we're trying to just leave for Benning I don't know where they thought they were gonna go

But I'm like dragging kids back to their beds You know It wasn't very like tactful with my approach It was very blunt like get your ass back in your bed And stay there or else you know So that was like 16 or 17 weeks And pretty much that Yeah that's classic dude

You're not a normal dude If you're showing up to boot camp That's freaking awesome So you do You go to basic and then you go to, do you go straight to AIT after that? Well, for us, as an 18 X-ray, you do the infantry program, which is called one-station unit training. So they go basic and AIT back-to-back without any break.

Okay. So it's boom, boom, right, straight through. Are you just having fun this entire time? No, no, it wasn't fun at all. I was just like staring at the clock, like get me out of here, you know. Like the runs, like the workouts, they weren't all that like stimulating and difficult. I was trying to play the game. I did play the game.

You know, I wasn't like a rebel. I was like, Roger that. I was a good soldier. I was just like, I want to get to the real work, which I know is at Fort Bragg. So like, get me out of here. And then, so you make it through all this stuff. You go to airborne school too?

Yeah, go when you finish Basic or AIT, and then you go straight down the street to Airborne School. Get your airborne shuffle on for three weeks. Oh, yeah. Do some PLFs in the sawdust. And then it's to, where did you go, SOPSE? They have SOPSY up and run at this? point. Yeah, then it was to stop see. And that's to get you ready for, that's to get you ready

for selection, right? Correct. You were kind of ready for selection. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Were you in worse shape now than you were when you entered just from being in boot camp and stuff? Or were you may able to maintain? No, I was, I lost, you know, 20, 25 pounds in basic training just because I didn't get, I wasn't getting the calories. I needed. You're, they were starving you. Yeah. The freaking government project. Yeah. They were trying to cut off you at their own. They wanted to tear me back down and have me sent back to the lab for like a refit. So I would say I was in worse shape for selection specifically than I would have been if I had just gone straight to that without going to base training. But it was okay because by the time I got to SOPSEE and or got to Bragg the Statsopsy, then I could eat like normal again and I put some masks back on.

So get back into more anaerobic stuff with some resistance. to be ready for SOPSE, so I was good to go. And how's SOPSY when you get there? Is it starting to approach what you have in mind? Yeah, it definitely was. I mean, the way SOPSE was back then, I think it was five or six weeks, and you would stay at Fort Bragg, and then you'd go down to Fort Campbell on Monday,

and you would train and be in SOPSY Monday through Friday, and then you would come back to BRAG for the weekend, and you would just do that for six weeks. And it was just a lot of PT, land nav, like not tying, some SF history stuff, but it was mostly physical. to get you ready for selection. Well, at the end of the first week, so it's Friday,

one week one is done, and now I'm feeling like I'm playing the game with like the big boys. I got SF guys that are now my caddrates, and my first time being introduced to them. I'm surrounded by a bunch of x-rays. I'm like, okay, now I feel like I'm in the game. That first week ends, and our lead instructor comes down. He says, all right, check it out.

The upcoming selection class has some open slots. so we're going to send volunteers or we're going to just force those that are in the top 10% performance-wise to go and it starts on Monday. I raise my hand immediately. I'm like, yep, I'm good. I'm ready to go. Like, let's go.

My confidence was really high. So it gave me a weekend to just get my stuff ready, my equipment, make sure I had everything I needed, which I did because I was part of SOPSE. So my SOPS experience was five days. And then I was in an SFAS the following Monday. And how is that selection? Selection when I went through was 14 days long. Now it's back to 20 or so.

It was 20, 21 for a long time, and then mine was the second class after they condensed it down into 14. I can't tell you why they did that, but you would think that that meant they removed like five or six days worth of stuff, but they didn't. They just rammed it into a shorter window.

So there was no white space in between stuff. Everything was just, it was much more intense because you still had to check all these blocks, but just in a week, less of time.

What percentage of attrition comes from that selection? Yeah, so the time I went, we started with around 300 or so candidates, and around 100 made it to the end, and then they selected around 40 or so. God, see, that seems like a freaking crazy roll of the dice if you're joining the Army to be an SF guy,

that you can go through the training and they can just be like, yeah, you're not what we're looking for. Is that what it is? Yeah, I mean, you know, I have some buddies that are selection cadre now and some that have been and now are back to the unit. You know, they make it as objective as I think they can, but it's open to subjectivity because there are human beings that are evaluating you.

And when, if you're looking at purely physical capability, like how fast did you run two miles? That's objective. How many push-ups can you do pull-ups, whatever? But when you're evaluating people for leadership and their ability to work in a team dynamic, that gets subjective pretty quick. So it is a roll of the dice to a degree because you may just have a bad, may have a bad day or a bad week. Your solid leader, you're a solid performer. You just didn't perform when you needed to.

And that's what the cadger had to go off of. So yeah, you didn't make this round But come back and try again How long do you have to wait Before you can come back and try it in? I think it's I want to say it's like six months No, it's not too bad

I think it's like six months Were there guys that you thought were like Oh yeah that guy seems like good to go And he didn't make it Didn't get selected Yeah, yeah a few my buddies That were actually in Basic with me

That made it all the way to Sopsey That came with me with that first chunk Because there were like 10 of us So that left sopsey early, I think maybe five of us got selected that first class. And the other five, I would have said, no, no, these guys are going to be good to go. I was mostly looking at their physical performance, like their rock times and their pull-ups, and they're like, these were physical studs. But for whatever reason, they just didn't display what they needed to.

Do the cadre debrief a guy and be like, hey, man, you were definitely not in the game over here. You fell short, looked like you had a big ego. Do they debrief guys? No. Damn. No. It's the cadrador and selection are like robots. It's not, they're not in your face. They're not screaming and yelling. There's a couple times that they're screaming and yelling.

Log and rifle PT are two iterations where they are in your face and screaming and trying to crack you physically and emotionally, mentally. But the rest, they're like cyborgs. It's very just, this is your task. This is your condition. This is your standard. Do you have any questions? Execute. That's it. And if you don't make it, like okay go there there's nothing they're not trying to they're not trying to get you to quit and they're also not they're to tell you why you don't get picked up or why you failed an event yeah they're like cyborgs that's wild because it seems like in buds really the whole first phase is to weed people out but most of it happens the first second third fourth week the fourth week is the fourth or fifth week depending is hell weak, you know,

and they'll get rid of so many people. But, yeah, that objectivity, I guess it happens a little bit different in buds, you know, like the instructors will see someone that's weak, and they'll kind of like, they'll start working on them, and they'll just break him. And that'll be that. Was there anything that was a challenge for you in this stuff

because you're a freaking government experiment? Was there anything that was hard for you in selection? Yeah, selection was certainly challenging. I think what I struggled most with was the team dynamic aspect. Although I grew up playing team sports, you know, you get put in these scenarios where you have a mission to execute as a small group and they'll rotate who's in charge. You're in charge of this, you're in charge of that. And that's where they're assessing you as leaders.

But they're also assessing everyone else as a team player. and their ability to support a leader, right? To kind of lead up the chain of command kind of philosophy. Well, as an aggressive younger person, as if a leader made a decision on how we're going to ask you something, and I didn't agree with it, I made that known. I'm like, no, that's not going to work. Like, I wanted to win.

And these tasks that they're given to us, they're essentially impossible. Like, within the standards that are given to you, there's no way it's happening. Right. They know that. It's not about can you get from A to B in the lot of time. It's about how do you work together as a unit?

How do you lead? How do you communicate? How do you problem solve? How do you do with stress? That's what they're looking at. I wanted to win. And if Homeboy came back with some crazy, ridiculous strategy that I knew wouldn't work,

I let him know that. I'm like, no, no, no, that's not going to work. And now this dude's in, like, a tough spot. He's, like, dealing with someone who's, like, bigger than I'm, and angrier than him. And he's trying to, you know, do his job as a leader. And, of course, he's being evaluated. The Caddra standing right there.

So I could have done a better job of being a supportive member of the team. I didn't have the same leadership philosophy and methodology and tools that I have now. So I struggled with that because even in the moments I could tell, like I'm not handling this very well, but I want to win. And it's just it superseded my ability to stay, you know, calm and tactful. Did they debrief you on that or did you just figure this out later? No, they did. So if you get selected, you sit down with a cadre after, and they go through your entire packet with all your scores and all their inputs.

So that was the number one thing that was told to me was you need to learn how to be more supportive of a leader. That's legit. Yeah. Give you some legit feedback. And were you humble enough to understand that at the time? I was humble enough to accept it. Yeah. I didn't have the same mental.

towards leadership then as I do now, where now I look as leadership as very much a skill. Like it's something that you can learn, but you have to deliberately train on it. Back then, even at that point, so I'm now 25. I just got selected, whatever. I still looked at leadership as a talent, as something that you either had or didn't have. And that was it. So I just took it like, Roger that, Sergeant, I appreciate it. But like, this is who I am.

and I don't have the leadership like skill ingrained in me genetically. I just don't have it. So I'm going to have to get better other ways to kind of make up the difference. Now I look, you know, my mentality towards it is wildly different. Yeah, no,

that's a lot of people make that, or a lot of people have that attitude. And, you know, we have a leadership consulting company and explaining to people that they can actually learn skills just like, I guess the example I was used

is playing guitar or shooting baskets and basketball. Like you can't just pick up a basketball and beat think you can make free throws. It's like not happening. You can't pick up a guitar and just think you're going to be able to play. It's skill and leadership is the same way. And are there some people that have a little bit of a tendency

that have better hand-eye coordination that they're going to be able to pick up basketball a little bit quicker? Yeah. Are there people that have a certain ability to recognize different notes when they hear them? Yeah, that's an actual thing you can be born with. But regardless, you still need to learn the skills in order to get good at.

And leadership's the same way. You're going to have some natural propensity for it. There's going to be some parts of it you'll be good at. There's going to be some parts you'll suck at. You take advantage the ones you're good at. You work on the ones you're not. But it's definitely everyone can get better unless they're a person that says, I already know everything.

And then they're going to be a problem. So then it's off to Q-Course after that. Yep. Get selected, going to Q-course. And back then, it's different today. But back then, you know, you go through these different phases, phase one, two, three, four. And in between those, you would just be waiting at

Brag for there to be enough students that they could lump together to stop the next phase. So a lot of white space in between. You know, phase one, you go down to Camp McCall. You're there for three weeks, seven weeks, whatever. Come back to Brag and reset. Well, sometimes those breaks could be a month or three months, right? What do you do during those breaks, just working out? PT formations.

They do like some LPD stuff with some of the tax that were back there at Brag, the guys that were like in charge of us keeping accountability. so we do some like leadership type classes. But you were mostly just hanging out, waiting, trying to stay out of trouble. And that's where actually a lot of guys, that's the reason why they're not Green Berets today, is because of that downtime.

You know, there's plenty of distractions in Fayetteville, North Carolina. God. There's plenty. Actually, they're all there. All the vices and distractions that you could want or at hope didn't exist, they're all there.

Girls, drugs, booze, nightlife, fights. That is what got a lot of guys removed from the program. because they just couldn't stay focused for that amount of time. Uh-huh. Because it took me just the Q course alone about 18 months. Oh, no kidding. To get through it. Yeah.

And how much of that time was it? I mean, just actually trained. Yeah, how much was actually training? Maybe 12. Wow. Yeah. When you were going through that, was there anything that was trouble for you in there?

Language school. Real hard. Yeah, language school was hot. What language did you learn? I learned Russian. in the Q-course, which is six months long. Do they have R's in Russian? They have the R sound in Russian?

They do, but I don't pass a shit. You talk about a confusing accent. You mix Russian in Boston together. Literally no one knows what I'm saying, including me. So everyone's left lost. What did you just say? I'm like, I don't think I even know. That was tough.

How long was the Russian course? Six months, and that's all you do, eight hours a day. Head set on, freaking, they don't speak. English to you. We have instructors. So you're in a classroom with like six, seven other guys, eight hours a day, just learning Russian. And it was even worse because we still didn't maintain our jump status during the Q-Course. So we did a jump like the week before I started at language school and I broke my tailbone. I broke my coxas. I came down, I landed on the, on the runway. But those shoots are not made for big dudes. No, man, I come down like a like an asteroid.

I always did too. Yeah. It's not. Especially with equipment. I mean, forget about it. It's just a freaking disaster. Even at 1,300 feet, you know, it's like by the time I shoot opens, I check my stuff, I'm dropping my equipment pretty much immediately and I'm smashing into the earth. Yeah.

With a vapor trail behind me. You know, so I came down. I had some wind. I couldn't steer. Couldn't avoid it. Runway. This is happening. Boom.

Broke my tailbone. I thought I paralyzed me. I thought it was perils. That's freaking horrible. It was scary. Guys have been paralyzed from that type of accident. Yeah. I couldn't move.

I couldn't breathe. I'm like, okay, this is the rest of my life. Fortunately, it was just a broken tailbone, which is not a convenient injury, you know? No, I've never had it, but it doesn't sound like it. There's no great, you can't cast it, you know, so you just have to stay off of it and let it kind of heal the best it can. But I'm immediately going into language school

or I'm going to be spending eight hours a day in a classroom. So my first, I know, three, four months of language school, I was either on a knee or standing. because I couldn't sit. You know, eventually I was coming to class one of those donuts, you know, those inflatable things. That's how I was doing so.

I mean, also not an academic, trying to learn a new language, which I'm convinced is in the same area of the artistic side of people's brains. Like if you can play music or if you can paint, that's the art form of learning a language. My wife's a great example. She's both.

Like, she's a musician. She's a phenomenal artist. She can pick up foreign languages like that. For me, nah, dude, it was brutal. It was just forced reps. Like, that's how you do it. So, I mean.

And you have to test out. Do you have to test out at a certain level? Yeah. You got to test out at. What I would say would be like a, like a, between a beginner and a novice level. To have a working knowledge, I think, is the way they kind of describe it. Where is that language school?

For prep. Jack. What were you? You were a 18 Bravo? Were you a Bravo? That was a Bravo. And how was that part of the schooling? That was great.

Yeah, the Bravo course was awesome. You know, just learning weapons and a little bit into tactics. But you're just playing with guns all day. Did you pick that? Is that what you wanted? Yeah. So I picked my MOS and my language, which determines your group. Everyone that gets selected, or at least back then, picked those two things, requested

MOS and requested language. And they would give, I think it was the top like 15% or 20% of the performers would get what they asked for. And then the rest would get whatever they needed to get. So I requested Bravo and I wanted Russian because I wanted to stay at that third group. What made you want to be Bravo? They're the ass kickers on the team, you know, stereotypically, but also in reality. Because you kind of have to be, man. And here's why.

Yes, you train on weapons and maintenance and troubleshooting, but you're also the primary tactician on the team or the primary tactical advisor to the team sergeant. That's your support function on a team. So you're putting together ranges, you're executing training. Well, every SF guy, every soft guy thinks that he is a perfect tactician and a perfect moxman. The other skill sets, medics, commo,

demo, those are much easier for those guys to teach their teammates because they don't have the pride associated with not knowing medicine. I don't have the pride associated with not knowing how to use this radio. You walk up to a guy and say, you don't know how to use your rifle, they don't take that very well. So you have to have an aggressive, dominant personality to be able to break through that barrier that your teammates have to be able to do your job. Yeah, they're going to take that very personally.

They don't like that. You know, I don't like that. Like, you can't shoot and you don't understand tactics. You tell that to a Green Beret or a seal or a ranger that it's not going to go well. Yeah, they're going to have, so it's tough. They're going to have a little bit of an ego flare up in those scenarios. And how was Robin Sage? Robin Sage was good.

I mean, aside from the infill, which is, I mean, horrible. We didn't jump, thank God. my buddies, he was a good buddy of mine today. He was on one of the teams that had to jump in because everyone on that team is carrying about 120 pounds in their ruck to sustain off of, to conduct unconventional warfare in a denied area. That's what Robin Sage is.

The teams that have to jump in, man, nah, nah, dude. If I jump in without equipment, I'm coming in hot. Yeah. You throw 120 pounds on me. You have to leave a mark in the earth. Putting dent in the earth. Yeah.

So fortunately, I didn't have to jump, but, you know, the infill's tough, no matter whether you jump in or not, you're humping miles through North Carolina. But once you get past that, then you're actually operating with other MLSs, which is the first time that you get to see that because it's the last thing you do and they bring, so now you can see what Medics do. You can see what the 18 Chalys do. You can see what the Camo guys. guys can do. You see the alphas. You see the team leaders. Up until you go to MOS, everyone's just a

candidate. Then you learn your job, and then you come together to execute your job with the other team, with the other MOSs. So I remember just when we were on infill, I started to cramping up. And I needed to take a short halt because I needed to stretch, because otherwise I was going to go down. And one of my teammates yelled the word medic, which is the first time I had heard that, like in real life. You know, you hear the movies, but someone actually yelled medic, and then a medic showed up. And I was like, oh, this is like a real thing. We actually have you guys. I hadn't seen it before, you know.

So it was cool to see those different jobs and how they employ themselves within a team dynamic. So it was actually a lot of fun once you got past, you know, getting to your site. How long is the freaking infill? Usually takes, you know, like two to three days. Oh, damn. To get in. Yeah. I mean, every route's different.

it's trains, planes, and automobiles and a lot of walking. So, you know, horse trailer from here to here. You get there, you walk, you know, 12 miles through the woodline, link up over here, jump on a boat, move down this river. You know, it's like a full-on infill as if you're going into actual denied area.

That's what they try to replicate. You get done with that, and that's it, right? That's when you get your designation, your green beret. That's it, yeah. Did your parents come down for that? Oh, yeah. Did your mom put in crystal? in your green beret? She probably did.

She blew some incense on me. Do you have like one green beret that you got that one time? Like, and that's the one that you get and the one that you keep? The actual head gear? Yeah. So I still have the same one is the one I graduated with. Right. So is that pretty common?

I think that that's most common unless a guy like loses it. We don't really wear it that often though. So there's no real need to upgrade because you, destroyed it, it's kind of funny, man. You spend all this time thinking about becoming one and you want to earn this little green hat more than anything. It's on the top of this mountain. It means everything to you.

You want to put it all in the line. And then you get it and then you never want to wear it because it's just a pain in the ass to put on your head. So we don't usually wear our uniform all that often anyway. But when we do, obviously it goes on. So I think that's part of the reason why most guys, the one that they had originally, is the one that they keep throughout their career. No, uniform is always not fun.

I remember I always thought to myself, man, I'm like a 30, 35, 38-year-old dude. I go to work all day. I don't have to wear a shirt, man. This is the life. Freaky good to go. But your parents came down to graduation and all that? Absolutely. How do they feel about that?

Because now what year is it? 2010. Okay. So Iraq is kind of chilled out by now. So you must just be eyeing Afghanistan at this point? Yeah, so at this point I know I'm going to third group, which is at Bragg, which is the one I wanted to go to because third group owned Afghanistan. For the groups, for the SF groups, that's all third group did.

The other groups would filter in and support, but third group owned Afghanistan. That's where I wanted to go. That's why I chose that language. That's where I ended up going. So from my parents' perspective, of course, they were proud of the work and happy for me. for being successful, but also petrified because they knew what was coming. And this was 2010. You joined in 2007.

Damn, that's a long freaking pipeline. Yeah. That's a long pipeline. Now it's much more streamlined. So the current Q-course, they've cut that white space in between, so they give guys, maybe it's a week or two or so off, and it's a much faster turnover rate. Got it. So you get, how was it checking into the battalion?

I mean, I showed up Never having been in like a real unit before Other than as a student And you don't get a whole lot of guidance It's like report the third group on this day It's like over there somewhere I'm like okay So you find it right

And then I walk into like group headquarters building And there's like some E5 work in the CQ desk And I'm like hi I'm here to report to First Battalion He's like okay It's over there I'm like all right Roger that So I got meander over there.

And the funny story is I'm walking around the battalion trying to get all these little boxes checked off, right? Check in with S1, which is your admin section. Check in with S2, your intel section. Like get yourself administratively within the unit. I'd never heard of S4. I don't know where it is. Okay, it's over here.

I find it. What do I need from you guys? So I'm mian around pretty lost. Clearly I was lost because a dude comes up to me. me and PTs and he's like, you need help finding something? And I'm like, yeah, man, I'm looking for this like S6 thing. He's like, yeah, it's over there. And as soon as I start talking, he's like, you're from Boston?

I'm like, yeah. He's like, I'm from Boston. I'm like, oh, no kidding. So we start talking about the socks and the pads and where you're from, which neighborhood, whatever, we're just like bullshit. And he's like, come over here, let me show you something. Following this guy, I have no idea who it is. He brings me into an office.

He's got Red Sox pictures on the walls, all this memorabilia. we're chopping it up and I realize I'm in the battalion commander's office I haven't dropped a single sir yet I have no idea what I'm talking to and it's like dawning on me and I'm like all right

but I'm just going to keep going with this because like he seems cool with it maybe this is just the way it is I don't know it's my first day in the unit and then I just hear this bellowing voice from the office next to it and this was Sergeant Major Springer Spratt, command sergeant major Spratt, who had just left SWIC, which is where the Q-Course and selection

is, and came back to third group. And he had some specific language about, you know, asking very politely who was talking to the battalion commander that way. And he walks in the office, and he's an old school SF guy, man, old school, like big mustache, big chest, right, walks in, yelling at me. I look over with the battalion commander. Like, are you going to step in here? And he's just laughing. I thought we were boys.

I thought we were buddies, you know? He hangs me out to dry completely. So Spratt's like, you know, looking at my name. He's like, I heard of you. He's like, you're one of those combatives guys, right? You're one of those like MMA fighter type dudes. And I was like, I don't know if I should say yes to this. I feel like you may want to challenge me out back.

And I don't know how that will go. I'm like, yes. yeah, it is me. And he's like, okay, well, basically, don't ever talk to the boss like that again. And, like, get out of here and, like, go find your company. What gave you that reputation as being an MMA guy? What, just because you wrestled?

Or did you pick up jih Tzu and stuff along the way? So I ended up getting Mac P., which is the Army Combatives Program, cert one and two during basic training that they offered to just, like, guys that were proficient with combat sports. So I showed up to the unit that, with that, or during the Q-course.

And then actually, when I was in Robin Sage, Alan Shibaro, who's a jih Tzu Blackbell, former third group, S.F. guy. He was a cadre for a different field team out at Robin Sage. And he came over one night randomly and was like, hey, you know, I heard you're into like combatives and stuff like that. You know, come check out my gym once you get out of here and you graduate and whatnot. That was my intro into Jiu-Jitsu. So I've been training with him a little bit before I actually showed up on day one.

I just think maybe word kind of just travel kind of quick, you know, or whatever. So that's your welcome aboard. You freaking bro out with the Italian commander and then get your ass shoot. Yeah, that's it. And how long does it take before you get into like an ODA? I was on my first team probably a week or two after that because the timing was interesting. My entire company was forward in Afghanistan, but they only had about a month left before they were coming back. Every team except for one of them was forward.

And there was a team that deployed offset from the rest of the company and the battalion because it was a specialized team. So it took my company, Sajum major, a little bit of time, a couple days, to think about where to put me. Because I met him that day, my very first day, I made my way over the company, met the Sajum major, introduced himself. He said, cool, man, like, what are your goals? I said, I want to get in Afghanistan. Like, now. He's like, of course you do. But, like, the entire company is coming back.

It doesn't make any sense. By the time you get there and get situated, you're going to just be packing things up and come home. So the timing's not there. But I do have this team that's set to go forward in a few months. I'm like, cool, can I go over that one? He's like, well, it's a different type of team. So, like, let me think about it.

He did. Eventually, I sat down with the team sergeant of that team. And this team focused on, preparation of the environment is the task that we were assigned. So kind of like left of bang type stuff, which isn't exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to go kick down doors and shoot bad guys in the face. This team was not designed to do that.

But it was more designed to find the bad guy so that someone can go kick him in the face. It's designed to facilitate the door kick is to get to the guy or get to the area. Yeah. Right. So I mean, it was that type of work. And it was a very senior team because most guys would go spend, you know, a few years on a standard ODA, and then they would migrate over into this

type of stuff. So senior dudes. But eventually, that's the route that I went when I was on that team within a couple weeks of getting a group. I mean, I'm just going to say, like, you're a new guy, you're checking in. You get a chance to go to Afghanistan in a more rapid manner. They could probably told you like, hey, we need a cook to go to Afghanistan a month. You'd have been like, I'm in.

Roger that. At least I know I would have been. I'm like, cool. Where's the freaking spatula at? Where's the ladle? Yeah. Let's do this. Did you have any time to like prep?

Was there any type of workup? Were they already done with all that? No, there was a workup. I think maybe, yeah, like I said, I think I was on the team about four months before we infilled. So I went and I learned Dari, which is a prominent language of Afghanistan.

So I spent six months in the Q course getting my ass kicked, learning Russian, show it to my group. And they're like, welcome, go learn Dari. I'm like, kidding me. I can't get away from this language thing, man, which, I understand the value of it now, actually, even once I was able to employ it.

So it was three months of that, and then some like preparatory collective training that we did, but it was pretty fast and furious before I was out the door. And then you, how was that deployment? What was it like when you got there? It was amazing. You know, initially I wanted to come in, do my five-year contract, get some payback for 9-11, learn some skills, and then get out. This was not going to be

like my profession or my career. And then I got on the ground in Afghanistan. It was a nine-month rotation, mostly down in Kandahah. We were mostly doing split-team stuff. So one team was on the Paki border and the other team was in like downtown Kandah. So I was getting a chance to see more rural

in an urban environment. And because of the team I was on, I was seeing the more overt stuff where we get in like mounted gun trucks to go support a particular eye. to being in a soft-skinned carola driving through downtown Kandah and civilian clothes. So I was exposed to a lot of what ODAs can do,

what S-F guys can do aside from the thing I really wanted to do. So we did end up getting to do a couple little things somewhat by accident, but it was in that deployment that I couldn't imagine doing anything else. I decided like this is what I'm going to do for my career. And I re-enlisted actually in Afghanistan for like, another six, I think it was beyond my current contract I was on. So it was great. So was the opt tempo good where you were working all the time? Busy. Busy. Yeah. Yeah. No like sitting around for a long periods of time. You were getting after it all the time. No, no. It was super busy. And that's cool.

You get exposed to a wide spectrum of different things that are happening. You get to see a lot. That's a freaking great first deployment for you. Yeah. And I was, again, I was with all these senior guys. So I was an E5, and everyone else was E7 or 8 or an officer. So I'm just learning from these dudes that have been around for a really long time. And, you know, some of them were on their fifth, sixth Afghanistan pump. So I'm just drinking from a fire hose. But just the knowledge that was coming in from these dudes, it just got caught the bug. And I was like, yeah, this is it.

This is for me. You get done with that deployment. You said you've gotten us some things. I mean, do you get in some gun fights? You guys gotten a few gun fights over there on that one? Yeah, yeah. But not nothing that, like, was too major? No, no, it was nothing to anything all that serious.

But what's funny about it is because the mission that we were on is not designed for us to be in those environments. But, you know, there would be like a Lerce unit or like another unit over here that was going out to this area for whatever mission they had. And we're like, well, maybe there's something out there we can check out that is in line with that mission. I don't know.

Maybe I can talk to someone over there. Maybe there's, I don't know, something. So we would just get added on to their con-ops. And then some things would happen. But because of our team and our reporting channels, it was different than the other units in the AO. So even though we had been in these engagements, there was no reporting of it happening.

At one point, the commander that we actually worked for heard about some stuff. And he showed up to our site. We were working under, NSW. So like, there was a C-O-5 that showed up. And he's like, has everything going, blah, blah, about first time I met him. He's like, okay, so just so you know, I know what you guys are doing and you need to stop. I'm like, Roger that, sir. Chuck. Yeah. Roger that. Trying to keep the boys. Trying to keep the boys down. Come on.

So you come home from that deployment. What's next? A ton of schools and training. Individual schools. At that time we were doing, usually it was six months on, nine months off before we would re-rotate. For me, I think it ended up being around nine or ten. I was back in the States, but it was just individual school, one after another. And then I went back over into Afghanistan for a short period of time with on a tasking from another unit that needed some support. And so I went over there for a quick little thing and came back. And then Like how long was that? When you say a quick little thing, was it like months or was it like four months?

Like 90 days. Oh, okay. 90, maybe 120 days, somewhere between three and four months. Now, are you still with the same ODA this whole time? Yeah. And so you still are kind of focused on the same type of mission? Yes. Until I get back from Afghanistan and then my company, Sajum, Major, decides he wants to put me on a standard ODA or a direct action-focused ODA.

So this is after your second, after that 19-year-year-old. day stint. Yeah. So on the 90 day stint, you're over there. Did you get some good lessons learned from that deployment? Oh, yeah. What did you take back from that one? That there are other units within the Socom enterprise that operate at an entire different

stratosphere, which I could tell even as a junior green beret working on, you know, around ODA guys, there are other people out there that are really good at what they do and they know how to do it. So I was a riding on the side of this thing. They just needed some support. It was for PSD stuff. Okay. It came over to third group because we're on Fort Bragg,

and they needed like a bigger combatives PSD type dude just to like take orders and not talk or ask questions. And I was the guy. Hey God, man. I got this all day. I didn't know really like what I was doing. I understood like PSD work. Yeah.

But who I was with. And what we were doing, it took me like a while to like figure that out. But I learned a ton. And that was really what sunk my teeth into what my next thing would be post-ODA time. Did you, are you still, are you training Jiu-Jitsu all the time now? Yeah. So when you got back and what about when you're on deployment, are you training it all? Do you have time?

Oh, yeah. You're like, yeah. Make time. Every trip I've been on, I've built a little fight house. Yeah. Even into like austere stuff, we'll get into the next. actual rotation. We're in the mountains doing VSO when I built us a fight house up there.

So you come back from the 90-day stint where you're doing PSD-type work. And then you get put it. Now this is when you get into like a DA-type ODA? Yeah, yeah. I get back. And my deal was I would do two rotations on the first team I was on. And I committed to that because there's a lot of time they spend in training. You know, I had to do certain stuff.

So it was like, yeah, that's no problem. Sajum Major came in right after I got. back and he's like, hey man, I'm going to talk to your team sergeant, but I think you need to be on like a, like a DA team. You know, like you're like, you don't fit in and this team you're on now. You don't blend. You're like, you're like, you're the worst low visibility guy in the history of freaking special forces. Yeah, man. So it didn't make sense from that lens and I was young and hungry and he wanted to like, you know, maximize on that, leverage that, get me into the fight for the more traditional sense. So he made with my team side. Team side was like, cool, man. This is,

what he wants this is what's best for him roger that so he let me go and then i went to a da team uh this is now in like early 2012 and i was with them just in time to go through a full train up nice of that type of work before we went in um what was my second actual combat rotation in the fall of 2012 and so how's that how's that working out the it was it was night and day man my first pump did doing what we were doing, we were living Cush. We were living Cush. Everyone had their own shoe. I had air conditioning.

I had a full-sized bed. I had a plasma TV in my room. Two different chow halls, two different gyms, full-blown fight house. Because one of our camps was like on the back end of a massive, of a bigger fob. So we had all the fob stuff. But then we had our own, our own stuff. You know, OGA camp was right next to us. They had a whole bunch of cool stuff.

So I was, but that was just the way it was for me. It was my first trip. Yeah. Like this is the way, this isn't living off the land. You kidding me? I haven't had to kill a single snake yet. You snake eaters. I got two chow halls to choose from.

When I switched teams and went to the DA team, we went in to do VSO, village stability operations. And that by design is very austere. You actually have limitations on what you can do to build up your physical infrastructure to keep it within line with what you're, Patent Force or those within that area with how they live. We assimilate to them, which is exactly the mission we wanted. But when you get dropped off a mountaintop helicopter, 03,

and you're the first team that's occupied this site, there's nothing. And it was like, oh, this is what ODAs do. This is, okay, this is what this. So it was a night and day shift from my first trip to my second. So now you're out in the middle of, where are you? Wardak. So you're in Wardak, just your ODA team, in the middle of nowhere. So there were three teams that they inserted in Wardak along the Chalk Valley, two on one side, one and the other.

But it was really just us to mutually support each other. And you are starting from scratch, building out what you're going to build out. Because there's no preexisting team there at all. There's no turnover or nothing? There was a turnover only because the team. that was on the ground when we got there, they had closed down their site, which is where we were originally planning on going,

but as things changed operationally, they shut that site down, they packed up all their stuff, they moved to this secondary location. They were on the ground for 24 hours before we landed. Okay. So there's nothing there.

There's nothing there. There was a team there, but they hadn't been working out of that site. Right. So then you guys start building out, do you have a partner for, that's there? Yeah, so they handed over there a partner force to us, which was an A&SF team.

So the regiment, the Army Special Forces, had created an Afghan National Army Special Forces unit. And they looked structurally the same way as us, same MOS, the same breakdown. And they had 12 guys or whatever. 12 guys, 12 guys, just like ours. Yep. So you show up there, you get settled in, and is the AO? How hot is the AO? How hot is the AO?

It was busy. It was hot. We got our footprint. You know, we're like patrol-based activities for the first, like, 48 until we got some semblance of some force pro going. And then on maybe day three or four, we went to drive down the street to an Afghan local police checkpoint, which you could see from our camp. There was maybe 400 meters down the road. I think we had a four-vehicle convoy. I was in a little trail vehicle working out of a hatch.

and by the time our second vehicle got on the road, we were ambushed. So at this point, we've got like some ratty chain link fence and some half-filled Hesco as like Force Pro, there's nothing, you know, other than guys that are up there with 240s.

So, tink, tank, tink, tang, and I'm like, what, I don't know what's happening. What kind of vehicles? We were in Matt V's, and then IG33, IG31, so I'm a bomber, you know, they're legit. Yeah. But even though I had been around a couple, you know, engagements prior, it was nothing like this.

Like we were like ambushed. This wasn't some, you know, moron who got creative with an AK-47 who wanted to get his jihad on for a second and then drop his gun and run away. This was like a no shit we're going to fight right now. So we were- And this is you're not even all the way out of the gate. No. It's all right there. So they dropped us off and do a hornet's nest, you know, which we kind of need.

knew, although we were prepping for location A, we ended up at location B, but they were relatively close where a lot of our intel and prep in terms of personalities and leadership and cells and who we would be targeting was still considered the same. I didn't realize it was going to be quite that level of B-Hive. So zero white space, which became our primary mission, was just to open that up. So every day or every other day, whenever we rolled, it was just like moved to contact, That's the mission for today. That's what we're doing. Let's go find the ambush and like set it off.

And you're going out with your team plus the Afghan SF team. So you got like 20, 25 guys. So we also had an infantry squad that was there as an uplift. It was about 20, 22. So I made it about 15 dudes. All be super young, minus the squad leader. Most of them were just fresh out of basic. Right on.

Young and hungry, though. Hell yeah. I can work with that all day. You give me a blank canvas. I love me some blank canvas. So there was studs like savages. Eventually, we created some savages. Afghan National Army SF team was I dedicated partner force.

Eventually, within, I say, the first month or so, we started doing bigger ops and we'd bring in Afghan National Army guys or another commando element or Afghan National Police guys. And this leads to, you know, me eventually getting shot up with an insider attack is because when you start getting all these different dudes from different units,

there's no practical way to establish a baseline with these guys. If you're living with somebody, you get to know. That way you can tell if something's off. Like the spidey sense can start to go off

because it's different. When you're getting new bodies as frequent as eventually we were, it drastically opens up the risk for an insider threat. Yeah. You end up, you get wounded early, huh? In this deployment?

Is this deployment you get wounded for the first time? Yeah. What happened there? Yeah. I ended up taking some shrapnel to the back of my shoulder. We were on the ground for, I don't know, just a few weeks. We drove the contact. We actually had an actual mission other than, like, let's go find a fight to get into.

We did get ambushed on the way from what ended up being what we considered to be the Taliban's strong point village within our immune. idiot a.O. It was the first time that we actually maneuvered into it. And my team sergeant would tell you himself, like he made a, he made an aggressive decision. That's going to piss some people off to go. In there. Yeah. And we were way over our heads and we were outgunned and outmaned, you know, because he just took myself, one of my teammates, and then a handful of our partner force guys, and we maneuvered, dismounted into the village, just like the six of us. We had swore by fire, machine gun coming from the trucks and some mortars, but like we were in a village. Now you're in like a more urban environment with three U.S., three partner for us.

We've been on the ground just a few weeks, you know, an era. And he would tell you the same thing. Like it was a mistake. Me actually getting hurt may have saved that because we fought our way to a two-story structure where we were taking Dishka fire from up to the road. So the guys are engaged in that way. There's some other dudes on some rooftops. and there's six of us maneuvering through an urban environment,

an Afghanistan urban environment, different than like Iraq, but you're still dealing with buildings and multiple level structures and windows and doors and all the hallways and alleyways, all the things, right? So I even noticed at one point, I'm like, we shouldn't be here right now. You know, we shouldn't be here right now. This is a mistake. I didn't voice that.

I was like, Roger that. Like, let's keep going. And we made it to the structure that we were trying to, breach to deal with the Dishka that was coming out of the second story. And we had been receiving some indirect that were coming in and

dudes were dropping grenades out of structures as well. So we're at the breach point to enter the courtyard into this structure that is still actively engaging. And something just blows up behind me. There was a grenade and it just ripped into the

back of my shoulder and it was like getting hit with a sledge hammer. You think about shrapnel penetrating your body. You may think it's like this piercing stabbing sensation, like a piece of metal going into you. But it's more just impact. Someone just hits you with a bat. And then I look back and there's just like a lemon size hole in the back of my shoulder.

I'm like, oh, okay. This just happened. So I immediately just like, no, I'm fine. Now adrenaline's pumping. It's a shock, but there's no real. pain that sets in. I'm like, we're good. My team sergeant comes over, and he's like, no, no, no.

So he grabs my other teammate. He starts putting some, we get into like a little strong point. He gauzes it up. Is the disc is still firing? Yes. That's good times. Yep. So that's still going off.

The boys in the trucks are really the ones that are getting it. And our partner for us had bared sending a separate dismount just themselves to stop moving in towards the building as well. So they're treating me, some gauze, you know, pressure dressing, wrap it up. And my team sergeant's like, we're aborting this mission right now. We're getting back to the trucks. And I'm like, no, no, no, I'm fine. Like, let's go.

We just fought our way all the way to this door that we're in front of now. Like, let's get in there. He's like, no, no, no. This is, we're in our riots. So that was the trigger for him to be like, yep, let's detach and take a look at what I'm doing. So a lot of ways I think I'm grateful Because I don't know what was on the other side of that door But those guys were still getting it

And it could have been It could have been a lot of different things Yeah You know Yeah I Sometimes the things just pile up Where you know I used to joke

You know he have the no go criteria Like hey this is no go criteria We don't have aircraft Or we don't have this We don't have that And I used to joke and say Hey we just have go go criteria Because we're fucking going

Like that was like you know My attitude But then this thing would happen something else would happen something else would happen and it would be like this is a sign

like these one sign I can overlook two signs maybe I'll ignore but now we got three four things that are going on that don't seem right it's like hey we're getting out of here this is a bad call and it sounds like he came to that conclusion which you know you got one wounded guy

you got it a bunkered freaking dishka elements maneuvering through the city yeah could go sideways real quick I mean, how much different does that impact, does that shrapnel have to hit you where all of a sudden you're not just a wounded guy, you're a dead guy, or you're a severely wounded guy. I mean, two inches, freaking, it's ridiculous

how those little things can change the whole scenario. How bad were you actually hurt once you guys pulled out? It wasn't bad. You know, I get back to the trucks, and we ITB, and my medic takes a look at it. He's like, do you're good, but it's like a pretty good hole here, man. So this was the first time anyone had been wounded.

We'd have been in the ground maybe just like a few weeks, like I said. And so he gets me medevacked out and I throw a temper tantrum at the camp. I'm like, I'm not going anywhere in my team side. It's like, yes, you are. I'm like, so I think I'm going to Germany. I think I'm going home. Like we just got here. This is where I need to be.

You know, I'm really childish in my response to that. but I do and I get back to they send me to one of the one of the outstations where there actually was a forward surgical team and they treated it and the way they treat that is they pack it with this antiseptic gauze

because they can't just sew it shut because it'll leave this open cavity for infection so they pack it and then you just change that dressing out you know three four times a day so it closes from the inside out it was it really wasn't a big deal I was supposed to stay at that location

until it was completely healed. The head doc who was at Bogram was made aware of my wound and he said, Nick will stay where you are until it's closed to make sure that there's no infection. How'd that work out? Yeah. After about, I don't know, three, four days, I started getting anxious.

And the only rotary wing flights that were going into my site where my team was, was coming out of Bogrom. So either way, I had to get to Bogram before I could initiate movement back to jaw res, which is where we were. Well, I grabbed one of my buddies who's on that support team that was there,

and I said, bring me down to the Tammack, which he does. And I go from one C-130 to another one until I find one that's going to Bogram. Just hitching a ride. And I go up to the time like, hey, you guys are going to Bogram. It was like the third plane.

I walked on. And they're like, yeah, we're taking off off in like 10 minutes. I'm like, can I come with you? They're like, sure. So I just jump in the point. plane. I don't tell anybody where I'm going. Landed at Bagram. I had been to Bagram before. That's where we originally landed when we got there, but I was only on Bagram for like a day until we just got

all about stuff together and then we flew out to our site. So I wasn't familiar with Bagram at all, which back then it was like a city. I mean, Bagram's huge. So I land. I have no idea really where I am. I know that the special ops camp is in the vicinity of this. So I find my way over there and I walk into the jock and it was my first time actually being in like a real jock. I hadn't seen one before with all the TVs and all the different staff sections and they're all wired in. It was like this is kind of cool. I hadn't seen it before. And I walk in and the SOTIF commander, who's my battalion level command team, they're the ones that are running the SOTF, special operations task force. He's like, hey, what are you doing here? And I'm like, hey, sir, how are you doing?

you know, I need a ride back to Jarrez. This dude's from Boston. So he starts going off. He had actually brought in a bleacher seat chair that he bought that used to be in Fenway Park as his like battle chair. Hell yeah. So they refurbished Fenway Park and they sold a bunch of stuff.

So he brings this over with him to Afghanistan. So rather than focus on why I am there, he just wants to show me his chair. He's like, dude, look at the chair I brought. Isn't this great? This was used to be out. you know, Fenway Park, whatever. And I'm kind of like, yeah, sir, that's awesome.

That's an awesome ship. Well, then the sort of command of Sajum Major walks over. And he's like, no, really, what are you doing here? I like how you can always snow the officers, but the freaking e-dogs, man. They're on to your bullshit. There was no any Jedi thing happening with him. He's like, why are you here? And I'm like coming up with some bullshit that doesn't float, and then the phone rings.

And he picks it. up and I hear the yelling on the other end of the phone. And it's my company, Sajum, who was at the location that I had just left from. And I had been gone maybe three hours or something, four hours. And I hear him screaming. And CSM is like, oh, no, he's right here in front of me. And I'm like, okay, now I know this is about me. Am I going to get court-martialed?

Like, what happens? I don't know. I know I'm in trouble. So he hands me to phone and my company, Sajum Major, just loses his mind. on me, you know, for like 10 minutes. And I'm just like, Roger that, Roger that, a lot of that going on. And at the end, he's like, okay, dude, listen, like, I get it. I get it.

I've been there before. I get it. But, like, don't ever do that again. I said, Roger that. Hang up. Well, now everyone's kind of joking about it a little bit. CSM thinks it's kind of cool, but he's also trying to be professional. There's a lot of people around.

I've clearly just done something and subordinate. It was a, it was a, the commander eventually gets switched on. He was like, oh, wait, what? Did you really just do that? Well, my team's on a mission, right, at that point. My first time in the jock, I just got yelled at, which is fine. We're kind of joking. And I look up red lights that's going off, you know, essential personnel only inside the jock.

People are leaving, people are coming in, people are getting spun up. I can tell something's going on. And it's my team on and op, and my team sergeant takes a round to the aftermath. And I'm watching this for the first time through the lens of, you know, an ISR feed. I've never seen it before. And it takes a minute to realize what's happening and I put two and two together

and I have an emotional breakdown of like rage and I'm like throwing chairs immature, completely emotionally charged response or reaction and I'm like, you guys need to get me a ride now.

I'm going back. And I get pulled out of the jock and the doc shows up. and I'm with the group or the SOTIF commander and the SOTIF CSM and the doc comes over and he's like, why are you here? You need to wait till you're healed. You're not going back. And I start yelling at him. And then the commander's like, listen, Doc, I don't think you want to tell this dude like, no.

Like he's, he just like jumped on a plane and flew here. Like he's like he's going to, he's going back. So they overrode that decision. And I was back on a bird the next day or the day after that back out with the team. And what happened to the guy that got wounded? Would you say that was your team sergeant? Yep. So he came in.

I was there to meet him at the hospital when he showed up to Bagram, which was good. He went into surgery. He was Mavac out of country. He was over in Germany. I don't think he ended up going back to the states because he returned back in to the team. He was out of the game for maybe a month or two. and then he came back over. Do you guys have any kind of backfill plan?

I mean, you only got 12 dudes. When someone gets hit, that's like a freaking significant amount of the force. Yeah, every dude does play a big role. We didn't get outfitted with a new team sergeant, just the next senior guy on the team picked it up. Yep. Oftentimes, we will get augmented by one of the support teams

that's in the area. Yeah, because, I mean, you got 12 guys. Like, that's a freaking, an important gun. Just, like, legit, like, just a gunner. Yeah. Even vehicles, like, whatever you're doing, that's freaking crazy to think about that. You lose two or three guys. Like, you're almost, you need replacement sometimes.

Oh, yeah. So you get back up there now. How often are you, what's your opt tempo like? Like, how often are you guys going out? Yeah, we're going out probably three, four times a week. And most of the time, do you have things that you're doing? Are you trying to do civil affairs out there? Or are you going out patrol to contact?

Like, what are you guys actually trying to do? Yeah, so our mission was to open up white space, open up freedom of maneuver so that some of the other units in the entire AO had the ability to begin their ex-fill process. So this is 2012 going into 2013. the writings on the wall that we're about to close down Afghanistan so the units on the ground are making those preparations to be able to get men, weapons, and equipment to Bagram and to Kandah.

So we needed to open up some lanes. So does that mean are you setting up combat outposts out there or are you just going out clearing and then leaving? What are you doing? No, so the Afghan local police concept was built specifically for this where we would build and or reinforce

checkpoints along the major avenues throughout the AO. So there were these Afghan local police checkpoints that were all down the major roads. So we were rather building those out, validating the ones that were already there, training the guys that were there

or bringing in like resources and stuff to make them more effective. So let's say you might, oh, we got this checkpoint down there, checkpoint four, we're going to go out there today, we're going to check their force structure, We're going to meet with their people. We're going to give us some pistol training.

And then we're going to come back. Yep. That's kind of like the type of stuff that you were doing. Yeah, that and then we were tied also into the local and regional government officials to help them with their structure. And they're building out and just gaining more control of the area from like a civil and diplomatic perspective, which it's a tough task to do that in Afghanistan. So we mostly focused on Afghan local police enhancement. via checkpoints along the major routes. What's the local populace?

Populous think of you? Hit or miss. In an area like that, you're really putting the local populace in a lose-lose scenario. We come in, big, big white guys, big American guys tatted up with all the guns and this stuff.

And we come in and be like, you're going to help us. And what are they going to say no? Well, the problem is when they say, yes, the actual dudes that run the show in that whole area, they're going to come back. Mm-hmm. So, you know, it's tough.

And they know those Americans, they know that they're going to leave someday. The local populace, like, oh, you're here now, but the Taliban's going to be here forever. Yeah. So it's an impossible. Is the biggest threat on the ground IEDs at this point? At this point, the biggest threat on the ground was IEDs, and then a close second would be the insider attack, which once that happened to us, in, what ended up being early 2013 on the same deployment, that was kind of the catalyst that drove that threat up

to supersede IEDs within that immediate area because it was just so effective. You ended up getting shot again, right? Or you get shot? Yeah. In the what? In the face? Yep.

I took an AK round, which sounds worse than it was. It really just grazed my cheek and, you know, ripped a chunk open. It did clip an ottery, so it bled a bit. but I didn't know that I had been shot for like an hour or two after the fact because it was the result of a massive IED that hit our lead vehicle decimated the truck and when I showed up to that vehicle there were some dismounts that had showed up as well this was a full-on ambush so we'll talk us through it so you're out on patrol how many vehicles

you got with you so we had I think it was four trucks and a couple side-by-side raises On that we were returning to base from the from the thing we just did like a KLE a key leader engagement How how far away are you from like what are these are these like four mile five mile transits? Are they shorter than that? This one was a little longer This one we drove out along the main road maybe nine miles ten miles and we were on the way back When we hit this and we had driven down this road multiple times before And this thing had been in place before all that. They just, they never set it off. Lead vehicle, which has my team leader in it, he, uh, that, that vehicle gets just decimated. What vehicle are you in? I'm in vehicle four,

working out of a hatch. And I see it go off in front of me. And we had hit a bunch of small IEDs before. So I was familiar with it. But this thing was it, the biggest and the most accurately timed. It just, boom, it was perfect. Picks up the truck and just launches it off the side of the road down into this apple apple orchard off to the side and it was down this little ravine off the side of the road and that was the initiation of a complex ambush so pkm IPG something indirect are all coming in and you know I know what react to ideas we have that SOP established and I don't do my job this is an important note instead I jump out of this hatch the vehicle still moving and I take off on foot towards the truck, which is, you know, a couple hundred

meters away from me. Not a tactical movement by me, like rifle in hand, and I'm just at a dead sprint to the vehicle. And I slide down off the side of the road into this, into this orchard. And I know everyone. This is a solo? Yeah. Yeah.

I'm just gone by myself. I know everyone's dead, right? There's no way anyone survived that level of destruction. The truck is on its side, so drive the side door is pinned against the ground, passenger side door would be facing the sky. And I slut off the road and I trip and fall, and what I had tripped over was my teammate who was in the turret of that truck, who was ejected and landed about 30 meters from the vehicle. I didn't see him. I trip over him, look back, and it's him, and he's alive, and I can't believe it. his leg snapped in half just below his knee

he's got a whole bunch of other like lacerations on his face but he's alive he's suffering from immediate blast injury for sure he's incoherent but he's alive he's breathing he's not bleeding from anywhere profusely so i do like a quick assessment of him and then i start hearing different rounds impacting the truck which was behind me about 30 meters and some dismounts had showed up and they were just kind of random shooting at the vehicle.

They're shooting at the blown up vehicle? Yeah. So it's just tink, tink, ting. I turn around. There's three of them. So I smoke two. The third one takes off running. And this is, again, an apple orchard,

but it's in October or it's in November. So there's not a lot of vegetation. There's just mostly trees and branches. So I can see kind of, but there's just a lot of. So I'm maneuvering through this. He's running away from me on an angle with his AK over his shoulder.

firing been my general direction while running away. And next thing you know, I'm looking up at the sky. Boom. I felt an impact. I'm looking up at the sky. And I thought that I had run into a branch from a tree. And it just knocked me over. So I pop up and I kind of look around and I'm fine.

And I go to reengage on this dude. And I noticed the vehicle is on fire. And I hadn't checked the vehicle. I've only seen one of my buddies So as bad as I really want to go kill this dude I was like I'm gonna go check the vehicle instead So fortunately the passenger door Which again's face in the sky had been blown off the hinges

Because the truck had basically collapsed on itself So the turret was you couldn't There was no access point inside the cab Other than that door Climb up the vehicle Look in And my team leader is buried kind of where the driver's seat would be,

and he's trying to establish comms, which just says a lot about, like, training and, like, just doing what you need to do, regardless of how bad it gets. I mean, he's in an exploded vehicle, and he's a mess. Both his legs are nasty. He's a blow than the amputee now.

Both his legs are completely mangled. He's got an arterial bleed through his arm. His face is completely riddled with spall, and he's on the radio. in a destroyed decimated truck trying to establish comms communicate to hire what's going on says a lot about that dude well i'm looking inside this vehicle you know we're still taking pkm and our pg now our trucks are set up they're returning fire we got a couple of our 60 millimeter mortars out they're returning fire team sergeant who are acting team sergeant at the time he's got a maneuver element that's maneuvering on the ambush line

I don't think anyone really knew where I even was because I'm in the middle of all this that's happening I look inside the truck I see him okay truck's on fire it's burning from the back towards the cab I look inside the rounds from inside the vehicle are starting to pop off from the heat so it's like looking into a like a popcorn bag pop pop pop pop pop pop pop rounds are still tinging off the front of the truck

from the enemy machine gun fire I'm like this is a really bad day here and this is where it ends. There's no way either one of us are making it out of this. My team leader played offensive line at West Point. Big Cat. This is the dude that's legs are smangled. Yep. Trying to make comms on the radio.

Yeah, our captain. So he's a big jacked dude? Big boy. I wouldn't say jacked, but just a hoss. Six, seven, about $2.90, $2.25 without kit. Big boy. with kit he's well over 300 pounds and we used to joke about this

you know which is kind of ironic that he and I can never be in the same vehicle because we were the only ones big enough to move the other guy if we needed to which is what played out so I see him in there

big dude wedged in a pile of metal that's on fire rounds outside the vehicle rounds inside the vehicle anyone else inside the vehicle no how is that So it seemed like two got ejected, or three got ejected. There were two in the back, the guy in the turret, and then the driver managed to, I think, scamper out of that doorway before I got there.

Were they Afghans or Americans? Was it all Americans? All Americans except for one of our Terps. One of our interpreters was in that truck. God, I can't believe these guys made it up. out of there. Yeah. That's freaking crazy. It is, it is crazy. Because I assume they all lived,

but I assumed that everyone would be dead based on the level of damage. So I jump in the truck and I kind of just wedge him up a little bit out of the area where he was. Kind of pressed him into the dash. And then I climbed myself back

out and then just grabbed his kit and just like deadlifted him out of this thing and just chucked him over the side of the truck. And at this point, Some of our partner force guys had showed up. A couple of my teammates had showed up. So they took him, busted out of the litter, began moving him. The truck pretty much burnt up completely, you know, within like a minute or so after we were both out.

And then we just circled around to find, scoop up all the rest of the guys that were just in like random areas around, set up a CCP and then, you know, finished the fight and then went to, you know, our med course action. How far back was it to get back to base? We were maybe three, four miles out. So did you go back before you Kazavak the guys? No, we set up an HLZ right there. Bird came in, we pushed out the dudes. They did launch a ground QRF element from one of the Sista teams that was in the Valley with us. They showed up on the ground.

We met a VACTA five or six guys that were in that truck right from there. and then eventually I got medevacked out after. Do you guys blow that freaking truck in place or did it burn so much that you didn't even have to do anything? They strapped a couple charges to it, but it was pretty much destroyed.

Anyway, they recovered some of the combo stuff and then bipped like the rest. But I was treating one of the guys in the vehicle once we established the CCP, one of our attachments, one of our nerdier attachments, although important, his eye had come out of his head. So his eye was like dangling down where his cheek is.

So I was treating him, you know, put the eye back in the socket, and I'm wrapping it up with gauze. And one of my teammates comes over and just slaps some gauze against the side of my face. And this is like 90 minutes after initial contact. And I'm looking up at him, like, what are you doing? And he's like, bro, you're like gushing blood.

I'm like, really? I'm like, all right. So he's holding the thing against my face. I'm putting this guy's eye back in his head. And then I, you know, stand up. I take a look at it. I didn't take a look at it. I'm like talking to him.

And my medic was like, yeah, I think we're going to need to get you out of here to get that looked at. And, you know, I threw another childish type of tantrum right there. I refused to leave until the other guys were out. And then the QRF showed up. So they showed up, situations under control. They were going to escort them back to base. there was one bird that had come back in, so I jumped on that, and then I was met it back down.

And then how was it, was the result of that? I mean, what did they do, stitch it up? No, they had to cauterize it because it clipped an artery. So they sent me to Bogram, which is where the rest of the guys were at, and I wanted to just be with those dudes. I wasn't sure if some of them were going to live. I mean, some of them were, like, real banged up,

so I wanted to get there and be with them. and I had a little bit of a situation with some of the Army staff that were at the hospital. They have this protocol where they don't allow kit, grenades, weapons. Like they secure all that stuff into like a separate area. I had never been in a hospital like this before. And I just come blasting in the front door, angry, looking for my teammates. And, you know, two or three of these little, like, E3 med kids were, like, stop physically, like, getting in my way to try to take my weapons into kit from me.

And I did not appreciate that at all. Fortunately, another SF guy that was there came over and grabbed me and pulled me in real tight and was like, you need to calm down, man. So I gave him my stuff. And there happened to be a Ami Reservist doctor was in Bagram, who in his day-to-day job owns a plastic surgery clinic. So he's an Ami doctor, and then he's a plastic surgeon. civilian life. He was the guy that treated me. So he pulls me over and he's like, hey, man, I got I'm going to cauterize your wound and then I'm going to, I'm going to sew it back up. I'm going to get you on some pain management stuff like now, like intervenously. And I'm like, no, you're not doing

that. And he's like, no, it's like going to, it's going to be unpleasant. I'm like, do, listen, Doc, like, hit me with some light of cane if you want. That's fine. Some like numb it up. but you're not going to put me out of my mind. I'm not going to be stoned and drifting around this place in Pixeland. Two of my teammates are in surgery. Three other ones are bedside right there. You need to hurry up and do whatever this is so I can go do my job, which is to be next to those guys right now.

So the sort of commander had showed up because there's six or now, I think seven of us wounded. He shows up and the doctor looks over at him. And sort of command is. He's like, just go ahead and do it. So I'm laying down on my side, and he's this little medical welder that goes in and, you know, he like burns it back together and then so does it shut. And, you know, it sucked. But I was so angry and filled with just rage and concern that it really wasn't that big of a deal.

And then you said all the guys that got wounded, they lived. Yeah. Yeah. And yet, how many of them got Kazabacked out of country? All of them. So now how many guys you got left on your freaking team? So out of the six, only two were SF guys. Okay.

Our captain and another one of our weapons guys, another Bravo. The guy was in the turret. So they replaced our captain. They gave us a new captain who was already in country. He was working out as a staff support officer in one of the other locations. They pushed him to us. and then it's back to business. Yeah.

You get back up and it's like you got to adjust to this new captain. You got to work through the guys that you did lose, the other guys that left, even though they weren't attached to your ODA, but you got to replace them somehow so you can start figuring this stuff out. How long did it take for you guys were going back out on ops? Yeah, there was definitely a lag.

That was the end of November. So right around early December was when the snow came in anyway. And when you're at 75, 7, 7,800 feet in the mountains, I mean, that's like real snow, like feet of snow. So the timing was kind of good for us because no one can move when you've got nine feet of snow outside in the mountains. So everything just kind of goes on pause for a little bit. From like December through like the end of January. That's where we got a new captain. We got plused up with a couple more attachments

to backfill the dudes that we had lost. So we had, you know, eight, nine weeks together just to kind of get our stuff together, bring the new captain of the speed. It was about the time we were ready to kind of get back into it come early February time frame. He was good to go. And then you start doing opt again.

Yeah. And now you're working like you were talking about earlier. You're starting to do some bigger ops and you got a bunch of other Afghans coming in from different areas, different units, and that could be sketchy. Yeah. And you guys know it's sketchy.

Yeah. We prefer to keep our task org with our internal unit because we lived with this ANASF team. And we're talking about like a broken-down clay, you know, structures. Like when I say we were living together, I mean, we were living together, right? So you gain that bond with those guys,

and you learned them. You learn their personalities, their character, their quirks. When you start throwing, you know, 100 random dudes at us because we're going to go do some massive village clearance, you don't know any of these guys. We had been training them, like, randomly within our training cycle where we would run through, you know, a couple days with the Afghan National Lime,

a couple days with the Afghan National Police, a couple days with the ALP, the local police guys, our own guys. So there was a system in place, but they're still just sending us whoever they wanted to go to training that day. And, you know, you said, you mentioned earlier that, like the threat, IED threat started to be surpassed by the threat of an insider attack. So was there insider attacks before you guys had yours? Yeah.

And so you guys are full aware like this shit can happen. Yeah, we were. We didn't take it as seriously as we should have. We didn't prioritize it enough to instill greater mitigation criteria. We had some stuff in place, but we were sloppy, I think, as a detachment. It's not anything you can prevent by any means, but we could have done a better job to mitigate it. You know, and a lot of the lessons that have gone out from the event with us, which is still considered the most catastrophic inside our attack since 9-11

is the lessons learned from that are being employed now really much as like as like pretty much a baseline for all the guys that work with with indage all right so so let's get there it's March 11th 2013 and you guys are getting ready for some kind of a big operation what were you doing a clearance what were you planning to do yeah we were doing a lodge uh village clearance. I believe my memory is terrible during this whole time frame because of me getting banged up that day. But I believe we were going to do like a 48-hour clearance with Iran and we would sit tight. I think it was more of an ALP checkpoint establishment mission to begin building something from nothing.

And so this is one of those ops where you have a bunch of other Afghan. that you don't know. Maybe you've seen them sporadically. But I mean, look, you get a freaking group of 100 Afghans that you saw three months ago. You know, like, who knows who these guys are. They might as well have just been, right, anyone random. So you guys had some standard operating procedures

as far as what you would, how you would conduct these operations. Because you know it is a threat. You know that an insider attack is, there's some level of threat to it. So you have some standard operating procedures about how you're treating the Afghans. Correct. And keeping them, keeping some kind of distance. And so it's basically like you would only allow the leadership into the compound.

That was kind of the standard operating procedure. Yeah. So our compound had two layers to it, internal, which is where we lived and where our Op Center was. And then we had outside that perimeter was where our motor pool was. So we kept out vehicles, fuel, weapons, or not weapons, but other storage. So our SOP was for an op, the units would show up, they would stay outside of our entire perimeter.

The leadership would come into our motor pool area so we could brief them on what we were doing. Standard practice is you want to keep that window where you notify your partner force, where you're going as narrow as you can, because they talk. So in an attempt to reduce, that word getting out,

we would just tell them right there and then, and then we would roll. And that worked for us, you know, and the Bravo section, the 18 Bravo section, is responsible for base defense, right? So me, my team and I, or my section and I,

we're the ones that put this together. Team Sajun obviously is the one that says, yes, that's what we roll with, and it worked that entire time. On this particular day, leadership comes in and a Ford Ranger pickup truck rolls in

and I immediately see it obviously it sticks out to me because it's a violation of the SOP that we developed and we've been executing two or three times a week for five and a half months Is it like a technical does it have a mounted machine gun in it?

I wouldn't call it a technical but there was a mounted PKM in the back I think a technical I mean I was in Eastern Africa and there's like different kinds of like Mad Max technicals. Yeah. So it's not an upgraded technical.

It's like the lowest form of a technical possible. Yeah. But a mounted PKM in the back. 100%. Mounted PKM in the back that a machine gunner could operate from a standing position. That rolls in with two dudes. And I see it. And my first response wasn't, oh shit, this is a threat.

It was, you know, these idiots just can't follow instruction, which is pretty common. in Afghanistan. So my first response was just I'm annoyed that you're doing this. And now I'm at a crossroads, man. And it's either do I address this problem right now, an error on the side of security, or do I let it ride?

I go the more diplomatic route where my team sergeant talks to his leadership or my commander talks to his leadership. And we handle it after the fact. I went with the more diplomatic option. And you've been working, I mean, you've had this SOP, it's worked, you've been working with a bunch of Afghans, like, oh, these idiots, it's all just kind of leaning you in that direction of like, oh, these people are stupid and, you know, I'll square this away when we're done with the brief.

Yeah, you know, and it's easy to look back and judge, which I do to myself about how easy you can get complacent, which is true. But when you've seen so many things that could have gone wrong, that didn't, you become conditioned to these types of mistakes or these types of acts by your partner force. It's not, they don't jump out as these glaring, red, flashing, holy shit, lights. But I noticed it and I'm like, you know what, I'll deal with this later. Let's just get through, let's just get through this mission. And we'll address it after the fact.

And this is the perfect storm because we do the mission brief, get our partner force leadership up to speed on what we're doing. And then we're doing our own team, internal comms checks. So we're in a circle. And, you know, you go around the circle, right? Like alpha up, Bravo 1 up, Bravo 2 up. Everyone's just checking comms. The trucks are all pretty much right behind me.

They're all up and running. Coms are good in the truck. Weapons are good in the truck. First thing we do. Well, when I got our vehicle set up, I had left my go bag, my rifle, and then my cruise surf, all inside the vehicle. Important lesson to note.

I have my Glock on me and I'm overdoing mission brief and final comp checks. Okay. My radio's good to go and I immediately turn and stop walking towards my truck, right? Kind of insubordinate

because you're really supposed to stay there until everyone's good to go. I'm like, I'm good, I can hear you, you can hear me, I'm going to go get to my vehicle. And I'm walking away from the group and that's when I hear the rounds crack off from behind me.

And my first thought, again, was one of our Afghan partners had just indeed their weapon, just negligently discharged their weapon, which also wouldn't be unheard of. But after the second round, third round, fourth round, you know, I can tell it's coming from a belt-fed machine gun. Like, no, no, no, someone's deliberately shooting at something. And I snapped my head around. And one of those guys, sure enough,

I jumped up on the back of that four ranger and was just opening up into the crowd. perfect setup for that. We're all lumped together, and he's, you know, 20 feet away with a PKM, ripping into the crew. So I see that, and my first thought is move to cover, eliminate the threat. Like, just react to near ambush. And although I've played this game now, I don't know, infinite amount of times in my mind,

I wonder if I had had my primary weapon system on me, would I have done what I am supposed to do? because I had cover right there. There were four or five armored trucks right next to me. Take a couple steps over. Weapon system comes up. Problem goes away. And we move on with life.

What I see after I see the shooter is one of our infantry uplift soldiers who was scheduled to be a driver for us that day. Frozen. And he's maybe eight feet in front of me. And he's like a deer in headlights. and he's staring at a guy with a machine gun shooting in his direction, 15, 20 feet in front of him. I see that, and although I know what I'm supposed to do, my love of a teammate superseded me doing my actual job.

So instead of moving to some cover and eliminating the threat, I move towards this kid. And I take maybe just like three, four aggressive steps. I'm coming in pretty hot. and I get my back to the gunna, and I get in front of this kid. And that's when I'm hit for the first time just below my right ass cheek, upper thigh. Boom. Knocks me down on top of this soldier, and then I feel another two, three impacts to my legs.

So I know I'm hit. I don't know the severity of it, but I've been hit before. I'm hit again. Okay. we'll deal with this here in a second and I drag myself in this kid you know maybe four or five feet behind the front corner of another truck

to get us a little bit of cover people are dropping all around us people are scrambling I get to this this next location I don't have my rifle on me there was a rifle laying on the ground next to me that our senior medic it was his weapon he had been hit

I roll over I grab that I throw that into action. I'm laying on my back. I put a couple horribly placed rounds towards this threat who's still engaging. And then one of my teammates comes in and smokes this dude. This was the initiation of a complex ambush. So we start taking machine gun fire and rockets from outside of the camp. So immediate threat's been removed. I can tell that we're in a firefight, but I'm in no position to address any of those problems. So I go to my next course action. and I check this soldier who I'm still kind of laying on top of who's just in shock,

but there's no holes in him and he can breathe. So no mass of hemorrhaging. You got an airway. Okay, we're good. I now look to see how bad my damage is. So I ripped my pant leg open and my right leg is just mangled. Docs estimated it was probably four or five rounds

I took to that leg. I took one to my lower left leg, which I didn't even know about for like weeks, weeks later. The right leg was definitely the problem. And the river of blood that was flowing from me to where I had initially been hit was substantial. So I know my formal lottery has been clipped. So time is of the essence, right? I know due to training I have probably maybe eight to 12 minutes before I'm completely blood out. So I grab a turnicot off my kid.

I slap that on, wrench it down, lock in the windlass. Bleeding doesn't stop. Second one goes on. I put a second one on myself, put that down. It looks like the bleeding may have slowed down a little bit. But I can tell him still bleeding. A teammate gets to me, and he's like, you're in bad shit. The look on his face said everything I needed to know.

He puts on a third tourniquet. And then he gets IV access for blood or for meds or whatever. And I was trying to, like, get him away from me originally. Like, I know I'm dead. Like, I'm in the expecting category. Like, I don't know who's doing triage right now, but I need to be with the group that isn't going to make it. I'm with the group that you don't waste your time on

because I know there's a lot of people that are down right now, and I know that I'm not one that can be saved. So, like, get away from me. He ignores me and does what he needs to do. Third tourniquet, IV access, and then his work was pretty much done. So he moves on. Well, I'm still confident that I'm still bleeding out.

So I'm thinking, man, have I done everything I can do? So I decided to grab some gauze out of my kit and ball it up, we'll call it a little power ball, just taking gauze and creating this little ball out of it. I loosen up one of the tourniquets, and I just wedge this gauze up into my thigh. and I'm kind of reaching up towards my hip, looking for the, to feel the pulse of the artery.

And we do training to be able to do this, but it's on something else other than, you know, you. And when you're bleeding at that volume, all the blood starts to shunt inwards to your organs, to protect your body to survive as long as you can. So my hands are real numb. I can't really feel anything. I think I feel something.

I'm brushing past broken FEMA. My FEMA was shattered. So now the pain is really kicking in for the first time. And I'm trying to stay conscious. I feel something. I think I just wedge down as how does I can press that gauze in, feed the rest of the gauze in on top of it, re-secure the tourn and get on top, lock that in.

And then my work there was pretty much done. You cover that in the book. you say this is going to hurt I ram the power ball into my leg reaching up toward my hip it hurts I'm feeling for the femoral artery it needs direct pressure to pinch the bleeding off the problem is the remaining blood in my system

is shunting away from my extremities to protect my vital organs my hands feel like meat mittens zero dexterity or fine motor skills in my fingers the only way I can tell I'm brushing past my shattered femur is the shearing shockwave It sends through my body. Going unconscious seems inevitable.

There it is. I think I feel a pulse inside my leg. No way to be sure, but the clock is ticking. Only a matter of minutes, if that, until I am completely bled out. And only matter of seconds before I pass out. I ram the power ball down as hard as I can. The pain rips through my body attempting to eject from my eyeballs. I feed more gauze on top of the power ball,

just as our medics taught us. I re-secure the tourniquet on top of it. Tighten the strap. Twist the windlass. Lock it in and pass out. I wake up what I think is just a few moments later. I wasn't out for long. I look at my leg and determine my work here is done.

All right, that's enough sleeping on the job. Get back to work. Be there for your brothers. I drag myself maybe six feet to a teammate. He is taken around through the cap. Nothing life threatening although certainly painful. The guys have applied some interventions already including a tourniquet which seems to have stopped the bleeding but he's in severe pain Note turnicates save lives an essential tool but that comes with some impressive pain for the patient

I do what I can to distract him provide some verbal relief My efforts create minimal effects but it is what I feel to be the best use of whatever time I have left which I am certain is not long. At some point, I go unconscious again. When I come to, I'm being carried out on a stretcher. Seems like they are preparing me for Medevac. I am right. How long has it been?

How long was I unconscious? It doesn't matter. I'm still alive. Still in the fight. The bird touches down. My teammates load me on. One of them grabs my face, looks me in the same. the eyes and says, I love you, brother. My heart is full. What an honor to have served with such

men. What an honor to die alongside such warriors. Medivax and our docs and our medical, military operations are so good that a lot of time, it's like, oh, if you get on the bird, If you're alive getting on the bird, there's a really good chance you're going to make it. It doesn't sound like you're thinking that way. No. Just hearing that, you read that, like, puts me back in that place, man. I wasn't sure how long I had been still on the ground, but I knew it was quite a bit of time. So I was surprised that I was still

Even alive at that point I was convinced that that was it though That was where it was ended Your boys put Cass all over that valley by the way And drop all kinds of bombs You're on the first MEDAVAC bird out obviously You get to the AOB surgery clinic And this is this is freaking nuts

You get you need a blood transfusing Because you've lost a ton of blood and somehow you end up with the wrong type of blood. Wrong type of blood transfusion, which is horrible. Do you remember any of that? You're not conscious at this point, are you? I remember being at that aid station. It's spotty, but I do remember getting pulled off the bird

and getting thrown on the table and then just, you know, the med staff scrambling to work on me. So the next, they get you stable enough, or at least they think they get you stable enough, to get you from the aid station to Bogram. They don't know what the problem is with me other than I'm crashing hot. So they put me on a helicopter to send me to Bogram

where there's a full-scale hospital. At this location that I was at first was a forward surgical team that certainly has medical capability. But once they put me on that transfusion, everything began shutting down. They didn't know why, but they knew I needed to get to Bagram immediately. It was while I was flying to Bagram, which was maybe a 9, 10 minute flight, that they realized what happened with the blood, because they were given my teammate,

my blood type, and they were given me his. We have very similar last names. They both begins with L.A., so they just switched up the names. Well, they're pumping him full of O-Positive, which is my blood type. which is I'm a universal donor. I can give blood to anybody. So he's fine. But when they looked to see what they were giving him,

they were like, wait a minute. And they looked to check to see what they just gave me. And it was like eight units. I mean, it was a ton. That's when they realized what happened. So I'm airborne. And they call Bogram and they say, we just pump Nick full of A, B, negative.

There's no way he survives this flight. I was already in a critical condition to begin with. there's no way he survives the flight, just be prepared to receive his body when he gets there. And in a lot of ways they were right. I mean, I coded on that flight, and to your point, the flight medics were getting real creative

with keeping me alive. So panels and the whole thing is out, I think they were hitting me with, like, shots of adrenaline and just, like, whatever tools they had to keep me clinging on, pull me off the bird, get me into surgery, They take my foot off immediately.

Really, I mean, it was probably dead at that point because now we're talking 90 minutes, close to two hours since the point of injury. But really, it was just trying to minimize how much damage my body was trying to recover from. And then, uh, inhibited dialysis, transfusion machines are just keeping me alive, you know, at this point. And that was the, that was the case for like three or four days at Bokraum.

What's the first thing that you remember when you come back? Where are you? I remember coming to at Bogram a couple times and I was restrained to the bed because I had been trying to rip the breathing tube out when I would wake up. When you're inundated, you know, a machine is breathing for you. but when you try to breathe yourself against that, it can throw off the timing of the machine so it feels like you're suffocating. It's a horrible feeling.

So I was trying to get this tube out of my mouth when I would come to. I don't remember doing that, but I just remember coming to and being, like, restrained to a bed and wanting for someone to put me out of my misery. And then when do you come to again? Like, what's your next memory?

When's your first full, when do they take you out of coma? When did they bring you back and let you start talking and thinking? Yes. What does that happen? I remember my now wife who was deployed and working out of Bogram. I remember coming to a couple times and seeing her bedside. I remember my sort of commander being bedside a lot talking to me.

But my last real memory is when they were moving me from Bogram to load me on to a fixed wing bird to fly me to Germany, which took about five days for them to stabilize me enough to survive the flight to Germany. I remember getting loaded on that bird, which is wild. Those C-130s that are outfitted. It's like a hospital on, you know, with wings. I remember getting on that flight. I don't remember much from Germany. I was only there a day. Do you know that you lost your leg at this point? No. Or your foot? No. No. Nope. No, no. No, no recollection of that, no knowledge of that. They took my leg up to the knee at Germany, and then they flew me from there to Walter Reed the next day. And I get to Walter Reed,

and my father was there, my mother was there. I went straight into the intensive care unit, which is where I spent the next, like, six weeks, because it was still real touch and go. And it was around that, it was at that point that I realized my leg was gone, or at least the part of it was gone. Did you think you were going to be, did they think, was it, when you realized you had lost your leg, was it above the knee or below the knee? By the time I realized it was already above the knee. They had taken it above the knee at Walter Reed. And the chief of ortho came in to the intensive care unit. And he looks at me, I'm whacked out.

I'm on ketamine and dilated, you know, I'm on a high cocktail. of pain management meds. But he looks at me and he's like, hey man, I'm doctor so-and-so, chief of ortho. Here's the situation. You've been here about three or four days. Your leg,

most of your leg is gone. What's left of it is riddled with bacteria and infection. Any one of these things could kill you. So my staff wants to take you into surgery right now and amputate your leg at the hip and just get rid of it. of this problem that could kill you and just get you on with life.

But I think I can save more of your leg. It's just going to be a street fight, and I need you, like, in the fight with me. And I just met this guy, you know, he's telling me that this problem could kill me at any moment, but he wants to, like, slug it out with me. And I don't think I really processed medically what he was saying. I just heard, like, let's get into a fight together. Do you want to do that? And I was like, yes.

Who's how we taken? Yeah, right. Who's how we taking? We're going to hurt some people and you can never ask me about it again. Who's how we taking? That was it. I think I just heard that and I said, let's do that. And he said, okay.

So that began my regimen of surgeries three or four times a week. And they were just going in and amputating more and more and more, cutting out dead tissue, cutting out more bone. Monday, Wednesday, Friday was kind of my typical routine and then flushing me with antibiotics hoping that the infection would get taken care of

and then it was just rinse and repeat like that for a month or so, five weeks, six weeks, something like that, until the infection eventually stopped which left me with pretty much what I have today. Yeah, let's do it. You got a section in here where you're talking about as you begin as you begin rehab.

So you get right into it. It says on one particular day I was walking my laps around the track. So I'm fast forward in a little bit, right? Obviously there's, and when you get the book, you can get some of these other details. I'm fast forward a little bit. One particular day I was walking my laps around the track one step at a time. It was packed.

In fact, a bunch of New York Yankees were there visiting service members. I typically avoided these meet and greet moments like the plague. when I was working. Kelly knew this, and Kelly was your rehab. Physical therapist. Physical therapist. Kelly knew this and did an amazing job of shielding me from unnecessary distractions. I'm pretty sure she literally hissed a dude one time like an angry cat.

Given that on this day, it was the Yankees. I was even less interested. Go socks. I was in a good stride. My prosthetic had a solid fit that day and I needed to push it. I decided to hold a 90-pound barbell straight overhead in order to. to increase the difficulty. Off I went.

Shoulders burning, core burning, glutes burning, perfect. We were working. I picked up speed. I didn't have a set number of laps in mind. I just planned on going until I couldn't go anymore. My body began to twitch uncontrollably. Fatigue set in. I was right at muscle failure.

I got one more lap in me. Let's go. I rounded the corner of the track and lost my balance. I already knew how this was going to play out. My wipeout was of epic proportions. The barbell went one way. My body, the other. and my prosthetic detached completely.

It was a totally yard sale. The barbell slammed on the floor, clanging around, looking for a target. It found the legs of a physical therapist who was coaching a patient through a stationary bike workout. The therapist fell on her back with a thud knocking the wind out of her. My body went flailing into a rack of medicine balls neatly organized according to weight, the heavier ones at the bottom, the lighter ones at top, all of which were now bouncing or rolling in all directions through the facility. The photo op with the Yankees stopped.

The stretches stopped. All conversations stopped. Everything stopped. As I lay on the ground, I conducted a quick damage assessment. Fingers, arms, leg, head, everything seemed to be functioning. The therapist, I knocked over, regained her breathing ability. I asked if she was all right. She was fine and asked the same of me. I looked around the gym to see that nobody had moved an inch. Nobody, including Kelly, had made the slightest attempt to either slow me down before I wrecked or come to my aid once I did. It was business as usual. I strapped my leg back on and staggered. over to Kelly. The only damage was to my pride. You good? She asked. Yeah, I'm good. Think I didn't

swing completely through and my foot hit the ground behind me. Yeah, that sounds right. Now go pick up those med balls and meet me over at the squat rack. So you're freaking get, how long was it, how long was it that you were like laid up, you were getting the surgeries before you got fitted for a prosthetic and all that? Yeah, I got fitted for my first prosthetic, probably 10. 12 weeks have to get it now, which is, you know, a monumental step in the process. Unfortunately, this is quite common. I needed a couple surgical revisions after that had happened, which is really difficult to deal with because it pretty much puts you back at square one.

You know, your leg changes shape. The swelling sets in. You have to wait until you can get recasted for another prosthetic. It kind of starts that clock all over again. I had to go through that twice, you know, and those setbacks. And I talk about this often, you know, like that's what separates those that can continue to make the strides. And oftentimes is what just derails people. They just can't deal with that with that setback.

How long about it? Is this like a five week, eight week setback? Yeah, no, I'd say maybe around three or four. Okay. Still, man, that's freaking. You know, yeah, it's tough because you're making that. You can see the progress you're making and then boom, you're back to where you were. And this is like a revision.

They do surgery. They fit you with a prosthetic. you start walking on all of a sudden, like, the way your bone is is jacked up or it's sticking out or something, and they've got to go in there and shave that thing down. Yep, exactly that. And then you got to get all healed up and start again. Yeah. So what you just read was probably around July timeframe where I was done with surgeries

and I was really making substantial progress working with my prosthetic. I got to the hospital in March. So, you know, a few months after that was when I was done with surgeries completely and I was I was really getting after it. Freaking walking around with a prosthetic with 90 pound barbell over your head. Yeah. You were going freaking hard. I was, I mean, my level of obsession, because I could already see where I was going. Like I knew what was in front of me was getting back to the team.

That happened in the hospital. even before I was on a prosthetic. I was like, I'm going back to my lifestyle and my profession. So these training sessions, this was my life. Yeah, you immediately knew you're going to go back to an ODA. 100%. Which, by the way, in case this wasn't clear, you have no leg. Right.

And you're saying, I'm going back to an ODA. Right. People are actually trying to get you to freaking chill out. And trying to, you know, that's kind of a funny way of saying. it, but people were actually trying to get you to adjust your expectations for your life. And you have a section in here where it's one of those scenarios. April 2013, my father tells this story better than I do, as I heard it, only secondhand. But on one particular day, a psych came in to visit me, and I had just been wheeled out for surgery.

My father told the doc the deal, and they began talking a bit. The psych explained to my father that I was continuously talking about returning to my job on an SF detachment, doing the same things I had done before, etc. He further explained to my father that he felt I was perhaps in a state of shock or denial simply due to the drugs, not yet aware of the severity of my situation. He essentially warned my father that at some point I would be made aware of how badly I was injured and that the likelihood of me doing what I intended to do is extraordinarily unlikely. perhaps impossible. He simply wanted my father to be prepared to deal with what could potentially be a dramatic, severe fall into depression. In hindsight, I may have had the same thoughts and concerns as he did. After all, I was on an enormous amount of medication. I was in surgery three times a week and I had expressed my intentions were unprecedented. Additionally, I am positive

he had seen this cause and effect happen throughout his medical career. So I had, I get it. No hard feelings, Doc. My father expressed his appreciation for the information and analysis before telling the psych that he didn't like, that he didn't see that as likely to happen. My father explained that he felt I knew what was going on. I had amazingly accepted the reality of my situation and just as quickly had already focused on the next evolution. He told the doc, this is just who Nick is. My father knows me as well as anybody. He's my best friend in this world. He knew that I knew my current situation and that even while doped up with enough pain killers and anesthesia to kill a horse I was already formulating a plan

Freaking ready to rock man You were there just mentally there Yeah man, that was it How long are you and Walt to read for? About a yeah total And that just, you report in here that it was great for you. Like the medical support that you got, the people there, the people that were training you were just freaking good to go.

Amazing. How is it happening? How does it progress? Like, what happens when the chain of command here is that you want to come back? What are they saying? So, I mean, I was in communication with them while I was in. hospital and they come visit me every now and then and we maintain comms but it wasn't so much about tell me what your what your goals are when you get back it was just how you doing do you need anything

has your family right that was the focus when i left walter reed and got back to brag i've reported back over to third group and i met with the group command team uh the first day in their office you know and of course they're like welcome back you look great i'm still early on in You know, I've been an amputee for about a year. So, you know, I'm no physical specimen. I'm still hobbling, you know, I'm still limp in, I'm still trying to figure out how to live life with one leg, and I'm sitting in their office.

And they eventually asked me, so like, what are your goals? What are you looking to do? And I told them that, I was, I'm going back to the team. And they just said, okay, is that something that you think you can do now? And I said, no, no, no. I have a lot of work I still need to do. but that's where things are going. In the interim, you know, I need a job.

I need to provide value here. So I requested to go to the combatives committee to work as an instructor, which is a great fit, you know, a long time like combatives dude. And they granted that request. I haven't talked to these guys, you know, years later about this exact moment.

They'll have all told me. Like, we had to do everything our power to hold back like the crazy one-eyed look like what did you just say or go down the expectation management kind of brief that I was getting quite a bit at the hospital they had to fight the urge to do both of those things and just stay kind of cool and neutral because they wanted to be supportive of me right but as a leader right like you also want to be practical to a degree So, you know, I understand that. They didn't think that what I intended to do was possible.

They didn't think that that was going to happen. But they did grant me the request to work as an instructor, and that's when the game really, like, went up significantly. Because as amazing as the staff is at Walter Reed, their job is to keep you alive and then get you as functional as you can be to live the rest of your life with whatever condition you're dealing with. they're not there to train someone to go back to an ODA. That's not their job.

The guys in my unit, that is their job. So I knew I needed to get back to brag ASAP to begin training with those guys and gals. First, I needed a job, which my unit gave me, and then I knew I needed to fight this thing administratively, which I didn't know what that looked like, but I knew it was going to trigger a medical evaluation board, which I referred to as a military eviction board,

because that's really what they're like programmed to do. And in their defense, most of the guys or gals or service members that they see are looking to transition out. So they do place a lot of emphasis on, let's make sure we get your VA rating where it needs to be, all the documentation, get you maybe an internship for what life looks like as a civilian.

Like that's what they're there to do. And I walked in and I'm like, I'm going back to the team. And the first person I got linked up with that kind of quarterbacks you through, that process just didn't get it. He just didn't get it. And I fired that guy, which I didn't know I could do.

But I threw enough of a tepot tantrum and talked to his boss. And I was like, you either need to get me someone who's on the same page as me or I'm just going to do this myself. So he was cool. He linked me up with this girl who was amazing. My name was Rachel. And she had worked with some SF guys that remained on active duty. So she became my girl and she was on the same page as me.

So the admin fight happened at that point, which took about eight months of time. So I'm working as an instructor day to day. And I've really just taken the same mentality I had at Walter Reed, which in a lot of ways is easier to maintain this because you're living in this bubble where your only job is to go to these appointments and you're like living at Walter Reed. once you get home, you got your friends. In my instance, I had my girl who I moved in with. Like there's these other factors that a part of your life that can distract you or detract

from the mission. So I had to take the same mentality I had in the hospital and apply that to a normal living environment. And just within the first week of being home, I had to make some real high choices and eliminate anything that didn't need to be there. Complete and total re-evaluation of how I spend every single minute of my day. And if you didn't need to be there,

if it didn't need to be there, both tasks and people, it was removed. And with tasks, I think it's easier to say I'm not going to watch Netflix anymore. But when you start talking about removing relationships from your life, that can be real difficult to do. And I sat down with my now wife.

And this is like courting phase of our relationship, right? Like she was in Afghanistan when I got banged up. And what was she doing in Afghanistan? What was her job? She's active duty at the time she was doing psychological operations. Got it. But we hadn't spent any like real time together, you know?

And then I move in with her. And within the first week, I sit down with her. I said, hey, babe, here's the deal. I'm going all in. Hey, just real quick. when you're communicating with your significant other, a good way to not start this conversation is, hey, look, here's the deal.

So we're getting off to a good start, bro. All right, here's the deal. It was the truth, though. Like, there was no alternative. This is the deal. This isn't, like, a course of action. This is the way it's going to be. I just wanted to be transparent.

I'm going all in on this, like complete and total, burn the boats. I'm either going to be successful or I'm going to die trying. That's it. Non-negotiable. I have to do this. And what that means on the tactical level is that there are no dinners. There's no, we're going to go to this wedding.

There's no, like, nothing, nothing. Everything's gone. It's eat, sleep, train, repeat until I get successful or they kick me out of the army. That's it. And I look back at that conversation now with the, family we have. We're married now, six years, two young kids, the highlight of my life, the most important thing in my life by a mile. And all that could have very easily just non-existed if she didn't have the strength to be okay with the somewhat craziness that I was

communicating to her. So I'm incredibly grateful that that happened. You know, it's like, it can be tough to talk about because it could have all, I've just, not been a thing. She was like, okay, Roger that, you know. And I think what enabled that was, she was also aggressively pursuing kind of her next echelon,

her next evolution in her career. So she was really dialed in professionally as well. So we were both kind of going down in parallel these hyper-focused roads towards our professional ambitions at the same time, which helped because, you know, she had stuff that she needed to do, stuff I needed to do.

We'd come together when we could, but it was an interesting, you know, introduction to our relationship with all this was going on. So, eight-month process of a med board. I'm working as an instructor, and I'm just, I'm living just this completely in total, dialed in, you know, minute to minute, hour to hour, lifestyle. Obviously, a lot of physical training was involved. And, you know, after about eight months, med board complete, the army allowed me to stay in on active duty. then that box was checked and then it was okay now I need to get back to the team and now I need to figure out how to go about doing that and it sounds like there's a really

specific list of things that you needed to be able to do like a like is it some kind of test like a fit for duty test is that is that like there was certain tasks you had to be able to do and where's that list come from it was created in in real time by my chain of command. There wasn't this laid-out pipeline. It started off simple. It was go do an Army physical fitness test. Okay, you did that.

And then they threw every Army physical fitness program of record at me. And once I checked all those blocks, then they started just throwing other stuff at me. So they had me, I was getting evaluated cognitively proficiency. They ran me back over to the 18 Bravo committee, which is where I learned how to be an 18 Bravo. They threw me back over there for like a one week, two week train up evaluation to see if I could still do my job as a Bravo.

They put me in front of psych screening, which no one's admitted this to me yet directly, but I'm confident when I say I was operating at such an insane pace and intensity that people thought I was like legitimately crazy. You know, people thought I had like a diagnosable problem. Well, that was delusional or like psychopathic. Like, we need to get this guy's mental well-being checked out because I think he's insane and needs like treatment. The site came back and was like, yeah, he's no crazier than he was before.

So he's good. So at this time, you're teaching combatives, which is who you teaching combatives to? Is it within your own battalion or is it like, who are you teaching combatives to? The group. So third group. So third group, you're teaching combatives. you're and then you're just PT and to try and get to be able to do this job. Yep.

PT and doing a ton of jihitsu, competing in jihitsu as well, which is a huge pot of this overall journey is that piece of it. Not just from a training perspective, but just mentality and structure and like technical focus on what I'm doing, adaptation to how do I do this with just one limb now, one leg now. Were you like a purple belt when this thing kicked off? No, I was a white belt. A white belt. I got my blue and my purple after I lost my leg. Jack.

But you trained before you lost your leg. I did. Yeah, yeah. I trained. I got into jihitsu right after I graduated the Q-Course, so I did that on two legs for a while. And then my jihitsu journey as an amputee started at Walter Reed. They had a local black belt who owned a studio downtown Washington, who would come to the hospital one day a week. Who is that?

Jose like it's like Ortiz was his name good on him awesome dude I met him at the hospital and then I began training he invited me over into his

into his dojo so I began training there like three four nights a week you know one thing that you and I forget if I'm going to cover this or not in the book but I don't want to talk about it anyways you've got this thing

that really like struck a chord with me so you explain that when you got a prosthetic when you put that thing on, there's a clock that starts because you can only wear it for so long. And there's a bunch of factors if it's hot out, what activity you're doing. And it made you, that was one of the things that kind of drove this efficiency in you. Because you go, okay, when I get this thing on, I have X amount of hours to operate walking around. And after that, I got to take it off.

And that was one of the things you said, okay. as soon as I get this thing on, here's where I got to get done. And that struck a chord with me because that's the attitude you should have regardless in life. It's like, oh, you're going to wake up today. You only have so many hours. But that put an exclamation point on that for you. Yeah, I'd say that, you know, having been in the military and special ops for a bit before

this, I was used to live in, you know, structured, disciplined lifestyle. But the forcing function of knowing I needed to be able to execute at the higher. possible level. In order to do that, I needed to be as efficient as possible. You said it. It was about efficiency. How do I maximize every moment I have upright on two legs? And I developed a bit of OCD on that because if I would, if I would go to leave my house

and I would leave something and I'd walk 12 steps before I realized I forgot it, that would irritate me because now that's 24 steps. I'm not getting back. So there's a glitch in my system. there's a glitch in my in my protocol, things aren't prepped where they need to be. This mistake can't happen again because I just lost 24 steps.

So I mean, I was dissecting like where I put my phone, my keys, my like to the inch within my life so that I didn't lose 24 steps ever again. You were freaking committed to this thing. How, what was the biggest challenge as you,

as they threw all these different tests, you, right? They're throwing the Army PT test at you. They throw this other test at you. What was something that really was a challenger? What was the hardest thing? Yeah, the final, the final physical evaluation, which was my final overall evaluation, was by far the hottest one. This was at the end of about 12 weeks where I was doing one or two assessments a week. And third group, again, only operated in Afghanistan. They were dealing with a lot of injuries. So third group took it upon themselves to create what they called originally the return to duty physical fitness assessment. And that was specifically for guys that were wounded that wanted to go back to operational

status. They spent months putting this thing together. This was while I was at the hospital. And they were telling me about it a little bit. And they developed it out. They ran, you know, able-bodied guys through it to develop their standards. And it was more of more tasks that were more in line with a combat scenario. So as opposed to just, you know, you know, know, push-ups, sit-ups, and running, it was tactical tasks, like move-to-cover type drills. Everything is done with a 50-pound weighted vest to simulate kit. Most were done with a rubber duck rifle, so it was more tactical tasks. 12 events in total.

Well, the day before I took mine, this was like my Super Bowl, and my training for about six weeks or so leading up to that point was mostly focused on. those particular tasks. The day before, I went in the gym just to loosen up, get some blood flow, get ready for the test that happened the following morning. And the group command sergeant major

and another dude who had been shot through the hand who was trying to go back to the team, they both took it that morning. So I walk in the gym to loosen up and they're both sprawled out on the turf, drenched and exhausted. Group command command. Sajumajahs, he just recently retired. He was the most recent

Usa Sox CSM. He's a stud. He's a PT stud. Abel-bodied dude stud. He's out on the turf, both of them on. And I walk over and hey, Sajumajer, how are you doing? He's like, not great because that test just kicked my ass. He's like, you're taking this thing tomorrow morning. I said, yeah. He's like, this thing's no joke. And I knew it was, it was brutal. I had never taken it entirety in its entirety to standard once because I knew it was just going to break me off. So in my training,

I was playing around with different resistances, but I would just lump together different groups of them and go back to back to back in repetition. I said, yeah, tomorrow morning, he's like, okay, well, I'll be here, you know, good luck. I said, thank you. So I show up the next morning. Group command team, battalion command team,

and about 50 other dudes are all there. There's a massive entourage. They basically closed the gym. or at least no one was training because everyone was just there to watch this my teammates are there and I knocked that out and the final event on this thing

is it doesn't sound bad but it's actually quite miserable the 12th event and I think you had I think it was two minutes in between each event the final one the 12th one is just as a walk on an in on a treadmill and it starts off flat and then every two minutes it increases in elevation.

So at the final point, you're walking at a 45 degree angle, which is steep. It's at a slow pace. You know, it's like a fast, like a brisk walk. So you're doing this 50 pound weighted vest, 12th event. Well, my issue, similar to the way I wiped out there at Walter Reed, was because of the lack of range of motion I have in my hip, when the angle is that steep, I can't get my foot out in front of me. So I had to develop a technique where once it hit a certain degree of elevation, I would rotate my body laterally and I would laterally shuffle up hill.

So my prosthetic is the trail leg. My sound leg is the uphill leg. And that's essentially just pulling me up. So I'm doing this little sidewards lateral gallop up this hill, which just looks crazy. So I finish Event complete I'm on the verge of passing out I'm on the verge of going to see the wizard

I'm losing peripheral vision It's getting real sparkly around me And I'm standing there trying to look tough Like I could do it again if I needed to And group CSN comes over And he says, hey man you know I just took this test yesterday And it kicked my ass He's like if I wasn't here to witness

You just do what you just do what you just did, I would never believe that that was possible. And this is at the end of 12 weeks. And I'm like, all right, dude, thank you. But like, what else do you need for me? You know, which my teammates were kind of laughing. I'm talking to the group command Saj and Major. And I'm like, thanks for the, thanks for that.

But like what, like, what's next? Come on, man. What else is it going to take? He looks over at the group commander. And he just goes, hey, Mark, this is your decision. But I don't know how we're going to tell this dude. No. after what we just put him through.

So he, Mac Eckett looked to me and he goes, all right, man, you'll have your orders come Monday and you'll be back on the team. You have a section here in the book. You got a few sections like this in the book where you have other people that knew you or that know you, chime in.

You got a section here about this. This is by Master Sergeant Jimmy Rooney. And he writes, the ORT is an extremely difficult assessment even for able-bodied men. Some events are arguably impossible for an above-the-knee amputees, such as the depth drop. In this event, an individual must climb up a four-foot platform wearing 50-pound weighted vest, jump off, make an athletic landing without touching the ground with his hands. Nick's mechanical knee was incapable of articulating in a dynamic fashion and prevented him from sticking the landing.

For weeks, Nick drilled this event, starting on one-foot platform. With no additional weight and gradually increasing height and weight over time the method he developed to complete this event was to land in a pistol squat position Essentially a single leg squat landing the guys and I watched him practices over and over again The mere thought of doing this myself made my knees and hips hurt but Nick insisted it was possible He meticulously measured out the distance from the platform to where his heel needed to land Marking it with the tape on the ground too far forward he'd fall backward Upon landing too close to the platform and his knee may explode He approached this event like a science experiment, a problem that needed to be solved through trial, error, and work.

On the day of Nick's final physical assessment, the ORT, it felt as if the entire unit was present. Nick was attempting to make history as the first above-the-knee amputee to return not just to an ODA, but to an ODA set once again to deploy to Afghanistan to conduct combat operations. Everybody was in all watching him perform. When he completed the last event with our entire command and attendance, he was, was given approval to return to the team. It was one of the most memorable moments we shared. So how did Nick put his mind and body in such a positive, motivated, and influential place to become so well known as not only one of the most aggressive warriors, but also a life coach, teacher, and mentor? I believe Nick's outlook on his environment is where it started. He had to

determine what it was that he wanted in life and set a plan to achieve it. Nick could have easily become negative and bitter and could have medically retired out of the military. Nobody would have thought less of him for doing so. He had been through a lot. Instead, Nick chose to pursue what he identified as his purpose. I feel the key to Nick's success is that he clearly stated his intent and it gave him a reason to get out of bed every morning. This only grew as he continued achieving goals along the way and Nick may not realize it but he became a model for success in every aspect of being a phenomenal green beret and leader. His fear of positive influence encapsulates everybody he comes in contact with.

Complaining around Nick is impossible. Giving anything less than 100% around Nick is not an option. His actions raise the bar for the rest of us to match. His presence makes us better. What did Nick do to get where he is today? Plain and simple, Nick embodies intestinal fortitude and cares about the men and the mission. Hell yeah.

Freaking. Insane, right? Jumping off the four-foot thing, landing on one leg? Come on, man. That's freaking savage. What was your Mach squat when you had two legs? Do you know?

Back in my, when I was like big, big, before I came into the military, I was around, I was in the 600s. What do you think your one leg? Is it stronger now than it was then? My one leg? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. That thing is just like freaking savage. Yeah. That's the most savage leg on the planet. Yeah, it has to be. You know? Yeah. It has to be.

So, you know, there's one more thing I want to read about this before we get into some of your other, you know, moving on from here. It's just going back. It's a little reflection on the whole scenario, but I think it's an important thing to read. You say on March 11, 2013, we were set to conduct a routine operation. As always, our partner force gathered outside our camp. The leadership entered to wire to receive the mission brief, only this time a truck also drove in.

I noticed immediately that it wasn't right. I was pissed. Do I address this now? I thought to myself, it seems obvious that the answer was emphatically in the affirmative. Why wouldn't I? The answer to that question is rapport. This is a tough balance and arguably the most critical factor for an ODA's success.

Fostering and maintaining relationships are the keys when conducting partnered operations. I decided to hold off. I would address this with my detachment commander after, and he would address it with the partner force leadership. This was a decision I must live with for the rest of my life. This truck was a Ford Ranger with a mounted PKM in the bed. This is the weapon that would moments later rip my body to shreds,

drastically altering the rest of my life. But this result is not the reason for my regret. The loss of my leg is not why I spring up sweating in the middle of the night. Living the rest of my life as an amputee is not why I continue to reanalyze my decision-making process on that day. Our detachment commander

Captain Andrew Peterson, Keel, our infantry uplift squad leader, staff sergeant Rex Shad, and our military working dog back were all killed in action as a result of my decision. It took years to be able to look at this event and extract positive value. The pain was too great. I couldn't see past my anger and the disappointment with myself. I couldn't see past the faces of my brothers who paid the ultimate. sacrifice it took time it took a lot of reflection it was hard but I owed them this effort so their deaths were not for nothing gradually I was able to gather the lessons learned

internal security SOPs partner force relationship dynamics and John Boyd's udaloupe cycle are just a few examples of what was extracted we used our experience to better educate ourselves and those around us in order to minimize the likelihood of a future similar tragedy. The loss of these men brought value to those who remain in the fight. How many lives have been saved because of their sacrifice? There's no way to ever know, but I am certain it is substantial. The insider attack on March 11, 2013, is considered to this day the most catastrophic

insider attack since the start of the global war on terrorism. It is referenced in schools and training events throughout the soft community. As painful as it remains, we have managed to pull the positive value from this tragedy. We must get better. We owe this to the fallen. Yeah, you know, you and I were talking when we weren't recording. You know, for me, I had a blue-on-blue incident in Ramadi that I was. was in charge of a friendly Iraqi soldier was killed.

Several more were wounded. One of my guys was wounded. And like what I did when I got home was debrief that event to every SEAL team on the West Coast that was going on deployment. And I had many times guys come back and say, hey, I was in the situation. We had this element over here, that element over here. if I wouldn't have known and trained to avoid blue-on-blues, 100% would have happened. And, you know, I was just saying to you that you're telling this story,

look, man, there's special operations guys working around the world right now as we speak with countless partner forces all over the place. And this is a lesson that everybody will not forget. And, you know, I know that the blue-on-blue that we had early in deployment saved lives later in deployment because we would have had, you know, I mean, there's other things. I talk about in extreme ownership. You know, I had a freaking Bradley want to put 25-millimeter chain gun on what they thought was enemy element on a rooftop. And that enemy element was actually my guys. You know, Laf talks about in there.

He had Chris Kyle. identify, hey, there's, there's, I see a person with a scoped weapon in this building. Do you want me to shoot him? And Laf's checking with the army. Do you guys have anyone in this building? And they're like, no, kill that sniper. And Chris didn't feel comfortable taking the shot, didn't take it. And luckily he didn't.

Because we were so sensitive to blue on blue. And so the lessons coming away from this. Guaranteed, you know, you say you don't know how many lives they've saved and we'll never be able to know how many lives. lives they've saved but no doubt the level of caution and making sure that assessment is happening all the time that's where we got to take away from these things for sure have to um you know another thing that that I breezed over a little bit is the fact that as you are focused on you and you're focused on your goal of like hey I'm going to get back to an ODA team at at some point along that journey before you took that final physical test,

you looked in the mirror and thought to yourself, wait a second, this isn't about me. And you're going over, if you can't do your job, it's not just about you. It's about the guys you might let down. It's about do they want me on the team? Do they feel like there's going to be slack

that they're going to have to pick up for me? Talk about that. You had some legit heart-to-heart conversations with the guys that you would be working with about the situation that you were in and whether you should proceed down that path because it wasn't just about you. You got 11 other guys that are counting on you to be able to carry the weight. Yeah, and not just the 11, but the families as well. And you're right. I was in a tunnel, my tunnel vision during that first phase. about me being successful, doing what I knew I needed to do, proving the naysay is wrong,

proving myself right, all that kind of stuff. It was about me. And once I began going through this assessment, I'm knocking one out after another, boom, boom, boom. Right around that time, I woke up in the middle of the night and a panic because I realized in that moment that I was going back to a team. and I hadn't thought about them once before. And these are guys that are around me. They're in the gym.

We're training together. I'm seeing them all the time. But I was so target-fixated on me doing what I needed to do that I didn't consider them. And it's just scared the hell out of me. So that day at work, I tracked down a couple of the guys that were local, had some phone conversations with some guys that were off-site doing some stuff. and I was like, guys, you know, I apologize for having not even done this up until this point,

but is this what's in the best interest of the team? You guys are supportive and you're in my corner, but are you doing that just because you care about me and you want me to be happy? Have you guys thought about this? Because I haven't. And I don't think I can give this an objective look because I'm so obsessed with success. I need you guys there to do that. and this was maybe four or five different conversations

and I got pretty much the same answer from all of them and they said listen dude we've all talked about this already amongst ourselves and the hard truth is we don't know if this is going to work but what I can promise you is we want you to keep working towards it we will be the ones to tell you

if this isn't going to work if you're able to make it back will assess the situation then and we'll make that hard call for you so you don't have to. So I had to put my trust into them and to my teammates to be able to look at it objectively that way. And Jimmy Rooney,

who you just read about, he was set to take the team as the team satchen. He may have already taken it at that point, but he and I were working together when I was working as an instructor. He was the head instructor of our Safawak Committee, Special Forces Advanced Urban Combat Committee, and we work at our offices or right down the hall. We worked together that committee and the Combatives Committee. So we had a working relationship,

and it wasn't until much farther down the road that he told me he was going to take two six, take my team. And he was the last one I talked to on that day at work. And we had a, you know, a candid, emotional conversation. And he said the same thing. And hearing it from him as the guy that I know is going to put the best interest of the team above all else because that's his job, I can trust him and the guys to give me that no-shit, objective feedback. So once I made that switch about wanting to pursue my own goal versus, and the reason behind that, to it being about them, and when I'm walking into my fourth training session for the day, and I'm exhausted and tired and beat up,

rather than thinking about taking those first steps off the plane in Afghanistan with my arms raising the, I was thinking about my teammates' son. I was thinking about my teammates' wife, and I needed to annihilate this workout right now. There's no other option for them, for that kid or for that woman. And it took what was already an extraordinarily intense and rigid lifestyle to another level.

And I could even feel the additional energy surging through me. It was like electric. Now I'm walking into these training sessions. It was just that much easier to get up at 0.3. It was just that much easier to do those extra 2, 3 reps when everything in my body and my mind is telling me to stop. The image of my teammates, 5-year-old, is what fueled that to happen.

Yeah. Freaking, I guess we get some of that bead into us, you know? Like you do you just never want to let down your friends and then you throw the family on top of that. Yeah, that's heavy. And you make it back. You make it back to a team. You end up going back to Afghanistan. And it's August.

It's fighting season. It's hot. What do you think when you show up there, man? There was a, you know, there was a quick. you know, celebration that I had just with myself. The boy collectively, we were,

it was all business, but I did have that glorifying moment that I dreamed of taking the steps off the plane. That was real short-lived because I realized how fast we were in the game and how many gaps I had.

So we landed, this is 2015, we landed, C-17 lands, it's taxiing, it stops, the tailgate hasn't even dropped yet, and the SOTIF command team is running onto the plane, which is unusual.

And they run over to our team leadership, and they have a little huddle on the plane. So we're all looking around. We had a horrible infill. I mean, we went through like five different countries, delays and flights. It was a mess. It took us like a week to get in.

So we're all operating on random time zone times, coming off an ambient, you know, half asleep. Like, okay, we finally made it. and this meeting is happening on the plane. We get the equipment off, and our team leadership's like, we need to go into the meeting briefing room like now. We go in there, and there was a 19th group team,

so Army Special Forces National Guard team that was operating down in Helmand that had a real bad situation going on with their partner force. Like we used the term catastrophic loss of rapport as being like mission abort, because we worked through Patna Force, they were right at that point where the machine gun barrels

were essentially being pointed inwards with the commando elements they were working with. It was horrible. So we needed to get spun up. Even though on that trip, we weren't falling directly under the SOTIF. We were falling under a separate task force

for that deployment. Task Force gave us over to the SOTIF to be the answer to this problem as like a temporary solution. So we were getting spun up the second, literally the second we landed. And it was game time. So did you guys go take over for them? We didn't take over, but we went down there and assisted them to get the situation under control for a couple weeks.

When you look at that from a leadership perspective, what was wrong? I'm going to piss off a lot of National Guard guys on this, but this is my opinion. is National God SF teams provide an enormous value across the operational continuum. Where I've seen it work the best is when they take National God SF guys and they attach them to active duty ODAs. In 2012-13, we had a National God medic that was attached to us for that duration of that deployment. That always works out great. When you have an organic National God ODA and you put them into a,

a combat environment. This is, I'm generally speaking. They just don't have the time that they train together to the same level that we do as in the active side to bring that same level of tactical capability to a fight. And they're hamstrung oftentimes because they group these teams together kind of as of a hodgepodge of different dudes in the unit to send them over. So you don't have that organic chemistry that you have with an active. down the active duty side.

So from just a management and operational perspective, they're fighting upstream because of that dynamic. And when you put them into a hostile environment, like in Helmand, and you're given that type of mission, it can be really tough. It can be hard for anybody. And if you haven't done a good work up together,

it's going to be even harder. Yeah. You also, you know, you get over there and there's like new challenges for you. One of them you talk about is getting in and out of an MRAP. And you go through this whole thing. You're like, if you don't know what an MRAP is, it's a mind-resistant vehicle. But they're freaking tall because they want them off the ground as high as they can be

so that the explosion, if it's underneath it dissipates. So they're, you're climbing a ladder to get in there. You say, I can recall one of the most frustrating tax was getting into and out of a mind-resistant ambush protected all-terrain vehicle to get In and out of these trucks, one must climb up four feet with the use of a couple metal steps. As with most military vehicles, the MATV is designed for function, not comfort or accessibility. Of course, getting into an out of one of these was simple as a two-legged dude, but in 2015, it was anything but to say this was frustrating. It would have been an understatement.

This was also something I did not even consider during my train up to get back onto a team, but it was a challenge nonetheless. I began drilling over and over again, in and out, trying different foot placements, trying different hand placement. How I shifted my weight. Then I did the same with Kit on. Then with a rifle over and over and over again. I had a teammate videotape my reps so I could watch the tape and check for deficiencies or wasted movement. I had them put me on a stopwatch over and over. I checked my time against one of my teammates to compare.

I focused solely on the task at hand. I wasn't thinking about all the other tasks I needed to master. And I certainly wasn't thinking about the bridge. Just this one piece of the puzzle. Focus. Rep after rep. I felt I was sufficient. I repeated this process throughout the entire deployment,

even after I displayed enough capability to my leadership, where they felt confident putting me on more and more operations. That's like one little thing, which no one would think about, and it's a freaking challenge for you, and you had to figure out how to do it. Yeah, because by the time I got to the team, man, they were already past their collective training phase. They'd already finished PMT.

They were basically just getting gear prep, taking some leave, and then heading into the box. So I had just like six weeks on the team before we were back in Afghanistan. So these tactical tasks, you know, they would have been fleshed out and training if I was with the guys leading up. I didn't have that time.

So things became real on the ground the first time I tried to climb into a Matt V or an MRAP and I'm like, how the hell do I even do this? You know? So that's just an example. And, you know, it's a list of tasks that I performed the same way and I, you know, downtime in between training and ops,

I would just identify one of these things that I knew needed work, and I would just, like, go crazy and just do it a thousand times. And I'm like, if I do this a thousand times, I'm going to figure out how to do it. If I do it a thousand times, I'm going to find a way to do it. I just need to do it a thousand times. So, like, how do I do that? I'll do it 100 times a day, you know, for 100 days or whatever, 10 days.

And what was your mission on this deployment? What were you guys doing? So we were running the Qtejas, which is an Afghan command. unit. That's their tier one unit that was established by Cag years prior that they handed off to us to run. So that's their premier direct action CT force. So we were running those guys based primarily up out of the Kabul area, not Kabul proper but in that vicinity. So we had, we moved around the basically the entire AO. And just running DAs mostly? Yeah. What was your op tempo like?

It wasn't as busy as the deployment I had prior, because they were just more specific point target rates based on higher levels of intel and higher levels of effects, whereas on the ground prior, we were just like going out and like paving the road a lot of the ways. So this was more tied to like strategic initiatives and directions. So we'd maybe have a thing maybe once a week, once every couple weeks.

But in that time, there were a couple massive ops that we were part of that took up good chunks of time. One of that was when Kunduz, the Taliban, took it over. We were a part of that as well. So we ended up shifting to that AO and we dedicated two, three months to the response to that and then to the rebuild of that AO. How many guys were in that force you were working with? We had around a company size element, about 100, 110 dudes. And the craziest thing about working with these guys, so these guys were built, you know, by Kagiyos pride. They had all, like, all the equipment. They had all the Gucci stuff.

Same uniforms. They're rocking PVS 31s. Like, they got, like, high-speed stuff. And they're all juiced up. Like, they're, like, they're pumping, like, sustanon in their, like, daily. Which you see that right when you meet these guys. That's, like, very strange. It is.

Yeah. Even, like, the standard Afghan commandos, they aren't. They aren't outfitted that way. They don't look that way. We meet up with these dudes for the first time, and they're these just yoked up Afghans, rock and cry precision. Like, this is weird.

But what made it, I never got to a point where I was comfortable, was under nods. Everyone looks the exact same. Whereas normally, I can tell the difference through my teammate and our partner force instantaneously. When you got guys that size rocking the same gear we are, I couldn't tell who is who. Dang.

So we had different, like, mockings that we used as, like, IR mockings to try to help us figure out where we were. But I was constantly uncomfortable when we were doing night stuff, which was a good portion of it because I didn't know who was who. Yeah, that's not feeling good. No, man, I didn't lie. I didn't like it. How were they?

They were good. They were good. Yeah, they were good. They were good. I mean, you know, it's an Afghan partner force, but they were the most proficient that I'd ever seen. No, they were good. And so that deployment pretty straightforward, doing a bunch of DAs.

Any big lessons learned from that one? I mean, I was drinking through a fire hose because not only with my Afghanistan for the first time as an amputee, I'm dealing with all these tactical gaps, we were living out of rucksacks most of that trip. So I didn't get a chance to really establish like a rhythm in one location at one time because we were moving around so much. So I had to adapt my loadout package for vehicles, for half infill ops, for dismounted ops. Like, where do I keep my extra legs? Where do I keep all my equipment? How do I carry all this stuff that I'm going to need if and when something breaks down?

It was a forcing function to think about how I would go about doing that. So for every deployment I've had since, it pales in comparison because I, I jumped off like the massive cliff to begin with. So now if I go someplace and I'm working out of the same location, it's like, easy. Quite simple comparably. Why do you got to bring an extra leg?

Like what scenario? Are you bringing an extra leg in the field? All the time. At least one. I mean, the technology in this thing is great, but it breaks. Like legs break.

You know, this thing's got a little microprocessor in it. You've got batteries? It's got an internal battery. Yeah. There's a little computer inside this. knee. So I have to charge it and then it runs like a computer.

It doesn't power me. How long does the charge last for? It depends on the level of activity because it goes into like a hibernation mode like a computer. Like right now it's like sleeping. So depending on how much I'm moving will determine how much battery life I have. But on an even on an active schedule, a fully charged knee will get me like three days. Okay.

And so you're bringing a whole extra leg in the field? At least one. Yeah. Sometimes more than one? Yeah. So I'd usually carry one mechanical backup knee on my person in my ruck. And then I'd have a backup one of these. The mechanical ones are a lot light up because there's no technology built into it.

Mechanical knee maybe, I don't know, eight pounds, nine pounds. God. This one weighs closer. I think nine pounds is a lot when you're humping around, bro. That's not fun. No. I'd rather not have to carry it. But I've broken so many of these things that it's really I consider it a requirement.

So my standard load out for like a vehicle type movement, a gaff, would be mechanical leg in my ruck, an extra one of these that I'm wearing now in my truck and an extra one of these in another truck. Okay, my truck was disabled or blown up. I'd have another leg somewhere to go get and put on. You know, it kind of sounds like a pain in the ass, but it's also like, hey, if you got shot and you're freaking prosthetic, you're like, cool, let me just put on the other one. Well, it's funny you mentioned that. One of the conversations I had with my group command team, they were voicing their concerns. They're like, well, what happens if your prosthetic breaks in the field?

And I said, well, I can carry an extra one. If your leg breaks in the field, you're out. And they kind of got a chuckle out of that. But that's true. So you got good. You got proficient and have a good, solid deployment. Yeah, successful. And we had a lot of visibility on us, that whole tree.

I mean all the way up to like Washington because I needed approval from the Usasot commander to be able to go. The Socom commander was aware of it. So no SF team, no soft team wants a lot of people checking in on them and paying attention to what they're doing and answering phone calls from, you know,

three-star generals. No ODA or team leadership wants that. My team leadership dealt with a bunch of that because it was almost like people were expecting and waiting for something to go wrong for them to pull me out and be like, hey, we tried it, it didn't work.

Let's, like, get back to reality here and, like, let's find, like, a real solution for this dude. But that didn't happen. We had a successful trip. No, no issues. So it was just, it was just hectic because I was doing this vehicle-type thing in all my free time.

So after that six-month pump, I was the most tired I've ever been in my life. what's the uh i know you you you wrote about how there's like a limit to the amount of time you can spend on it well how long can you patrol for like a foot patrol so i've done you know multi-day missions um it just you know it's it does start to take its toll after a while because there'll be a point where i have to take it off at a minimum you know wipe down the sweat maybe throw on some antiperspirant type stuff get it back on and go so um it just depends on those different variables, but there were times when I'd be in the field out on something

for four or five days. And as long as I had, you know, a couple, two, three hours during my rest cycle to kind of let that fluid go back into the residual limb and kind of plump back up, strap it back on and be good. Yeah. Well, be in the field for a few days. It's freaking legit. That's awesome. Do you come home from that deployment and what? But go again? That's the deal? Yeah, back from that trip. Standard training cycle for us, individual schools, collective training into PMT, and then the next year, the year after that trip, we were over in Samoa on our next thing, which was a CT mission as well, CTDA mission, just different continent, but very, very similar.

Doing the same thing. Doing the same thing. Did you have a partner for us over there? Yeah, we had five. Oh, damn. Yeah, we had a bunch of Somalis. We had some Kenyans We had some Ethiopians

And you're training them And you're going out Did they're doing work You're doing work with them? Yeah, we were We were targeting Al Shabab This is an al-Qaeda affiliate We were targeting those guys

And it's good opt tempo? It was busy We were going out Once Two, three times a week We were in DAs. Yep. Doing DA.

Outstanding. We were down south. The other unit we were working with was further up north, and we would just flip-flop to support each other. It was busy. And are you getting a flow now? You said, like, hey, once you did that first deployment to Afghanistan where you're living out of Iraq,

are you in a pretty good flow now where you're starting to be able to deal with your leg? It's not that big of a factor. Yeah. So the two years I had, like since Walter Reed, you know, the first trip to Afghanistan or the train-up, Afghanistan, now I'm like two, two and a half years post-injury. I learned a lot of lessons and ways to maintain my prosthetic and my body. So I'm learning how to do this.

So by the time 2016 trip came around, I was much more confident in my tactical prowess and insertion within operations. Hell yeah. And then what's after that Somalia deployment? Another deployment? That was 2016. So I came back from that, and that was when I transferred groups from third group to fifth group. The reason I transferred because my wife, she went down a different career path and got orders for Campbell.

So I transferred groups. At this point, we were married. So to stay with her, obviously, I transferred from third to fifth, went over there, and then got integrated with those guys, and then my next trip was into Lebanon. Check. And you're obviously still active duty right now. We'll kind of let that one. We'll use our imaginations for that deployment over there.

At what point did you decide you were going to try and get a commission, become a warrant? Or what you guys call in the Army a chief. Yeah. In the Navy. I'm sure you know this. Yeah. A chief is an illicit guy in the Navy. And we still have a warrant officer.

We have chief warrant officers. But what point did you want to become a warrant officer? Yeah. I started looking at it. when I was in Somalia, because I warrant had to go home on emergency leave, and I kind of took up a lot of those tasks for the detachment. When I got back from Lebanon is when I dropped that packet and got picked up. Yep. So we, the SF warrant offices, we go to Fort Bragg to go to our school, whereas every other army warrant officer goes down to Fort Rucca and goes through the warrant officer

course. We have our own program because the SF warrant officer is wildly different than all the other warrant officer branches. You know, there's only two combat warrant officers and those are aviators and then SF guys. The rest

those are managers. Like they you run a desk, right? Because you're an expert in that particular system and your job is the managing task. On our side of the house it's different because you're on the team. So we have our own school. So I went and did that. That was in 2019, yeah, five-month, my five-month course, it's a lot of writing and briefing and officer

stuff. And you loved every second. Dude, salute to the Army and the special operations for this whole thing. Just for them keeping you on that path, opening those things up, you're becoming a warrant officer. Like, that's freaking just outstanding that this happened, you know? I mean, look, this stuff could be easily be shut down. Like, there could be some senior officer.

that's like I don't think this is the right thing to do and boom you know so that's outstanding that you actually that the army allowed this to happen do I believe it should hell yeah of course but I'm saying man you know some of these some of these bureaucrats like they don't think that way they don't think like you think they don't think like I think so salute to the army and to SF for for keeping that door open freaking that's just outstanding I know how one of my guys was Ryan Job was blinded and you know I talked to the admiral and I was like hey sir he he wants to stay in and the admiral's like whatever he wants he wants staying we got jobs for him yeah that's freaking

outstanding um you get picked up from warrant and then what's the next step next step is going to my next attachment as the assistant detachment commander and I was notified the team I was going to go to with about two weeks left of the warrant officer course And the second I was told the team number, I knew the type of team it was going to be, which was a maritime ops team, a dive team. Yep. Right, in SF, all the teams that end in the number five,

they're dive teams. So I just completed the Warn Office course, right? First amputee to ever go. It was challenging as hell. Believe it or not, it's, you know, there's a lot of physical stuff. To go back a bit, when I first got to group, the Warn Office on the teams,

stereotypically were the out of shape old guys that were never around. Well, the regiment realized that and they completely re-altered the actual course to include a lot of physical gates that you had to pass because they didn't want these old crusty guy out of shape guys on teams anymore. If you're going to be a warrant office on a team, you need to be able to function as a team guy. And every ODA has the assistant commander is a warrant. Is that right? Every ODA doesn't have a warrant, but because it's a small community. Most do, and that guy is the assistant detachment command. Because the SFODA, the 12-man construct, is designed to run split team ops.

It's not just like a random number. Yeah. So the captain takes one section and the warrant takes the other. Yeah. If there's no warrant, who takes the other one? The sergeant. The sergeant. The, the team sergeant.

Yeah, the senior enlisted guy. Where does the captain get his experience before he's the captain of an ODA team? Is he coming from infantry? Is that where he gets his initial experience as a leader, like as a platoon commander or something? Yeah, most come from the infantry. They don't necessarily have to have an infantry background, but they're, I mean, they're green. Even like the most experienced new captain,

in today's world, you're not seeing it that much because there's not a lot of combat, but they get maybe one trip as a platoon leader in their conventional unit, go to the captain's career course, go to the Q course, and then show up. And that level of inexperience is why the SF warrant officer exists

because their trajectory. They get two years on a team and then they're gone. So the most senior captain on a team has been there for 24 months. Like that guy just barely figured out his job, what an ODA does, how we fit within the overall picture. And then he's on the next thing. The warrant is there. You know, we're expected to do five, six years on the same detachment where they had to be that strategic advisor to that leader. That's freaking legit.

So you get the dive team assignment. or sorry, I cut you off. So you were saying that Warren Officer School was actually, there were some challenges in Warren Officer School. It wasn't a walk in the park? No, no, it was legit. Yeah, it was tough. So, I mean, I got like two weeks left before I'm going to graduate,

and I'm just about the top of this ridge line. Like, graduation's inevitable at this point. So I'm feeling pretty happy about my, you know, my performance and where I'm going, I'm excited. And then I get the phone call, like, you're going to this team right here. And I had the same response that everyone, every SF guy gets when he's totally going to a dive team, which is shit. Okay.

Because everyone knows, CDQC, the combat diver qualification course, everyone knows that that is the hottest school within the Army by a mile, physically and mentally. And most fearful of it, most don't want to go down that road. You know? Yeah. I had the same response. It was, okay, well, my celebration here was sure I lived,

because now I've got to figure out how I'm going to do this. Yeah, that sounds like I was giving all these props to the Army. I guess we got to give more props. They're like, cool. Oh, you want to be warrant? Cool. Oh, you got one leg. How's dive school sound?

Yeah, and it's, I mean, it's funny, man, because I got back to the group. I got to my new battalion, got assigned to my new team, and I met with the company command team the next day. And within the first couple minutes of that conversation, they told me that no one had any expectations of me going to dive school. Oh. I had the same conversation with the battalion command team a couple days later and was told the same thing from them. God.

Which I found was interesting, you know, and I looked at them kind of sideways. And I said, listen, this team is there a bunch of aggressive savages. It's the most senior team we have in the battalion. They're hungry for combat. They haven't seen it yet. We need a strong leader on that team. There are only two warrant officer candidates. There are only two of us in fifth group that went.

me and my buddy me and my buddy Mike had wildly different experiences Mike did a lot of like interagency stuff and he was more on the technical side of things and did a lot of intel stuff my experience was like all combat so they looked at both about packets

and they're like we can't send this guy to a dive team especially this one it's going to have to be Nick but it'll work because he's a strong leader they'll respect them it'll help keep things moving in a general direction dive teams are known for being insubordinate, aggressive, you know,

it's the double-edged sword for leadership because you got a really high-performing detachment, but you're going to have to deal with their aggressiveness and keeping them within line in a garrison environment. So they made it clear to me that that was the reason why I was going. And yet they didn't expect you to be actually going through dive school. Like that wouldn't be a requirement necessarily, is what they're thinking. In their eyes, that's what.

what they were thinking, I didn't see it that way. Yeah, yeah. You're just like, okay, well, I got to go do dive school. It's the one thing that separates dive teams from every other detachment is going through that extra filter. And it's really irrelevant to the actual execution of maritime ops. It's just that fine filter to be able to push yourself through that hell. And then you take 12 guys that have all been through that and lump them together. They are going to be a high performing detachment no matter the mission. Were you in the water much growing up?

A little bit, but not much of a, I grew up in New England, you know, so yeah, I mean, spent time in the water, but I wasn't a swimmer. Okay. You know, never scuba dive before. Nothing. So this is not going to be fun. No. Yeah, it's not going to be fun at all.

You got to start training for it, right? Like you got to start figuring out, like getting comfortable in the water is a big deal. Do they normally pick guys that have some comfort in the water? Or do guys volunteer? Does anyone volunteer for it? Some do. It's rare for a new dude to show and be like put me on a dive team. Most are happy with the little green hat in the head

and they want to just like chill and just get to team stuff. It does happen. It's not very often that it happens. I think the sergeant's major, they do ask if there's an open slot on a dive team, hey, you know, are you comfortable water? Do you spend any time swimming? You know, which I think brings value to, your success in CDQC

is more about your being comfortable in the water, not necessarily your ability as a freestyle swimmer. Oh, yeah, it's definite comfort in the water. Well, I mean, I haven't been through that school, but in basic seal training, you go through some pretty significant dive challenges, and people, it pays to be comfortable in the water. You have to be.

Yeah. So I do think they have that conversation, but if the answer is no and they needed another diver, it's like, okay, well, you're going anyway. And you had to fight against a med board again to kind of like get a waiver to go to this school. Yeah, it wasn't a med board, but I did need a waiver approved

to be able to go because of my physical profile. So there had never been an amputee to even like consider going. And now I'm kind of back where I was where I had to fight the admin fight and then also prepare myself physically and mentally. So the admin side, it worked out great for me because I went through my dive physical,

which is the most in-depth physical we have in the army, they check you for everything because it's just such a high-stress school. There's two phases. I get through both of those. Both are clean. Both are good to go. And then our med clinic sends up the waiver for me to be able to attend administratively. Well, that needs to be approved by the SWIC surgeon, who's a full bird colonel.

I said, okay, cool, send it. I get a phone call about a week later from some 910 area code number, which is North Carolina, answer the phone. and there's just some dude on the other end of the phone, like yelling. And he's talking about a one-legged guy who wants to go to dive school. And I think that someone had just dialed my phone number by accident. And I'm overhearing a conversation about me. And I'm going, hello, who is this? Dude's just yelling.

Talking real aggressively, talking real fast. Finally he stops. I'm like, who is this? He's like, Nick, it's Mike. And I said, Doc, how you doing? well, Mike was the third group surgeon back when I was in Afghanistan. He was the first guy that operated on me when I got flown into Bagram. He had since been promoted to 06 and was working as the SWIC surgeon.

So he and I knew each other real well. I didn't know that that's where his job was until he calls me. And I'm like, oh, no kidding. Okay. He's like, I'm staring at your waiver. It's in front of me right now. I said, are you going to approve it? He's like, yeah, I already did.

I just sent it back. He's like, I think, yeah. of your mind that you want to go do this, but if you want to go, go ahead, like, good luck. So, you know, ironic turn of events, if it was anybody other than him, who knows if that would have been approved, because you are assuming quite a bit of risk, both for him as the medical professional and then the commander in which he works underneath, like, they're assuming that risk to send me to a course like that as a student. He gave me the green light, and then once I had that, I had already been training, you know,

physically, my first day on the team, I was in the pool. Day one. Like I just met these guys. It's my first day in this battalion. It's my first day as a warrant officer. And I'm in the pool. You got to get like fin legs or some shit? Yeah.

So I did. And I went to my prostitist and I said, I need a fin. And they make, you know, fins for amputees. It's not like a new thing. He gave me this one. And things maybe, I don't know, three feet in length. It's small. And my teammates called it my finding Nemo Finn.

It's just the difference between my leg and this thing, which is so different. But the concern was that, you know, if it's a longer lever, it places more force through the socket what's actually attaching to my body. So we were concerned that if it was too long, I was generating too much force, it would rip the prosthetic off my body. So we went with a more secured option, even though it gave me less propulsion. So that was what I had And, you know, I just said, you know,

Roger that. This is my equipment. I'm just going to figure out how to make it work. Really had to turn my left leg into just an absolute tank because that's what was propelling me for treading and for underwater nav and for all the finning was my left leg.

That's what I used in the pool during our train up. And, you know, my teammates were phenomenal. But at the same time, it was no one really knew how to do this with a guy with one leg. So it was a lot of trial and error and like figuring it out. Did that. And then I was in communication with the leadership down at CDQC.

They reached out to me once they were made aware that an amputee was going to come down. It was a third group dude who was actually one of my instructors in the Q-course was now the sergeant major down there. So he hit me up and was like, hey man, just like keep me updated with if you're modifying any specific procedure, I just need to know what that is. because my instructors don't, like, know what this looks like. You know, so you know, like, maritime ops, especially in the schoolhouse, it's very procedural,

like left foot here, right foot here. It's broken down step by step by step to increase efficiency and reduce risk to keep it as safe as possible. Well, for me, some of those steps just don't exist. If it's like, put your right foot here, well, like, I don't have one. So what am I doing when everyone else

is putting that right foot over there? Right. So just those small little tweaks is what my team and I we're kind of playing around with. And then I messaged that to the cadre down there. It was ultimately up to them to decide if what I was doing would meet their standard requirements. A couple adaptations with a couple different things.

But, uh, and then the CDQC journey. What's the attrition rate at that school? It varies from 20% up to like 60%. There are some classes that graduate like five guys. You know And if you just If you fail They just send you back to SF

You just can't be on a dive team Type thing You usually will get Two or three attempts at it Okay Which is quite common For it to take a guy Maybe twice

How long is the school? Six weeks You got a section in here You talk a little bit about this Which I had a lot of joy And laughter when I was reading it The Combat Diver Qualification course or dive school has several tests.

Students must successfully complete. Each is designed with a purpose according to years of data collection and lessons learned from generations of previous combat divers. The most notorious is the one-man competency exam. During this test, students are required to wear a blacked-out mask

to simulate nighttime conditions and then surge underwater for several currents. Once the surge phase is complete, the students are placed at the bottom of the pool and paired up with an instructor who systematically removes the student's air regulator and in places a series of deficiencies. So how do I breathe without a regulator?

You don't. You hold your breath. The student is required to trace the air source line from its origination point to the regulator while on a breath hold in order to retrieve the air source and breathe. This process is repeated until the exam is completed. If this sounds awful, it is because it is just that awful. The one-man competency exam is widely considered the most difficult test within dive school. and is the reason why so many do not advance in the course.

There is, however, a method to this madness. Conducting underwater operations is arguably the most dangerous task we do within the military. The ocean is unforgiving. A plethora of things can go wrong. And as with most operations, something will almost certainly will go wrong. Given the fact that we as humans require oxygen above all else to live, problems underwater can quickly turn deadly. During underwater operations, it is just you and your team.

at times perhaps it is just you and your dive buddy and if things really go bad it's just you when a problem presents itself you absolutely must be able to correct it and depending on the severity of the issue time becomes a critical factor every second counts pressure is at an all time high the stress of these situations can be incapacitating the only way to work through the situation is to remain calm good times we have a test like that similar it's called pool competency It's the same thing. They're just going to freaking jack you up underwater. Yeah.

It's not fun. It's not fun. You got to fight the demons. Every survival instinct you have is humans. You've got to battle through that. Yeah. Yeah. But you made it through.

Yep. You made it through that dive things. Do you fail a couple times? I failed one man twice. How many chance do you get? Three. Yes. blacked out on the water, my first two go-rounds. And my blackout experience, they tell you,

you know, you're going, you're going to start to feel yourself going, like when you're being choked out, right? Like, these get soft and start to feel yourself, getting comfortable. Like, you're on the verge of blacking out. Yeah. I, that doesn't happen with me. Mine is just continued increase in pain and discomfort, and then you're out. And then I come to when I'm on the pool deck. What kind of are you using a like a normal regulator like the kind with one hose that you press a button and air comes out of it? For this, yeah. So you're using open water tanks on your back with the standard regulator. Yeah. We have this in seal training.

They have this regulator from like 1968 or something. And it's got two hoses. One's an inhalation hose and one's an acceleration hose. And it looks like, you know, if you look at Jacques Cousteau, diving in 1973, like that's what he's using. And it, there's no button to press. It, you have to drink the water out. You just suck the water out of it when you put it back in your mouth and they just

take this thing and freaking tight. It's insane. The only reason that this regulator exists is for buds at this point. Oh, they still use this. They still use it. Wow. They still use it to this day. It's crazy.

It's a crazy evolution. Yeah, but I've talked to some of the people that, that work. at that company and they were like yeah that's the only people we make it for I guess there's I guess there's an occasional person that were requested if they're an underwater photographer because the bubbles are behind your back but other than that it's just these because there's no reason to use it it's the worst it's the worst piece of equipment ever like for diving like they probably made it and like a year later like hey this is dumb fix it but that's what we still use uh not fun um all right so you get done you pass now you're a

one officer inside of a inside of your ODA team rack up another deployment where are you going this one the one after that uh we were in Iraq damn okay doing a lot of diving in Iraq were you not much what year was that 21 no kidding last year well we went in in December 20 December 20 into 21 I mean from what you can say without going into classified material like what was your general mission. Advise assist. I mean, the Iraq of today is much different than the Iraq of your days. How did you like being the number two guy in command?

I enjoyed it. Yeah, we did a couple split team scenarios, but then because of what we were doing was pretty routine. Myself and my actual team leader, we would just swap out at times. So I got some reps at the Detachment Commanding thing. So it was good. And you like that being in a leadership position? Very much so.

It's difficult as a warrant because a way it was described to me was it's a commandless, thankless, selfless position. You know, when you have that tripod of leadership, the detachment commander, the captain, your senior enlisted guy, and then the warrant officer, you know, the detachment commander is in charge of the team. He runs the team. The senior enlisted guy, the team sergeant, he runs the boys. They all work for him.

The warrant exists kind of in between that. And the way you influence as a leader is more done through your actions than it is about having one-on-one, like molding sessions with the individuals because that's really the job of the team sergeant. So your approach to leadership as a warrant has to be a mature one, which is tough for a lot of us because we're aggressive type A pipe hitters who think we know exactly what Wright looks like. So I have to stay back from that.

and lead through supporting others and lead through more of your actions than your verbal mentorship can be tough. And then, so where are you out right now? Are you still at a team? I just came off the team. And so where are you stationed now? I'm still four Campbell,

still in fifth group. I just took over as the company operations warrant for our advanced skills company. So when I was working in the combatives committee, It was underneath the advanced skills company. So now amongst the company level leadership where I work alongside a major and a Saja major. Got it.

You know, that kind of brings us up to date for this, for where you're at, right? What you got going on. You know, this is the thing, though, about this book, is this book, objective secure, it's not a memoir of your life. It's not like, hey, here's a bunch of stories. It's actually, it's actually like almost like a field manual of how you can overcome things

and how you can achieve things in life, which is a pretty awesome book. And look, obviously I read some of the stories out of it today because you relate, oh, this event happened. Here's, you know, what occurred. Here's what caused me to do this. Here's where I learned this lesson. There's a lot of that stuff in there. But the actual book is, I mean, the subtitle the book is battle tested guide to goal achievement, right?

Which is freaking legit. Like, hey, here's a guy that has gone through a bunch of obstacles and overcome those obstacles. And he did it not by luck, not by miracles, but by figuring out how to assess these things and how to overcome them. and you take the military methodology that you learned from being in special operations and you applied that to your life and applied that to a challenge you face

and you outline that throughout this book and that's why if you're listening right now just order this book right now because there's so much good information in it to help anybody that's overcoming anything that's facing any obstacles but I would feel bad if I didn't at least give people

sort of a heads up sort of some of the high that you go over in the book. So I just want to crack this thing open and like just like I said just hit some of the high points of How you live your life how you overcame these things The book is called objective secure you start off objective secure a military brevity term used during the execution of combat operations meaning the location or target has been isolated and contained The assault forces eliminated all known threats and the element is prepared to move to the next objective phase of the operations of the operation reaching objective secure during a combat operation is a good

feeling it means we have a foothold a location to reconsolate established communications prepare stage and if necessary fall back to but this does not mean the mission is complete objective secure in our context here is twofold first it is a victory a milestone it marks the success of achieving a necessary goal along the route to mission accomplishment. Second, it is a tool, a system, a methodology, a process designed to manifest our reality. Objective secure is a philosophy and a blueprint that was created in real time, refined, then retrospectively analyzed following years of trial and error, years of failure, years of obstacles, and years of adversity. It was forged by fire and is battle tested literally. Objective

Secure. Did you have that name out of the gate for the book? No, not at all. I mean, I created this thing. The original Objective Secure was about a nine-page Microsoft Word document that I slapped together as the result of being asked the same question hundreds and hundreds of times was how did you do what you did. So rather than answering those every single time. I said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do. I'm going to answer that question, put a little more thought into it. And that way I can just attach and send. It was about efficiency.

I created the original one of these things, purely out of efficiency to answer the question to provide that information to those that were seeking it. It wasn't until years later. I used it as such for years. It wasn't until years later that a good buddy of mine now, my business partner, hit me up. I was actually still in dive school. I had about a week left, and he called me out of the blue and said, I think you need to write a book.

And I said, get out of here. What do you talk? Dude, I'm clinging by a thread down here. I'm exhausted. I can't even have this conversation with you. We eventually circled back a couple weeks later, and I gave it some thought. And this is in the middle of 2020, COVID. I got a lot of extra time and energy on my hands.

Jim's are closed. The combative's house is closed. we're doing this weird half on half off work schedule, you know, remote LPD sessions. It was just a strange time. I had a lot of extra time and energy that I otherwise wouldn't have had. So I had a respect to him, I gave it some thought.

Thought about that Microsoft Word doc. And I said, I actually kind of have something. And he said, just keep going with it and see what it turns into. So I sunk my teeth into it. I became real obsessed with it. I really found out that I actually enjoy writing, which if you had asked me that,

a week before this I would have said no no interest but actually do enjoy it but I didn't figure out the title until maybe about the halfway point I started thinking about it and then it kind of kind of flipped yeah you got um well you you the way you run your life and it becomes really clear in the book I haven't touched on these part of the books yet but like you're you're you're very calculating in everything that you do this is what I need to get done here's what and that's what makes this so effective And obviously it's worked outstanding for you to be able to pull off the kind of shit that you've pulled off. That comes across.

And one of the ways that you break down the book is you use some of the, well, you use the way you learn things in the Army. And one of the things that you talk about is the ethos, the warrior ethos. And here's part of it. I will always place the mission first. Now I realize the term mission has a strong military undertone, this absolutely applies to everybody because everybody has dreams. That's what the mission is. It's a dream, the long-term goal.

The mission is what is waiting at the end of the road. Missions are impactful, often life-changing, but for many, the mission will remain just that, a dream. Many do not reach mission success. Many do not turn the dream into a reality. Those who do are able to recognize the need for something. Sacrifice. A subset of discipline, something we'll get into later. the active foregoing what we want for what we need.

So you break these things down. So when we say, I'm fast forwarding. So when we say I will always place the mission first, what we are saying is I will make the necessary sacrifices and I will prioritize my time. And again, I'm like jump, You've got all kinds of applications of this where people read it and be like, oh, I think that might be me right there. Oh, I think he's talking about me over here. Or, oh, I need to do, I need to do better on that thing.

So this book is very practical from that perspective. The next section I'll read is I will never accept defeat. This statement has a somewhat obvious meaning behind it, resolve, resiliency, and toughness. The mentality is that if you get knocked down seven times, you get up eight. Pretty straightforward. I'm going to read one little section out of this. Our egos do not digest failure easily. Our egos want us to constantly project strength, ability, and knowledge.

Our egos can prevent us from asking questions and pushing our limitations. Humility requires allowing ourselves to become vulnerable, to expose our weaknesses, things that are extremely difficult for most and for individuals who work in the special operations community, they're next to impossible. Gotta stay humble. It can be tough. So when we say I will never accept defeat,

what we are saying is strive for failure and when you reach it, learn from it, apply it, and keep moving forward. Again, a bunch of good examples you throw in here about this and all totally pragmatic. Next one, I will never quit. Initially, this sounds similar to what we just talked about,

but upon further examination, we'll recognize the difference. I will never quit is about avoiding complacency. It is not letting ourselves get comfortable, not celebrating too long, not accepting status quo, and not growing stagnant. It is adopting the principle that satisfaction doesn't exist

and that now is the time to attack. Check. These things have a lot more meaning. When determining the appropriate rucksack, we need to think about the mission. We need to choose the right size rucksack for the job. Choose one too small and we'll not be able to bring the necessary equipment. Choose one too large and we tend to fill the extra space with things we want rather than only the things we need.

O ounces equal pounds. Next thing you know, we're humping 70 pounds instead of 60 pounds. At first, this may go unnoticed, but as the miles continue, the extra 10 pounds take their toll. This will undoubtedly increase fatigue and reduce focus and ability, leaving us less effective when it is time to go to work. And this is what made me want to read this. Same as with ounces, minutes become hours.

Hours become days. Days become weeks. And before you know it, a year has passed with little to show for it. Later in the book, you got some of your time, like you got your daily schedule written out. It's like to the minute. Yeah. There's no time being wasted for freaking Nick.

No, man. Not when Nick's on the mission, man. When Nick's trying to get back to an ODA team, there's not a second wasted. Can't. Can't. I mean, for one, just the gift of perspective with coming as close to death as I did. driving in how precious life is and how time is our most limited resource and just to maximize

the gift of we have of minute to minute to minute, just that that perspective was given to me through what happened. And then when you've got, you know, big goals, that's what it takes. That's what it took for me anyway. I think that's actually just what it takes, not just for you but for anybody. I will never leave a comrade. I will never leave a fallen comrade. We know the obvious meaning behind this, the meaning reserved for the warfighter,

the mentality that no matter what, nobody gets left behind. When we open the aperture a bit, however, this tenant is speaking to a commitment to doing whatever it takes. Yeah, there's not too many, there's not too many sayings

that have the word never in them, right? And that's what this is. This is like the commitment. You talk about this in this section. When we understand that everybody eventually hits a decision point and that when they do, most give in, our decision point becomes an opportunity. Man, we were just talking about this the other day.

Like, your life, our lives are just a bunch of decisions. They're just all decisions. What are you going to do? What are you going to eat? What are you going to get up? What are you going to do today? What progress are you make? What time are you going to waste?

You say it gives us a chance to either extend our lead or make up ground on our competition. Through this understanding, we will begin to welcome these decision points. We will seek them. We will find ourselves intentionally pushing until we find ourselves standing at the crossroads. And when we arrive, when most would find themselves conflicted, we are not. We embrace it. So when we say, I will never leave a fallen comrade.

What we are saying is, I will do whatever it takes to make it. At times, we have to ignore the brain, listen to the heart. and take the risk. It's weird how many decisions you make without even thinking about the fact that you have a choice, right? People just allow things to happen in their lives. Sure. Oh, that just, you know, oh, what are you doing today?

You know what I mean? What are you doing today? Oh, you know? Like, no, that's not part of the plan. That's not part of the plan. That's not going to work. That's not going to work. Nick knows what he's doing.

He knows what he's doing on Sunday afternoon at 1340. He knows what's up. And this is where you break down how we're going to execute this. So, like, you just kind of talked about the mindset through the warrior ethos. And now you get into the execution of this whole thing. Phase one is the mission. Here's where we identify the mission. And again, how many people are going through life?

They don't even have their mission identified. I'd say a lot. You know, I've talked about the fact that I was very lucky because when I was very young, I joined the Navy and I just wanted to be a good seal. And what, like that gives you, you can make so many decisions based on that. You can make, you can do so much just on having a goal like that. Here's where we identify the mission. This is a long-term goal, the dream, the what we are trying to accomplish, the who we aspire to become.

There's a reason why this is phase one. is exceedingly important. If we botch this up, we may be making progress, but progress in the wrong direction. So if you're listening right now and you don't know what your mission is, you already got a significant problem. You've got a problem going on.

Because where are you going? Where are you going right now? What is your mission? If you don't have a mission, you need to figure out what it is. 100%. And yeah, I think that the way that you

like had that man you you freaking woke up from a coma without a leg and we're like cool I'm going back to an ODA team there's my mission like this is what I'm doing design we must have a solid understanding of our current situation

our mission are obstacles and how we are going to advance this may sound intimidating but don't let it overwhelm you and then you break out you know there's another thing we didn't talk about we didn't talk about the fact that once you didn't have a leg, you're like, all right, I need to be beneficial to my team in other ways beyond just physical.

You know, you're going to be able to hold the standard. And I would say you probably do a hell a lot better than the standard. But you're like, hey, there might be some deficiencies that I have because I only have one freaking leg. So I'm going to make up for that. And you started going to some of the more cerebral parts of special forces. Started going to schools to learn, you know, operational art and design. And that way you had something else to offer. It was almost like a backup plan.

If you didn't have it all physically, which again, I would say you definitely have it physically. But if you had some slack there, you're going to be able to make up for it. That was a conscious decision that you made. Yeah, that was tough to accept that growing up as an athlete and a fighter and, you know, being that door kicker on the team is what my team wanted of me. It's what I enjoy doing, spend time in the gym, the fight house, on the range. And everybody was a win-win. Accepting the fact that no matter how hot I trained, I was never going to be as physically

dominant as I was with two legs, how can I make up the difference and still be that asset? And this was in the hospital. I was still an inpatient status, living in the hospital, going through surgeries when this happened. And actually, the used to saw Commander Cleveland, he showed up just to visit me. and we had a conversation, and that's what opened up my eyes to the other skills within being an all-encompassing Green Beret or an effective ODA, kind of the softest side of our business. You know, most of us come in because we want to kick down doors and shoot bad guys in the face, but there's a lot of other skills and tasks that enable that to be able to happen. So I recognized it then and committed to it in my own personal time. So rather than reading about exercise physiology or nutrition, I was reading about cultural dynamics in Afghanistan.

I was enhancing my foreign language skills. I hated doing this stuff, man. I absolutely hated it. I loved the way I spent my time with two legs. I didn't want to do this at all. But I believed that it would work. And I just forced myself to do it, man, which I'm preaching to the gospel. or I'm preaching to the quiet on this is like the discipline to execute on the tasks that you know will bring value is the road to success.

Doing the thing whether or not you feel like doing it or not. And I know like you're the subject matter expert on this. I've learned a lot of this from you personally during all of the stuff we're talking about. It's like did the research. I know this will work or I'm confident this will work. Yeah, it sucks. but doing the things that suck is what separates the average from the grate.

So diving myself into this road, operational Latin design was a school I went to. I needed a waiver to go because I was in E6 and it's reserved for more senior leaders who are going to be dealing with like campaign planning and type stuff. But I went as a tool to increase my cerebral and intellectual capacity overall,

but then I was able to leverage what I learned in the course and apply it to my mission. Take the lessons learned and actually use those techniques to outline my day-to-day life and my operational approach. So it was multifaceted what I was able to leverage by doing that. Yeah, it's almost like what we were talking about earlier with leadership and how leadership's a skill. Well, you know, planning is a skill and designing courses of action to overcome obstacles. It's not just something you're born with.

You can actually learn how to do it. And that's what you did. You went and learned how to do it. And here, you look, you applied it. the field but here you're applying it to your life you go through this you go through this phase diagram you got these all these diagrams in here determine your current situation define the mission frame the problem identify lines of effort you go through this whole thing and then once you figure out what the lines of effort are

you talk about how you're gonna now attack those lines you got the next phase which is research access to information has never been as readily available as it is today. Never. There's absolutely no excuse to be uninformed. I don't know how it's just that an excuse and avoidable reason. We must set ourselves up for success. The key to this phase, however, is to move quickly. We cannot get stuck here. The research is solely to get the wheels spinning and provide some direction to advance down our lines of effort. So you're, and you know, you give like examples of this. What is it? One of the examples you give is, hey, I'm living in a crappy house. I want to get a new house. Here's the thing.

Things I can, here's the problem. Here's how I can make this happen. It's a campaign plan. Oh, I got to get a cheaper rent right now so I can save more money. I got to get some additional income. Like, you go through it. Another one you got in here is, what is it, becoming an instructor, right? Like, these are things that you're doing to, you've actually taken these methodologies and applied them to your life.

And it's not complicated. Next phase is approach. This is where we create our approach. We have already determined our long-term goal. Our mission are 300-meter target. We have also identified our lines of effort, the broad conceptual categories along which we will advance. In phase four, we are going to implement the list of tasks and considerations. We identified through research the series of short-term goals that exist between where we are now

and where we are trying to go along our lines of advance. These are objectives are 25, 50, 100, and 200 meter targets. Here is where we prioritize, organize, and correlate along the timeline. So again, this is another place where people can get caught up, right? Oh, I created a good idea. I have a good plan. And then they don't execute on it. They don't, well, not that they don't execute.

We're going to get there. But they don't figure out what do I need to actually do to get there. Like, okay, I see that I want a new house. I know I need money. How am I going to get more money? That's what this is. What are you going to do? What are you going to actually make happen here?

Friggin, again, these things seem obvious. It's really not that complicated. And I think a lot of people ask that question, how to whoever they look up to will learn from, wanting a complicated answer. because it just enables the excuse. Well, this is just too complex. Well, he's a seal.

He's a green beret. Like, I can't, I'm not either of those things. So this doesn't apply to me. It's actually quite simple. It's not necessarily easy, but it is simple. Yeah. The amount of times I've been asked, how do you get up early in the morning?

And my response is, oh, I set my alarm clocker when it goes off, I get out of bed. That's legitimately what it is. No, so when your alarm clock goes off, you get out of bed. That's what you do. That must be. It's simple, not easy.

Simple. That freaking pillow. That pillow grabs a hold to Echo Charles over there, man. You get straggled by that thing. You get him putting chokeholds over there. It's very dangerous. Here's another place people miss out. You got to execute.

Phase five, execute. Discipline. Discipline is controlled behavior. In other words, it is the combination. of sacrifice and time prioritization. Warrior ethos one. I will always place the mission first. With discipline, we are stopping ourselves

from doing what we like or want to do and or forcing ourselves to do things we need to do. That's another thing. I'll use that answer sometimes. You know what you need to do. Actually know what you need to do. You're not doing it. Like, you're not going to get better at Jiu-Jitsu,

not doing Jiu-Jitsu. You're not going to get in good shape by not working out. You know what you need to do. Like you said, I think there's people that want you to say, well, there's a big complex thing that we need to discuss. There's actually not. There's actually not. Just not doing it. Just start doing it.

Focus to remain discipline. We must remain focused. This right here is essential. We have our plan. It's broken down into a series of objectives. Each objective has a series of. requirements and tasks that we must accomplish to reach objective secure. We know there will be a host of challenges and obstacles along the way we anticipate setbacks. We project failures. We are prepared.

But what are we actually focusing on during the process? The reality of it is it's our choice. Picture you getting your purple belt here, by the way. 2016. Check. How many times a week you train? Now? Yeah. I'm coming off a shoulder surgery. So, um, None, but usually two, three days. Uh-huh. Yeah. What happened to the shoulder? I told my labor room.

Doing jih Tzu? No, this was just wearing tear, but I completely dislocated it back in 14 in a jihitsu tournament. Shredded the labor room. Put it back together. It was fun. Wait, 2014, isn't that when you were still a white belt? I think in this particular tournament, I had just belted blue. Yeah, there's a lot of people that were unhappy the day they saw you in the freaking bracket

You know what I'm saying? Well, I mean, especially it's a weight class sport, right? So, I mean, from the waist up, if you looked at me versus my opponents, there's no way these guys are in the same weight class. Oh, shit. How much do you weigh right now? Right now and probably 2.15. What would you weigh if you had your other leg? 250?

Yeah, that's... No, really. You know, 45 pounds of leg is just not there anymore. Wait, so you said right now you weigh what right now? About 215. 2.15. Yeah, that's messing up some people's. Some people are bummed out where they see that bracket.

They're looking at you going, there's, hey, get a scale. Yeah. And when I was in the hospital, I learned a lot from Anthony Robles, an All-American wrestler born with one leg out of Arizona State. I read his book, Unstoppable to help me with my training. And it's funny, there's an excerpt in a book from his mother who talks about, how when he was real young, the other parents would be like,

hey, this isn't fair. He only has one leg. Like, go easy on him, you know, because he was learning how to do it. So they noticed that as a disadvantage and they felt bad for him. Well, once he got real good and beefed up his upper body,

it was the complete opposite where now the parents are going, this isn't fair because he's wrestling at, you know, 205, but really he's got the upper body of someone who's 235. It just went complete 180. It's like I can take advantage of this Yeah

Yeah Damn You got a section in this part Hard work now that we choose to stay on track It's time to put in the work Here's where the tangible gains are made Bottom line up front Good things come to those who work hard

Great things however Come to those who are willing to do whatever it takes To those who are willing to push themselves To a higher level We're going a little beyond hard word work. Well, freaking Nick style.

Structure. Our daily structure informs us of what we are doing and when this is of course created based on many of the objective, secure considerations and requirements. And like any schedule, this provides us with some structure, a guide.

And you got some cool examples of your freaking schedule and stuff in here. I wanted to point this out. Cost of ambition, we can quickly disregard those who genuinely don't want to see us succeed. They are irrelevant, so there's no associated cost. The haters of the world suffer from insecurity. They lack confidence.

They look to tear down somebody rather than build themselves up because it's easier. They are weak, ignore and move on easy. Our loved ones want our time because they love us in the onset. They are genuinely supportive of the goal cheering us on any way possible. Then the realization sets in that in order to accomplish. It's this mission. We are going to have to prioritize the task necessary to reach the objective along the way this takes time. Time that is spent elsewhere.

There's going to be some friction here. Yeah. Especially those that, you know, have spouses, kids. This is where this is where this gets tough. Yeah. How old are your kids right now? Five and 16 months. That's awesome.

Freaking outstanding. Fear. They don't want to see us disappointed. Manage your expectations. Don't get your hopes. out up, this is out of love, big goals are inherently a long shot. We have accepted the fact that there will always be failures along the way. We have accepted the fact that it's going to be painful. Resentment. It's always good to think about that resentment. Number one, to make sure that

you're not getting caught up in it because this thing will eat you alive, man. And the biblical story of Kane and Abel, I've talked about this a lot. Kane was so resentful of Abel that he literally killed his brother. Just literally killed him. His brother. Right? We use the term brother in the most, the strongest bond we can possibly have with another human. And this guy killed his brother because he was resentful. So you got to watch out for it yourself. And you've also got to watch out for another people. When those around us see our drive, our work ethic, our dedication, they too may feel obligated to perform. Oftentimes it's a positive chain reaction, accepted with gratitude. and resulting in output.

This may also, however, have a negative response. It is not a catalyst for performance. They cannot or refuse to reciprocate, which results in a feeling of laziness or lack of ambition. Similarly, some have also attempted to achieve the goal themselves and were defeated. Our success will affirm their inability to do the same.

In both cases, rather than being a source of motivation, we can become a source of resentment. We must also be aware of the flip side of the same coin. when our ambition and determination are not reciprocated by those around us, our loved ones, it can result in our resentment towards them. You gotta watch out for that. Sneaky. It sneaks up on you.

You know, it's one of my buddies was trying to, Seth Stone was trying to go. He's like, hey, I want to go to Princeton. There was like a program to go to Princeton while you're in the SEAL teams. And he asked me like, hey, do you think I should go? I was like, hell yeah, man. And he's like, well, some of the other guys are. Tell me, don't go. It's not going to be bad for my career.

I was like, bro, how's it going to be bad for your career to be a seal officer that went to freaking Princeton and has a degree in international policy? Who said that? And I think it's the same thing. People just didn't want him to get that little extra little thing going on. It's like a little resentment coming through. Yeah, maybe. Watch out for that one. Community, to put it bluntly, if we hang around with losers, we'll become a loser.

That one kind of speaks for itself. I think the classic is you are the average of the five you spend the most time with, which I don't think is statistically accurate, but anecdotally and common sense-wise, that makes sense to me. For sure. For sure. And again, you've got all kinds of backing up data and stories and information to explain these things. I'm just trying to hit the high point so people know that when they get this book,

they're going to get a legitimate guide on how to live. Consistency, unfortunately, it's easy. It's easy to be great for a day. Anybody can do it, but the other 364 days that make the difference, and this is truly the most challenging aspect of execution, consistency. That catches a lot of people off guard. Discipline, hard work, and consistency. How can you stop someone who is willing to stay on track despite temptation,

someone who's willing to sacrifice and put in hard work, someone who is willing to dedicate himself or herself on a daily basis. How can you stop someone who is willing to do whatever it takes? The answer is you can't. Phase six, track. There's no reason to overcomplicate this one. It's simple. This is simply keeping track of what you are doing and how you are doing.

It's a diary, really, for all my alpha tough guys out there, you will likely refer to this as a log. But that's all it is. We are logging our actions, what we're doing, how we're doing it. How what's the oldest law? You got logs from your freaking college workouts. Oh yeah, go back down decades. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I've got some I've got some old old. I have the little write in the rain notebooks and so I've got that I just always track a workout in and I've got probably What is it? 2022? I might have 15 years worth of I could pull up. I'm gonna have to check that one. I had to pull it up.

I had a little situation unfold. Got a little little situations. Well, we, we, there was a guy that did a, did a video about me being on steroids. And I've never done steroids. And, you know, he kind of broke down, he had broken down like what we had said on this one particular video where we were,

we were kind of just having fun, bullshit and back and forth and, you know, talking about echo skinny knees and a lot of people sat down and and anyways you know this guy his name he's got a video a thing called more plates

more dates good good dude his name is Derek anyways he made a video and he just did like an assessment I competed in jujitsu I like he just did an assessment like oh yeah he's probably on TRT and probably juiced at one time and I just we just made one back and said like hey no

Actually, I haven't. And I realized that there was things that I said that made him think, well, oh, Jocko says he can squat 405 for 20 reps, which I kind of like, I don't know if I actually said, yeah, or 10 reps or whatever it was. But I'd said it bullshit with Echo on the podcast. And it wasn't even a real podcast. We were just kind of like, it was before. So it was that I said I worked out four times a day.

Like there's some little clip where I'm like, oh, four times a day. And I had to clarify, well, what I mean is like, oh, On a good day, I lift, I run, I go to Jiu-Jitsu and I surf. Those are all some physical, those are all tiring, right? But they're not like I didn't do some crazy workouts. So anyways, while we were doing that, I kind of went back and just kind of reviewed, you know, just to get some real numbers out there where I said, hey, here's what, here's an actual number. This is the time. So that's like the last time, but I got just like stacks of these little notebooks, you know?

but journaling you're talking about journaling over there man yeah man some alpha males are going to get freaking distraught over that turn that's why I talk about it as much as I do because what are you going to do you're going to call me a bitch I mean really like really you know that's not like ego talking it's like one I don't care

and two like okay good luck with that but like journaling login is a huge part of my day to day and I'm like I'll scream that from the rooftops And it's always good like you I, I, since I track my, since I write down, I can't, track is a strong word for me. But what I like about it is over time, if you're not careful, you can start to like let some things slide a little bit. You know, you're like, well, you know, I only really need to do this or I only need to really do that or what could I actually do? This is good enough, I think.

And I had this conversation with the Bert Soren from Sorin. from Sorenax, you know what I'm talking about? And I was like, man, there's exercises that I do just to make sure that I don't lose that capability. Like whatever it is. Whatever that exercise is, muscle ups, like overhead squats. Like I had a hurt elbow for a year, man. I could not do an overhead squat. Couldn't do it.

Maybe it wasn't a year. But, you know, in my little log book, it says elbow still hurt. You know what I mean? Can't do overhead squats. So I know what's going on. I know why I'm not doing it. those little things to put in there. Do you use any like the electronic tracking devices

of your sleep or your whatever? No, not yet. No, not yet. I mean, the technology seems to make a lot of sense. I haven't found a gap yet where I may need to know that I got 6.125 hours of sleep at 75% efficiency. I don't know what difference it would make.

Like it's time to get up. period so that's that my watch says I only got you know 40% quality sweet it's like it doesn't matter yeah yeah actually I was talking to JP and he said so he was doing my buddy JP and he said that he started sort of his attitude would adjust based on what is he stopped wearing it because it's it would say oh you need more rest and he'd be like oh this workout's good and he and he said he took it off bro he was like I'm not doing this no because it doesn't matter like you just said Hey, I'm up.

This is the workout I have to do. I'm going to go do it. When you see, hey, you're only at 27% recovery. Man, come on. Start to feel it. Phase 7, assess. This is where we analyze the state of our situation and identify areas of progress, stagnation, and or regression.

Again, how often are we going through life without actually assessing where we're at, what's going on, what's our status, what adjustments do we need to make? Like, this seems so obvious, but guaranteed. Guaranteed. I would actually say most people aren't assessing where they're at.

Maybe they do it, oh, you know, when they do it is, what's the new year, right? The new year. The resolution. Yeah, they're like, hey, you know, I need to do this now. but this is something you should be doing all the time. Where are you at? I used to tell the,

I used to trick, though, when I taught the young junior officers, one of the little tricks I would play them. I'd say, what's the most important piece of information that you need on the battlefield? And they would be like, where the enemy is,

how many weapons they have, how many there are? And I'd be like, no, the most important thing you need to know is where you are. So that's what that's about. Assessment. Where are you at

so you can make changes to your course and get it corrected. Honesty is what's critical with this, which a lot of us struggle with, man, especially with social media, like what people project oftentimes isn't real. And you get so conditioned to projecting this facade that you believe it yourself.

That's going to hurt. In order for this to have any kind of significance of value, you need to have that internal no-shit dialogue where you can be honest with yourself. Like where am I currently at? Forget about my last Instagram post Which has 17 filters on it I took 57 different attempts for the perfect angle

Forget that And your captioned That was very enlightening, I'm sure Forget that Look yourself in the mirror Like what is my current status And be honest with yourself You're gonna bullshit yourself

And forget about all this It's not gonna matter Yeah It's one thing that's nice about Jiu-Jitsu You can't bullshit your partner You can't It doesn't work This just doesn't work

that's that's another reason for me like I have those logbooks my workout so I can say man you know what I don't really need to do that I oh wait a second let me look at what I see what I was doing two years ago oh I was actually doing this many reps or this many sets or whatever and that's what it oh I need it keeps me keeps me honest actually absolutely you know um phase eight repeat has the goal changed if the answer is yes then repeat the process that means go all the way back to to the beginning and do this assessment. Again, if the answer is no, repeat the process with specific and intentional adjustments

based on the identified lags or deficiencies. Boom, execute, back to work, move out, continue to gather the data, stay the course, trust the process. We cannot make brash decisions. Odds are there are variables within our equation that are working. The only way to determine what is creating positive effects

is through small incremental adjustments over time. It's hard. This separates the average from the greats. If it were easy, everybody would do it. Repeat, repeat, repeat. The process does not stop. Focus. It is worth it.

So, again, those were the highlights to this guide, this methodology. The sort of military, the military planning wrapped around what you could use for everyday life. Freaking legit, man. Thank you. Freaking legit. Thank you. So that's kind of, that kind of gets us up to speed, right?

How many years you've been in the Army for right now? 15. I guess you're going to stay for 20. At this point, man. It would have to take something real convincing to get me out of your reality. How do you know what the hell would get you out of the point? Yeah. Are you starting to look at what you might do after the military?

Yeah. So, I mean, it's, I'm going to continue to write because, again, I found out that I actually enjoy it. So I got a few projects. I kind of work on it. Well, you did spend seven years in college, so you got some experience at it. Got some lessons learned. Yeah, a little bit. So continue to write because I enjoy it.

And then I'm not working for anybody else ever again. After 20 years, I'll work with a lot of people, but I'm going to choose who I work with. But the days of people telling me what to do will be over once I get that DD-214 in my hands. So I see myself doing, you know, consulting, speaking, workshops, seminar type stuff. And, you know, I got a small crew around me now

that are in line with that, you know, successful buddies of mine and some family that are doing well in life, but feel unfulfilled. You know, because my buddies, you know, they work for like Salesforce and they make a ton of cash.

They live in Manhattan. Wildly successful, but it's like, do I want to look back on my deathbed at 80 and been like, I sold a lot of software and I had a really nice house? Or do I want to do something, sink my teeth into something that I'm proud of that gives me some,

fulfillment. So just turning that into from what is now in nights and weekends kind of side thing into just what I do full time. Where will you raise your family once you get out? It's a good question. My wife and I have in this conversation right now. I would like to go back up north. But I want land as well. So I'd like to be able to live ideal for me maybe as like Western

or Central Mass where I can get my family, because it's all about what culture don't want to raise my kids in. That's the conversation her and I are having. I think that there's a lot of value. I grew up in more of an urban environment where there's the edgy, fast-thinking wittiness

that comes, the expression is with New York. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere because it's tough. You take someone from that environment, that culture, put them into a much slower environment, like Tennessee, where I'm at now. Yeah, they'll probably be frustrated because things are moving at a slower pace,

but they're going to do well. Because they can move fast and talk fast and think fast, where if you take someone who grew up in some, you know, backwoods area and through them in Manhattan, they're just overwhelmed by events. So I'd like to be able to give my kids a taste of that high-tempo environment, but I don't want necessarily, like, live in that environment. Yeah, I think there's a good, if you can get, somehow, get both those,

get your kids in both those environments where they spend some time where they're like in the city scenario, and they spend sometimes where they're out in the country scenario. Because, you know, you also have those kids that, like, they're out in the field and there's, like, a rattlesnake, and they just, like, grab a stick, you know, hold the things head down, pick it up, swing it up against a tree and kill it.

You know, and you're like, that's pretty legit, too. Absolutely. So you get, you can, and you can, kids are, their minds don't get developed even remotely to the capacity that they've got, you know? So if you can get a little bit of that, both, You know, you get them in the city sometimes where they're comfortable with that. You get them in the country sometimes where they're comfortable with that. I think that, I think that's optimal, you know.

Same thing, man. Got some space, you know, get a little range set up out there, some quiet, some lands, made TVs, some, you know, some hike-in trails, do some outdoorsy stuff. But then, you know, I'm two and a half, three hours outside of Boston where I can go in. Yeah, you might need to go to New Hampshire or Maine or something for that kind of scenario. I can't. I don't see you having a range anywhere in. in your backyard in Massachusetts.

Is that even possible? Legally? That may be tough. It may be tough if you had the land. But that type of dynamic, I think, is the goal for both of us. Right. You know. Right.

But you got to have, you also have, man. You got some roots in Boston, man, where you want them to have. Do you want them to have a Boston accent? I try to indoctrinate them into that now, you know? And, you know, my oldest is five. He doesn't have, like, I'd say, a 10. to see accent yet but he uses some of the vernacular down there you know the y'all and the and the whatever

and i'll i'll correct him on how to pronounce words with an accent you know because he's learning how to read and write and he's like you know see a ah he's like you know car and i'm like it's cae yeah say it again cae he's like no dad it's car i'm like negative it's cow my wife is like would you leave him alone where's your wife from originally Milwaukee they kind of have not much of an accent, right? It's kind of like a Chicago thing. It's a little Chicago. It's like, yeah, don't you know.

It's kind of like Minnesota. Minnesota thing. Southern Canada type thing. Hers isn't really that dick. Some of her family is. Right on. Awesome, man. I think that's probably a pretty good place.

Echo Charles. Yes, sir. You got any questions? I was going to ask about Jiu Jitsu, but we kind of talked about it. What would you want to ask? Just, you know, how's the training? When are you getting back to training?

Because your shoulder and stuff, right? Yeah, man, I'm probably another eight, nine weeks out before the docs will clear me from that and there'll be a slow progression back. But I'm not training jihitsu like I used to. I did deprioritize it where I was real heavy into it and competing and like real aggressive

and enhancing my skill and my technical capacity. Now I get in there a couple days a week just to keep a finger on the pulse and enjoy it, kind of open mat style. And I help with the instruction of my son who's in jiu-jitsu now. That's kind of a natural progression for a lot of people, right? Especially when you get kids and, you know, all this stuff. It's like you keep jiu-jitsu, but you deprioritize it a little bit.

Yeah, that makes sense. How's your kid like jih Tijuana? He struggles with it a bit because there's a lot of free time where they're trying to teach some real technical stuff. And he doesn't do well when he's told to just sit there and like pay attention. He's five. He's five. I very seldom because I taught kids classes for a long time, including my own kids classes.

Five is young, man. It's almost like when they're five, you should have a half an hour class because you just get them out there and keep it fun. They already know how to wrestle. Like it's a natural thing. So if you just say put some rules around what they already know, some very basic rules, they'll have fun.

And the funner you can make it, man, the better off you're going to be. And, you know, I, I'm sure you've heard me talk about this before, but, like, I pushed jiu-jitsu too hard on my kids when they were younger, like competing. They trained seven days a week. That's a lot. Yeah.

Seven days a week. And we were just, I was just talking about with my kids the other day. It'd be like on Saturday, we'd get to this gym at 8 o'clock in the morning. And, like, I would teach their striking class, and then I'd bring them up and teach their jitzy class. And then I would train for two hours. or two and a half hours. So they'd be here just in this gym,

ages like five through eight, for like five, six hours, Saturday and Sunday. That's aggressive. It's not the best protocol. I would have been done a better job. Now, look, they're coming back to it. I mean, one of my daughters is like training. She's trained more than that right now.

You know, she's getting after an echo knows. Yes, sir. Echo almost lost his arm to her the other day. You're getting hostile. Every time I come in here, she's here. No matter what time, by the way. How old is she? No.

21. 21. But she wrestled in high school and stuff. She's down for the cause. But yeah, you can't get two. Can't get too. You got to make them love it. Yeah.

We scaled it back. It was twice a week. And now we're doing like one. And then we brought in some gymnastics. And he does like this little CrossFit like kids class thing. It's just there's more movement. Hell yeah. With those things, which is good for him.

Well, this was the main point I want to make. My son had a friend, because I would like try and get every kid in the neighborhood to train Jiu-Jitsu. And my son had a friend who I brought him in when he was five. He hated it. I brought him in when he, like literally a year later, he was six, hated it. He was seven. Hated it. He was eight.

Hated it. And finally when he was like nine, all of a sudden it clicked. And he was like, oh, I understand what all this means and what this could help me with. And it, you know, and he started training all the time. And it wasn't like he was then five years behind my son. You know what I mean? Like the kids are only going to learn so much And they can learn so rapidly that once they get engulfed in it

They'll catch up pretty quick Right So you don't have to worry like this is a wasted year Yeah Go freaking full Go freaking full Nick Lavery on him like You missed a training opportunity son Right that's actually a good point

Yeah Because they'll be able to make up for it And if they if they're into it man that's worth That's worth it Look we can find you People can find you machine nick.com that's it

uh you have a youtube channel you have Instagram which is nick at nick dot machine lavery lavery's lavee

laveeer why any closing thoughts neck I appreciate the invitation man I uh you're in this book you didn't you didn't read the pots where I mentioned you

yeah no I actually dude I totally appreciate it it feels weird you know I bet it does No, it's fine, but just like a level of gratitude to the lessons I learned from you and from these works. You know, once I did realize that leadership is a skill, although some people may be genetically enhanced based on character traits, it's a skill that requires reps like anything else. And you were the first dude that I found, the first mentor I found when I realized that I had that gap. there was a difference and I drove down that road.

So a lot of my operational and personal successes are from your works and the way you message that. So I'm a fan. So it's an honor to be here and just spend some time with you, man. So I appreciate it. No, that's awesome. And, you know, my last job in the SEAL teams was running training. And there was so rewarding. I kind of already mentioned it, but having guys come back from combat.

and say, hey, we got out of this situation because of what you taught us. And now having been doing this stuff, you know, the amount of feedback that I get like that, man, it's just, it feels good to pass that information on and you're going to get the same feedback, you know, on your story, on the lessons you learned, on the methodology you put forth in your book. So I appreciate you taking that and running with it. And that's what we got to do. You know, we got to take care of the next generation. So I appreciate it, man.

That means a lot. And yes, it was a little, I did purposely avoid the parts of the book. Oh, there you go. I just dimes you out. But all good, man. I want to read one last thing. Just because I think it closes out the message really solid from the book. I was not genetically gifted with any astonishing.

I don't come from a family of wealth. I make mistakes constantly. I lose focus. I procrastinate. I waste time. I feel pain. I experience fear. I bleed. I am not cut from a different cloth. I am not from another planet. I am a human same as you, which means we have the ability to choose. It doesn't matter what we do for a living. How much money we have in the bank, the size of our house, the disability we live with, who we care for, who cares for us. the car we drive if we have a car at all how popular we are or how much we can bench it does not matter we must simply decide this is what i believe this is who i am going to become and i am willing to put it all on the line to achieve it so there you go man um you live and proof of those words joining us, man. Thanks for sharing your story, your strategies for victory. And most important, thank you for your continued service and sacrifice. You set an example for all of us.

And the next generation that's coming up is going to be looking at you and knowing that they can get things done. And it's an example, you know, not just how to live, but how to live right. So thanks brother. I appreciate it, bro. And with that, Nick, laborie. The machine has left the building. Appropriate.

Yeah. Fully appropriate, right? Yes. You're no, you're not like, well, that's, no. What a freaking stud, man. In the classic hackworth sense of the word. You know that? Hackworth? Yeah, no hackworth.

That's the way he describes. There's two categories of people. Oh. Studs and duds. Hopeless in my heart. But like the most, the best thing he can describe, he goes, this guy was a stud. That's like his big statement. But yeah, man, Nick, just amazing human out there crushing.

And what a beast, man. Here's small point of contention, which you just elude. Which you just alluded to before you hit record. He says he has not genetically gifted. He's a little bit genetically gifted, right? I was going to chime in. You were sounding good. I was like, well, you are a monster.

Yeah. He's a massive monster of a human being. Yeah. And then, but then I was thinking about that. When he was 300 pounds as a bouncer, how tall he say he was? 6.5. 6.5.

Well, he said he shot up to 6.5. I was looking at him. I'm evaluating. I'm thinking 6, 6, 6, 6, 6.6. That's what I'm thinking. Not a small human. No, giant. And you can get by, you can get by with that in life.

But then you can go on the next level. Yeah. And he's not like a sloppy, like two, you know, even how big he is. He's not like a, and I'm not saying all because it's like, I'm not saying that. But there's a difference between just being big and sort of lurchy and maybe sloppy and like a six, five stud as it were. See what I'm saying? And he was for sure that. So I can imagine.

eating with a diet coach and all this stuff. I didn't do a good job. I didn't do a good job of capturing the fact of like the discipline that he imposes in his life to achieve these goals. Look, it kind of is clear that you have to, but you know, he's, you know, this is how many calories I'm meaning at this time. This is what I'm doing here. This is the workout.

This is the stretch. And this is the mobility. This is the time, you know, zero 400, Revelli. Zero, 2428, you know, in the gym. 0 521 starting cardio 0610 first calorie intake 700 via egg you know like that kind of thing

bro he said something or the one part that really I was like bro that's so true if you can just remember that because you know he mentioned tunnel vision at one point he mentioned tunnel vision right about when he was just thinking about his own goals kind of thing I was like bro I think that that's like an asset that tunnel vision because that's really a big part of what discipline is is not getting distracted by other stuff,

including like your own feelings, right? So you guys, both you guys are talking about like, when you wake up in the morning, you just do it. Just do it. You're not distracted about how you feel, how much sleep you may or made out of gotten,

you know, the weather or all this stuff or whatever. You're just not distracted by that. You just sort of do it, right? So technically, distraction is kind of the main enemy of discipline. And he mentioned it, how it was like,

I was just like tunnel vision. I was like, yeah, that is, huh? If you can maintain tunnel vision and leverage that, bro, I was like, bro, that's so true. I hope to remember this in at times that'll benefit me. Where he was like, he was talking about getting in and out of the vehicle, right?

Where he's like having trouble. So he's just practicing. He's like, if I can do this a thousand times, I'll be good. I'll be good to do it. Hey, I'll be good. I was like, proud, that's so true. And, you know, and we know it. Like, we know it.

But it's like, okay, so you need these guys like, what's the group, the acrobat group, like a Cirque de Soleil or something. or you know, whatever. Yeah, you called it. Yeah. And they do these things. You're like, how the heck can they just nail that? It's so precise or whatever.

But then you think about it in those terms where if it's like, yeah, let me do this a thousand times. Let me do this 10,000 times. Let me do this. I mean, probably even more than that. Just do it that many times. And it's just so automatic, just like anything else you do. Not anything else, but like a lot of stuff you already do as a human, like walking. Probably you ever consider about what your body has to do to just stand up and walk?

Like your little feed and all this stuff. So it's like, man, you just. kind of put it into perspective. It's like, yeah, you just apply that to like kind of hard stuff. And probably you can do it, but you got to maintain that tunnel vision though in a way. Yeah. And the tunnel vision you got to watch out for because he got tunnel vision just focused

on himself. But I, what I liked the power when he was like, oh, when it was about me, he was working hard when he realized it was about his teammates and his teammates, kids and wives. He's like, I can get another freaking rep.

Watch this. You know what I'm saying? So, you know, you are much less likely to allow yourself to let your friend down than to let yourself down. You know, that's why people need a workout buddy, right? Oh, yeah. Like, hey, are you going to be there? I'm going to be there. You don't want to let your friend down so you show up. They recommend that.

If you're having trouble getting it done, get a workout buddy. So he had that like amplified times 1,000 because it's him wanting to be able to. execute the job to take care of his teammates. That's what this is about. So freaking Nick, awesome. Awesome guy, man, just an awesome guy. Hey, look, no matter where you are in life, you know you can do a little bit better.

And Nick is a good example to all of us. You know, I could probably do a little bit better. Everything that I do, every single thing that I, Jocko Willink do is a little bit easier for me because I got two freaking legs. Can you imagine jumping off a four foot thing in order to be able to do your job that you want to do? You jump off this four foot platform. You've got to land in a pistol with another random prosthetic leg sticking out. And stick to land it.

And stick it. By the way. Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah. So what, you know, they said in the book, if you're around Nick, you have no excuses. Well, we're around Nick, man. Nick's out there.

Think about that right now. That's so true. So the pistol squat thing stick in the landing jumping off the four foot thing sticking the landing in a pistol Squat even if you're not that like impressed with that What if you were six five Freaking two you know two 15 one leg though seems saying like you would have been two 50 the equivalent of like a two 50 See I'm saying now do it Way way more impressive

So we're doing better if you don't want to do better you're gonna need to work if you're gonna do work you're gonna need to work you're gonna need to recover If you're going to need to recover, you need the right fuel. You need the right fuel to work sometimes. I'm on some fuel right now, some jaco fuel. I drink some go. It feels good. I feel good. So joccofuel.com, you can get some fuel.

Supplementation. Supplementation. You can get mulk. You can get joint warfare. Go read the reviews on joint warfare and then press click order because it makes you feel good. Yeah, way better. I had a jiu-jit. do sash that was slightly more intense than maybe I was used to or whatever.

No problem, but my elbow and shoulder. So I had to double up the joint wherever there. It's a good move. Hey, that's my life, man. Energy drinks, which we use the term in its own category, separate from the poison that you may have been drinking. This is energy drinks that are good for you, actually give you energy. And now they taste good.

They may not have tasted, they might have been not, they may not have been to your liking before now they will be we fixed it we took input we're not over here like no no we took input wanted to taste better now it tastes better now it tastes freaking delicious so we're up there uh joccofuel com you can get the drinks at wawa you can get this stuff at vitamin shop you can get it at eb i owe everyone a list of where you can shop for this stuff i'll get it out there i'm sorry joccofuel com go get some origin usa.com we didn't even talk really too much with nick about jiu jihitsu but he did talk about how Jiu-Jitsu was like a huge part of his recovery

and what he did. You should be doing Jiu-Jitsu. And you may have previous to this podcast had some kind of an excuse. Yeah. As to why you couldn't train because you have this and you have that and then you have the other thing.

So you don't have an excuse anymore. Nick was a white belt. He didn't have, he doesn't have a leg and he got his black belt. Yeah. And competed, by the way. And competed. So yeah.

Yeah. And that and. So come on. There's a As far as like You know you want to go hard into Jiu-Jitsu There's different levels Which to me are 100%

All of them are 100% acceptable If you just want to train recreationally You just you want to train and go hard and see You know for your rank or whatever Or you want to train to be a competitor No They're all All legitimate

All viable All viable You do them all It takes a lot more to do them all You see what I'm saying And this motherfucker did it all So you are correct. There is no excuse.

Yep, we have no excuses. So train jiu jitza.com. Get yourself an American-made glee. And while you're there, get yourself some American-made jeans. Get yourself some hunt gear. We've got some good hand. Hunt gear coming out. We're going to sell it all.

We're going to make as much as we can. Next year we'll make even more. The pieces are freaky great. So origin-usa.com. Support America. And support yourself by getting awesome. some stuff and don't forget that we have a store what's that store called jaco store oh there you you go just like jaco podcast jocco store same thing you get this just like jaco fuel yeah yeah it's true

yep yeah you want to represent on this path varying levels of representation available by the way but yeah we got some new stuff on their discipline equals freedom standard issue shirts i wore one yesterday yes sir you were you representing hard it was impressive but yeah you like some stuff get some stuff there's something called the shirt lock if you didn't know is what it is subscription service shirt. Even I have to admit at this time currently

I'm looking at your shirt which is a shirt locker shirt and I must say it is pretty solid it's squared away. Yeah, pretty solid. It's nicely done man.

This one is one of the there's like six shirts that are kind of the crowd favorites that everyone kind of like asked about this is one of them. Yes sir. Yeah, that's a good one. But yeah,

a lot of good stuff on there. But yeah, jocco store.com. Subscribe to the podcast. Go to jocco underground.com. We've been, we just, we just recorded a couple

all those. We have our own little platform just in case things go totally sideways. We don't control the platform that you're listening to us on right now, unless you're on Jocco Underground.com, in which case, we're all good. But they could shut us down. They could stuff. There's people, there's some of these platforms stick advertisements into the middle of our podcast. Did you know that? Yeah, I don't know. They just insert a damn commercial. Oh, for a thing. So we're in here talking about war, talking about combat, talking about loss of lives. And we're going to, oh, here's an advertising.

Okay. So we don't like that. Jock Wonderground.com. There's no freaking commercials on there. $8.18 a month. If you can't afford it, it's okay. Email assistance at jocco underground.com. We can get you hooked up.

We just want to make sure that we can continue to do what we want to do with freedom. YouTube channel. Psychological warfare. That's a little MP3 thing, which we owe another one, which I've been thinking about, actually. Yeah. So that might come to fruition flipsidecampus.com. Dakota Meyer out there getting after it books. Nick Lavery, objective secure.

Just go on to Amazon and order it right now. It's a little guidebook on how to live your life. Check it out. Only Cry for the Living by Holly McKay, who risked her life to write a book. By some miracle, she made it out of Syria and, Iraq and Afghanistan and she interviewed all kinds of people on all sides of the conflict. If you want to know about it, go get that book. She's been on the podcast a couple of times.

I've written a bunch of other books. Check those out. Eshalamfront. Eshlamfront.com. It's a leadership consultancy. We talk about leadership. We teach leadership. Go to ashlamfront.com if you need help with leadership.

And if you don't think you need help, it's your first indicator that you need help. with leadership. We also have the online training academy, just like Jiu-Jitsu. You've got to keep training. You got to do it every day. Extremeownership.com. Check out the Extreme Ownership Academy. And also from the charity perspective, if you want to help out veterans,

check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an incredible charity organization. And if you want to help out or you want to donate, you can go to America's Mighty Warriors.org. Also, check out Micah Fink's organization. He's a seal. He's taken veterans into the wilderness and repairing their their soul. Actually, they're repairing their own soul. He's facilitating, I guess I would say. Heroes and Horses.org. Once again, if you want to check out nickmachinenick.com. You can find him there. Nick Machinelavery on Instagram. So it's nick.machene.lavery. And he's, and he's, He's got a YouTube channel as well. He said he's going to start putting on more YouTube stuff, so check that out.

And then, of course, for Echo and me, we're on the Twitter, or on the Graham, or on the Facebook. Echo's at Echo Charles. I'm at Jockel Willink. And when you go in there, watch out, because the algorithm's going to try and grab you by the throat. And thanks to all the military out there for risking your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for us. and a salute to all the wounded vets whose sacrifice is continuous every minute, every hour, every day, every week, every year.

We thank you for your sacrifice. And of course, thanks to Nick for coming out, for sharing his story with us. And thanks to Nick for teaching us a better way to live. And also thank you to our police law enforcement. enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all first responders. Thank you for your sacrifice to keep us safe here at home.

And everybody else out there, just remember what Nick had to say when he's talking about the fact in his book that he's not from a rich family. He's not genetically gifted, which that's a little bit of contention behind that. but listen we know this he's now been physically put into a situation where it certainly was not a gift so he's in a situation right now that's more challenging than most of us have and he makes mistakes and he feels pain like everybody else but none of that matters none of that matters he's not complaining about any of it what matters is that we simply must decide what we're going to do and who we're going to be. So go make that decision and then get after it.

And until next time, Zeko and Jocko out.