Jocko Podcast - 437: Special Ops, Intelligence, Sacrifice, and War. with Joe Kent and the Story of Shannon Kent.

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

>Join Jocko Underground.com<"Send Me: The True Story of a Mother At War", by Joe Kent.Joe Kent is a retired 20-year-veteran of our nation’s Special Forces and a widower raising his two young sons in Yacolt, Washington State. His first wife, who also served, was killed while fighting ISIS in Syria. Four years later, he married Heather Kaiser.0:00:00 - Intro0:03:45 - Joe Kent. Early Days.0:09:50 - Entering The Military.0:21:51 - Selection.0:29:22 - Shannon Kent.0:55:57 - Baghdad 2007.0:58:34 - Meeting Shannon.1:16:50 - Iraq 2011.1:57:10 - The Last Deployment.2:00:45 - Tragedy Strikes.2:22:22 - Joe Kent Running For Congress.2:42:06 - How To Stay On The Path.3:03:53 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 437 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. The Strike Force commander spoke up. Let's go, boys, warrant going to be around forever. Might as well go give the taxpayers their money's worth. The night's GRGs or grid reference guides had already been printed out. Everyone took one and slid it into their forearm quarterback pad for easy reference.

Each sailor on the manifest checked their night vision devices, completed radio checks, and slid a magazine into their rifle as they walked out the door toward the flight line. At this point, it was always assumed Shannon would accompany them on target. She was too valuable to leave behind. Not much later, three Black Hawk helicopters lifted off with the strike force on board

and raced towards the objective. Tonight would be fun. Tonight they were landing on the X. About 20 minutes later, the crew chief inside, Shannon's bird shouted 30 seconds over the roar of the rotors while holding up his two fingers in a pinching motion in case someone couldn't hear his warning.

30 seconds out, find your safety line, make sure your nods are adjusted, and get ready to rock. Moments later, the helicopter flared and landed about 50 meters from the target building. The seals sprinted toward the objective. Speed, surprise, and violence of action are the keys to success on these types of missions.

Shannon ran behind them, keeping close. Infrared lasers bounced on the front door. A light flicked on inside the building. The occupants knew they had company. The seals mechanically breached the door with a donker, a portable battering ram, and flowed in, moving through the target building with a fluidity that comes with hundreds of hours of practice as a team. As one seal button hooked into the prayer room, a teammate right behind him ran into a military-aged male. Without hesitation, he took him to the ground and put a knee on his back. The other team guy in the room was doing the same with another.

The radio call went out moments later. Objective secure. Shannon was already making her way through the breach point anxious to see if her analysis was correct Hey Shan back here in the prayer room pretty sure we got jackpots one and two Shannon rounded the corner and saw two of her friends standing there with two zip tied detainees She didn't need to take more than a quick glance at both to know they got both of their targets Hell yeah, she thought it was a good night but not as good as a few nights prior when they'd hit 13 objectives in one night.

That was going to be a hard night. And that right there is an excerpt from a book that has just been released, and the book is called Send Me, the true story of a mother at war. And this book is the story of Shannon Kent, a U.S. Navy senior chief who spent her life and sacrificed her life working and fighting

in the special operations and intelligence community. And she actually wasn't the only one in her direct family unit to serve. Her husband, Joe Kent, who co-authored this book, spent over 20 years in the Army and in joint special operations

as well as with other government agencies conducting missions around the world fighting terrorists and insurgents. And it's an honor to have Joe Kent here with us tonight to share the story of his amazing wife, as well as his own experiences and lessons learned from life, war, combat, and of course, leadership. Joe, thanks for joining us, man.

Thanks so much for having us. I really appreciate it. Yeah, it's great to meet you. And it was really awesome to read the book. get the details around Shannon's life and what she did. And really, of course, you know, from my background in the SEAL teams, I have worked with people in Shannon's role a lot over the years, but there really hasn't been anyone that painted such a good picture of that side of special operations. So you did a great job bringing that to light.

And I think a lot of people are going to get a lot out of that and start to understand what it takes to put an X on a map and send an assault force out there. There's a lot of things have to happen to get there. But before we get into the book, let's talk about you a little bit. So where were you born? So I was born in Oregon, Sweet Home Oregon, just to the south of the Eugene area. So kind of out in the middle of nowhere. And growing up in the woods scenario type thing?

Well, kind of. My dad got a job at the Forest Service. So that's how we kind of ended up there. but then shortly there after both my folks got into law school. So moved to Eugene and then spent most of my life growing up in Portland, Oregon, believe it or not. So it was kind of a good mix, I think, between growing up in a city. Portland at the time, 80s and 90s was kind of a medium-sized chill city. There was none of the craziness that we have now with Portland. But I was really involved in Boy Scouts, so spent a lot of time out in the woods. So, yeah. And so what did your

mom and dad were both lawyers? Yeah, my folks were both lawyers. Yeah, my mom ended up, she stopped practicing once we started. I'm the oldest of five. So once I had a bunch of little brothers and sisters, she kind of pulled away from that. But then my dad, he's still a practicing lawyer. A practicing lawyer of what kind? Civil law. Okay. Yeah. And as you're growing up, was your dad in the military? No. Uh-uh. So both grandparents were, you know, like they both did their time in World War II, but not a family of, you know, military service or military traditions. What were you into when you were growing up like in school? Were you? you studying? Did you do work? Did you do like I didn't do homework. I know kids I have four kids now

and homework is well they're out of that grade but or out of that age but you know when I was a kid like we didn't do homework. I didn't do homework. I do from time to time. Okay. I did not no. No, I think I usually copied off somebody like right before it was due maybe. I was a pretty bad student. I did not like school. I mean basically from the time I was I don't know like probably five or six I knew I wanted to be G. I Joe of some sort, you know. And that kind of matured as I watched the A-Team. And then once I got old enough to, you know, pre-internet, you got to go read books and stuff. So once I got a library card, I realized actually like I liked to read.

And so I read all the Vietnam books. And I had my mindset. I was going to go be some flavor of commando. But really what solidified it for me was 93, was the Black Hawk Down. Just seeing that, you know, on TV, just piped right into people's houses. I think that was the first time Americans had really seen brutal graphic combat. And I was 13 and I was like, man, you know, just entered high school. And I was thinking there's 18 year old kids who got killed there in a couple years.

That could be me. Who are those guys? Like how come they're over there fighting but nobody else is? Like I want to go. Whoever those guys are, I want to go be one of them. Yeah. Did you, were you able to kind of disseminate that there was Rangers and that there was special forces and that there was Delta?

Did you figure all that out from the Black Hawk Down scenario? Shortly thereafter, you know, I started to read. as much as I could. And I think there's a couple books that came out after that. It took a while, I think, for the actual Black Hawk Down book to come out. But really, the mission of the Green Beret has really grabbed me because they seem like they are always constantly deployed, even at times we weren't in war. And I figured, you know, actually especially post Blackhawk Down, that we weren't going to be involved in any kind of, you know, long enduring conflict. Kind of funny to say that now. Everyone thought that. But that's what I thought, you know, in the 90s. And so I was like, okay,

being a green bray sounds pretty cool and then of course the recruiters are like well you can't go do that right away but you can go be a ranger which to me was like okay that's pretty badass but i'm gonna try that but i got to say i did read uh what i think i was in high school like right before i joined the army i read rogue warrior and i was like holy crap like i like i like i like going to a dive team in sf but i was like man maybe i should try and be a seal but i went and i talked to the recruiter and the navy recruiter was just like yeah you know you got to pick a navy job first and here's all the navy jobs and i was like man that those all sound really terrible. I'm like, but how do I? He's like, but then maybe after boot camp, you can try. Oh, you're. And luckily, I had one, one of my dad's friends who had been in the military was like, whatever you want to do, get it in writing, which was like actually the best advice ever. Because I told him that he was like, do not do that.

He's like, if they put it in writing and it's what you want, well, go ahead. He's like, but don't go down that rabbit hole. So the army was like, well, if you want to arrange your contract, it's right here and we'll spell it out for you. Boom. Yeah, it is weird that in the 90s, we didn't think that there would ever be a long, range or long-term war again. I mean, the Gulf War happened.

It was over in 72 hours. And then, and even when Blackhawk down went down, I was in the teams already. But I remember following that deployment, I was over off the coast of Somalia and Rwanda happened. And there was 800,000 people that were about to get slaughtered. Yeah, 800,000 in 100 days. And we were there. and they were spinning us up like, hey, we're going to go and at least provide humanitarian.

We didn't go anywhere. We didn't do anything because they did not want to have anyone else, any other Americans to have any kind of incident over in Africa. That just wasn't going to happen. So the idea, yeah, we used to be training for like what we called the big Mish. Yeah, exactly. You would get one big mission. That's what you would think. Yeah.

We're going to get one big mission and that'll be that. And you had to keep your fingers and toes crossed. that you were going to be on that mish. Exactly. Yeah. When I came in, I mean, even going right to Ranger Regiment, 275 wasn't in the Black Hawk down incident, but we had a couple guys who had come over from Third Ranger Battalion. My squad leader jumped into Panama.

But it was like these guys who had gotten one chance, you know. But then there was a whole bunch of other guys who had been in even longer than them who were just like, yeah, we were there, we were close, but it didn't end up happening. And so I thought that the combat was like this fleeting thing that you might get a shot at in a 20 year career. 100%. There was guys, I know guys that did 30 years

from like 1971 to 1991, or until 2001. And they never fired their weapon in combat. Yeah. And great guys, but it just didn't happen. Yeah. And so,

would you go right out of high school then? Yeah. What'd you do to prepare for Ranger's School? Did you like get ready for it? Yeah, I wrestled in high school, played football. It wasn't very good at either one of them. But like, you wrestle all four years? I wrestled all four years, yeah.

How'd you do? Not very. Washington's got some good wrestling going on. Really good wrestling. So being like in the city in Portland, you could do okay. But if you get outside the city, people take their wrestling really seriously. Oh, I said Washington. You're in Oregon.

But it's right in the border. So, I mean, we were wrestling against guys from Washington and Oregon. But if you get against any of the country kids, like they just kicked the crap out of us. So I got, I got beat a lot. But I got in really good shape. And I think mentally it really prepared me. Did lots of running and all that stuff. Did you wrestle prior to your freshman year?

I didn't. There was no real wrestling programs before high school. The mental toughness that when you show up as a freshman you've never wrestled before that you're about to get, because your first match in your freshman year can be against a kid that's been wrestling since he was five years old, and he's going to murder you and pin you and rub your face in the mat in about 45 seconds. Yeah.

It's definitely going to hook you up with some mental toughness. And I think I felt like I was in pretty good shape as a whatever, 13-year-old. But then I definitely had that exact same experience where there was kids who have been wrestling just because their dad was really into it. Or they just were like freakishly strong. And I got a lot of humble pie. How did your parents feel about you when you started looking at the Army? You're like, I'm going to the Army. And your parents are lawyers.

Yeah. So they're highly educated people and they're looking at you thinking, what are you doing? Or were they down? I think they hope that I was going to outgrow it. But by the time I was old enough to start talking to recruiters, it had been all I had been talking about since. I was like five. And the mentality in Portland, and I think in a lot of schools, especially at the time, was like you either go to college and get a four-year degree or you're going to be homeless

on the streets. Like there's like no, there's like, don't go to trade school, join you in the military. That stuff just doesn't even get talked about. It's like, you know, you go to college or else. And I was like, the last thing I'm doing is going to college. You know, this optional four years of more school, like that is not for me. So they were actually pretty supportive of it. You know, they've always been pretty supportive.

So they're like, hey, as long as you have a plan, you know, and I think they figured I was to get free college and kind of be bored, you know, in a couple years and just sort of come back and figure out something else. So what year was it when you enlisted? 98. Did you leave in the summer? Yeah, like right after high school? Yeah, like right after graduation.

Yeah. And did you, I kind of ask you this, did you prepare for Ranger School? Like, were you rucking? Were you getting ready for it? Yeah. You know, I don't know if I rocked. We backpacked a lot in Boy Scouts. So I felt like pretty comfortable with all that.

But, you know, I knew all the Army like two-mile standards and all that. So I was running, was running like five miles and all that. and, you know, made sure I could do pull-ups and push-ups. And I was, you know, lifting weights and stuff. So I felt physically ready. So you're in Boy Scouts. You're going to school. You're not great at school.

You're not putting a lot of effort. Are you just kind of a clean-cut kid? Were you getting any trouble? Were you, like, a problem child? Were you listening to rock and roll music for any other, participating in any other sinful activities? I was definitely listening to heavy metal and all that type of stuff and thought I was pretty badass.

I was really lucky, though. My Boy Scout troop was badass. We had a former Green Beret, Vietnam era guy who was the scoutmaster. And basically his whole philosophy was we take the boys out in the woods and we kind of let them go Lord of the Flies. And like the older ones that are good leaders will take care of the younger ones and like it'll all kind of buff out. So I think a lot of the stuff they were letting us do at the time. Like I think if if I were to go try to do that now, I might end up in jail. You know?

So it was just a great experience, man. It was just such a good outlet that like all the truth. trouble we got into was out in the woods, screwing around, you know, rappelling off stuff, whitewater rafting, just a great outlet for all that young male energy. So I didn't get in a ton of trouble in high school because I think, I mean, really, too, like it was hard, it was hard to get in trouble in those days. As long as you, you know, used a little bit of tradecraft, like, you weren't super blatant about it. And, you know, that was, it was kind of like the 90s, you know, people would say, hey, don't do that again. But there wasn't any, like, recording of you

on a phone and you know the parents getting called posted to social media yeah i feel i feel for kids that are growing up nowadays it's just so it's so hard to actually just like kids be kids and there's like no forgiveness or tolerance yeah so you go to your recruiter he you see the ranger opportunity and you roll out to boot camp yeah camp is boot camp yeah yeah anything special about boot camp uh i really liked it i mean i was just stoked to be there i was like that that goober who was like oh my god this is so cool they gave us B to you's like going to give a sim 16s, you know. So I was really just happy to be there. The same thing, airborne school is like, oh man, they're going to let us jump out of airplanes. Yeah. So you go to

airborne school and then did you, so did you have orders to go to regiment? Yeah. So you get the, you get the opportunity. It's like a ranger variable contract. So you at least get to go try out to go to go to regiment. So the month long process of, you know, getting smoked and dogged out to make sure you can get then go to regimen. Is that rasp then? It was called rip at the time, but it's rasping now. And it's a month long? Yeah, it's about a month. I think now it's a little bit longer because they actually teach the guys some basic tactics in case they get deployed right away to war. When I went, I think we just got the crap smoked out of us.

I know I know we did some land nav in there somewhere, but I just know everything was like time rucks, time runs, and then just beat down sessions. And Rangers is, from what I can tell, kind of the most Spartan of the military units, period. Are you agree with me? I would agree with you, definitely. Yeah, definitely. Like there's no, when you're in a Ranger Regiment, you are going in the field. You are, you're still getting like dropped down.

Yes. Made to do push-ups by people that are like one rank above you. Very common, yeah. It's almost like, is it almost like a boot camp environment kind of continues? It is, yeah, except for, like, with no guard rails. So, like, when you're your NCOs, I mean, for better or worse, I mean, they can really, really mess if you if they want to. But I was, I mean, I think especially in the late 90s, going to Ranger Regiment was really fortunate because I don't think the rest of the army, like the traditional infantry units, the conventional guys. At the time, I don't think they had money to really train.

But I got there and it was like, hey, you know, it's Spartan, like you said. But it's also like your job is to be physically fit. Your job is to know your weapon system and to know basic tactics. And so it was a really good foundation of just basic soldiers. And when you're at Ranger Regiment in the 90s, you're not going on deployment. You're not going on like a six-month deployment. You're just always ready. Always training. Always. It's the cycle. So you do your big workup so you can do an airfield seizure, which means you're like a human lawn dart, you know, doing like the low altitude, like mass tactical with all your crap on onto an airfield to seize it. So you get to land on concrete, you know, if you're really lucky. And then you do the same thing with the rotary wing assets, a lot of live fire. And then you do individual training. And then you do an individual training. And then you do the land on. And then you do the And so it's, yeah, it's just that cycle. If you've been there back then, if you had been there for a year, you just kind of rinse, repeat that year and hope your number comes up for the Panama,

their grenade. Yeah, for the big mesh. How many times did you do an airfield seizure and jump out and then on concrete? Oh, too many to count, like a bunch. If you'd been there for, especially in those days because that was like a core bread and butter. Nowadays, I think they're probably more laser focused on, you know, strategic strike. But then that was the big mission because that was what they did in grenade and Panama. So we were just kind of practicing that.

You eventually get a little bit better about steering your parachute, like to some grass or something. How much did you weigh when you were a young ranger? Probably 190, 200-ish. Oh, yeah. So I was hitting like a-so. And then if you're over six feet tall, you can jump the machine gun or the Gustav. And so I always had one of those stupid things strapped on to me. It'd be like, congratulations, you're a 240 gun or you're a Gustav gunner and see if this big awkward, like, the Gustav wasn't too bad, but like the 240 just makes you.

Do you lower it down before you hit with your ruck or you land with it? I'd lower the ruck, but I wouldn't lower my weapon system because I was like, man, if I, if that thing's gone, then I'm going to be the biggest jackass in the world. So I'm just going to ride the sucker in. And you're living in the barracks. Yeah. So you're living in the barracks. You talk me through like a week at in Ranger Regiment. Man.

So every day is pretty much like you're doing PT and whatever, like 530, 6. And at the time, this is before I think like, you know, CrossFit and people were lifting. So we were just running or rucking. That was the two, the two forms of PT. You're either running like really long or really fast or some combination of both or you're putting a backpack on and going for a long stroll. But then we'd be at the range quite a bit. I mean, especially now that I understand like how much it costs to send it. As I matured in my soldiering, I could actually appreciate what I was given as a younger guy.

We're at the range quite a bit, you know, shooting. We'd usually, after our PT session, you know, put on our military gear for the day and then we'd walk to the ranges. That was always, I was like, why did we just, we just ran and now, okay, all right, whatever, you know. Although sometimes we would throw everything we needed in our backpacks and take off for a couple days and just live out of your backpack and shoot at the range. Combatives were getting pretty big then too. So there was a lot of rolling, a lot of scrapping. I think on the Army side, Ranger Regiment picked up Jiu-Jitsu before the rest of the Army did. So we were arm barring each other and choking each other.

And you had that wrestling background too? Yeah, yeah. So we were fighting quite a bit. So that was usually a big afternoon thing, was lift and fight. So, I mean, really in a week, as a young guy, and this is why I think I loved it. I mean, you could basically get paid to work out, get paid to go shoot, and then go beat up, you know, beat each other up with your buddies, you know. Living the dream, man. I mean, it wears on you.

After a while, of course, you get tired and all that type of stuff. And there's always all the admin nonsense you got to do here and there. But I think a lot of that is really, really minimized in Ranger Battalion. Yeah. Yeah. Rangers are just outstanding when you work with them. They are just, you know what you got, man. You got a professional soldier ready to get after it.

And so then at some point, pretty common, you see the green berets. Now, you already had that idea coming in? I did. I did. Yeah. And the x-ray, like the 18 x-ray program wasn't available yet? It wasn't. It just started.

Once I was in the Q-course, we had the first like five test x-rays that were in the pipeline with us. But that was not a thing at all. You had to be an E-4. For a while you'd be an E-5. But then when they started taking E-4s, this is right before 9-11. I've been a battalion for about three years, coming up on three years. And I was like, you know, I think now is a good time to do it.

You know, there's never a good time to say you want to leave Ranger Regiment. Like, that's just not something that you do unless you die. In the mentality while you're there in the mode. But the funny thing is, like, there's only so far that you can advance as an NCO in Ranger Battalion before you kind of have to leave. So like, you'll never hear Rangers admit this while they're, you know, wearing a tambouret, but a lot of them end up going to SF eventually. So on Fort Lewis, where we were, there was also first Special Forces group.

So we could kind of see the SF guys. you know, from a distance. And this is when Rangers had to have high and tights. And the SF guys all had long hair. And I was like, that's pretty sweet, man. This guys get to have long hair, you know. But yeah, I had decided I was going to try out. And I actually ended up in Special Forces selection on September 11th.

That was like the first, that was like our start day was like 9-11. So selection is how long? Selection's in about a month. And that's just, they're just weeding people out to see if they really want to send you to the Q-course, right? Exactly. Yeah, yeah. The Q course is about maybe the easiest way to get out of there. The shortest way to get out of the Q course.

You're still there for well over a year. But yeah, selections a month. It's a, there's some, you know, traditional, like kind of beat down, log PT type of stuff, but a lot of it is individual to see if you can make decisions on your own, how you do without getting feedback and guidance, those types of things. Land Nav being the big vehicle for all that. Good times. Yeah, really good times.

How many people, you know, start in your selection and how many people get selected? So my class, we had around a little bit over 300 that showed up on day one. Now, showing up on day one means you're just going to take the PT test. And so there's a lot of jokers that, like, I don't know, like on a whim, we're like, I'm going to go take the PT test. So that 300 number or that over 300 number, I think by the time they actually put us on the trucks to take us out to the actual camp, Camp McCall, where selection happens, I think we'd probably lost about 100 guys or so that just didn't pass the PT test.

And then eventually at the end of the, what about at the end of the month long selection? At the end, I don't know the exact number of my class, but I think we were below 50 at the end of it. Okay. Yeah. And then any, then you roll into Q-course. Yeah. And what's your specialty? So I, weapons.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It went from 11 Bravo to 18 Bravo. So I wanted to get out of the Q course as quick as possible. And I was like, oh, play of guns. Like, cool. Any challenges going through selection?

or going through Q, course, sorry? I mean, the interesting thing about selection, especially coming from a unit like Ranger Regiment, like in Ranger Regiment, you're never alone. You're always in a big group, all the vehicles and assessment tools they use to see if you're going to be a good Ranger leader. It's you're having to lead other troops.

And so everything arduous that you do, it's with other people. SFAAS is pretty unique in the fact that it's like one of the few places in the military where they take you and they isolate you from everybody else. And they're like, well, here's your list of tasks to do it's on that board out there, and you're going to do them or you're not going to do them.

And that's it. Which at first I was like, oh, actually this is, this is really challenging. This is very different than what I've done. But then after a while I was like, okay, I actually kind of like this. This is cool. I'm much more in charge of my own destiny than I had been any other time in my military career. Did you go to Ranger School already? So did you actually get to go to Ranger School?

Yeah. Okay, that's awesome. Yeah. So that's a big advantage, I think, going into the Q course because you already understand tactics. You've already been dogged out and tired. And you've kind of seen that movie a little bit before. So you're like, this is going to get ugly in about 24 hours. you know, like you kind of know that's coming.

So that helped out, especially with the first part of the Q course is like a mini-ranger school just to get everybody on the same sheet of music with small unit tactics. But I'd say the hardest part of the Q course is just kind of how long it is.

Like you're there for a really long time. So there's a lot of guys who will just mentally get it in their head that like, oh, I, you know, failed this gate or that gate, now I'm screwed. Did you say a year? Yeah.

The Q-course is a year long? Does that include language training? That, yeah. Well, for me, that included language training. Yeah. What language did you go for it? I got Pashto. So right, because it was like right after 9-11.

Oh, okay. They just started sending guys into Afghanistan. They're like, all right, we got to get more posthew speakers. And the funny thing is, like if you're like Shannon and you're an actual linguist, they test your aptitude. If you're an SF guy and they've already invested that much in you, you're going to go to a group and that group's got X amount of languages. And if it's a really hard one, like too bad, you're not leaving here until you figure it out. So we went to take the, at the end of the actual Q course itself before language school, they have you go take the language. aptitude test and the instructor that administered it to us was like, hey, I don't care if you

max this thing and it's the best score ever or if you spell your name wrong on it. If I give you Russian or Arabic, you're not leaving here until you get a one-one. So I don't really care. So I don't care how the military says, whether the military says you can learn a language or not, like you're going to learn it or you're not going to leave, which is a pretty good motivated. Do they take that D-Lab score though and like assign you the level of language that's appropriate. So if, because I remember I took that test, I never had, thankfully, never had to take language. Which I shouldn't say that. I, I guess I wish I would have learned a language, but I didn't. But you had to get a certain score. And if you got a really good score,

you could learn Chinese or Arabic. And if you got a bad score, then you were going to, like, Spanish or French or whatever. And the Spanish and French schools are like six months long, and the Arabic schools are a year or whatever. Were you in that kind of like selection pipeline? So I had taken that test before and I had done okay on it. Like, I think I qualified to learn, like Arabic or whatever, but at the Q course, like, they don't care. Like, if you're assigned to fifth group, like, you're going to get Arabic, Farsi, or Pashto. At the time, I think we had some Russian speakers too. If you went to seventh group, well, you were lucky. You were going to get to learn Spanish and you were going to be out of there like four months, you know. But so it was

that that was really the point there. Just like, we don't really care what this thing says. Like, you're going to learn whatever language your group needs to learn and the standards one one. So, sorry, bud. So you're from 18 years old to how old do you know when you get done with the Q course? Uh, 23. So you've been in for five years, man, you got a good grip of what's happening in the military. And how does that, you know, you and I were talking about the big mesh and nothing going on and now September 11th comes. And how did that attitude like sweep through the team? I think all of us still thought, especially my Q-course class, we still thought that we were going to miss it.

So even when I got back from SFAS, there's a little bit of a gap there because you have to go back to your old unit and then leave. right when I got back from selection, this was right before Third Ranger Battalion jumps into Kandahar in Afghanistan. And so it still wasn't, we weren't sure which battalion was going to get that mission. And so every battalion, I think, got read the op order. So we got read the op order. My battalion's already forward deployed there. They were already in Germany.

And so me and a couple other guys were like, hey, we're going to get on this bird. It's taking gear. We're going to go. We're going to jump into Kandahar. And like within, I think the next morning we're like watching the news. It's like the Rangers secure Canada hard. I was like, well, I might as well go to the Q course now because in my mind, I was like, Afghanistan's over.

It's done. They're going to get bin Laden, whatever, but we're not going to send more guys over there. That's crazy. And then while I'm in language school, the ground war, the Iraq invasion starts. And I'm like, dude, I missed everything. Because you thought that was going to be over quick too. So I got the fifth group in the summer of 03. And luckily when I walked in at fifth group, they were like, I don't know what they knew,

but they're like, this is not going to be over anytime soon. We're deploying in August. Like, you know, get ready to get it on. Yeah, it was really weird to watch that whole mentality. I had the exact same. I was going to college. So I was an illicit guy. I got picked up for an officer program.

And I was in college. And I called my D. Taylor, who was a friend of mine that I knew, he's like the all guy assigning officers. And I was like, please, I'll go to college when I'm 50. Like, I just send me back to team. And this was early. This was like September 13th. Yeah.

Or something. He goes, hey, this is going to. to last a really long time. Yeah. And I didn't believe him at all. You know, I was the same mentality as you like, oh, this thing I'm going to miss it. Yeah. Be a loser.

And yeah, so some people had a better vision of how long this thing was going to last. And I guess we underestimated the, uh, underestimated the stupidity of decisions that are getting made, the military industrial complex, all these factors that come into play. The, I mean, some of the, the way we handled those missions, it's like, oh, yeah, you're right. This is 100% going to last forever. Or at least for 20 years. So that's kind of the origin story of you. But, you know, I want to go to this book here and talk about Shannon a little bit here.

She's, and talk about her story, which I'm sure. And so, again, the book is called Send Me. You know, I read it, got done reading it three years ago or whatever. It's just, like I said, it's a great book. It gives insight to things that people have not really talked that much about, and especially at this level of detail from a first, you know, from that ground level and people that were right there with her. So get the book and here we go. This is Pine Plains, New York, 1990. Shannon Smith, five years old, watched his other kids swung from rung to rung on the playground monkey bars.

She had just started her tenure as a kindergartner at Seymour Smith Elementary School in Pine Plains, New York, about 80 miles north of New York City. The notorious horizontal ladder featured on both schoolyard playgrounds and military obstacle courses requires a bit of technique, grip, and upper body strength to move from one end of the bars to the other. Two things most five-year-old children are in short supply of. I bet you can't do it, a young boy taunted Shannon. Yeah, huh? Yeah, huh, that's what the little kid says. Yeah, huh, yes I can. Shannon replied, not to be shouted down.

No, you're too little, the boy sneered. Shannon comfortably stomped over to the bars, determined to show this bully up. She didn't start the fight, but she'd finish it by graciously swinging from bar to bar, or so she thought. Shannon grabbed the bars, her feet dangling below. She missed as she tried to swing her hand to the next one, falling off to the P-Rock below. The boy laughed. She got up furious and mounted the bars again. She swung and failed again.

It took everything in her to hold back the tears. She wouldn't give that boy the satisfaction of knowing she was upset. I told you you couldn't do it. The boy pointed at her laughing. It's the kind of taunting that haunts a child for years to come. The playground bully is a common scourge among children, but that doesn't make the experience less painful. Shannon came home that day and told her mom about it. She was upset specifically because it was a boy who told her she couldn't do it.

And Marion could see Shannon wasn't defeated. If anything, she was more determined than ever. The next day, Shannon snuck over to the monkey bars. She tried to make it across again, but failed. She kept getting back up on the bars over and over and over again, gritting her teeth with fire in her eyes. I'll show him, she thought. This went on for days, maybe weeks.

The metal bars tore up Shannon's palms, blooding them from her repeated attempts. Slowly day by day, she made it from one bar to the next, then the next, and then the next. Eventually, the momentum carried all the way through, and she made it to the end. Landing back on her feet, triumphant, she earned the kind of confidence that kids get from conquering the seemingly unconquerable. It was the beginning of a lifelong trend. When somebody said, no, you can't do this, Shannon's response was always, oh, yes, I can. So, I mean, great little anecdotal story that I'm sure, you can see clearly it was so well reflected in the book.

That's kind of her attitude about stuff. That is. Oh, you don't think I can do this? Yeah. Stand by. Yep. Watch me. Yeah.

So she, and you talk about, you know, she had this. ability and a gift for languages, right? And so she ends up working at a polo club, which is interesting. And at this polo club, she learns to speak Spanish. Yeah. Which is, again, kind of crazy for a young kid. And she was on horses. She's a horseback kid. Yeah. Yeah. So Pine Plains, New York, really rural New York, not the New York City that most people think of. Yeah, there's a big polo club there. I think a lot of wealthier folks from the city keep their horses up there. And so there's a whole industry around that. So she loved horses.

And then a lot of the ranch hands, I guess some of the best, I don't know anything about my polo, but from Shannon I do. But some of the best polo players in the world come from Argentina. And so there was a lot of these professional polo hands and professional polo riders that would go up there for the summers. So Shannon got a job up there. And she's like, well, everybody speaks Spanish. Like, so I'm going to learn Spanish.

Like that was just her mentality, you know, because she had that, she had that mindset where she could like see patterns, especially linguistically, like the way people talk and just kind of repeat it in a way that I don't think most mortal people have. So that was her, I think her entry into learning that if there was a language out there, she could figure it out. She could crack that code. Dang, that must be nice. Yeah, exactly. So she's doing that. She's working there. Going to the book here, although a stable and its horses were where her heart was. Shannon also held a summer job at the local pharmacy, was a scholar and an athlete at school. She participated year-round sports, excelling in volleyball, basketball, basketball, cross-country,

and track and field. She sang in the chorus, played flute in the school band, and was involved with school theater. Was there anything she couldn't do? So she's just getting after it in all aspects. Yeah. She would find that 25th hour that exists in a day that most people just can never unlock. So that was, I mean, that was her. That's just, I mean, every aspect of her life. I mean, She was very talented and incredibly smart, but also an incredibly hard worker. And I think when those two things intersect, you just find incredible people. Yeah, we'd be lucky enough to have one of those too. But when someone has both, that's what you get, a woman like Shannon.

She graduated. And again, there's such great stories and background stories and her family. So get the book. I'm going to fast forward a little bit right now. Shannon graduated from Stissing Mountain Junior Senior High School in spring of 2001. She ends up going to college for a little while. And then September 11th, 2001, Shannon's father, and, you know, this is in the book, but he's a, he's New York State Police. Her father, Steve and her uncle, who's a firefighter in New York, responded to the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.

Just down the Hudson River in New York City. That infamous day, which also included an attack on the Pentagon and the downing of United Airlines Flight 93 in Western Pennsylvania, resulted in thousands of Americans. dead at the hands of terrorists and millions more fighting a campaign against international terror organizations for more than two decades. Shannon's younger brother joined the Marines shortly after the terror attacks, and to no one's surprise, Shannon's stint in college didn't last long. America was now at war. That changed everything.

During her sophomore year of college, she talked to a Navy recruiter about how she could best leverage her talent for language in the service. Emerging from the ocean at midnight with a green face on a top secret mission, like Shannon had seen in the brochures was still out of reach due to a bar on women in combat positions. But they did have a job that seemed like a perfect fit. Cryptologic technician interpretive. By the time Shannon left for recruit training in late 2003, the U.S. had lost lives in Afghanistan and Iraq, but both wars were still in their infancy. Rear Admiral John Paul Jones, famously known as the father of the U.S. Navy, once said, I wish to have no connection

with any ship that does not sail fast for I intend to go into harm's way. Shannon Smith wanted to go into harm's way. It is amazing how, I know Tim Kennedy told a story when he went to enlist in the Army after 9-11 and there was like a damn line around the block. And that's out here in California. And just the amount of people that stepped up, I mean Shannon's brother going in the Marine Corps, her going to talk to the Navy recruiter. the amount of people that stepped up in that moment to serve is still,

it still moves me every time I think about it. Yeah, that was a pretty awesome moment, I think, in our history, especially for the guys that were in, just to see the outpouring of people that wanted to serve. And then, I mean, one of the first times I talked about in the book, one of the first times I met Shannon, I asked her, like, what made you want to join the military? And she was like, well, I'm from New York.

They hit my towers and my dad, my uncle were down there. And so I wasn't going to just sit back and let somebody else. go take care of it. I wanted to do my part. A bunch of details that are in the book about, and it's very interesting to learn about, you know, we touched upon kind of the language aspect of things, but what

that school looks like up in Monterey, there's the defense language. You guys don't go to the defense language in the state here. No. That's like the I think it might be the best place in the world to learn a language. It's got to be. I mean, because they take kids from all over the United States of America who've never heard one foreign word.

And they teach them everything from Chinese to Arabic, you know, to Russian in 18 months. And when those guys get out, they can speak, they can read, they can listen. Like, it's, I think it's pretty amazing. Yeah, it's amazing. So this is up in Monterey. It's DLI Defense Language Institute. So Shannon goes to boot camp. She goes to language school.

And I'm going to fast forward a little bit here. It says Shannon was a phenomenal linguist and everybody knew it. She picked up the nuances of opinion. and modern standard Arabic came to her rapidly. By the time she graduated from DLI, she attained a language rating of 332, which meant she was rated as superior in listening and reading and advanced and speaking,

rare for a brand new linguist straight out of basic training. In addition to her language rating, she earned an associate's degree in modern standard Arabic, which is awarded in October 2005 a month after she finished DLI. But there's more to cryptologic warfare than language. Shannon's chosen field would require her to master highly technical disciplines like signals intelligence, Sigint, cyberspace operations, and electronic warfare.

For some sailors, those skills are a one-way ticket to a dark office, sitting behind a desk, pouring over classified documents. Although Shannon was perfectly capable of performing that aspect of the job, she wanted her work to be more hands-on. Her younger brother was a Marine fighting in Iraq, and although she was worried about him and hoped he would make it home, she couldn't wait to get in on the war herself. So yeah, it's very normal in the Navy, and I don't know too much about the Air Force, although I'm pretty sure it's probably something similar.

But in the Navy, a lot of times if you're a linguist, you'll be sitting in a room listening to radio waves that are being received. You know, cell phone calls that are getting made, and you'll sit in a room, you know, or on a ship, and you'll just interpret what's coming in. And so it's very common for, you know, a linguist to have a bunch of flight hours because they're flying around over some country listening on the, listening to radios and interpreting things. And so that's a very normal career path for someone with Shannon's skill set. But as she mentions, like, she wasn't really, she wasn't really looking to do that. So at the time, so this is what now, 2005. So at the time they're doing something, the Navy was doing something called individual augmentees.

And what it meant was there's certain skill sets that the Army needed, the Marine Corps needed, or special operations needed, and you could leave, well, not leave the Navy, but you could augment the Marine Corps, the Army, special operations through this individual augment program. Look, you might be a lawyer, you might be a cook. I mean, we literally had individual augmentees

that were cooks and radio men. and sometimes it would be a linguist. So it's something that people volunteered to do most of the time. Some people did get fallen told to do it. But she ends up volunteering for this individual augment and getting assigned to Baghdad. And she's going to go to Baghdad and work with. There was a joint special operations element there

that was made up of seals and special forces guys working with something called the ICTF, which was the Iraqi counterterror force. And these were, the ICTF was, they were as good as the Iraqis, well, they were some of the best Iraqi soldiers that there were. They had been well trained, they were well equipped, like they had all of our weapons,

they had all of our gear, they had our night vision, they had all of our gear. So this was a very capable partner force. Did you ever do ICTF? time? It was with the ISOF, so the commandos. They were like the Rangers to the ICTFs like Delta Tier 1. So, yeah, I've worked with those guys quite a bit. It's interesting because the ICTF and the ISAF itself, I would say are probably softs like best enduring legacy in Iraq because when ISIS

came and the vast majority of the Iraqi security forces that we spent trillions training, threw their guns in the dirt and surrendered to ISIS. Issoff didn't. They refused to. Like their commander who we trained, he passed away a couple years ago, but General Faddle, he held those guys and they got abandoned by the Iraqi military and they fought like hell in Anbar to hold those provinces and then to recapture them eventually. So they actually stayed, held their ground and fought and did what they were trained to do. So something we can be proud of. Yeah, no doubt. I know that the Mosul guys, the Iraqi special operations groups that went up into Mosul, they took massive casualties, massive casualties. And you compare that to, I was in Ramadi in 2006 and there was a whole

battalion of Iraqi soldiers that just left. Yeah. You know, their commander got IED and they all just left. Yeah. Like, yeah, we're not doing this. And that happened with companies on a regular basis. I mean, there was companies that got overrun and they, you know, they'd lose five, six, seven, eight, ten guys and then all of them would just leave.

So, yeah, there wasn't, it didn't paint the best picture for the future. But like you said, that enduring relationship and the, the amount of effort that went into training the ICTF and the commandos obviously left the mark because for those guys to do what they did and I only know about Mosul oh I know the most about Mosul I know they went into Ramadi as well because and Ramadi was and I saw pictures after they got ISIS out of Ramadi it was just completely destroyed but my point is and your point is that the Iraqis the Iraqi Special Operations Group actually was well trained and was committed and lasted from this time now we're in 2006 2007 all the way up until

2016 17 18 and and they fought hard and they were able to achieve their missions there So Shannon ends up she's now with this with the Seals and the SF in Baghdad That was actually a very cool kind of joint mission now and I was supposed to go there in 2006 We were I was gonna take my time the tasking SEAL Team 3 and we were going to go to Baghdad. And so I did my ad vaughn was to Baghdad and went out with those guys and, you know, got to know them a little bit and got the turnover. And then when I went home, it changed.

Yeah. You know, things changed around. We ended up going to Ramadi. But so I got to at least see them spend a few like probably there for, I don't know, five, six days seeing how they're operating in. You could see it was, like I said, very well equipped. And the SEALs and the Green Berets were kind of doing port and starboard. You got them tonight.

We got them tomorrow night. And they were just kind of going back and forth. At least that's what I remember. And doing a lot of targeted raids. Yeah. That's what was happening. So now I think this is, what is this, 2007? 2007.

Where are you in 2007? So 2007, I'm in Baghdad as well. So we had done. But that was my fourth deployment. So I was back actually in Baghdad. And I was working with the Iraqi Special Operations Intel guys. So we had guys that we trained up to go out there and do recons for us. We'd go out every now and again, low profile with them, either to snatch guys or just to do

the advanced recon to make sure our guys were going to get IED on the way out there. But their biggest role in the fight for us was the human intelligence. So we had a bunch of them that we had trained up to run sources. So that was specifically what I was doing over there was just working with the ISOF rec you guys. And you and I were both in Iraq at the same time too in 03. I got there in like fall of 03 and left in spring of 04 and you were there that whole time. We were. Yeah, yeah. I think you guys took it because we were new in the unilateral direct action, us and the gram,

the poll option there too. And then we went to go train up the initial Iraqi Special Forces guys in the middle of Baghdad. And then, yeah, you guys stayed there and kept kicking indoors. Yeah. And then so you went to Baghdad, downtown Baghdad. You in the green zone? So this trip I was, 06, 07, and then the next trip, 08, I was in the green zone. Before that, when we were training the commandos, we were up at FOB Justice and Cotomy.

Got it. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty, you know, I forget we were talking about before we pressed record, but one thing that made me a little suspect of everything in the world was there was this road that went around biap, and it had these big giant potholes in it. Yeah. And it sucked to drive on, you know. And then they filled in all the potholes.

and then put tank treads across as speed bumps so you couldn't drive real fast. Yeah. And I said to myself, this is almost like a catch-22 type scenario. We've got the military doing things where you say, this makes no sense whatsoever. And then after a while there's MPs out there

giving out speeding tickets. Oh, yeah. It was, that was a cool thing about being over there that early in 2003 because it was still, you know, everyone used the term wild west. It was pretty wild west in 2000. Yeah, we were kind of like pirates then.

I mean, it was pretty wild then. There wasn't a lot of rules. Yeah, as the years drug on and we were there for way too long, that's when like the Garrison mentality broke out, unfortunately. Yeah, that was my first indication that, oh, yeah, I can see where this might be going was when they filled in the potholes and then put, so a tank tread, Echo Charles is just basically like a big thick piece of tank tread, but it's a speed bump.

It's a ready made speed bump. And so they filled in the potholes, put these things out there and I'm like, oh, I can see where this is going. And then, yes, I do remember some of my guys coming back, like, we got pulled over. We got a speedy ticket. What do I do with this? What does this even mean? So now, fast forward from 2004, 2005, or 2003, 2004, when you and I were there together,

now we're going 2007. And Shannon is with this group in Baghdad. And we'll go here. She took every opportunity to talk the Iraqi commandos in their native tongue. She could walk up to any of them confidently converse with such. that it actually threw many of the Iraqi commandos off. They became enamored with her because it was so rare to see a beautiful white American woman and even more rare to hear them speak perfect Iraqi dialect.

Her excellence was obvious to anyone who's watching. She was the only one who could do this because the ICTF was completely mixed unit, which created a unique language environment. There were Shia and Sunni operators working side by side with Kurdish and Christians, resulting in a mix of dialects and accents being used in any given conversation. the green brazen seals were beside themselves the first few times they witnessed Shannon at work as they are typically the ones trained and responsible for rapport building

through learning of a language but language proficiency had taken a backseat for many in soft as the war in Iraq escalated and seals have no like focus on language whatsoever yeah that's very interesting that you got all the we don't think about that but there's all these different dialects just like you know in America, we got someone from Long Island,

and you got someone from, like, deep Alabama. Yeah. And you've got some girl from the valley out here. They're almost mutually unintelligible languages. They can be, yeah. And it's the same thing that happens in Iraq. I know that one thing that we loved about our Iraqi soldiers and our interpreters was we'd go into a building in Ramadi,

and they talk for two minutes with people. Yeah. Like, this guy's not from here. Yeah, exactly. And it'd be the equivalent of, you know, you're walking in New York and somebody breaks out some deep, Alabama accent. You're like, hold on a second. One of these people is not like the other. And so they would just sort that out so fast. And it sounds like Shannon was able to do that. Yeah, she had a thing for

the dialects too, because modern standard Arabic is so, it's universal because of the Quran, but it's not commonly spoken in places. Like Saudi Arabia, they still speak pretty traditional modern standard Arabic. But Iraq and the Gulf, they speak completely different. It's actually very, very different. It's very frustrating if you spend any time studying modern standard than to go to a place like Iraq and you're like, wait a second, you guys don't actually speak this Arabic. But she loved it. And so she just grasped onto it really, really quick. And that was like a huge rapport builder for her, was just being able to speak like a native. So there was a bunch of Iraqis that I met later on who insisted that Shannon had either an Iraqi father or mother. They're like, yeah, we get it. She's

redheaded. But there's some redheaded Iraqis out there too. And so they were like, what's the deal? You know, where's the Iraqi in her in her blood? But it was just her passion for languages. Even when you knew her, would she like listen to recordings and be like practicing on her own? Yeah, yeah. She was a true lover and student of Arabic especially. So she would, we listened to, we listened to a crazy amount of Arabic music, like Arabic hip hop. And then when she, because they get tested on listening, reading, and then also speaking. And so to get good at reading, this is a, this is a Shannon trick.

She would watch Bollywood movies with Arabic subtitles. So there's like this Bollywood stuff going on with the crazy Hindi music, but then the Arabic subtitles. And I'm like, what are you doing? Like what beautiful mind nonsense is this? She's like, no, that's how you get to know the, because you have to read the subtitles. You pick a language that you don't speak. So then you have to read the one language that you do speak.

And I was like, okay, that's not how most humans learn things. But okay, whatever works. But yeah, she would immerse our entire house and everything in Arabic. Did you ever pick up any Arabic from it? Well, I actually, I never went to Afghanistan. I went to Iraq on repeat. I couldn't buy an Afghan trip. So I went to Iraq, Yemen.

So I eventually just picked up Arabic and then, because we have to test every year on language, I just switched over my language to Arabic. So I did like a three-month course and like kind of figured it. I was good enough. But we don't have to pass the DLP. We don't have to pass the listening and the reading. We can just get by an oral interview. So I could kind of BS in Arabic.

But I was nothing like her. I mean, as I was studying Arabic, I'd ask her, I was like, hey, so what's your, what's your secret? And she's like, okay, so you listen to the word and then you imitate it and you don't forget it. I was like, thanks. That does not help me whatsoever. I'm going to go back to writing it down a hundred times. I don't forget it. Check.

Fast forward a little bit in the book. Although her deployment began behind a desk as an analyst, the Navy SEAL lieutenant commander that she reported to recognize that she was capable of more and wanted her to start going out on target. It may seem like people in the military, especially those deployed to a war zone, would just intuitively know how to be ready for a real world combat mission, but that's rarely the case. They need to be shown how to arrange ammunition pouches on their plate carriers, where the bleeder kit or medical pouch goes, so anyone responding to an injury knows where to find it,

and even the not-to-use-tie-down-sensitive items like lasers and optics and assigned rifle. Shannon was no exception, but had not received any formal special operations combat training at that point. Roe, and it's another guy that is mentioned in the book, Roe had already gone on some 60 or 70 combat missions, which made him the perfect mentor. The task force operational tempo was so high that during that deployment, it was not uncommon to go on a mission that immediately be sent on a follow-on mission than another follow-on mission. Under Roe's tutelage, Shannon learned to not only set up her kit properly, but also to narrow down the time frame she needed to get ready when alerted for a time-sensitive target. Shannon and Roe were tied at the hip and often alternated as the intel asset on combat missions. Sometimes Roe would go out on missions resulting from information Shannon analyzed.

Another time, Shannon would go out based on Roe's analysis. It became so obvious, it became obvious to everyone around her that she was never going back to Fort Gordon. The trajectory of her career had been permanently altered. She had been baptized into the world of special operations. Fast forward a little bit. The word that Shannon had a knack for finding bad guys, spread fast. And halfway through her deployment, it was not uncommon for other operators to ask, hey, can you do that for us? What's your training? Can you work with these guys? Can you talk to

the Iraqis for us? Can we bring you out on target to deal with the females? She was eventually pulled to another side of special operations world in Iraq at that time. It's not clear who found her or some or how high up they had to be to have enough power to pull Shannon from her position. Like most of Shannon's career, much of her work with this group was was and is classified. And likely won't see the light of day for at least another decade. The citation for the Joint Service commendation medal she received for that deployment is the only unclassified documentation of her contributions. It describes how her efforts led, quote, directly to the capture of hundreds of enemy insurgents and severely degraded enemy combat capability.

So she got noticed, you know, and that's one thing that's cool about war. Yeah. Is that you do, when it gets, when it, when it gets tough enough and when it's intense enough, all of a sudden people just want to know what's going to work. You know, people ask me about the rivalry between like different units and between the Army and the Marine Corps. In Ramadi, it's like, no rivalry. You know, it's like, hey, will you help us? Yes, we will.

We'll help you. That's kind of how it's going down. Who can do the job? Yep. And she got, you know, noticed for doing her job well, pulled to. another unit doing more work and you know ends up as she as you write in the book you know baptized in special operations and it can be very difficult to go back to well depending on your attitude there's some people that would look what she's doing and say oh get me out of here yeah

she obviously liked it and um carried on with it now this is 2007 and we already talked about So you're in Baghdad as well. I am. Yeah. You're working. And so you're training commandos? So working with their intel guys. So we're trying to run down targets for the ICTF to go out after.

But specifically, we had a pretty unique job. This is right when the EFP thing is kicking off. So we actually sliced off a handful of the Iraqi Special Operations recon guys who had access to the Shia side to really start tracking down those networks that were bringing over the EFPs. from Iran. So we were doing a lot of pretty high-level targets, but we had to do a lot of intel work to get to that level. So that was like my single-minded focus for that trip was the EFPs, but then we also had another group of Sunni Iraqis who were working heavily on the foreign fighter flow. That was a big thing too. So we were working that mission. I actually briefly met

Shannon then for like 10 minutes. Yeah. The EFPs explosively formed projectile. This is now 2007. And what they realized is you can make a shape charge, a flying shape charge, basically that's going to go. And it rips through pretty much any armor. And they're very devastating against vehicles. And it's a horror show. And the Iranians were kind of bringing that in through the Shia. And they were using it in a devastating manner. So that's what you guys were focused on.

And then, like you said, you also had the foreign fighters coming in on the Sunni side. Yeah. So we had guys trying to look because the day-to-day battle rhythm of just trying to basically take bad guys out the battlefield that weren't going to kill us there. That was a full-time job. But we wanted to actually have people that were starting to look exterior. Like, hey, we've got the Iranians playing here. We've got the foreign fighter flow. Let's start taking a bigger picture.

Can we interdict these things before they hit the major urban centers? That was kind of our charter at the time. So I had kind of made that jump from being a regular team guy to like, hey, I want to be more on the ops intel side. Because I figured after our like 03 and 04 deployment, I figured that. like, hey, the problem here in Iraq isn't like, can we go kill the bad guys? Like, if we find the bad guys, we kill them. I mean, whether it's Greenbred, SEALs, Delta Force, or the Kentucky National Guard, if we know where they are, they're going to die. Like, that's not the issue. The issue is trying to figure out, like, what's causing the insurgency, you know, who's supporting the insurgency and like

where the high-valued bad dudes actually are. So that was, that kind of became my, my little lane I carved out in special operations and ultimately how I ended up meeting Shannon. Yeah, so you're doing that very job. You're kind of putting together a mission, consolidating info, and you're walking around, trying to get this stuff sorted out, and it says this in the book. Joe Rounded a corner, he heard a woman's voice

discussing locations for Abu Abbas, the leader of a Shia terrorist cell he was trying to hunt to run down. His eyes quickly honed in on the woman the voice belonged to. She was a gorgeous, slender, young redhead wearing faded New York Yankees baseball hat with piercing blue eyes

and a welcoming face. Almost instantly, nothing else mattered. Wow, Joe thought. He guessed the Yankees ball cap was part of an effort to play down her natural beauty, but it wasn't working. Her reddish blonde hair and ponytail protruding from the back of her ball cap was somehow both elegant and casual. She wore a light red and white flannel button-down shirt with her sleeves pushed up and a pair of blue jeans with leather work boots. The Sig Sauer P-226 9mm pistol in a black kidex holster was on a right hip contrasted her beauty. It snapped Joe out of his reverie and reminded him.

him where they were and how serious this business was. She stood with a map of Baghdad behind her, while her computer monitor displayed Arabic text and map coordinates, addressing a few analysts from Joe's unit. He exchanged head nods with them and then stood to the side to listen to what the beauty in the Yankees cap had to say. Based on the pattern of life, we assess he still lives in this neighborhood,

in this area, she said pointing at a map of Baghdad. She glanced up. She made eye contact with Joe and held it. heart skipped a beat as she smiled at him like they were old friends. Joe caught himself staring into her eyes for a little too long, grinning as if he was relieved to see her. Sure, there was a spark of instant attraction, but there was also something new and profound. Her gaze gave him a feeling of instant peace. She held eye contact with him for a moment longer before turning her head

back to the group of analysts. Her face, all business again. So there you go. Yep, it's the first time my meat. Yeah, that's, I imagine from your perspective at that point in time, seeing a beautiful red-haired woman with a freaking 226 on her belt. Yeah, you're ready to rock and roll. Will you marry me? I should have asked the question because it took me a while. I didn't see her again after that day for quite a while. But yeah, that was an interesting way to meet your wife for sure. when you're out on that deployment so now it's 2007 what was the atmosphere of the war that you're that you're thinking during that time uh chaos and frustration i think i mean because i had been over that was my my fourth trip we had been there for you know a minute we could kick this thing off at

oh three we had already caught saddam a long time ago we killed czarcawi and things were not slowing down whatsoever. I mean, there was Americans that were coming back in body bags or mangled pretty much every day. I mean, this is right as the surge is kicking off and guys are fighting block by block every day. So I felt like we were just trying to stop the bleeding at that point. I mean, especially me as a guy who had had some time over there and watched the evolution, I felt like, hey, I actually have a responsibility here to try to bring some sort of order to this because I understand Iraq at this point. And I think a lot of us felt that way. Like fixing Iraq almost became like a religion, I think, in the military at that point in time. So it just seemed like we never had enough time.

It always seemed like we were a day late and dollar short. So just a lot of frustration. I was pretty skeptical that adding a ton of troops into the mix was going to do anything but get more guys killed. But yeah, it was just a, I mean, it's hard to explain nowadays because I think like just the frustration and the angst and the kids. chaos of that era was just so palpable then. It's hard to replicate now. I mean, I think as things drug on in Afghanistan, people felt the same way. But especially with the body count being as high as it was. And when the EFPs came up, we had barely just started to control some of the Sunni insurgency, but then there was the Shia insurgency. And there was the EFPs. And it was like,

man, now we've got Iran plan in this whole thing. It was just how do we sort this out? So it definitely seemed like a up a there was no enough time in every single day to to do everything we needed to do yeah i i always think back to world war two when you left for world war two you yeah you'd come home when it was done when it was done right and the nature of doing you know either it's a six-month deployment some cases a four-month deployment some cases it's a year-long deployment but there's an there's an end in sight and it doesn't really matter you know i'm going to turn over to you Hey man, good luck. Like I did what I could do and you're going to do what you can do.

But there's a lack of continuity and there's also a lack of, well, there's a lack of continuity for sure. But there's also, I guess you were just talking about. There's a frustration because you're going to go and you don't get to stick with it. And what's going to happen in the next, okay, I'll be back in a year and a half or a year. Yeah. What did anyone make any real progress? And it's like every new unit that shows up. When you show up there, it takes a little while to figure things out.

And it just doesn't seem like the smartest way to run a war. As much as I hate to say that because it sucks to deploy for long periods of time. Right. That's why you need to, before you go into war, you need to decide, okay, is this really what we want to do? Exactly. And what the instate is, too. I think that's another big problem that we had, especially at this time frame. It was like, what was the goal?

Like, we came in here because like Saddam was a bad guy and he had to, we took out Saddam. So now are we really going to stay here until there's no more violence? And then us being here creates more violence. So it's like this does seem like a big, big loop that we're in, you know. And then when you step back and you look like, well, there were people that were benefiting from this. That's where my frustration comes from nowadays. But at the time, it was just like, man, we were beating our head against the walls. And we just couldn't figure out how to actually solve this problem.

Yeah. Shannon wraps up that deployment. Go back to Shannon here. Shannon crashed onto this special operation scene head first and didn't slow down once getting in. After Shannon returned from her first deployment, she made a quick stop in Germany for language training and a little snowboarding in the Austrian Alps before volunteering for the new Naval Special Warfare direct support course, which would allow her to serve in combat alongside Navy SEAL. She was the first female to attend, but she wouldn't be the last. So this is, you know, we read that her first deployment, she was not, she knew how to put a gear together. Yeah.

So she, all these people that were doing these individual augmentees that were going to come and work with seals, we needed something to do to get them trained up. And so that's what they started doing this direct support course. Fast forward a little bit. She was permanently assigned to Naval Special Warfare Support Activity 2 in Norfolk, Virginia, where she worked side by side with East Coast Base Navy SEALs. The SEALs were initially hesitant, not because she was a female, but because, non-seal support in general was a new concept at the time yep this is all of us were thinking that one of my bosses laid something great out to me which was I was getting ready to deploy to Iraq and we were taking these EOD augments and I said hey why

don't we just send SEALs to EOD school like then we don't have to worry about having someone else and he said because seals will be thinking about seal things even when they're EOD and EOD guys will think about EOD things and EOD And that was so smart. Yeah. And I ended up having the best EOD guys. Yeah. The EOD guys end up going through.

They now go through your entire workup with the SEALs. So they're basically, if you're one of those EOD guys that comes to the SEAL teams, you're going to be basically qualified as a SEAL. And they did everything with us. Yeah. So, but there was definitely resistance across the board. Hey, we just want SEALs. Yep.

Which probably especially sensitive in the. SEAL teams because you know we are so uh we don't have the idea like in in special forces you guys have the idea of like oh we're going to train up these local nationals and we're going to put our trust in these other people and we didn't do a lot of that that's not part of our nature you know and that's why even the guys that the ICTF you know that was kind of a new mission for us very yeah we we did look I did it in the 90s I went over to C's and trained people from the Philippines and train people from Thailand and train you know we did all that stuff but it was not I don't

know we just didn't view it the same way we didn't view that as our mission as your mission right even though it completely is our mission I mean it's in our doctrine that that is our mission yeah foreign internal events the same thing as you guys but we don't we don't we we used to not really think about it that way yeah yeah I mean I can tell you I 100% as a young seal and look was I the smartest dude in the world when I was am I the smartest dude in the world now no was I was I was I even dumber when I was you know 22 years old in a seal between and they're like this is foreign internal defense building relationships with the host nation I was like what tell me what door to kick in yeah exactly yeah

freaking seal with a machine gun so it's it's no surprise that you know someone like Shannon showing up though everyone it was there is pushback yeah that being said you once you realize the skill set that you don't have as a seal then you go oh yeah yeah this is 100% needed that's the interesting thing people will ask me all time like was there you know how did chanin get put on one of those specialized teams that just brought women in and i'm like no there was this whole period of the the initial war on terror where technically women weren't allowed to the front lines but there was a lot of women who found their way onto the front lines either because of the circumstance or just because they were the

best person for the job i mean like you said before there was no like do you have this qualification that qualification like if you were willing to go there and you could perform you got a slot up the team that was it maybe it wasn't codified you know in military doctrine that was going to be your full-time job when you redeployed. But there was a lot of folks like Shannon who had that ability. They went and they proved themselves. And they were out there operating at the highest levels. Yep. And I'll tell another one. Oh, you can't be in combat arms. Okay, so you're in logistics in the army. Yeah. And guess what you end up doing in logistics in the army in Iraq? Logistics convoys. Right. One of the most dangerous things that you can do. Probably more dangerous than the vast

majority of what we did. Yes. Because I would rather go kick in the door with a bad guy behind it, then go just run the gauntlet of Root Irish over and over again. Yeah. So that was an interesting dynamic was these logisticians. So someone comes in to be a logistics person in the Army or the Marine Corps and you end up out there running convoys. And same thing in Irmadi. I remember I was watching a casualty evacuation go. I had an element out of seals with Iraqi soldiers and one of the two of the Iraqi soldiers got hit.

And there goes the casualty evacuation. And the person in the turret was a woman out there in the turret of a one-one-three. And I was like, yep, check. I mean, she's rolling down complete exposure, IEDs everywhere. There's active gunfights going on. And like, yep, salute. Go get some. Yeah, exactly.

So now she, again, she details or you guys detail some of that training in here and what she's going through. Fast forward a little bit Baghdad, Iraq, 2009. Shannon was with AJ and his platoon. A small group of Navy SEALs and Iraqi special operations assigned to a strike force in Task Force 17. Charged with hunting, Iranian thugs in the back alleys of a Baghdad neighborhood. It was her second deployment to Iraq, so the hot summer air that smelled like trash and expired humans was familiar, as well as the not-so-gentle reminder of what their fate entailed should they fail on any given night. These raids were so regular that they took that it would be easy to become complacent,

but Shannon took her work too seriously to allow that to happen. was tasked with producing some of the most valuable intelligence in the war, usually at great risk. This mission was no different, especially for Shannon. She was the lone female on the manifest with nothing but her wits and language ability to see her through the night. No other Americans had her talent with the local dialect and the Iraqi operators were impressed with the way she was able to draw information out of people on target.

So what a huge capability. So you go in a lot of times like the females, they're not going to talk to a male, even an Iraqi soldier or an Iraqi interpreter, they're not going to talk to them. And sometimes the Iraqi soldiers don't want to talk to the women either. Yeah. And they don't see any value in it. So having someone that could speak Arabic to the women and pull them aside. And all of a sudden you have a whole another story to compare to the story that you're being told. Yeah. So it's tough, especially in the Middle East. I mean, just women aren't going to talk to just some guy, you know. And so we really, I think for the first couple years there, before we actually just started deploying a lot of women on the

intel side, we had half the population that we got nothing from. Yeah. You know, which is crazy to think about how much of an intel fight it was. It was just like half the population who's seeing everything and in general ignored. You know, once we started really tapping into a lot of the women by, you know, trending up Iraqi women or getting American women over there, then I think we finally saw like, man, these chicks are everywhere. Like, and the men ignore them. Like they're like a piece of furniture. Yeah.

But they can tell you everything that's going on. To that point, having a female on target for a high level HVT raid was almost unheard of at the time. but she played a pivotal role by conducting on-target interrogations that led to follow on targets. It's not an understatement to say that the secretive task force 17 was more effective and deadly because of her efforts and her performance directly led to initiatives that resulted in a broader implementation of females in SOF for years to come. Although their deployment was off to a busy start with frequent night raids, the task force was stood down for 97 consecutive days after Ranger made a controversial kill on target. after waiting for over half their deployment to start working again,

it became clear that the Rangers were on indefinite hold. AJ's platoon knew a change was needed. So that's one of those things. You go out on target and, you know, I don't know the particular situation here, but a controversial kill. Maybe the person was unarmed. Maybe, you know, who knows.

But something like that, you kill an unarmed civilian or a controversial situation. They get stood down for 97 days. Like that's what happens and I thought it was interesting that they put that in there because now everybody knows that on a team You're like if something bad happens we're not working anymore Yeah especially that phase of the war oh Yeah heavily adjudicated that that phase of the war was heavily adjudicated and it's like well

So what are we gonna do we got to be careful about what we're doing Yeah So that's what they have to do that's what they have to contend with they work through it. Fast forward a little bit. In my opinion, you are the gold standard for females entering special operations. The gold standard, AJ told her. Indeed, on only her second combat deployment, Shannon was responsible for and credited with, quote, executing human intelligence operations in a very complex environment in support of a joint task force and, quote, expertly led an indigenous network producing many information intelligence reports, which were of national significance, according to her

post deployment awards. Shannon returned. home from my rat so just real quick on that I mean I kind of mentioned this early on what it takes to put an X on a map to get an assault force to go in there is so complicated takes so much work effort so many meetings and reports and the the way it appears in the movies you know like oh bad guy's gonna be here tomorrow night oh great cool let's go hit that target that's just not not what happens it takes it takes so much effort to make these things happen. I mean, one of my lieutenants was like,

we had to beat our heads against the wall to get an operation to happen. You have to, like, you have to be so determined. Yeah. If you don't have a determination, you're not going to execute a single mission. Like, if you don't have a few people on the intel side that are completely determined to make things happen,

you're not going to execute anything. Yeah, I mean, it's really the ultimate form of hunting. hunting humans and it's hard. I mean, especially when you have a complex network of insurgents that know what they're doing. And they've got a couple years under their belt and they're constantly switching up their tactics. And that's another way that Shannon was able to become value added for the task force because not only did she speak the language, she was a certified signals intelligence collector. So she could do all the significant stuff. She could do the analysis that went with that, which is almost in itself. That's three different jobs. And then she got human qualified. So she could

actually go out and run sources on her own. So she was kind of a one-stop shop. So even just as like I did in human collection, but I would have to double check stuff from our Sagan analyst and she could do all of it all in her own. I had to take a turp with me. She could literally do all of it. So her flashed a bang on Intel. I mean, that's just like you're trying to get the customer what they want. She could get it in a shorter time. And so she made herself very valuable that way. And she was obsessed. I mean, that was her thing. No, that's literally amazing. So the three things that you just mentioned, you have signal intelligence. You've got some type of electronic information coming in through various capabilities.

and then you have the language itself and then you have the human side of things and those three things are normally three different people three different departments it's very hard to get but here you have one person Shannon that can do all those things outstanding um back to the book here Shannon returned home from Iraq at the end of 2009 back to a role at support activity too

more women were being assigned to the teams at this point and Shannon was not only expected to assume more leadership responsibilities as someone who had been there done that but also to be a mentor as it pertain to women serving and soft. Brittany Burris was one of the women who arrived at the unit while Shannon was deployed. The first time they met was in a locker room on base. At best, it was a lukewarm exchange. Her first impression of Shannon was that she didn't like her and didn't want to mess with her.

But after they talked a few times, Brittany realized their personalities were very similar. Shannon and Brittany became quick friends over the course of the next year before their next deployment, leaning on each other as one of the few females in the unit. but while they were training and preparing for the next trip overseas, major events were happening that would change the course of our war in Iraq. So now we get to Iraq 2011. Where are you in 2011? So I'm right back in Iraq.

Yeah, we were gluttons for punishment in fifth group. So yeah, that was my, I was there from the late spring up until we withdrew, right, Thanksgiving 11. Fifth Group's assigned AO is. the Middle East. Center of the Middle East. How long did it take for them to invite someone else in to support them? So us in 10th group. So 10th is supposed to have like Europe,

but they actually did a lot with the Kurds up in northern Iraq and Turkey because that was kind of their A.O. as well. So us and 10th were switching out back and forth. Seventh and third got in the mix a little bit. Like third groups in extremist force, their direct action guys. They came and did quite a bit with the ICTF throughout the war. But really at any given time of the Iraq war proper,

it was either fifth group or 10th group that was running. the show. Yeah, yeah. I worked for, there was fifth group the first time I was there and then it was 10th group in 2006, at least in Alambar province. That's who was running the show. But yeah, I, you know, the seal teams used to be geographically assigned. I guess broadly speaking, they are, but they used to be more specifically like seal

team one was Southeast Asia and seal team three was southwest Asia. And seal team five was like North Asia. And seal team two was Europe and seal team four was South America. So it was more specific than it is now. And if we would have kept it that way, it would have been just Steel Team 3, you know, the whole time. Good deal for that. Yeah, good deal for everyone else doing

whatever they're doing in whatever other part of the world. But obviously, once the war kicked off, it's like, oh, yeah, we need to get everyone in here. It's going to take everybody. Yeah. So now we're in Iraq 2011. What was your job at this time? Were you just back over there with?

Back over there on team. I had actually just gone on warrant to extend my team time. Oh, okay. So, yeah. So I was over there. As a warrant, we were trying to wrap up the whole mess as we got the, as the sofa fell apart. And we realized we were going to have to withdraw. So I was actually doing an advisory work with two of the different Iraqi intel services.

And so we were actually establishing a lot of our long-term intel relationships at the time. But I was actually right back in RPC as we shut that thing down. It actually ended up getting condemned. It's like a structural issue. Like it's going to kind of implode on itself eventually. But yeah, we were living based out of there and just trying to wind things down. So RPC. Yeah.

What did that stand for? Rodwania Palace Complex. That's what it was. Yeah. It was really easy to find on a map because it had that spiral. Big old spiral. Yeah. Yeah.

And Cusei's like zoo had been there. So like in 2003 there was all the rumors of like there's still tigers out here. I think there were. But yeah. Yeah. That was disturbing going those like torture chambers and stuff like this. Super creepy. Oof.

But now it's 2011 going back to the book. We have a high. confidence grid verified by both Sagan and human Shannon delivered of findings to her peers, a platoon of Navy SEALs who were already jocked up and ready to roll prior to the concept of operations or con-ops planning briefing. Shannon was deployed to Iraq for a third time in 2011 during a period of transition with U.S. forces drawing down and leaving the country in the hands of American military contractors in Iraqi government while the Islamic State or ISIS gained momentum. As an intelligence professional, Shannon was skeptical of the path the U.S. had

chosen in Iraq and it was more and it was more than news on the television to her she had friends across the country who would be impacted many of them negatively but the war but with the war in Iraq ending where else could Shannon go to contribute to the fight against terrorism that that now defined her in so many ways or her fighting days over so you're there at this time is the is everyone just thinking bro why are we pulled like this is going to be going to completely fall apart. Pretty much. I mean, it was a mixed bag. There's a lot of people were like, well, it kind of ran its course. Like, let's just pull stakes and go. And I could understand that mentality. But at the same time, I remember sitting in a meeting at the embassy with the state

department and the CIA. All the players are there. And at the end of it, I just asked one of the CIA analysts and one of the state analysts. I said, hey, so what's the actual goal here? Now that we've left, what's the U.S.'s long-term goal here? And they said, well, we want to make sure that al-Qaeda and Iraq never resurfaces. And this doesn't become a hot bet for terror. And I was like, man, do you guys realize we handed this entire government over to the Iranians who have been using all the power that we gave them for the last couple of years to systematically run down and kill and torture and just really oppress the Sunnis. And you've got the Sunnis pressed between basically Baghdad and Damascus in this pressure cooker. And now we're going to leave. I was like, I mean, none of us really predicted exactly how ISIS was going to come back.

But we all could see the direction that it was heading because people were like, oh, the surge worked. therefore there'll never be another al-Qaeda again we killed all those Abu what's his names guys like they'll never pop back up and I'm like well these people have no other means of recourse like I don't condone the fact they've chosen radical Islam but I kind of understand it especially since we've handed this entire government over to the Iranians but then the negotiations fell apart for the sofa and it was just sort of like everybody kind of got tired and it was like well I guess we'll just leave and we just left and sharing off we were back right back there a couple years later yeah the that the Shia oppression of the Sunnis,

I mean, what are the Sunnis going to do? They're looking around and here comes Al-Qaeda and ISIS. It's like, oh, you're going to help us get rid of these guys or at least punish them for the way they've treated us? Where in? Okay, yeah. Going back to the book here, fast forward a little bit. For Shannon, it would be a good last deployment to the country

which she had spent so much of her adult life living and fighting. It was the best troop she was ever a part of. She was recognized for her, quote, understanding of insurgent networks coupled with her impressive leadership. She definitely managed several networks and extensive sub-networks producing numerous high-level intelligence reports, providing critical information to special operations commanders targeting militia groups. Her dedication resulted in several operations that captured high-value individuals and disrupted well-known insurgent networks. This wouldn't be her last adventure, though. She recently volunteered for an assessment and selection course, which she would attend later that year. If she was successful, she would join the ranks of an organization that was regarded as the pinnacle of clandestine intelligence operations in the special operations community. The selection would not be easy. There are no published standards and no real way to prepare for it. Both males and females can attend, and there's only one standard, the standard, to pass and be selected for further training. Shannon had seen

SEALs try out and come back empty-handed. This was a no-joke program, but she was confident that she could, would crush whatever they threw at her. Shannon was also recognized as the Department of defense's linguist of the year it was a prestigious honor and a meaningful meaningful validation of her skill proof that she was playing at a different level than most others in the intelligence community yeah that's to be the defense department's linguist of the year that is some very serious recognition and she realized that there was another another group another rung up the ladder I think she she or you guys referred

to do in the book, but it's an organization that combines special operations and intelligence gathering at a very high level. And she realizes, oh, I could go and volunteer for that and carry on this trajectory that she obviously liked the book here. Afghanistan 2012. Shannon deployed once more with Naval Special Warfare in 2012 for her first trip to Afghanistan. She was assigned to NSW Special Reconnaissance Team 2 and tasked with supporting an East Coast. seal platoon at a village stability operation site. VSOs were the Afghan application of counterinsurgency doctrine. Soft troops supported by conventional forces embedded with Afghan tribal elements and

Afghan security forces at the village level in an effort to deny the Taliban the ability to exploit locals, much like the Iraqi-Iraqi coin surge in coins counterinsurgency. These operations brought the U.S. into daily close contact with the local populace. The VSO portion of the Afghan coin strategy sent U.S. soft out to live in small village outposts, living side by side with Afghans and training the village security forces at the local level. The VSO program in conjunction with the Afghan surge brought the subject of women in combat, in particular women in special operations to public eye. Afghan culture segregated women from men in a more drastic way than U.S. forces had experienced in Iraq. It was culturally taboo for male service members fighting in Afghanistan to interact with local, women so the need for women in combat roles shifted from luxury to necessity.

But Shannon's mission was not just interacting with local Afghan females. She had mastered the ability to blend her human and Sagan knowledge to become a more virtual one-stop shop for painting an X on the enemy. That was a huge advantage for Shannon. With all her experience, she was assigned to a VSO site in Zibul and tasked with collecting actionable human and accompanying seals on operations. The team guys understood how unique her skill set was. They needed her to do what she did best.

hunt the enemy. So she just rolls out on another deployment. She did, yeah. She got picked up for, she passed selection for the unit, but then that was right when the SEAL team that she was assigned to got orders to go to Afghanistan. And so she could have said, now I'm going to go, I'm going to carry on my career,

but she was like, well, if they're going to combat, I'm not going to set it out of all right. Fast forward a little bit here. So she's in Afghanistan on this deployment. Shannon worked closely with Commander Job Price, a 42-year-old Navy SEAL from Pennsylvania and respected leader of SEAL Team 4th. He'd been dealing with a lot on that deployment.

Their task force had just lost 32-year-old Petting Officer First Class Kevin Ebert on a few weeks prior on November 24th. He was a Navy SEAL corpsman assigned his SEAL Team 4 and was killed in action on his second combat deployment during a firefight. At the time of his death, he was preparing to leave the Navy and pursue his medical degree and become a physician. Shortly after his death, the Taliban killed a young girl. She was around the same age as Price's daughter. Mending the task force felt like they were essentially losing the war at that point, but continued to work around the clock to the point of exhaustion. It was all they could do to feel like they were making a difference.

Shannon and most of her soft and conventional counterparts were multiple deployments into the seemingly endless, certainly doomed war on terror that was over a decade old with no end in sight. The loss of teammates and the daily grinding stress of being in danger while cycling through never-ending deployments was one more thing for everyone to deal with, to suffer in silence as the mantra goes. On December 22nd, 2012, all outside communication was suddenly shut down. No one knew why their comms had been cut, but typically that only happened when a family back home needed to be notified of a death.

Commander Price was found in his room with a pool of blood on the floor, still holding his assigned pistol. A picture of his daughter was missing from his desk. his death came as a shock to everyone. So this was just a absolutely terrible situation. And Joe Price was in my sister platoon when I was at SEAL Team 2.

No really. And this seemed really this was crazy to hear about, terrible to hear about because he was just like as a squared away guy. It was, he had gone to Ranger School as a seal. Oh, really?

So he had a lot of, He had a lot of rangerous tendencies. You know, we'd call him Ranger Price and stuff like that. But, you know, just this was shockwaves, right, through the community to have the commanding officer on deployment of a SEAL team. This was just shocking. And in here, Shannon called Brittany, which is one of her friends. They talk about it. And it says, Commander's Price Death was the final strong.

What they saw is a series of unaddressed issues. They constantly dealt with the challenges of being women in NSW. Out of the approximately 400 seals and enablers assigned to their team, there were only seven women. And Shannon and Brittany were two of them. Brittany had already been sexually harassed and assaulted during that deployment. And Shannon had faced her share of harassment too. It wasn't all bad, but they were often treated very poorly. Shannon carried that weight with her.

They considered themselves tough role models. and Shannon was fierce in that regard. We need to make a pact to help people like us, Shannon said. I want to help people like us who are in this community, but feel like they need to be tough because they're scared of losing their security clearance and scared of retribution, scared of people thinking differently of you,

thinking that you're weak, so you bury those feelings, then people commit suicide. Why? Because we're too scared to tell people. They cried together and swore to help. And, you know, the reason, you know, that that comes into play is because in the future she's going to have this opportunity

become a psychologist where she thought she could truly help out in that regard. Yeah, she saw the mental health crisis that I think gets talked about a lot now but she saw it from this incident she saw it really, I think, before it was commonly being discussed.

She saw what was bubbling up under the surface. I mean, something that she always talked to me about was like how isolating it can be to be in leadership and that's, you know, when she stood back and really thought of like, why would our commander kill himself? And a lot of people were like, well, why did this even happen?

This guy was so strong. You know, he was such a great leader. How could this happen? And she said, hey, when I stood back and I thought about it, it was like, because who's the commander going to talk to? He's the boss. Like, he's not going to go complain to what the XO, to the senior enlisted guys. He doesn't have that.

He can't even, you know, reach out and touch his group of peers. So he was completely isolated, dealing with all of that on his own. And then she saw it, you know, a lot of her other counterparts, a lot of the intel enablers who, like the last thing they wanted to do, was look weak in front of the guys. And then, you know, she had been around for a while too. She's like, you know, seals, green berets, right? Like, nobody's immune to this stuff, but nobody's asking for help because of the way our culture is.

Yeah. And different people are different. And some people can just do 10, 12 combat deployments and they're okay. And some people do two. And it really messes them up. Yeah. And so you've got everyone, some people do one. And it messes them up.

Some people are in one bad situation and it messes them up. Some people go through bad situation after bad situation, lose a bunch of friends and they're okay. But you have this whole spectrum and you can't just kind of cookie cutter. Yeah, exactly. Okay, after three deployments, you need this much down time. It doesn't work like that. Yeah.

Yeah, there's no formula for it. Yeah. If you've seen X, you get Y. Yeah. It's a very human thing. It varies so much. And that's probably one of the huge things that causes it to be such a problem. and people and absolutely like oh going and telling everyone hey I need a break like in the seal

platoon that does not it's not happening it's not happening hey I need a break right now like it's not happening and guys won't say it and if they do need to break especially because if you're one of those guys that's messed up after two deployments and you're looking at your buddy who's done six and and he's still going strong you're definitely not going to say anything yeah what are you can do hey I'm I'm burnt out I'm tired it's like no you're not going to say it's like no you're not going say anything and you're just going to bury it and clearly and I you know after I was I was with with um Job in like 1998 to 2000 so I mean I and I you know lose track of his career I don't even know what his career looked like but I can tell you what it looked like I don't know exactly

what it was but I'll tell you what it was it was deployment deployment deployment deployment deployment deployment yeah and so yeah terrible thing great guy yeah So I'm going to fast forward now to this next chapter, which, look, am I trying to sell books here for you? Maybe. But maybe we reach to a whole new audience right now because the name of this chapter is, secret love. Hell yeah. So the name of the chapter, secret love. I've never covered a secret love chapter here.

I'm glad to be, Jocko's first love story. First romance novel we're getting into, man. But as I get into it, we see where the title comes from. Undisclosed location, 2014. Anticipation and Fear of the Unknown was hung as thick as Virginia's humidity in July. About 20 service members met at an obscure parking lot at 8 a.m., but they didn't know anything about what was in store. What little information they did have came from a short email they'd received the night before,

telling them where to be and to wear business casual attire everyone present had already been through a 40-day selection course for this murky unit and knew to expect the unexpected but this didn't ease anyone's nerves it was only the first day of a course that would last about a year and that exact duration wasn't even clear joe kent was terrified of failing but was was terrified of failing of not making the cut for a veteran green beret that was the most potent form of fear he was capable of fee There was no time to dwell on that, though. Time to fake it till you make it. He told himself while attempting to make small talk with the classmates. Suddenly the sound of metal on metal broke the silence. Joe turned to see a blue Nissan pickup truck strike a car. His eyes focused on the

driver, a gorgeous athletic strawberry blonde that was in the driver's seat. A flash of familiarity washed over him. I know her. Maybe 2007? Shannon. A, Shannon said without missing a beat. She looked right at Joe with cool with cool blue eyes Grinned shrugged and then quickly Corrected her parking she jumped out of the truck and walked to another group of students like any other day at the office Damn she's cool with Joe thought He had thought about Shannon on and off over the years and returned to Iraq several times hoping he might run into her again He promised himself that he wouldn't let her get away go talk to her now Joe thought as he approached their eyes met

triggering the same spark of familiar comfort he felt in Baghdad all those years before. This was the woman who gave him a brief reprieve from the angst of the war in his 2007 deployment to Iraq. As she approached Shannon and looked at Joe like she was almost expecting to see him. She was the one who got away, Joe thought. But now here she is six years later competing for a slot in the same unit I'm trying to get into. He wasn't surprised she found a way into the qualification course for this outfit considering her skill sets. but it still felt serendipitous. I can't believe that parked car jumped out and bit your bumper like that, Joe said.

That shit'll buff out, she replied. Joe let himself laugh out loud, maybe a little too loud. Her cool devil-may-care demeanor confirmed he was talking to the right girl. I'm Joe. Were you in Baghdad, 2007? He extended his hand, which grasped with a firm handshake in return. I remember. So there we start the secret love.

Um, you know, you go into some details about the course and some, some, some as you two are, actually, there's less details about the course as a, you know, classified stuff and that you guys are doing. And, but in the midst of that, this, this, this romance is taking place. Secret love. The secret love is happening. Man, the secret love. It's strong. Uh, you, I'm going to fast forward now.

And, and again, that's why I get the book. Get the book. You get those details, you know. the stuff that's not classified to talk about, the way the relationships developed. It's really interesting to see that from the outside, but to get kind of an insider's look at what it's like for two military people that are both entering

the murky world of intelligence and paramilitary operations, and how does that, you know, what does that look like in real life? Because there's movies about that, Echo Charles? Yes. Some movies like that, right? Yeah. Where it's, you know, the husband

and wife team. Right? It's a thing. Yeah. But what does it look like in real life? It could be a real thing. And here we go. So get the book.

Fast forward a little bit. You guys are done with training and selection. And you both get selected for this organization. I'm going to go to the book here. I need a beer. It had been a long day, most of which have been spent driving in a new city. He could feel it in his back as he got out of a rental car at his hotel. He had been looking at locations.

A terrorist leader was using to plan a tax. while determining if he was being followed. Now was time to write a report. That's the part they don't show you in the Jason Bourne movies. Speaking of movies, he thought. Fortunately, there was a pub across the street where he could grab dinner and a beer and knock out his report before catching a few hours of sleep. As he walked over, he turned his cell phone back on to catch up on his life.

This was just a training mission after all. Hey, hon, call me when you can. I love you. The text message read. I wonder what she wants to talk about Joe thought as he hit the callback button. Shannon rarely called Joe while he was working. She knew firsthand how important it was not to have distractions in this profession. Hey, she answered, ecstatic.

Hey, what's the good news? He said figuring her tone might mean something good happened. Well, she had hesitated a moment. I was going to wait to tell you, but I can't. You're going to be a dad and I'm going to be a mom. Holy shit, a baby. Joe was ecstatic. He never had an interest in kids or raising a family,

but Shannon had changed how he viewed the world and he wanted that out of life. The idea of bringing a child into the world with her genuinely, genuinely excited him. So let's get married soon, Joe said without thinking. Oh, yeah, way ahead of you. You're good with Lake Placid, right? She said in her all-business voice. Of course, hey, I just asked you to marry me.

Joe laughed. You've had my heart from day one, Joe Kent. We are getting married ASAP. So right on. So you guys get done with this course and you find out she's pregnant, time to get married. You have a small wedding in Lake Placid, New York, just as directed by Shannon.

Exactly. Like she always wanted to. You end up with your first kid. She's got a, while she's giving birth, she has a, she has a playlist that she's playing. It's called, it's called Colt infill. This, the boy's name is Colt. So when he's shown up to this, this playlist,

Colton Kent was born August 11th. and then you leave on your 10th deployment. How was it, how much different was it going on deployment when you had a baby? Night and day. Night and day difference. I mean, when I was younger, my first, I don't know, nine deployments, I just wanted to go, go, go. And I felt like I could, you know, just put everything on hold because there was really

nothing to put on hold. I could just go and deploy and, you know, figure out life later on. And my life was deploying. And then when I got married and had a kid and had obligations and had, you know, things that I wanted to be there for back at home, it was completely. different ball game. I actually ended up going back and having to apologize to some friends of mine. I was like, man, I actually did not realize how hard this was because, you know, as a young team. Oh, you're married friends? Yeah, because like as a young team guy, I'm like, hell yeah,

we want to deploy. Like, you want to give us a year off? I'd be like, I'd be furious. Like, we can't take a year off. There's a war going on, you know? But then, you know, seeing that on the flip side, like, hey, man, this is, this is hard. It's hard to walk away from your wife and kids and get on an airplane and say, hey, I'll see you in six months. Yeah, my buddy Leif, who didn't have any kids when he was in the teams and you know now we work together and he we had you know like a four day trip and he has three young kids yeah and he was just like bro i don't know how you did because i had like all my kids yeah and you know you're leaving on deployment it's like terrible yeah and i know i i you know you just miss so much of all the all those highlights of growing up you just miss

them just miss them all yeah you know learning to walk learning to crawl learning to swim first this first that it's like you're not there for any of them yeah if you're lucky you get a text or a picture and other than that it's like you're not there um did so that was your 10th deployment did you did you start reconsidering your your job i didn't i didn't i didn't i just that was what i was born to do in my mind. I honestly didn't even look at any other options, you know, after, you know, being in SF and then going to the unit and then, you know, eventually transitioned over the CIA. I was just, that was what I did. You know, I figured Shannon would, you know, stay in the Intel world, too, and kind of we'd be able to make our careers and make our families around that. But that was

just kind of me justifying it in my own head. But yeah, I definitely had that initial, like, hey, maybe I shouldn't be doing this. But then I immediately, you know, push that off into a corner of my mind and said, no, your role here is to go fight our wars. Yeah. And I've had that conversation as well with many people, which is guys have been deploying, like whether it was in the ancient days where a sailor is leaving on a ship for four years or six years. Yeah. And then coming back and that's what you're doing.

Are you going on some war for three years, five years, you know, traveling around the world? So this is what men have been doing for a really long time. and, you know, the world, the kids carry on. The kids can push through it. It's definitely hardwired into our DNA. I think it's not something that's common nowadays just because of modern society, but I do think that warrior trait of this is what I do, I go and I fight and we'll sort the rest out later.

I think that's hardwired into our DNA. Yeah, I can tell you that when I was going on a planet, like it sucked, but I wasn't even a factor. Yeah. It's what you got to do. It wasn't like a thought like, well, what am I going to do? That was the same way. It's like, well, I'm going to do my job.

This is what I do. Everyone knows what I do. The dates on the calendar. We go to the airplane. See you when I see you. Yeah. That's what's happening. Fast forward a little bit.

Actually, fast forward a pretty good chunk here. Shannon is with some doctors. All right, Shannon, thanks for making the time to see us today. We have some answers explaining why you felt so awful. Shannon nodded her head, anxious for him to go on. We confirmed you have thyroid cancer, which isn't surprising. which isn't surprising since your diagnosis puts you at a higher risk. The doctor said, getting right to the point,

Shannon couldn't help but show emotion. Tears ran down her cheeks. There are a few different treatment options, but the most direct way to deal with this is to conduct a biopsy and cut it right out. Shannon composed herself and straightened her posture. Well, let's cut it out. Shouldn't be a big deal, right?

I have stuff to do. She mentioned the upcoming biopsy to Joe in a text message on her way home but didn't elaborate. She didn't want him to think was anything other than a routine medical procedure. Joe was caught up in what he was doing in Iraq and figured it must not be a big deal if she was texting him. The surgeon removed the cancer in one surgery and Shannon was back to work within a day

without missing a beat. On top of being a special operations combat veteran, a mother and a wife, Shannon now added cancer survivor to her list of titles. She sent Joe another text message, this time with a photo of a noticeable laceration across her throat freshly stitched. Got a touch of cancer cut out. She typed in a blunt follow-up text. Joe was instantly worried.

He had no idea it was that bad. He asked her he should go home, but Shannon and his sister wasn't a big deal and she could take care of it. Dude. Yeah, that was her. I mean, just no factor.

She said something about like a doctor's appointment maybe a biopsy. And then like the next day or two, she sends me that picture and it's like this fresh. I mean, because thyroid, like they cut right into your throat. So it looks like somebody tried to slit your throat. She's like, got the cancer cut out. I was like, wait,

What I missed? Do I need to come home like cancer? And she's like, no, we're fine. Like, yeah, just no factor, no big deal. What year is this? This is 2016. And you're just still doing these deployments? Yeah, I'm right back in Iraq because the counter ISIS fights going on.

So we're right back over there, basically as we predicted in 2011. And this is before we decided we were actually going to drop the hammer and go into Mosul. So we were in that weird period where there was like, you know, the trench warfare going on. there was the Iranians were playing there as well. ISIS was still sending suicide bombers in. So I was kind of working between Baghdad and Kirk Cook. But just, yeah, for me, it felt like what I'd been doing for most of my 20s and 30s at that point. Was there, what was the gap between 2016 in Iraq?

Yeah. What was the longest time you spent out of Iraq? It was that gap right there because I left Thanksgiving of 2011 week properly withdrew. God. So you show up five years. years later, and you're just like same shit. Same shit, man. Except for they, well, now ISIS holds entire towns, which Al-Qaeda and Iraq never did.

It was like, oh, so we actually made things even worse. And all the guys that we trained, with the exception of the AISOff, like the trillions of dollars we spent there, the nearly 5,000 dead Americans, these guys surrendered. And now we have to reconstitute and rebuild an Iraqi army. I was just like, man, this is ridiculous. We've got to do things differently. But now, and then at the time, it was just so absurd because ISIS had captured most of the equipment that we had given the Iraqi army.

So they've got like U.S. stuff. And so we were occasionally doing bombing missions, like to bomb the U.S. stuff. Like it was just absolutely ridiculous. This is like the military industrial complex, self-licking ice cream come. But it's obviously a real threat because ISIS has now taken over large swaths of multiple countries. You know, there's terrorist threats in America and in Europe. So it's like, well, we're back here and we have to deal with it. At the time, Obama basically had no tolerance for us going really hot and going kinetic.

So it was just like, we're here, we're collecting intel, we're kind of doing some ops, but there was no will from hire for us to actually just take care of it and cut the cancer out. All right. So after four months, Shannon's declared permanently cancer-free. Awesome. And you're coming up on your 20-year mark. And, okay, just getting some highlights here. Shannon's pregnant again. So you got a lot of stuff going on.

Um, as the arrival of your second son is getting closer, you get asked if you can deploy again for your 11th deployment, of course. Um, and this is where it kind of sucked that Shannon was like familiar with the whole deal because she knew that you didn't really have to go. Like you're at the end of your career. You can be like, yep, I'm, I'm going to, you know, get my medical stuff. taken care of and I'm gonna you know I need a little twilight time I need to ramp down she knew all that yep you couldn't be like hey you know I gotta go yeah she knew you were full of shit yeah exactly exactly yeah and um she didn't like it yeah usually it helps that I could be forthright with her you know but this was a case where it did not help me at all because

there was another deployment that that came up and they did need some of my skill sets but at the of the day they could have picked somebody else but like my commander asked me if I could go and I couldn't say no right like I'm really important so I got to go over and and she was just like you are so full of shit like you you just got home like I'm pregnant again like so this this deployment did not go over very well with Shannon yeah yeah Shannon did not take the news well she worked in the same community so there's no bullshitting her she didn't need to she knew I didn't need to go and didn't and was unhappy with this decision I get it this is you this is one of the reasons I love you but I'm I'm not happy about it.

You'll have to figure out how to be you without this someday. It felt like he just returned from his last deployment. So, so this, you going on deployment again, she, and we'd mentioned, you know, when Joe Price killed himself, how that she recognized this, this problem psychologically with so many guys. And so there's a, there's a PhD program that she hears about. Yeah. And she decides she's going to go try and get this PhD, get her PhD in psychology and, like, help out the community and in that manner. Fast forward a little bit. It says Joe's final deployment came and went.

He did not save the world or win the war on terror. Maybe they didn't need him so bad after all. That was, that was like I have a big star next to that because that is something to keep in mind, you know, like. And this happens in the SEAL teams. and it's like you think that the machine needs you. Yes. Yeah. But the machine doesn't need you and the machine is going to carry on.

And you do your duty and then you get done with your duty. Carry on. Yeah. I had a friend that was Ozzy and he was like SAS for a very long, like over 30 years. And, you know, he was getting at that point where he's going to get out. And I could see, you know, and I said, hey, bro, I'm going to tell you right now. The SAS is going to still be the SAS. Right.

If it doesn't matter if you go to work tomorrow or not. Yep. And that's a rough truth, you know, because we all think it's about, you know, like, I'm so important. I have these skills. No one else that's like, no. Yeah.

So you did not save the world. Did not. No. June 21st, 2017, baby Josh was born. And Joe had been promoted to Chief Warren Officer 3 the year before. So his number, so his number for some, sort of bureaucratic staff purgatory assignment would be inevitably called.

He had plenty of vacation to burn and decide to quit while he's ahead, concluding what most in the military would characterize as a legendary career, the kind almost anyone who had served would envy. That's affirmative. He figured he could find some kind of work in special operations or intelligence community when he retired and could continue to contribute to the fight with a plan in place. Chief Joe Kent requested to retire from the U.S. Army and move on to the next chapter, with Shannon and their two boys.

So you make the call. All right. I'm going to get out. Now, did you think about going to the OGA with paramilitary at that time? Yeah. So you had a plan. I had a hundred percent plan. So I had already like changing ship.

I'd already spent all my like SF team time and then I bought more team time by going warrant. And then about the time I was getting looked at to do admin at special forces group, I went to the special operations unit that Shannon and I met at. And then I had had a good. run there and I was a CW3 and so at some point they were going to make me do actual officer stuff and I was like well my 20 year mark is just hit and so I'm going to go but I had already worked with those guys a good deal over in Ground Branch and it's I mean for people who are outside the

world it sounds like super murky and secret squirrel but it's pretty common I mean ground branch recruits heavily out of the special operations community and so if you've been there for 20 years you know guys that were over there I knew our mutual friend Brian Hoke and some other guys some of my other former teammates already over there so I had it all planned out and you know as we'll get into In the book, or if you buy the book, Shannon knew exactly what I was planning. Yeah. It wasn't a secret. So you had all that going on.

Yeah. Meanwhile, the Uniform Services University of the Health Sciences Department of Medical and Clinical Psychology runs an American Psychological Association accredited doctoral program that produces certified clinical psychologists for service in the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force. The Navy provides funding for only two doctoral students per year to attend this prestigious program and those slots are highly competitive as they are open to anyone who has at least a bachelor's degree, including civilians and enlisted Navy personnel alike and are fully paid for. Passing the admissions board is crucial for acceptance into this program, but applicants must also be eligible for and meet the standards of a commissioned naval officer. This is required even if you are already serving in the Navy as a session's standards for commissioning as an officer are different from retention standards in the military regulations.

the former being significantly more stringent than the latter. So she's going to apply for this program. I mean, taking two people out of the Navy, that's ridiculous, obviously a stringent program to get your doctorate. She goes through a whole series of interviews and this big application progress. Fast forward a little bit. Joe was getting ready for work when he heard Shannon shout,

holy shit. She popped out of the bathroom and handed Joe her phone. Read that email and make sure I'm not hallucinating, Shannon said. Congratulations on your acceptance. to the Uniformed Services Health Service Clinical Psychology Program. Joe said as he hugged her, this is life-changing Joe. Shannon said, wiping away a tear. I can stay with the boys and have a job that matters.

This is everything. So, awesome. I mean, just so awesome. And that's one of those things where when you're applying for a program like that, like I applied for the officer program. And the one I did, they took 50 out of the Navy. And like the first year I applied for it didn't get it. And there's nothing you can do.

It's just a big bureaucratic machine. So when I got picked up the next year, it's like, again, you're very happy because it's something you have very little control over. So for her to get picked up, like I bet I guarantee 30 totally awesome qualified applicants, at least, probably if not 300, totally awesome qualified applicants that for whatever reason, now look, she must have had a hell of a record. at this point with her experience and everything. And actually, it's in the book, you know,

some of the things that she wrote about why she wanted to do. And she talks about Commander Price and like it's, it's, it's awesome. And I'm sure she was a front runner. But nonetheless, it's a bureaucratic machine. Oh, big time. Yeah. And you don't have,

it's not going to be fair. Let me just say that. It's not like a selection process where you can like make sure you're the fastest runner. Right. You've got the mentality. It's like at some point you put your packet together and you hand it to a bunch of dudes. and, you know, they make the call, you know. Now, as she's all stoked, you're all stoked, and then it turns out that in her medical

record, they didn't screen it closely enough the first time. And because she had cancer, even though it was completely gone, she's not eligible for the program. Right. It's like the, it's literally a catch 22, which is insane when you think about it because you have people in the Navy who the Navy says, hey, you guys are good enough. for us to keep, for us to send to combat, for us to do whatever we want to do with you, but if you want to move or rung up, we're going to hold you to the standards we'd hold

somebody coming off the streets. So technically she wasn't able to qualify to be assessed into the military, but she was good enough for retention standards. So literally a catch 22, incredibly frustrating. Yeah. So she's, you know, she's fighting it. She's writing letters. She's trying to get these things changed. You know, they always say there's a waiver for everything in the military. Like you got some kind of an issue. You can find a waiver. You can find a way around it.

So she's trying to find a way around it. But she's literally being told this is not possible. So it's a tough fight. Meanwhile, back to the book here, her unit's next rotation to Iraq and Syria approached. And Shannon knew she was fit for combat. Since the clinical psychology program wasn't happening anytime soon, she had a choice to make.

She was in an all-volunteer, Special Operations Unit and no one forced her to do anything. If she didn't want to go, all she needed to do was say the word and transfer to a different unit. It wasn't lost on her that if her commission had been approved, she wouldn't even need to consider going to combat again. Shannon's sense of duty was ultimately overwhelming. Her unwavering commitment as a leader to both her comrades and the nation was something she couldn't shake no matter how conflicted she felt. She came to the resolution that with the psychology program off the table first, now she would deploy and do her job but whether that was part whether that was a part of her and

joe's life plan or not i just don't see any way i can avoid this deployment and still look myself in the mirror shannon told joe after dinner one night shannon and joe weren't so different from each other they would always go if asked no matter what no matter the consequence they lived by isaiah six eight whom shall i send and who will go for us and i said here i am send me. It was that simple for both of them, but also represented their most significant marital conflict. So the tables got flipped. Yeah, exactly. I mean, just directly flipped. And now you're looking at her and she's getting called to go back again. And same thing. She knows she can walk away from the unit and say, I'm not deploying anymore. I got, I mean, how old is your youngest

at this time, Josh? one. Yeah. So she could easily say, yep, I'm done. And how many years did she have it at this time? Like 15, 14? Yeah, 15 years. Yeah.

I mean, she easily could have, but we had that very discussion right there. And as much as I didn't want to support her on it, I couldn't argue if the logic. Because she was like, look, I've been going to war, you know, my entire adult life. And every time I've deployed, half the guys have had fathers. And she, or I've had kids, they've been fathers. And they've gone over there. And so what am I going to say? And I say, well, no, it's different because I'm woman.

You know, she's like, that logic doesn't make any sense. And I was like, well, actually, I agree with that logic. I think it is different because you're a mom. And she was like, I understand where you're coming from. But, you know, that just doesn't make it. I can't justify that to myself, you know. And if you were me, you'd be saying the exact same thing. And I couldn't argue with that logic, you know.

And also, I mean, it was, I had deployed so much and she had deployed so much. It was pretty easy for us to talk ourselves into like, hey, this is just, it's just another deployment. Like, what's the big deal? It's not that big. we'll be fine, you know, six months on the other side of this. It'll all be everything to be back to normal, just like it was. The last couple times I deployed, just like it was for all of our adult lives up to that point. So there was definitely a lot of anxiety and tension initially, but once we accepted it,

we were both like, well, this isn't our first rodeo, you know, like we can, we can handle this. Yeah. And the atmospherics in the world at this time, this is now 2018, late 2018. Yeah. And in the meantime, you retire from the Army and you go. to OGA, CIA, paramilitary, you pick up that job. And so now you're going on deployments.

Who's with the kids? So the only time that we were both gone was right before Shannon was killed. She deployed after Thanksgiving in 2018, was killed in January. I deployed in early January right before she was killed. So I was supposed to be gone for about four. 40 days or so on a shorter trip. But she was killed within about a week or so for me to get it there.

Where were the kids? With my parents. Did they, did your parents come down to live at your house? Did you send the parents up? Yeah, my mom would come and my dad would come as well. Yeah. So you're on deployment, like you just said, she's on deployment. And she ends up with a cross-functional team in man bitch, man bitch.

which is in Syria. Just to give kind of an explanation around that. Captain John Turnbull, a civil affairs officer in charge of the cross-functional team in Manbidge. Cross-functional teams were somewhat of a hodgepodge of special operations and conventional soldiers combining the unique skill sets of civil affairs, psychological operations, and special forces soldiers with the security that local partner forces and American infantry units provided. John's small team operated out of a cluster of grain silos on the edge of Manbidge proper. their only backup was a small unit of soldiers from the U.S. Army 3rd Armald Cavalry Regiment at a small camp to their west.

It was outlaw country and his team had broad authority to stabilize and rejuvenate the small northern city of approximately 300,000 that would eventually be cited as the model for what Syria could look like post-ISIS. They weren't technically qualified to perform intelligence gathering activities, but they did have access and influence in the community. and collected information accordingly. This is where Shannon came into play. CFT Manbidge was an excellent source of leads for her, so she planned to make Manbidge a regular stop

during this deployment to keep tabs on what they had in development. So this is just, you know, it's almost like you get to piggyback on with this cross-functional team, and she sees that they have access, and they go into this place, and they know the routes, Um, she also has a guy named Scotty Wirtz with her who's a guy from Steel Team 5. Um, he's now at this time he was with the, the DIA.

So he's out there, like a security type. Yeah. Role. Yeah. And that's what they're doing. And this is, this is common stuff to be, to be happening to merge, especially, you know, this is the kind of thing that would never have happened pre 9-11. Right.

Exactly. But post 9-11. Like. people working together and trying to make good outcomes and bad situations, trying to reinforce each other and synergize the various teams together so you can make progress. So that's what she's doing. So again, there's so many good stories in this book. Obviously, I'm not doing the whole thing, but so much good information.

how things are being done, the risks that are being taken, how to overcome and mitigate those risks, some of the, some really powerful breakdowns of intel gathering. I mean, there's a whole breakdown of trying to get Baghdadi,

like just how those are looking. I mean, it's very interesting to read, get the book. I'm going to fast forward, January 16th, 2019, CFT Manbidge report departed from the silos at approximately 11 a.m. local time. There were two American vehicles in the convoy. Shannon and John in the lead vehicle, while Clark drove the other with Scotty and Chief Farmer.

Jasmine, two more American Green Berets and 16 SDF soldiers. Those are Syrian Defense Force soldiers. Following in gun trucks rounded out the rest of the manifest. Their convoy tried parking at the school as planned. But the situation on the ground dictated a move to their alternate location outside the Palace of Prince. restaurant. And this is, you know, it's interesting is when I was a kid in the teams and they would talk about this idea of a semi-permissive environment.

Yeah. Right. And it's where, but it never made a lot of sense to me until the war started. And then you realize there's different parts of the world. There's different things happening. And this is kind of a classic semi-permissive environment where they're going into town. Of course, they have to have security. But the threat is not visible.

It's certainly present and and that's this this environment that they're in again. It's hard to define to someone that doesn't understand it because are they at war? Well Yeah kind of but are they at war where there's an enemy that's clearly visible that's where they're fighting against? Yeah not not really so you end up in this weird in this weird situation that actually is more difficult. Yeah, the semi more more yeah it's more It's more difficult because, and actually when you were talking about ISIS earlier, man, I was so happy to see those ISIS flags on trucks in big convoys. I was like, oh, this is. Yeah. We're actually good at this. Like the counterinsurgency thing, like we're not so hot at.

But like if you are willing to hoist your flag and say the enemy are over here, we will remove you. That was just, we can do that. Yeah. I was so stoked to see that I was thinking to myself, oh, this is not going to go well for them. No. As opposed to being in an environment where you've got insurgents mixed in with the civilian populace, local populace, using them as human shields, maneuvering in ways that are difficult to detect. So that's the situation that they're in here. This semi-permissive, leaning towards not permissive, but a semi-permissive environment, and they're going in to, and the mission is to go in and gather some intelligence.

They have a meat set up. back to the book after parking their vehicles to deliberately make it difficult for anyone to walk up unnoticed and slip an iED under their trucks clark moved to the restaurant's top floor and established overwatch for most of the market on the sidewalk below shannon and scottie synced watches and reaffirmed the exact time everyone was required to be back all right john will be back no later than 1,100 zulu you know what to do if we're not back by then shannon said confirming an abbreviated five-point contingency plan commonly used throughout the military roger we know the plan. Good luck, guys. John replied. Clark watched as the routine patrol departed with Shannon and Scotty breaking off to move toward their destination. He didn't know exactly where they were going or who they were meeting, but such was life on a Shannon Kent mission. Fast forward a little bit. Pulling security during the daytime in a bustling city market is nerve-wracking. They were surrounded by two and three-story buildings all with their own windows and doors that could open it at any time. You never know what's truly going on or who might be watching you from a front.

Clark felt uncomfortable but couldn't fit his put his finger on what it was then he noticed something outside the window four or five guys were literally staring him down not talking they didn't seem very friendly but they weren't doing anything that could be considered hostile either little did he know ISIS had started planning an assassination in December of 2018 they wanted to use a suicide bomber to hit the American soldiers and manned bidge who had been causing so many problems so they imported operatives from Aleppo who linked up with local contacts

that were already patrolling the city looking for a chance to attack. They finally saw an opportunity on the 16th of January. Clark moved back down to the street so that one of the Green Berets could go inside and use the bathroom. As the Green Beret came out to relieve Clark,

they saw Shannon and Scotty on their way back to the restaurant along with the rest of the element that had been out on foot patrol. They regrouped out front as the vehicles were prepared for movement. Clark was standing next to his truck ready to go, talking to one of the Green Berets and an SDF soldier. At 1238 local time,

just as the team was about to get back in their trucks and drive back to the grain silos, a man approached their position from south of the market. He walked right past Clark toward the restaurant entrance where the rest of the group stood. Without warning, he detonated a hidden suicide vest within feet of Shannon, Scotty, and the rest of their group. Senior Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent,

loving wife, daughter, sister, friend, and mother of two, was killed in action alongside Special Forces Chief Warren Officer to Jonathan R. Farmer, loving husband and father of four, former Navy SEAL Scott A. Wirtz and Gaheed, Gidear, Tahrir, an American working as a civilian interpreter. 11 Syrian nationals also died in the attack with another 18 wounded. Yeah, that's difficulty in these environments is that you have to be right all the time.

And they only have to be right once. That's right. And they don't care about human life. So it doesn't matter. You know, you kill some of them. They don't care, but they kill some of you. And of course, meanwhile, while this is happening, you're on deployment, you're working your new job. And we'll go to the book.

This is how you find out. Joe left the States in early January for his first deployment as a CIA paramilitary officer and was fortunate to work for one of his best friends, Rocco. They were on an ODA in fifth group together and had remained close since 2005. Later that evening, Joe returned to the office after a mission to check in with Rocco. as he walked in he noticed Rocco looked somber Hey guys why don't you give Joe and I am Joe in me a minute Rocco said indicating he wanted everyone to leave the room they obliged Shit what did I screw up Joe thought

Hey man there's been an attack in man beage On the task force Two females are KIA That's all we know right now We're trying to get names do you know where Shannon is Fuck man bitch she's in man bitch Joe replied She was not the only female in the task force so he could not be in

entirely certain it was her he ran back to his room to get his phone hoping for a text saying she was safe no text jo ran back to the office he had another number in syria and her work email no answer on the phone and no email either there was nothing to do but wait at one point Rocco looked up at Joe from his computer screen he stood up and walked over i just got an email brother rocko didn't want to say the next part he had tears in his eyes It was Shannon. She was killed. I'm sorry, man. So immediate numbness and disbelief and all that. Yeah. Do you get all those? I did. But being overseas, I knew I had to get home. And I also knew that there was going to be people who were tasked of notifying Shannon's parents.

So I had to call her chain of command and say, hey, I've been notified. What's the timeline? for notifying her family because I never had to actually do the duties of casualty affairs but I had to do the training and so I knew the machinery that was taking place in the States and I didn't want her parents to just get a random knock on the door

so I pretty quickly made the decision I'm just going to call her mom and tell her so I had to stay relatively focused you know kind of compartmentalize a lot just to get through that phone call get through the phone call back to my parents And then, you know, luckily the agency got me out of there pretty quick.

But, yeah, it was a whirlwind getting out of theater back home and then just waiting to receive Shannon's remains and all that. But, yeah, it was a lot of numbness, you know, obviously a lot of regret. But a lot of clarity, too. I mean, I was overseas. My wife got killed. My kids are at home with grandparents. I was out in a non-permissive, semi-permissive environment, doing something very similar to what Shannon was doing. doing in a different part of the world.

I could have gotten killed that day too. I mean, really, you can roll a dice so many times and your numbers are going to come up. And so I felt incredibly selfish and pretty guilty for being there. It was like, hey, my kids have no idea. They just lost their mom. And I could have made them orphans today. So I was flying back.

And I was like, I got to step away from this life that I've lived for my entire adult life. That was the only bit of clarity and all the sorrow that I had then. How old were the boys at this point? They're one and three. Yeah. In the book, you go through some of this stuff in detail and talk about, you know, some of that, some of that emotions that you're going through. And very powerful, very powerful.

And yeah, very moving. One thing that I, you know, you get to the point where you're talking about the funeral. And it says this, a thousand sailors, hundreds of other service members, of New York State police officers and many family and friends filled the pews at the Naval Academy's Chapel in Annapolis in memory of Senior Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent. Having her memorial service at the Academy's Chapel was a big deal. She was the first enlisted sailor in the, in U.S. Navy history to be given the honor. Yeah. Like I said, there's the, get the book because there's just so much, so many details of her life.

and it paints such an awesome picture, so much heroism, such a look inside spec ops and tell, but on top of that, you know, I often try to explain to people that the people you read about in books, they're people.

Yeah. And in writing this book, you do a great job of painting the picture, not just of another soldier, another sailor, another Marine, but a person. And it's just, it's very moving. And just to close out the book, you say this. A month after her death, U.S. backed Kurdish forces,

arrested five members of ISIS. They were believed to be involved in the January 16th attack that resulted in Shannon's death. In a series of raids, Shannon's fellow warriors took out target after target, killing or capturing those responsible, methodically striking them down from the shadows. The violence America's warrior elite is capable of knows no bounds. If you take one of theirs, they will take ten of yours.

And so it was. The death of the man ultimately responsible for the suicide attack wouldn't bring Shannon back. But knowing a price was paid for her and her teammates' deaths was reassuring. The world is a better place without such evil in it. the world is a better place because Shannon Kent made her mark. So you're, you know, you obviously, like you said, probably with the most crystal clarity, you needed to leave the life behind.

What did that transition look like? It was pretty rapid. Got back and, you know, we did Shannon's funeral and all that. And the CIA said, hey, take as much time as you need. Tell us what you want to do. They're very supportive. A bunch of other jobs I could have done there. but I know myself well enough to know that like I can't be halfway in that world that if you give me enough time I'd find a way I'd find a justification in my head so I knew I needed a hard break and I needed to get my kids closer to the family but then also a big part of moving back to back home back to the West Coast was you know just really to remove myself from the DC area in the intelligence world because I knew if I stayed there and halfway in I'd you know I'd get back into it somehow so

It happened pretty quick. You know, I decided within a couple months, I was going to move back home and, you know, bought a house, you know, back in the Northwest and, you know, just decided to carry on from there, you know, to give my kids as much stability as we could, get them closer to my family. And then what about work? Yeah, so right away, I resigned from the agency and then I did some contract stuff for a while, teaching stuff based out of Fort Lewis.

But then I got a job, just a regular job as a program manager for a technology. company work from home you know so flexible hours was this was COVID yet was it like this is right before I got it right before COVID it's a 2019 so how did you like working from home at a computer managing project in the civilian sector you know that seems like a rough transition it was a rough transition yeah it was a rough transition I mean honestly if I hadn't had a good supported network of my family and you know my own ways of you know making sure I worked out in the morning and stayed sane and, you know, still hanging out with some of my friends.

I probably would have gone a little crazy. But no, it's a hard transition, especially if you don't plan it. Like, I did not plan on getting out. My transition plan was to go be a paramilitary guy. I never thought through. I'd hear people talk about transition this and that. And I was just like, you know, I'm never going to do that. I'm never going to go be like a real nine to five guy.

And then I found myself in that world pretty quick. So really, I mean, I think had I not had the kids to keep me grounded, probably would have been a lot messier. I want to see a copy of your first resume that you sent in. You have literally zero civilian experience doing anything. They're like, can you do project management? You're like, I can run sources and I can assault targets and I can blow things up. How does that help?

Can that work? Definitely found, though, that a lot of our skills, especially of management, I think, from the military, definitely immediately apply. I read, I mean, I read your book right away, actually. It was heavily recommended by a couple people. And I was like, oh, yeah, okay, we can do this. This stuff actually applies, managing, whether it's managing people who are assaulting targets or whether it's managing guys that are, you know, doing tech projects.

At the end of the day, you're still just managing people. One's probably more appealing to me than the other. But at the end of the day, you're still dealing with people. You're still working your way through problems. So it wasn't, obviously, my preferred line of work. Yeah, I didn't know either because, you know, I did, the last couple of years I was in, I was running the West Coast training, and so I was teaching leadership. But I didn't think that what we were leading in the SEAL teams had anything to do with how you'd lead on the outside.

And it wasn't until I went and talked to a company and talked about these principles I talked. It wasn't really, because I'm standing up there talking about these principles that we use, but I didn't know how they were landing until people started asking me questions. And I started solving them the same way. I would solve an assault in the target that had gone a little bit sideways. Like, what are we going to do? And that literally the first question I got asked, I thought to myself, oh, everything that we know from the teams and from the military, when done correctly, applies to any leadership situation.

So you're doing that for a while. And then in 2022, you decide you're going to run for Congress. Yeah. So you're a glutton for punishment. glutton for punishment man yeah yeah so actually i mean i started running in 21 it was basically um i got involved in politics really um meeting trump at dover uh Shannon was killed a month after our troops were supposed to be out of Syria so Trump gave the order to get our troops out just before Christmas and 18 because we had taken away all the ground that ISIS controlled so Trump did but

no other president in the war on terror had done he had actually said like when we get rid of all the ground ISIS controls, then we're leaving. We're not going to stay here and chase these guys around the desert for 20 plus years. Like we've seen that. We're not going to do it again. So when we took out that last little stronghold they had, Trump said, all right, let's get the troops out. So I had a front row ticket to see how the mid to senior level bureaucrats in the intelligence community, Department of State, Department of Defense basically said, no, we're not going to do that. We're going to leave these guys here. And Shannon was there in the midst of all that friction. So there was the chaos of Mattis resigning. And then he had a bunch of downward pressure

on the task force. And I could see this because I'm talking to her. We can talk on classified systems. I'm reading all the sit reps. I'm seeing the drama too at the CIA. And all the downward pressure for the guys on the ground was, hey, the boss thinks we need to leave. We need to find reasons to be here. And so there was a big pressure on those guys to go out there and like make ops happen. And so for me, I, when she got killed, I was surprised, but I wasn't that surprised when I thought about it analytically because I was like, look, man, if you're out here just fishing around for missions, like you're doubling and tripling your opportunity for the enemy to kill you. And one of our last conversations we had, I was like, look, do not be the last person

to die in a war that most of the country has already forgotten about. Like, this is a bad situation. And she knew it was too, because they had all kinds of like crazy guidance. Like they were going to be pulled out Christmas Eve of 18. They were going to fly to Urbiel because they were going to pull everybody out of Syria. And then that got fragoed because, you know, there's pressure coming down from Sentcom for them to stay there. So I was one. So I was watching all this friction unfold. And I had been pretty pissed off about the way the wars were conducted up to that point through multiple administrations as well.

So I was a pretty early supporter of Trump when he went after Bush on the debate stage and said, like, we never should have gone into Iraq. We screwed the whole thing up. And so I really liked his, you know, just kind of common sense approach to foreign policy. But then watching all of this unfold, when I met Trump at Dover, I was like, screw it. I'm going to resign from the agency anyway. It's like, I'm just going to tell him how I feel. And basically I was just like, look, you're getting it right.

Like your gut instincts are right. all the so-called experts, like they're not. Keep doing what you're doing. And I thought nothing else would come from it. I thought he was just kind of humoring me. But I got a call a couple weeks later and I got a chance to go meet with Jared Kushner and some other guys in the administration. They said, look, we want to hear more from guys that are on the ground.

Like we've gotten nothing but screwed over by, you know, the adults in the room, the experts, the guys who couldn't win the war for 20 plus years, we want to hear from guys like you. And so started working a little bit on the Trump campaign, did some advisory work there. and then being in the Northwest during COVID and during the riots was a big eye-opener for me. Like I was like, man, this country's changed a lot in the time that I've been overseas deploying, like watching Portland burned down because of what Antifa was doing. Huge eye-opener for me. But then ultimately, my congresswoman, she voted for Trump's impeachment after January 6th.

And so to me, that was a real call. I was like, well, you know, if we're ever going to get involved in politics, now is the time to do it. because the woman that I voted for is not representing, you know, my need. She had also voted to keep our troops in Syria. She had a pretty bad voting record up to that point. But that was the straw that broke the camel's back. And really, I didn't even intend to run for Congress. I started going to, like, Republican meetings.

And everybody was mad that she had done this and that she had voted this way, but nobody was doing anything. And so, you know, I was looking around. I was like, is there somebody that's already, like, an established politician that's going to run against this lady that we can back? Nobody was stepping forward. And so to me, it was like, well, you know, if you're looking around trying to figure out who the leader is, congratulations. Like, that's supposed to be you.

So I said, hey, I don't know how to run for Congress, but what the hell I'll try. So, you know, I googled how do you run for Congress? So I could file all the right documents and, you know, off the races from there. So I was like a two-year campaign. So I was running against an incumbent Republican, so taking down an incumbent is pretty challenging to do. So you had to primary, you had to get through the primary first. Get through the primary, yeah. And she's incumbent.

She's an incumbent, yep. So she has the money machine and the backing. Yeah, she's got the cash. There's a couple of their candidates that are running against her as well. So we had a five-way Republican primary. How did you make yourself kind of stand out? Really getting out and talking to people. A lot of our politicians, because of the way money is involved in politics,

they can win elections by just bombarding the airwaves with millions of dollars of ads. And that can work in a lot of cases. But if you've got somebody who's kind of sideways with their voters and you're willing to get out there and do town halls and go talk to people and actually build a grassroots campaign, then you can take them down. How many days a week would you be out doing that? Like seven days a week. Because we didn't have any money or any reach. So basically anywhere where somebody would give me a room of a captive audience where I could just talk to them for a minute or two, I would show up. So we did like over 300 in person town halls in that time period. And then, you know, any kind of media we could get where I was out there,

you know, spreading the message. So it was a very much an insurgent campaign. Ultimately, we ended up beating the incumbent had 14 million spent against me spent all of our money how much money did you bring in we brought in about three and a half million which was good yeah but they they said they had 14 million in the primary and so yeah and so then well that's going to leave you without enough money or exactly where you need more money to actually run the race yeah we have really late primaries in washington so uh our primary wasn't resolved we vote first tuesday in august that's the primary but in Washington for some reason it takes us like two weeks to count the ballots. Whole different story, but it took them two weeks to sort out the primary that I was the winner.

And so by the time I was the actual Republican nominee, we were flat out of money. My campaign staff had all worked for like over a month. A couple of the vendors who really believed in me had credited me a bunch of money for ads. So we were in the whole like 200 grand going into the general. We raised another almost million dollars just in that small period. But the Democrats were smart. They sat back and they watched the Republicans just beat the crap out of each other. all summer because we did it was a bloody primary and so they hit me with six million dollars

uh basically on day one of the general so we still ended up only losing by less than a percentage point had to do a recount all that type of stuff so once the recount was over because i'm too dumb to quit i was like well we're going to run again so here we so here we are groundhog day of running for office and how's it how's it look what are the atmospherics now on this run i think they're much better we don't have a really contested republican primary um last time we had that a lot of people felt passionately about their candidates and we couldn't really just bring the party together going into the general. But I think we've got a lot more unity at this time. I'm endorsed by the state party, endorsed by all the county parties. So quite a few years there of hard work really paid off.

When is the primary take place? August. Yeah, it's in August. And then the generals in November. Presidential years, too, my district swings about five points more Republican. This is kind of a weakness of the Republicans. We've got a lot that only vote once every four years. There's a lot of people out there who only vote when the president's at the top. So 20, we had 60,000 Republicans who voted for Trump in 20, voted for Trump in 16. They just didn't turn out at all. So we anticipate most of them will come back out. We're also working heavily too on legal ballot harvesting. Washington's all mail-out voting. So it's completely legal in Washington for any person to go and collect ballots and then turn them in for people. So I don't like that. I wish we didn't do it, but those are the

rules. And Republicans for a very long time because we don't like that have said that we will not ballot harvest, like it's a point of pride. And the Democrats are like, oh, okay, we're going to go ahead and ballot harvest once the ballots drop. And that gives them about a month head start on collecting ballots. And so we're finally getting- So talk me through ballot harvesting. Yeah. So you want to go to areas where you've got the most, most of your voters. So Democrats do this really effectively in heavily urban areas. They'll hit apartment complexes, they'll hit retirement homes. Republicans, it's a little bit different for us. So we're looking at, you know, ballot boxes and churches, ballot boxes in gun stores, gun shows is another key place.

But a big thing is just activation, getting our activists out to knock on people's doors and say, hey, you have a ballot that's in the mail. If you'd like, you can vote right now and I'll take the ballot in for you. Or I'm going to keep going back and knocking on your door until I see that you've actually turned your ballot in. So you can request, and any person can do this in Washington, you can get lists from the Secretary of State that say, once the voting period has started, it will say who's turned their ballot in already.

You won't say how they voted. It'll just say whether or not they've turned their ballots. So basically every day we can start knocking people off the list that have already voted that we know are Republicans. And then we can go chase the other people who haven't turned in their ballots yet. So data drives a ton of this. So obviously it costs money to get good data, it costs money to get people out there in front of the doors. But we're doing pretty well with raising funds right now and getting activists trained up to chase those ballots. It's weird how this does not sound like a democracy, does it?

No, it's not. It sounds like just crazy. I really wish we could vote in one day in person. You show an ID card that says that you're an eligible legal voter, and you vote right there, and we count it in front of everybody on paper ballots, no machines. I wish that were the system. But right now, it's money and mobilization. Big time drives politics.

Where does your money come from? Small dollar donors. So I don't take any big corporate pack money. I get all my money from individuals. So last time when we raised $3.5 million, our average donation was $51. When we broke that down even further, like people weren't giving me $51 on one shot. It was a lot of people who like over the course of three different donations, you know, that equaled $51.

Got some people who give more, which is always greatly appreciated. But, you know, people will ask me like, oh, I can only give you $10. I can only give you $15. Like, that's how grassroots candidates run. So we're doing national level fundraising. So we're sending out, you know, mailers and text messages to people throughout the country. And then when I go on media shows and stuff like that, that helps as well. But small dollar donors, I think that's how we actually beat the corporate capture of Washington, D.C.

So when people hear that and they go, oh, go to Joe Kent for Congress.com and they can donate right there. Exactly. Whether it's five bucks, ten bucks or five. What's the max they can donate? Max you can donate is 21,000. So you can donate a lot. If you want to donate a lot, please, please do. We greatly appreciate that.

But even if it's only five bucks, man, that helps out a lot because of enough people do $5. or even folks you can do like five bucks a month, you know, just like one, what a coffee cost nowadays. If you can donate that, you can actually really help fuel a campaign. It's going to make a difference. And then what are you looking at as your concerns for America and your goals for America? Right now, I mean, we're in such a crisis. The border, I think, is a massive crisis. I was just here in February, went down to San Yard Arsito, went out to Yucuba Hot Springs and just watching that sea a humanity. It's crazy, right? It's in, I mean, it's an, very? It's an, Asian. I mean, there's no other way to put it. I mean, the Iraq-Syria border was more orderly

when I was serving there. I went to Yuma in 2021 when Biden first said the border was open. And then it was kind of what you would expect. There was a lot of Hispanic folks coming across. Most of them, I think, genuinely seemed like they were seeking economic opportunity. When I was here in February, I think I can count on one hand the number of Hispanic people. That might be our neighbors that I saw. The vast majority were military aged men, Chinese nationals, a ton of guys from the Middle East. They would say that they're a Turkish or they're from, you know, Indonesia, but I'd go and I'd talk to it. I'd talk to some of them.

They're all speaking Arabic. The Chinese nationals, to me, all look like SF guys that were invading a country low profile. I mean, like none of them looked like they had just walked through the desert to get here. They were all in basically like, you know, R.E.I. Tactical casual, you know, clean cut, physically fit. You know, what are these guys doing here? You know, and so we've had, we think, about 12 million illegals coming into the country. With that, there's also been enough fentanyl to kill every American,

multiple times over. It's like 113,000 Americans have gotten killed by fentanyl. We know the fentanyl, the precursors come from China. The cartels are pushing it across the border. We can stop this. Like it's not like a force of nature. It doesn't have to happen. If we shut down the border, we can save lives here in America. Pretty much every event I do up in my district, somebody will come up to me and they'll tell me that they lost a loved one because of fentanyl. And the vast majority of people right now that are dying from fentanyl, they're not like career drug addicts. It's people that like think they're buying an oxycodone because their health, you know, their health insurance won't cover it.

We're seeing it with the, it's getting put into the vapes and stuff now. And now a lot of it, I was just doing a ride along the other night. It's not even coming in pill form. It's coming in powder form, which means some of the stuff that's more lethal if you, if you touch it and it gets on your fingers. Like, you can OD that way. I mean, this is biological warfare that's being waged against us. So I think the border is the number one issue. Number two issue is just our out of control spending.

I mean, we're 35 trillion in debt right now because of what we've done by weaponizing the dollar with these sanctioned regime. throughout the entire world, we could lose our status as a reserve currency holder. If that's even eroded, our entire world can change really, really quickly. I mean, America's always been able just to print money, right? You know, like our, even when our economy doesn't necessarily produce anything because we shipped our manufacturing overseas, Biden's killed off our natural energy, our natural resources, we can still print more money. But that's not a luxury we're always going to have, especially of what China is doing

what the Brits countries are doing. So if we don't get that under control, that debt is going to get leveraged against our country. And so I just think we cannot continue to like, you know, be the world's policemen, provide security guarantees for the entire world. I'm not saying we completely withdraw from everything, but Washington, D.C. has got to get its budget under control. Like, it's very basic. Like, we take in just shy a $5 trillion per year, but we're spending $7.7.7.5 trillion per year. Like, we've got to get realistic. And Washington, D.C. refuses to do that. So I think those are some of the biggest issues. There's a bunch of other ones. But I think right now we're in such a bad

way between the invasion on our border and the fact that D.C. is deliberately trying to kill the dollar and saddle us with debt. And that's what's driving the inflation. That's why people can barely survive right now. I think those are probably two of the most pressing issues. Is it why, if you're in Washington, D.C., you're a part of the government right now. It's insane to just sit there and keep writing these checks. Yes. Yes. And yet no one seems to care. No. There's a handful of guys that are fighting really hard there in Washington, D.C. And they get called every name in the book all the time. But the vast majority of people in D.C. just think, well, we can just keep printing money. Like, hey, if all my special interests and a couple projects here in my district are going to

get funded, what do I care that we just blew the budget out by $2.5 trillion? And that's just the attitude in Washington. And I think that, you know, there's definitely some nefarious factor there. You know, there's people that are making money and they don't care. But I do also think that there's this bias that people have towards normalcy. If things have always been a certain way in your head, you think they could never change. Basically, everyone who's alive right now America's been the top dog. I mean, the people that were alive before World War II, they're all gone. And so all of us that are alive right now, we're like, ah, you know, America's always been on top. We've always been the prime reserve currency holder.

Actually, no, we haven't. I mean, right now, this period of like peace and relative, you know, stability and success that we're having, it's actually kind of an aberration when you look at the broad scope of history. And so I do think there's a lot of people there that are just complacent. They just think, well, you know, people have always been complaining about the debt. Ross Perot, way back the day was complaining about the debt, we can just keep doing this. And then China is making very, very big moves right now to make it so that we can't keep doing this. So your primary is in August and then it's to the polls in November. All right. You're a glutton for punishment, man. I'm a glutton for punishment. Yeah. If anybody's thinking about getting into politics, I would say it's

really important that more veterans do get involved in politics, but it's also a pretty quick way to destroy your entire life. I think it's worth it. I mean, the country's worth it. I mean, I really think... And you've got two young kids. Two young kids. And, you know, look, I mean, for a long time,

I think that our generation of warriors thought that our fight was overseas. And now we can kind of step back and see what those wars were all about, how we were allied to, how the blood and treasure of our country were squandered. I very much think the fight is here right now. Like, we cannot let this class of politicians

continue to run our country. Like, the warrior class has got to step up and really just start. asserting ourselves and saying, hey, we've seen what war is. We're not going to lead our country down that path anymore. But also, we fought bled and invested for this country. And so we are going to make sure that that is not just absolutely ground into the dirt going forward. Oh, man, man. So people can find you, Joe Kent for Congress.com. Go there. Also, you're on Twitter at Joe Kent

16 Jan 19 You're on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube All at Joe Kent for Congress That's where people can find you And help you support you And get you to where you need to be So you can go lead Echo Charles, you got any questions?

Yes Yeah So back in the day The real interview starts Back in the day, what, 2003 When you guys were talking about the tank treads Yeah And the speed bumps.

You mentioned the MPs were giving out tickets. Yeah. Who's paying the tickets? See, that was the thing. Like, I think they could eventually take away like your on-base driver's license. Yeah. Just so the individual. Yeah.

You can't go to you like your boss and say. But there wasn't like a pay. You didn't have to pay, but it was like you've been cited. Yeah. So now if we cite you again, you'll be under some sort of uniform code of military justice. Yeah. So like a write-up? Yeah.

Like the equivalent little write-up, little verbal and a write-up. I did have a buddy of mine who actually got a speeding ticket and he got kind of mouthy of the MPs and he got detained. But this was on the way back from a target and he actually had detainees. We had like one that we had come back from Target. We were back in the wire. We crossloaded the detainees onto like some admin pickup truck and he was driving them to like the actual and he gets pulled over. And he's, you know, just off a target. He's tired.

So he gets mouthy at the MPs. The MPs detain him and detain the detainees. So like our commander had to go down there. It ended up being, you know, commander had a good sense of humor about it. It was like, so you got detained, taking the detainees. Yeah, it was like one of those other moments where it's like, man, I think we've been here for a little bit too long. They pulled the old switcheroo on them. They did.

It's good for the goose. Yeah. See what I'm saying. That's my question for the day. That was your stump the chumped right there. Stump the chumped all day. Yeah, good to meet you. Nice to meet you too.

Joe, any final thoughts, man? No, man, we covered a lot. I really appreciate you having me on, man. I appreciate you providing a platform for so many of us guys from. you know, our, our generation's war to tell our story, man. I think it's really important. So appreciate what you're doing. Right on, man.

Well, it's an honor to have you here. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for sharing your lessons learned. And, of course, thanks for your sacrifice, you know, not only as a soldier, not only as a special operations, a warrior, but also as the husband of Shannon Kent, who made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom, for our security. And we can never repay the debt. owed to you and your boys.

The only thing we can do is try and live good lives. Absolutely. And honor her sacrifice, man. Amen. Thank you. And with that, Joe Kent has left the building.

Echo. Pretty awesome insight at the Intel side and the sacrifices that get made over there, the hard work that gets done. A book definitely represents that very. well so did would this is stuff that you kind of wouldn't know stuff about correct you know other than like what you see in a movie yeah and there is some you know

there's obviously there's similarities right just like there's similarities between top gun yeah the movie and top gun Dave Burke they're out there doing it just like there's similarities between terminal lists which is a show about seals and actually being a seal but are obviously things that are different. And with the Intel side, that's, you know, you see, in movies, you know, they'll show like the meeting, you know, with the source. And so they show that kind of stuff, but it's very Hollywood-ed up.

And it actually doesn't show the amount of work that it takes, man. It is hard, hard, hard, and dangerous work, clearly. So I thought it was awesome to meet Joe and hear these stories and the book's great. So get the book and send me the true story of a mother at war. Meanwhile, back over here, you know, we're trying to live good lives, trying to be the best we can. We have this opportunity. We get to do this. So let's be better.

Let's make sure we are training, reading, thinking, being smart, good fuel. check out joccofuel.com get yourself some greens get yourself some protein powder get yourself some ready to drink protein get yourself an energy drink I have one right here yeah things are good and good for you and good for you cross the board joccofuel.com check it out

everything that you need also you got doms today yeah full body doms okay so what was it caused by Well, in a nutshell, short answer, a congregation, if you will, of consecutive workouts involving ghee jiu-jitsu, which I haven't done for a few months. Gee, there's all been no ghee, and squats. So I did squats and then drank them all straight to jiu-jits. Yeah, that'll do it. The other day, I did 10 rounds with like kind of the heavy hitters.

Yeah, you know? Yes. I was definitely feeling that one. Oh, yeah, 10 rounds. Even like, yeah, you guys, you're crazy for always going 10 rounds. So what's the, generally speaking? I'm not saying to fulfill your deal, whatever. Like, to me, I'm going to say mine.

You tell me if this is acceptable. So five rounds to me is kind of like the minimum standard. So if you go five rounds, you go home and you're like, cool. Yeah, you go four rounds. You're like, I could have done at least one. And then you kind of really wish you did maybe two more, right? If you're at four, you do six rounds. You're like oh shit I'm kind of feeling that you do eight rounds that's a full day to me six to eight you're you're in the zone for sure

Yeah you go 10 now you're just like hey this is like an extra credit day. That's how I feel but let's let's face it there's a whole other variable that we're not talking about that's who you're rolling with yes because let's face it You know if you're going with the heavy hitters yeah You know and that even that is different because if you go with a heavy hitter like you go with someone that's big and slow You're not moving a bunch you maintain you got to fight that something, get a little burn in your arm because you're trying to keep your, you go to someone that's moving the whole time? Yeah. Now you're getting that.

So, you know, who you're rolling with? Yeah. That's a big, big piece. Bro, I'll go do 100 rounds. Yeah. You know what I mean? Do you know what I mean? Yes, I do.

And not even get a workout. Yeah. Meanwhile, I do two rounds. No, yeah. With someone that's getting after it. You know, you might feel different. Well, oddly, maybe ironically, I don't know a little terminology, but the times that I do do eight, nine, 10. Let's face it. I've only done all 10 probably a handful of times.

Total. By the way. But every single time where it's like eight, nine, 10 rounds or whatever, it's always been with that. You know, the fucking, what do you call? The heavy hitters. The one that you organize. Yeah. Otherwise, who's going 10 rounds? Exactly right. But think about it. When you go to the regular class, who's doing 10 rounds? Kind of not everybody, you know? Well, in a normal class, usually they'll do five. Yeah, fine. Exactly. Right. That's about a half an hour of work. You know, then people got to get back to their job, their kids, there are all this other stuff going on. Right, it's true. Because you already spent some time doing the training, doing the drills, doing the learning the techniques. Yeah, it's true. So yeah, full body doms from squats,

then straight to jiu-jits. Now, you were telling me something about protein the other day, like getting it in the system. Yeah. What was the bro science behind that? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay, this is from Thomas DeLauer, by the way, one of his things.

We're going to do something with him. But nonetheless, very well-aclished guy in the fitness industry. So he knows a lot more than me, and I listened to him. So he went over this idea. Your bro science, but it came from a legit source. Legit source, exactly, right. So basically, in a nutshell, because he goes deep into it, like the mechanics, you know, the mechanism is all this stuff.

But after you work out and you're trying to get in your protein, if you ingest a high dose of protein after the workout, it'll send a bigger signal for protein synthesis, meaning you absorb the protein. More like the signal that tells your body to absorb the protein Physiologically is bigger. It's a bigger signal if you take in more. So the milk train is kind of trying to leave the building and you've got to get on the milk train. Oh, Dave. There's 30 grams where we're at? It's actually like more than that more.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think if I'm not mistaken, I could be wrong, but I think he was like at least 60. So two moks. If you go two mokes at 60, yeah? Boom. Boom. And then he talks, he says other stuff in there. One was with like the different types.

of protein so there's like fast digesting slow digesting so if you do the fast digesting first then you get the slow digesting then you can have the fast boom and it's like this on slot of just protein synthesis over time see I'm saying so the way I said it that's totally real science you got to listen to him you're gonna say it way more eloquently than me but we get the message see I'm saying all you need is okay what are we doing then we taking in plenty of protein after workout how about that do you feel like eating when you get done working out yeah but

There's like a window, you know. So like three minutes after your last set or three minutes after your last round, no, I don't feel like eating at all. But you take shower, you sit down. Oh, yeah. You feel like eating, drinking the whole deal, 100%. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

The doms. So you need the protein for the doms, but don't forget about that joint warfare. Yeah. Some of that super cruel. Oh, by the way, so people were asking super krill versus fish oil. Yeah. because we brought up fish oil. And people like, I thought the krill oil is better.

Hey, if you can, some people can't have krill because it's shellfish. So they can't. They're allergic to it. We actually, we actually created the fish oil to make up for that. And some people just prefer fish oil. So personal preference. My recommendation is if you can take krill oil, take krill oil. If you can't, for whatever reason, that's okay.

that's where we made the fish oil. And some people just, what they're looking for is fish oil. So, and they're asking for fish oil. So we made fish oil because not everyone translates directly to it. I want fish oil. And you say, well, I got krill oil for you. And they go, no, I want fish oil. Like you went to a restaurant.

And you say, I want pizza. And the person says, no, I have cake. Tacos. Yeah. You're like, well, I don't want tacos. I don't want cake. It's different. So that's what we did.

But if you can handle the krill oil, then get the krill oil. But if you have a shellfish or you want, for whatever reason you prefer fish oil, we got you. It's all good. So I wanted to mention that. Hey, anyways, you heard the deal. joccofuel.com. You need fuel. Go get some.

Also, Wawa. We got the, we got the, the milk, ready to drink protein at Wawa, vitamin chop, G&C, military commissaries, Afeas, Hanford, dash stores in Maryland, wake firm, shop, right, HV, down and take. Heyas, dude, they're building like walls of jaco fuel. So everyone in Texas, thank you for getting after it. Same thing with Meyer up in the Midwest. Thank you for getting after it.

Same thing with Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness. Don't forget about Wegmans up in the Pennsylvania area. They've got pallets on the floor. So go get some of that. Shields. And look, small gyms, if you've got a little gym, you got a CrossFit gym, you got a Jitza gym, you got a powerlifting gym,

and you want them to sell Jock Fuel there? or you want to sell joccofu there because it's yours good email jf sales at joccofuel.com so there we go also origin usa.com you heard joe kent mention the fact that we gave up a lot of manufacturing we let it go overseas well at origin USA we are bringing it back to america that's what we're doing we are bringing manufacturing back we brought the we brought the freaking equipment back on ships that's what we did and now we got it Americans are being trained to use it. They've been trained to use it. We had the people that had the knowledge that passed it on. So if you don't want communism in the world, if you don't like slave labor in the world,

if you want America's economy to be strong, if you want the world to have a clean environment, because do you think they care one iota about the environment in China? They don't care at all. They don't care. It doesn't matter to them. And in many countries overseas, that's a lot. That's the those are the facts. They don't have the EPA. They don't have any rules and regulations about what they can dump into the water or blow out their smoke stack into the atmosphere.

They don't have any rules. So we have rules here. There's a reason for those rules because we care about the environment. We care about our workers. OriginUSA.com, get the best gear you can buy. By the way, best gear. By far.

Just FYI. Best gear. And we got new gear coming out all the time. We're getting better and better. We got new like workout gear. Awesome. So anyways, check it out origin USA.com. Go get your boots.

Go get your jeans. Wouldn't it suck to wear an American pair of jeans that aren't made in America? It's like a oxy. Bro, you don't want to do that. OriginUSA.com. Go get it. Hey, one more thing. We have law enforcement jiu-jitsu training, August 27th through the 31st up in Maine.

So if you're in law enforcement, you got some people on your crew, you want to go to train J-Git-We've got a bunch of experienced jujitsu. law enforcement officers that are going to be up there helping teach going through the mechanics of combatives. So please come and check that out. That was also at origin USA.com. Do you know the schedule for that? Like is that like a few times a day? Is it kind of like the camp? It's kind of like immersion camp.

Also, J.P. Danel is going to be up there. He's going to be talking through leadership inside law enforcement. So it's going to be awesome. It's going to be an awesome camp. So check that out. Yeah, that would be good. Also, Jocko store called Jocco Store, where he can represent discipline equals freedom.

on her apparel. Got some cool shirts, some hats, some hoodies on there. Summer's coming up, maybe less need for a hoodie, but we got some good stuff on there. My daughter, Rana. Yeah.

We were talking the other day. Oh, yeah. And she said something, she said discipline equals freedom. Or I said discipline equals freedom. But what she said was, she was, it's so true. Yeah.

And I was like, okay, guess it landed. Yep. You know, it landed. It did land. And you get on the mats of justice, you realize it's truth. Yeah.

You know? Yeah, you're not kind of, you don't feel like you're scrambling all the time for something if you've been disciplined in that little something. And that goes for anything. So, the one, any something is true. Because, you know, I grew up, we grew up working out. Well, I grew up, like, working out. Yeah, yeah.

Pretty much. When it was time to start working out, I start working out. We, yeah. Oh, hell, yeah. So, you know, every once in a while. And this is just, this is going to seem obvious. But I think if you pause and think about it, just like Hannah did. Because she'd been hearing discipline equals freedom.

Since when? Since a long time. 2015, like, well, since she was a child. Yeah. And even at age, whatever, 20, whatever, 23. Even at 23, she's saying that out loud. It's true. Yeah, but I would say this.

The way she said it, it was almost like as if the full recognition, the full understanding came to fruition in her head. So there's, imagine you're looking through a scope and there's like fog and there's some blurriness and then all of a sudden it just comes in a perfect vision. Exactly. Boom. Or like you're using your red camera. Sure.

And you know how it has those little lines around whatever's in focus? Focus assist with you all that. Do you use focus assist? Is that considered weak to use focus assist? Put it this way. Did I just, did I just dime you out? No, no, no, no. Do you lose respect from the people out there?

I don't think so. And if I do, hey, that's true. So I put it this way. If people deep in the industry said, hey, it is weak, it's weak to use focus. I would that would make sense to me but I'm still gonna use focus assist okay well as focus assist on the red camera sure do the other cameras have that yeah yeah for sure well it came in a focus like that far yeah just the way she said it she goes it's so true yeah yeah oh yeah and that and you don't want to say that you

don't want to give your dad props right you know what I mean it's hard after 23 years you're like you know what you kind of right about this stuff you know what I mean did you ever did you ever give your dad props about something No, not. See? Yeah, actually, yeah, like 30 years later. What was it? Do it and it'll be done.

Do it and it'll be done. Yeah. He made it. He got an approval. Actually, yeah, yeah, I gave him the props. But I give him indirect props by using a lot of his old stuff, but I never really gave him the props, which actually I might. Yeah, BC, the legend of BC. Is there one more example you can give?

One never know, do one. He used always say that. One never know, do one. And what that is is like some poetic way of saying like you don't know you just don't know do you right one never know do one and then I remember thinking by you sound dumb saying that so freaking whatever and then I say that I say that stuff to my kids all the time like you just never know one never know one never know do one that's a good idea you know what that kind of reminds me the iterative decision making process yeah okay you don't really know yeah take a little step and let's see yeah and a lot he would use it a lot of times when something would happen that like you were expecting something else to happen and then you know so it just shit doesn't go all the way that you think it's going to go every single time that was his whole point and then it's like it was his point after something would happen or when you're going into a situation it'll just be like one never know do one nonetheless yes but you're correct and hannah is correct

too because and when i say the working out thing it's like that's where you can kind of remind yourself how true that is. Because like if you're working out all the time and you're in freaking great shape and then you go out and have dessert on Valentine's Day or you know, whatever, you're free to do that

because, right, your body's just going to burn through that whole thing. Like even in and of itself is going to burn through the whole thing because all the working out you've been doing and then not to mention when you go work out tomorrow or I's going to burn through even more.

So it's like literally no factor. You're free, completely free from the effects of that dessert. But if you're not disciplined, it's like, bro, that's just one more freaking stack upon stack of just terribleness onto your health. You see what you're saying.

So I understand. Unless. Yes. So if you want to represent, you know, we got some cool new, we got a new design. It's out. This one equals freedom version four. I saw it. And I got to admit, I liked it.

Not bad, right. It's squared squared away. Because let's face it, I'm not going to say you're off base in the early version, the earliest version. Yeah. But let's face it. My immediate modification was a big step. Improvement.

It was like going from, it wasn't like iPhone, you know, 1.1 to iPhone 1.2. It was like Blackberry. It was like Motorola Razor to iPhone 9. Okay. All right. Hey, look, I can't refute that. But this new one that you made,

step up, bro. Legit. It's a good one. Credit. The old school, the original OG, has some, like, you know how you have the rough draft of something,

and you always have a little special place in your heart for the rough draft, you know. It's not the first. It's a classic. It's a classic. Exactly. Right.

See what I'm saying. They're all available. They're all available. Get anyone you want. But yes, there is a new one out there. Also the short locker. It's a subscription scenario, if you don't know. You know, it's like you get a new design every month.

Some good designs there. I saw that people, or I noticed, that other people noticing the sugar-coated lies one. That's from two months ago, by the way. That seems to have landed very well. Lended very well. Lies-wise. Yeah. So I'm considering maybe releasing that one.

just to the general public you know so people can represent you know okay lies lies sugar coated lies lies lies it says lies twice yeah just kind of it's kind of a big deal there's other ways you could have done it right yeah but you didn't

put it twice thank you for that confirmation nonetheless it's called the shirt locker but it's on jocco store.com so pull them you can see the deal you want to check that out there's some examples of some of the designs on there too so you can kind of see what up But yeah, go on there.

Check. Like something, get something. Also check out primalbeef.com and or Colorado craftbeef.com. These are two steak companies right here in America. Primal beef out there in the Shenandoah Valley and Colorado craft beef, obviously up there in Colorado, making the tastiest steaks. And by the way, ground beef and by the way, hot dog, like, and by the way, meat sticks and jerky. So check them out. primalbeef.com, Coloradocraftbeef.com, great companies, great people, great stakes.

Go get some. Also subscribe to the podcast. And don't forget about Janko Underground. And don't forget about the YouTube channels. And don't forget about psychological warfare. And Flipside Canvas, Canvus Dakota Meyer making cool stuff to hang on your wall. Plus books, obviously today we covered Send Me the True Story of a Mother at War. Just check that book out.

Written by Marty Scoveland. I haven't given you much love there. Marty Scoveland. and he co-authored it with Joe Kent, but fantastic book, check it out. Also, I've written a bunch of books. So if you want to check out the books that I've written, you can check those out, especially.

You might want to check out those Warrior Kid books. Just, and actually, I should have talked about it with Joe. His kids love them. So check out Wave the Warrior Kid, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Check out Mikey and the Dragons. And then the books that I've written, you can check those out as well. Also, we have a leadership consultancy.

Just got back from the muster in, Nashville, Tennessee. How was it? Outstanding. Yeah, it's really, the event is always good, but just how smooth it is and how everyone's so much more refined.

Yeah, the experience great. Tilt was there too, representing. Tilt came out. Man, how awesome was that? Oh, yeah. Yeah, he was fired up to be there. He was signing books and taking pictures. The legend.

The next muster that we have is in Dallas. It's 16 to 18 October. So look, these events always sell out. This will sell out too. So if you want to go, go register now. Also, we have something called the council. And these are up in Washington State. They are very isolated.

It's very detached. It's a very small group of people. And if we've got Council 4 is sold out. And then that's going to be followed by Council 5. We have a few seats left, 26 to 29 June. So if you want to come check that out, go register quick. Also, we have the Women's Assembly. down in San Antonio, Texas, September 11th through the 13th.

So again, if you want to come to one of our events, check that up. But also, if you just have, if you just need leadership help inside your organization, go to Aslanfront.com. That's what we do there. Also, we have online training at the Extreme Ownership Academy. Go to Extreme Ownership.com. And if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help their families. You want to help Gold Star families.

Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization if you want to donate or you want to get involved. off to go to america's mighty warriors.org also heroes and horses.org that's micah fink's charity organization up in montana taking taking our veterans up into the mountains so they can get lost and get found jimmy may has also got his organization beyond the brotherhood dot org check that one out and if you want to connect with us once again jo kent jocent for congress dot com he's on Twitter at Joe Kent 16 Jan 19 and he's also on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube at Joe Kent for Congress.

I'm at jaco.com and I'm on social media at Jocko Willink echoes at Echo Charles. Just be careful of the algorithm. Don't let it get you. And thanks once again to Joe Kent for joining us tonight and a solemn salute to a true warrior, senior chief Shannon Kent. Thank you, Senior Chief, for your leadership, your courage, your service, and your sacrifice. We will follow your example. And thanks to all the men and women around the world right now, especially tonight to those from the Intel community

that work so hard in the shadows and take great risks to gather the information needed to protect our great nation. Thank you for what you do every day. Also thanks to our police law enforcement firefighters paramedics EMTs dispatchers correctional officers board of patrol secret service as well as all other first responders Thank you for risking your lives to keep us safe here at home and everyone else out there just remember Remember that what you do what you get to do What we get to do we have that opportunity. We have that freedom because other men and women for over 200 years have gone out and put their lives at risk for our freedom.

And remember that they're people. They're real people. People like Senior Chief, Shannon Kent, a wife, a mother, a daughter, a warrior who sacrificed her life for us. Remember all those brave warriors and live accordingly. And that's all we've got tonight. Until next time, Zekko and Jocko out.