Jocko Podcast - 456: 1st Of The 506th. Protecting Our Way of Life. With Jason Kedzior.

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

>Join Jocko Underground< In the Battle of Ramadi, in 2005 and 2006, the soldiers from the 1st of the 506th upheld the highest traditions of bravery and professionalism-and it was an honor for SEALs from Task Unit Bruiser to fight alongside them. Jason Kedzior is one of those soldiers.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocco podcast number 456 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink. Good evening, good evening. Lieutenant Colonel Ron Clark, commander of the first of the 506, Red Curahy, told us that if we were looking for action, we'd find it. Although firefights and other hostile action are routine, IEDs are the worst problem, he said. They were responsible for five of the six deaths. His men have suffered since deploying in January. As of mid-May, his troops at Camp Corregador on eastern Ramadi had suffered 380 attacks from IEDs while finding and destroying 667 more. Corregador is roughly the size of a super Walmart, including the parking lot.

Buildings and houses outside the perimeter that the enemy could temporarily occupy are so close that they could practically heave mortars at us by hand. on average the camp gets shelled every other day Clark told us that because attacks are so constant body armor and helmet are required anytime you leave a reinforced roof building An added attraction is the snipers who occasionally pop off around into the camp from the minarets They know of Americans unwillingness to attack religious buildings Even if they're clearly being used for military activity

when I asked Colonel Clark why Iraqi army or police couldn't be used to make sure nobody entered the mosques with weapons, he was quick to say, we never hesitate to fire back when fired upon. However, he added, our fight requires strict cultural and religious sensitivity in order to be successful and legitimatize the Iraqi government and army. The constant threat of snipers and mortar attacks contributes greatly to the general unpleasantness. of life in Corregor. The camp is also short on amenities, even by Iraqi standards. It's also short on men. Company strength should be 136.

Charlie Company originally had 138 men, but because of casualties and normal leave time, Captain Claiborne, the Charlie Company commander, says he's down to only 102 men available for operations. Luckily, I've not had any soldiers killed while on the battlefield, he says, but I've taken a lot of casualties due to IEDs, shrapnel, and bullet wounds. I've had close to 20% of my company right now eligible for Purple Hearts, if that tells you anything. And those right there are some excerpts from an article called The New Band of Brothers, written by Michael Fomento, a journalist, and former U.S. Army Airborne Soldiers. who embedded with several units in Ramadi in 2006, including obviously the first of the 506. He also, by proxy, was therefore embedded with seals

from task unit Bruiser. And the 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, is a legendary unit that traces its lineage back to the 506th parachute infantry regiment of World War II. Formed in Georgia, 1942, its nickname the Curahees from Curahe Mountain, which translated from Cherokee means stand alone.

And they fought extensively in World War II at Normandy, the Rhineland, the Ardennes, Bastone. They fought throughout the Vietnam War, including during the Tet Offensive and the counteroffensive in the Battle of Hamburger Hill. And in World War II in Vietnam, they were decorated with four presidential units. citations into Valerous Unit Awards. And of course, the 506 was memorialized and honored by the HBO special Band of Brothers and Outstanding miniseries based on the historical account from Stephen Ambrose's book by the same name, Band of Brothers.

And in the Battle of Ramadi in 2005, 2006, the soldiers from the 1st of 506th upheld without question the highest traditions of bravery and professionalism. And it was an honor for the seals of tasking a bruiser to fight alongside them. And it's also an honor to have one of those very soldiers, Jason Kedziore, here with us tonight to talk about his experiences and lessons learned from that battle. Jason, thanks for coming on, man. Thanks for having me, Jocko. Yeah, I guess this kind of started many years ago. We were both home, but I got a letter to sent to my gym.

And in the letter from you was your battle patch, the ace of spades from your helmet, first of the 506, might be the coolest and most meaningful thing that anyone has ever given me. So that battle patch just represents so much that that happened between the first of 506 and the guys, my guys. So when you reached out to me again and said you were going to be in San Diego, I said, hey, man, let's have a chat. Yeah. So thanks for coming out, man. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's honored to be here. Let's get your story, man.

So you grew up where? Yeah, I grew up in a small town, Peking, Illinois. It's about 40,000 people, blue-collar town. Most people know Peoria, which is on the other side of the Illinois River from Pekin. And it was formerly Caterpillar headquarters. So, you know, your grandpa probably worked there. Your dad probably worked there. Your uncles probably worked there.

But no, from Pekin, just. surrounded by cornfields and just a, just a small town and but good people. What'd your, what'd your mom and dad do? So my mom's been with the federal government for, for, you know, over 30 years. You know, she worked at a United States attorney's office and then Bureau of Prisons and a federal defender's office. And my dad was a local police officer. Any prior military or any military in the background, grandparents or anything like that,

or your dad? Yes, quite a bit actually. So on my mom's side, my great-grandpaul was in the Navy, and he got, he was drafted. But he was, him and my great-grandmother, they had like a little, like a little coffee shop, or I'm sorry, a little, like a convenience store. and like my grandpa was was young at the time and so when he got his draft notice to go he was older he was like in his 30s was this for world war two world war two and so um he's like well i got to go and my great grandma was like well what do you what are you what are you doing you're just to leave me here with what did he didn't fight it or anything like that i guess it was some sort

he was a he was a character and and he left and um i don't really nobody really knows where where he was at in World War II, he was a CB. And, um, but somehow he ended up acquiring like a, a German Luger and, uh, and a, uh, Japanese Imperial Army rifle at somehow, uh, and my, one of my uncles still has those today. Um, and then, um, my grandpa, he was, uh, he was in the Marines, uh, during the Korea timeframe, but he was sent to, he was sent to Hawaii while his friends were sent to Korea and they never, um, Let him live that down. And then my grandma's brother, he was a pilot and crashed over the Pacific, but it was like in the 50s.

It was in a wartime, and nobody really knows what happened there either. What about your dad? My dad, he was a Vietnam veteran. He was a he was a door gunner on a Huey in 1965 with the first air cab. Get some. Yeah, yeah. Very quiet about it. You know, 5,000 Hueys went to Vietnam and.

3,200 of them were lost in combat. I did not know that. That's insane. That's insane. And the average age of the whole crew, all of them together was like 20, including the pilot, the co-pilot, the crew chief, and the gunner. Yeah. Yeah.

He doesn't really talk about it that much. I mean, I remember asking him when I was like little, you know, hey, what was it like, you know, did you ever kill anybody, you know, that sort of stuff? And he was like, son, I was a doorkner and nom. And I remember we were driving down the interstate. I don't even know where we're going. And there was some timber along the road. And after like a long, long pause, like the conversation had switched, right?

And he just looked over at me and he said, Jason, he's like, do you know how hard it is to know that when you're flying at 150 feet? And, you know, they're in there in the tree line. And the conversation just ended. So I didn't ask anything else. Do you have brothers or sisters? Yeah, two brothers, a younger brother and an older brother. So you're the middle child. Yeah.

Well, my older brother is quite a bit older. He's 16 years older than me. And so I really, I don't have a lot of memories of him. He went off to college and stuff when I was really little. Did he go in the military? No, I was the only one. You're the only one. All right.

So you're growing up, what are you into when you're growing up going to school? I just, I mean, playing and playing on. outside doing sports. I mean, I always had a ball in my hand. I was no good at anything, but I love playing baseball, I love playing basketball, that sort of stuff. Did you play in high school? No, right before I was a pretty good baseball player, but I got him getting hit by a pitch and never picked up a bat again. And so, which was a big regret of mine, but I had really good hand-eye coordination, but I just never stuck with it. And then what about music, where you into music or anything.

I've never played any instruments or anything, but I was really into the Dave Matthews band. Okay. I love the Dave Matthews band. See, this occasionally works, man. Casey get the whole vibe, Echo Charles, noddingly too, by the way. Dave Matthews, all day. I love Dave Matthews.

All day, all day. You spent a bunch of time, so you grew up around corn. Yeah. Out there, detassling corn? Yeah. Let's go. Give us a brief on detassling corn. Were you doing it back in the day

Like riding in the front of on like a little rack with kids sitting in there to pull the corn out? Oh yeah Oh yeah I mean that we were yeah we were doing that and we were we were walking the fields too So I mean it was it was pretty hard work so explain detasseling corn okay So all right so when you when you when you start the process of decattasseling corn First of all what's the tassel all about you got to explain to people okay So a lot of people on here they're they don't know anything about this all right So you have male and female rows of corn, right? And the tassel that you have to pick is pollinates the corn.

And when it's at the end of the pollination process or to control the pollination process, you have to pick that corn or pick that tassel. And the corn is 10 foot tall at this point. And so, I mean, sometimes you have to, if it's corn is too tall, then that's when you're getting on a tractor and go on it. But if it's a manageable height, then I mean, you're getting up there and getting that tassel. But it was super hard work.

I mean, so I was pretty sheltered growing up. I went to a Catholic school. And so when I was in seventh or eighth grade when I started, when I got on that detassling bus, I learned a lot about life on that detassling bus, stuff that I never heard before. There's all kinds of things going on the detassing bus. Because this is what? Just packed with a bunch of things? bunch of kids between the ages of 13 and 20? Yeah, I mean, the, like the crew boss or the assistant

crew boss was, um, uh, was probably in high school and, you know, and then like the, the pickers or whatever are, are going to be, you know, in seventh or eighth grade and going into high school. And so it's just like a young crew going out there, um, into these cornfields. And so, um, what time you start in the morning? You're starting early. I mean, you're getting up at five in the morning and you got to be getting on the bus by, you know, 530 and you're probably out of the field within 30 minutes. And you got your, you got your lunch bucket and just a, and just a jug of water. And that's what you have for the day. And, I mean, you're, you know, when you, when you start there, the corn is, is wet. I mean, it's soaking wet from the dew from the day before. And then,

and then maybe if it rained or whatever, I mean, it's just the, the fields muddy. And I mean, you're just, I mean, you're walking through that, those fields. and I mean you're just soaking wet by the time you reach and and then you know get then it gets to be like you know 95 degrees outside and then you're just all stiff from you know the salt or whatever it is and it's just it's it was hard work but man it was a lot of fun um but going back I mean to in order to in order to in order to control this pollination process so so so each so you know the silk that comes off the corn all right so each piece of silk that is off that corn, it goes to each individual kernel on that corn. And so when you pick that tassel, it controls the pollination process. And so, yeah, you would just, you would go, you would walk down the fields and you don't know how long the field is most of the time and you're just, you're just going out there. And then you're just, you're just hopping row to row to row and then walking back.

And then when I, when I became a crew boss and assistant crew boss, I was, I was, yeah, I was, yeah. Yeah, I was driving the tractor and... When do you get done? Did you just work all day until sunset? No, we usually kind of cut like probably around, I'd probably say around three o'clock in the afternoon. So we were home by dinner. How much money did you make? I mean, you're like probably $4 or $5 an hour, you know?

I mean, probably, yeah, yeah. So it was, I mean, but like you thought... What about when you were the tractor driver? Did you make a little bit more? Yeah, yeah. Every step up you made because it goes off like your picking quality. you too right so I mean like you're if you're a fast picker I mean you might you know get like you might stay a little bit extra to make a little bit more money and and then they they like okay

hey this guy this guy gets it he's able to and you it's you know baby steps and your your crew boss is training you how to drive that tractor because I mean I didn't know how to I mean I was 12 years old you know I don't know how to drive a stick shift and so like I'm driving a stick shift and turning that that big tractor and making sure I don't miss a row is you know you're going down and but I had a lot of fun and it was hard work in the sun, but it was just good hard work. And that's what you did every summer? Every summer.

From the time you were 12? No, I mean, I was in whatever seventh grade is. Yeah, seventh grade I think is 12. Okay, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, all the way through high school until my senior year high school. How much money could you make over the summer? Man, I don't even know. I mean, I guess it just depends.

Could you get a few grand to buy like a little pickup truck or something? Yeah, I'm sure I did make a, make a few grand, but I don't even know where that money. That money is long gone. Right on. Did you start, when did you start having an interest in the military? Well, I was, there was always an interest in the military. I was, I would watch like almost every war movie that was out there. I mean, I mean, you know, Rambo and missing in action, firebirds, fly to the intruder.

I mean, I'm going way back. I know. But so it was always like how about platoon apocalypse now in full metal jacket? So I so my grandpa, he was in the Marines. I remember, uh, I remember seeing, he would always watch that. And so like I would, so I remember going in one time and it was just me and my grandpa and I was that opening scene and I'm just like this is out of control. You know, I never had seen anything like that. And he, he just let it play.

And I mean, the opening scene, by the way, is 45 minutes long. So before people made. What does it call me? Make a thing for YouTube and it's a bunch of different things. Mashup? Yeah. So before people made mashups on YouTube,

somebody in my platoon made a videotape mashup of cool parts of movies. And, you know, it would be like a minute of this and two minutes of that. And then it went to the beginning of Full Metal Jack and just played 45 minutes straight.

It's like, yep, the whole thing is freaking epic. So you show what? Your grandfather took it to you? Yeah, took me? Yeah, took me down. I mean, well, I mean, I don't know if I, he, he just let it play. And I was just sitting there watching it.

So that was like my first, like, you know, like, really, because I don't even really know how I, because, I mean, you're talking VHS. So I don't even know really how I got away with watching like rainbow and stuff like that. But I did. And I was, I loved it. And, and yeah, so that's, that's kind of where the interest, that's where the interest was. I mean, because, you know, my, like, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, I was too young when my great grandpa when he passed.

So, like, I didn't really ask to them or anything like that. My dad was so quiet about it that I never, that I, that, that it, there, it wasn't like a big influence on me, like, oh, you're, you know, you're going to go here. It just was something that I was always interested in. So you're in high school, September 11th happens. What year for you? Sophomore. Sophomore year.

Sophomore year. I remember being in, uh, history class. It was first period, and they had a TV on one of those rollers, and they rolled it in, and one of the towers was already hit, and we saw the second one come in live, and everybody just knew then. I mean, they were just saying, hey, we're going to war. Like, this is, this is it, and I was a sophomore, and I just remember being so angry. I was so angry, and that was kind of it. that was kind of it. And then like the influence of like my older brother,

he was really kind of pushing me towards that way because I was pretty, I was wild in high school. And, and, hold on a second. You can't just breeze by. I was wild in high school.

What were you doing? So like I wasn't getting any trouble or anything. So it's okay. So like I had mentioned my, my dad was a local police officer, right? In this, in the town that I grew up in. Well, he was,

he was not only like the local police officer, But he was, do you guys have crime stoppers here or whatever? Isn't that like a community program type thing? Yeah, so it was like a crime prevention thing. And they would do like reenactments and stuff like that. And so like his face would be on all these reenactments of, hey, can you help us solve this crime? Call this number and he would have a reenactment for it. So like with a unique last name that I had and then my dad being a local police officer,

or like it was almost like I felt like I had to kind of prove myself that I wasn't a, I wasn't a cop's kid. And so I drank a lot and went to, went to a bunch of parties and I got caught at everything I did by my parents and sleeping. He's a bad criminal. Just getting rolled up. I was terrible. Plus your dad's a cop, dude.

I didn't have a chance. I didn't have a chance. And trying to, you know, and like I'm thinking I'm young and lying about. about what I'm doing and like, why are you all muddy? I was like, oh, I don't know, but I was really sleeping in a beanfield, you know, trying to, trying to get away from the cops and it was so dumb.

That's a great answer. Why are you so muddy? I don't know. That's like the first time I met J.P. to know, and he had, you know, like cuts on his knuckles and like a broken couple fingers. And I'm like, what happened to you? And he looks at me and goes, I fell down the stairs.

Even he knew, even he knew that he was, He said and be trying to lie to me. He's like, I fell down the stairs. I was like, uh, who'd you hit? And he goes, uh, blah, blah, blah. And we had a little conversation about that. But yeah, when you're, when you think you're gonna get away with some stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. So it was just, it was just me being like a, like a rebel trying to go against the grain of, of me being this, you know, um, oh, I'm the cops kid. So there's, you know, a certain, certain way I should act. But I was just like, no, like, I can show you I can get down and, man. Let's go that bean field. Yeah. Did you guys party out in the cornfields?

Yeah, yeah. That's where the ragers were, man. I mean, like, you know, when the parents were gone and, you know, a big party would be. And then, you know, of course, you know, the sheriff would come to break it up and then we'd all just scatter, you know. And so your older brother saw that you could be possibly not making the best decisions. He absolutely, he 100% saw it. He 100% saw it. and I actually owe a lot to him for kind of guiding me in that direction because he knew.

I mean, he knew. And he was, I mean, he was, I mean, he already, yeah, he was, yeah, he was well out of college and, and, you know, starting his own career and, you know, had, you know, a couple of kids, my niece and nephew at the time. And so he knew. And I owe a lot to him to, to, to, to that he guided me down that path. And so, I mean, there were no college visits. there were there were nothing like that i mean i knew exactly what i wanted to do with with his guidance and and uh and going to the military so it was just kind of complete high school you weren't striving for any valedictorian or anything no no there was nothing nothing like that at all so how long until

when you graduate high school would you go straight to the recruiter did you go did you go did you enlist while you were still in high school like some kids do no it was uh it was after i graduated and i went to, I went to the Army recruiter and I said, hey, get me into Afghanistan, because we were in Afghanistan. I was like, hey, get me into Afghanistan. I want to go infantry. I'm ready to go tomorrow. And they're like, hey, hey, hey, slow down, slow down. Like, hold on, hard charger. And this is what, 2003? This was 2003. Yeah, May of 2003. Okay, so as soon as you graduate. Yeah. Okay. And I mean, I was the easiest recruit that ever, I didn't know anything about bonuses. I didn't know anything about, I didn't know anything about anything.

I just, I saw Rambo and I was like, hey, let's, let's go. I want to get into that fight. Like, do not let this war end before I can get over there. I want to go kill as many bad guys as I possibly can. And I wanted, like, I'm ready to go tomorrow. Yep, that recruiter. I wonder how well those recruiters spot that kid. They didn't even have to do, they didn't have to do anything.

They're just like, oh, we got a special spot for you. Yeah. How long they take before you were able to leave? So I was on the delayed entry program, Because so many people, because at that point, we went to Iraq, and the invasion started in Iraq in 2003. And so I left in October of 2003 to go to basic training in. So did you get one more summer of detassling in? Did you de-tassel you last summer?

I don't recall. I don't think I did. I don't think I did. You leave for basic in October of 2003. 2003? Yeah, 2003. And so how's basic training? It was, well, I mean, it was a, it was a shock to me

because I had never, I had never, you know, experienced anything like that. And, well, like going back, it was, like, I remember my, like, I remember my, like, so I didn't even really, I didn't tell my parents I was, I was doing this. I was just, I just was going. And then I eventually told them at some point. And I remember my dad being, like, super upset.

about it. And I remember he came, like when the, when the recruiter came to pick me up to take me down to St. Louis to go, I remember. But you hadn't told, so you enlisted in sometime right after high school in the delayed entry program and you didn't tell your parents? Yeah. I mean, I just, yeah, I mean, I was just like, hey, this is, I mean, again, it's like, it was the rebel, right? It was wild. Like, I got it figured out, right? I got it figured out. I know what I'm doing. Like, I'm all good. Of course. And you knew everything. I knew everything. Obviously. Yeah. And so. And so I remember my dad coming over to the house, and it was right before the recruiter was supposed to come pick me up. And he was like, Jason, you know, don't do it.

Don't get in there. There's nothing I can do for you if you get in that car. And I was like, no, I know exactly what I want to do. But I know he was coming from a good place. He was coming because he never talked about Vietnam, and still doesn't. but he he knew from picking up the infantry, seeing the bloody messes that was happening, picking up dead soldiers,

probably mowing down a bunch of people. He knew exactly what he was saying, but it just didn't, he was just saying, all you are is a number. All you are is a number. Don't go and do it. But I mean, I did it anyway. and but he was coming from a really good place.

He was coming from a good place and I knew it. But it took me, it took me several years after the fact to, because I remember that conversation. But then, but as far as basic training, it was a, well, just FYI, I mean,

there's a whole phase of life where kids don't listen to their parents. Right. And it's like, maybe it starts around between the ages of probably six and 10 is where it starts and it maybe finishes at like between 25 and 40

you know it's like a whole it could be anywhere in there yeah you know uh and it's that's actually one of the reasons in in the warrior kid books that I made it uncle Jake instead of the dad oh interesting and I also recognize that there's

a lot of kids that don't have a dad around so I didn't want to make a kid think like oh well this this kid has his dad to help him, and I don't have a dad, so I can never do this. But it's Uncle Jake, and he's just, you know,

he's outside the fam, you know, a little bit outside the fam. So that's, that's one reason. But the amount of people that come up to me and say, you know,

I'm so happy you wrote those books because my kids listen to Uncle Jake, but they won't listen to me. I say the exact same things, but they won't listen to me, and that's just the way it is. That's just the way it is. So your reaction to your dad,

when your dad, a Vietnam veteran telling you like, hey, don't do this. You're going to be a number. And you're like, no. Dad, you don't understand. Actually, I remember my dad when I enlisted in the Navy, he goes, you're going to hate it. You don't like authority. You don't like people telling you what to do. And you're not going to, you're going to hate it.

And I said, it's different, dad. This is the seal of teams. It's a team. And that's how ignorant I was. I thought, well, you know, it's just a team. So there's no one in charge. I mean, that's just how stupid I was. And my final example is when my son was like 10 years old, he was doing jiu-jitsu,

and he was put on arm lock on some other kid. And I told him like, hey, you need to get your hips a little more underneath that or something. I told him something, he looked at me and said, no, you don't. And I was like, awesome. You're right, bro. You're right. You know everything. I've been doing jih Tijuana for 25 years at that time.

Yeah. But you're good to go. Yeah. So very normal. Very normal. So did you start thinking when you got to boot camp? Maybe your dad was right. Yeah.

I mean, it was like the, it was the shock of everything. And it was just, you know, complete chaos and not knowing what was going on. And, but I think, you know,

I think that's normal. But it would mean, at the time, it was the hardest thing that I had, I had ever done, you know. Um, I remember they were like, hey,

you know, at the end of, you know, basic training, you know, you got a, you know, the final event,

the final FTX is like a 15 mile. road march, you know, and then we just had completed a two-mile road march, and I had never, I had never done anything. I'm like, dang, this pack is heavy, man. Like, how am I going to get through 15 miles? Like, dude, this is like, what am I going to do, you know? And, but then just like, you know, the learning of land navigation. And I've never fired a weapon before, you know, but I was firing a rifle and all these, you know, throwing grenades. And I'm like, dude, this is, like, this is awesome. Like, this is great. And, um, and, um, um, and, um, um, and, um, um, and, um, But, but yeah, but, but then like, you know, looking back on it, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's like, oh, you know, when you're at the 101st airborne, you know, it's like, it's like 15 miles as child's play, you know, you're doing that like every Thursday.

And that rolled right into AIT? Rolled into AIT and it was just kind of more of the same. When you get to AIT, is it still a boot camp environment or does it start to become a little bit more mentorship environment? Yeah, it's more of a, it's still a boot camp environment, but I mean, like you're getting a little bit more, a little bit more freedom. And, I mean, I was 20 years ago. It's trying to, trying to remember. But I remember still being, it just kind of seemed like all one. It kind of seemed like it was just the kind of the same thing, but just you got a little bit more freedom. Did you have any challenges in boot camp? Did you have any challenges in AIT? Anything that did you ever get like, oh, I'm going to fail this thing? Were you pretty good to go? No, I was, I was pretty good to go. I didn't. I didn't really have anything that my marksmanship was really good.

I mean, I started from nothing. So, like, the way they built me up and to teach me how to shoot and everything was all. Everything that they did, like, had a purpose. And I didn't like the drill and ceremony stuff, you know. I didn't like that stuff, but I never really struggled at anything. I was just like, you know, I don't know if it goes back to the tassling days or whatever, but like, you know, being in the mud and stuff like that, I mean, it was no big deal for me getting dirty. I mean, I was out in the timber and stuff a lot as a kid.

So, like, I just, I loved it. Just perfect. So as you're wrapping up that, did you have a contract to go airborne or, you know, when you're going to, you end up at the 101st? Did you have a preexisting contract or do you have to screen for that? Like, how does that work? So for me, I mean, yeah, I would have, again, easiest recruit that ever went. So, I mean, I just said, hey, give me, you know, Army infantry. I don't care where you send me as long as I can go to Afghanistan.

Like, I went like, you know. And so, so I did, I personally didn't have that contract. That's where I found out, like, in basic training. I'm like, wait a second, you got $6,000 to sign up for four years. I was like, what the heck, you know? And, you know, and all these other, you know, got jacked. Oh, man, I didn't know.

I didn't know a thing, you know, because I had it figured out, right? I didn't tell my parents about it. No one was there to guide me. It was just, like, this is what I wanted. So I got everything I wanted. I mean, the recruiter never, I mean, lied to me or put me in a place. You got everything you wanted and not anything else. I did, yeah.

And so it was a basic training where they were given out different duty stations for those who didn't have like a, you know, a rip contractor or whatever going into it. So, so yeah, so they told me I was selected for the 101st Airborne and I was, man, I was so fired up. I was so excited to go there. Now, is that based on your performance? or what is that based on? I don't know if it's based on performance or I remember you fill out a wish list too.

Did you even know in your wish list that you wanted to be airborne? So the guy next to me, he said, I'm going to do Fort Campbell, Fort Bragg, and I think he's like third ID. I'm sorry, it was 10th Mountain. And I was like, those sound great. And I just copied off of his. Again, I didn't, I didn't know, I didn't know a thing. That's so awesome, dude. So, okay, so then where do you get, where do you end up getting stationed?

So I got stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and I got there in January of 2004. And that's what the, is that with the first of 506? No. Because you were originally, weren't you originally going somewhere else? Yes. So talk me through that. Yeah. Okay.

So, um, so I get to the 101st in January of 2004. And then at that time, um, all those, all the 101st guys were in the invasion. And so like, it was like a ghost town when I got there. And so I remember my mom drove me six hours from Peking, Illinois to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. And I was supposed to report to this replacement battalion. And so my mom's like, oh, my gosh, you're going to the replacement battalion. Like, what is that man? Are you going?

Like, I'm like, I don't know, Mom. And so I get dropped off and I'm just kind of learning, like, where I'm supposed to go. And then that's where they assign me to third battalion, or I'm sorry, Alpha Company, Third Battalion, 187 Infantry, which is the right. Ocasans. And so, but again, I have to wait until they come back. So I'm like just with a group of guys who are waiting to, to go to their unit, because the 101st at that time had, had three infantry brigades. They had first brigade, second, grade, and third brigade, which was 327 infantry, Fipodeuse infantry, and then the 187 infantry. And I was assigned to the 187. And so

once they get, once they get back home, and I go into, I go into the unit and it's, again, not knowing anything, I thought that, you know, hey, I pass basic training. I'm going to be, I'm accepted into the family, like everything's cool. And it was anything but that. It was any, it was rough. It was like, it was tough. And, I mean, but you got to think.

Like, so the 187 infantry, the one, the unit that I was first assigned to, they, they just got done with two deployments. So they were the only unit in the 101 to go to Operation Anaconda in 2001. They get back home and then they go to an invasion in 2003. So here I am as a cherry dick coming into the 101st with these guys who have more combat time than anybody else. And it was, it was rough. It was rough. I mean, it was no holds bars, fist fights.

take downs you don't measure up and I'm like what is going on here you know and it was it was just hard and rough and I was like man do you like I don't know about this like this is this is like what is going on like is this how is this the step to be accepted into because I didn't have any martial arts background it ended wrestling or anything like that so man it was again I was it was easy Did you get put into a platoon or something when they get back? Yeah, I was just put into a platoon. And I was just surrounded by all these veterans who, like with two combat deployments under their belt. And it was, man, it was just rough.

It was just rough. So did you start a workup with them? Did you start training with them? No, because they were doing like a lot of, when they came back, they were doing a lot of three-day and four-day weekends so they could go home to our family. So I had a lot of like free time on my hands. and when you weren't cage fighting with your platoon flights. Oh my gosh. It was just,

it was just rough. And I remember I was just like, man, like we're not really learning like how we're operating here. You know, I mean, we're learning if I can take a few punches and stuff like that in, and takedowns.

But like, we're not learning like about like different weapon systems or stuff like that. I mean, that eventually came. But I was there such a short period of time that I never did a workup with them. So what changed? So there was like a restructuring in the Army, and they were going to, they were closing down third battalion of 187 and turning it into a Calf Scout unit. And so they had come up to all of us new guys.

And all of us new guys had the same experience. I mean, it wasn't just me. It wasn't just me. I mean, everybody had the same experience as I did. And so they said, you can either go to, you know, first battalion or second battalion with 187 or you can go to this new unit that's forming up. And we all opted to go to this new unit. I think one guy stayed, but the rest of us went to this new unit. But we had no idea what this new unit was going to be.

Had no clue. And we ended up heading over there. And they said, yeah, we're starting up this fourth brigade. And it's going to, you know, it's the same job, infantry. But if you want to come into this unit, you have to have a minimum of like three years or something like that. and well, your time still applies in basic training for your contract. I initially signed up for three years. And so I had to extend like eight, eight months or something like that to start with this new unit.

And they're like, okay, yeah, reporting that parking lot, you know, tomorrow at 06 for PT and you'll get further instruction. It's like, okay, right on. How many people showed up in the parking lot for the first semester there? There was like four, four of us. It was me and me and another guy that I was with at 187 and then just two other brand new guys. And we're just like, we had no sergeant. We had no, we had nothing. I mean, it was just an empty parking lot.

There was a guy, his name is Jason Dudley. And he was a special, I was an E3 and he was an E4. And so he kind of just let us let us on a PT. And we did PT. and then we came back and we're just like, we don't know what we're supposed to do. We have nothing. So we went to headquarters like, hey, it's like, yeah, just, you know,

just, you know, be lost and, you know, come back tomorrow. Who was in the headquarters unit? It was just, I mean, it was like, there was hard. It was like, there was nobody there. And so it was, but it wasn't like slowly, but surely, like guys every day started just showing up. And like the ranks started getting filled. And, um, and so like, it was just kind of like,

you know like you're going to be in delta company you're going to be in charlie company you're going to be an alpha company and then so next thing you know like our ranks are our ranks are filled up and then we started getting some structure and um i remember um my first the first sergeant that i had in um that actually knew what he was that he was doing had some sort of structure and started training of us was uh marco sylva and um and uh he was a he was an e5 and he i mean he pt us like two or three times a day. And if we weren't, because we didn't have any weapons.

I mean, we didn't have, um, we started doing like little battle drills and stuff like that with, with our hands, you know, I'm up, he sees me.

I'm down, I'm down type stuff, um, doing obstacle courses, um, things like that. But, um,

it wasn't until we started getting weapons and barracks and stuff like that where it was like more regimented. How long did that take, was it a couple months? Was it, yeah, I would, I would go,

I'd probably say it was like, it was like, it was like maybe six months it took to, to, like a to have some sort of base, some sort of foundation. And you end up in Delta company. Delta company. Death dealers.

The death dealers. Did you guys have that name already established? No. So once we had our company and when we were segregated into our platoons, you know, first through fourth platoon, I remember my company commander, Yucayasenti, who was the man. She's a beast. he um he kind of like put it up to a vote and he was just like hey you know we have a and i think

he understood at the time that um to establish culture to establish what what do we want this to be and he was such an aggressive guy that um somebody had shouted out um death dealers and he's like i'm good with that and so and so that's how it happened and and like it was so uh it was so awesome like to be, because then we found out we were the 506 too. And I remember watching my, I don't have a lot of money growing up, you know. And so like I remember, you know, again, going back to watching a bunch of war movies. I remember one of my mom's friends had HBO and would tape Band of Brothers. And then he would give them to my mom so I could watch them.

And I was watched it over and over and over. And I was so proud to be part of the 506. so proud to be a part of like the death dealers because I mean like it was like just the culture that was set it was it was just everything that I signed up to to do I'm like yeah this I can get down with this yeah yeah you kaiasenti the first time I met him remember it was the first time you know we were doing planning and operations or whatever and so we'd be sitting down and talk and I was with Seth Stone and we're going over whatever whatever we're going over for an And we're talking, then we start, you know, after a little while, start talking about normal human things.

And so his first name is Yucaya. And I was like, I don't know if I asked him. I don't really remember. But I just remember him telling me it's haiku spelled backwards. And I laughed. And he's like, yeah, my parents were hippies. He's like, and they got me freaking company commander of death dealer. Let's go.

Yeah. But what a, what a beast. So did you meet, did you meet him at, at Carrigado after the first son? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because, you know, we'd be when you're doing, when you're planning these operations. Yeah. Especially early on where I'd come over and trying to integrate and make sure that we, you know, we're doing the right things.

That's where I met him and Claiborne and just the rest of the guys. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, he was. And stoner loved, Stoner loved Senti, dude. Like, he was fired up. Yeah. Yeah.

And then you had, and then you, on top of that, you had, you had this. connection with the 506. You had the connection with Currie. Do you remember when Colonel Clark showed up? I do. We had a, we had a battalion formation, and I remember he said, today is a great day to be in the Armymen. And he's like, you know, we are, we are the 506th. And he's like, we're going to be training hard. And he's like, you guys are going to love every second of this. And what an amazing guy he is. He's the best. Um, he, he is such a great leader. So like, you know, of course, it's like a new guy. Like, I'm not going to go, you know, approach him as a, as a E3 or E4. But like, he would just, he would,

he would come around all the time. He would come around just to get to know you. Um, not like, like, like, you know, intimately like, hey, how many, you know, brothers and sisters or whatever do you have or, you know, stuff like that. But, um, just more of just like always being around, always being a presence, always, um, always just giving that. that positive example and just a great, great man. Yeah. I couldn't agree with you more. The interactions I had with him, again, going to Kragador for the first time,

meeting with him and just his attitude and how his attitude spread through everyone. Like everyone, I mean, most people there just had such a positive attitude about what we're doing, how we're going to do it, how we're going to make things happen. Just, you know, I always describe him as one of the best leaders I've ever worked. for anywhere. Just awesome. And that sounds exactly like the type of thing he would say when he takes over as a battalion commander.

Like, it's a great day to be in the Army and we're part of the first of the 506. And it was just such a powerful moment. And it was just, I just get so much pride from it just with the history of it all. And it was just a really, really proud moment for me to be a part of something like that. I just knew there was, there was just something special about it. There was something special about it just with the leadership that we had. Yeah. Yeah.

He's now, what, three-star general right now. Hopefully he'll be president one day. Did I say that? Yes, I certainly did just say that. Sergeant Major Catterton, another guy that was just great guy. And they just made a great team. Yeah, it's good. What's the workup like?

So now you're formed up. What's the workup consistent? What are you guys doing? Guys are going to schools. guys are yeah just just a bunch of different schools and just a bunch of hard training a bunch of battalion exercises uh you know company um exercises platoon exercises and we're just getting to know each other how we want to do stuff um what our internal soPs are going to be um what the battalion um what the kind of the what the standards they're they're pushing and um i

mean it was it was it was a truly trained two standard like you are going to meet this standard or we're not going home. And I mean, it could be, it could be, you know, two in the morning before everybody gets it. Everybody helping each other out. Everybody policing our, police in our own. I mean, we had like onesies and twosies that would, you know, get in trouble and stuff like that, but for the most part, like, we policed our own and we were good. Like, we were, we were, we were really good when we were getting ready to go. So you, when you're going on deployment, You guys thought you were going to Sauter City. Did you guys think you were going to Sauter City?

Yeah, so we got orders to Sauter City at first, and everybody was just pissed off. Everybody was so mad because they're like, oh, great, we're going to some yellow zone. Like, here we are. Like, we're really good. But you're sending us to some yellow zone. And I remember, I don't know who it was, but somebody came was like, yeah, well, we might go to yellow zone. and then it just, it might move more towards a red zone later, but for right now, this is where we're going to be.

And we're like, oh, okay. But we had no, all we knew was we were going to Sauter City. And then how does your, how do you actually go on deployment? Because you first go to Kuwait, is not what you guys did? How do you get there? On a plane. Like C-17s, just loading you guys up? Yeah, we went to.

Do you pre-stage gear? Does your gear go over on ships or anything like that first? Yeah, the gear goes on ships and connexes. And then, I mean, we, we, we, carry our, you know, rifles and machine guns with us and stuff. But, um, uh, but then, you know, after we get to, I can't remember where we landed, but we left from Fort Campbell. And then, um, we took a, we took a commercial airliner over to over to Kuwait and then commercial airliner filled with all you guys or a, or a civilian flight.

Um, no, it was just contracted civilian area. Yep. It was filled with all of us. And I mean, I remember being on this being on this enormous plane is the big. plane I've ever been on in my entire life. And I made my machine, because I was a, I was a 50-cal gunner. And so, and so, like, my, my, my saw was right next to me on this plane. I'm like, this is, this is crazy. I didn't expect it to be like this. Yeah, that's why I was asking, because everyone goes on deployment a little bit differently.

And, and it's just always, it's usually not what people expect, what a civilian would expect, you know, a civilian, even guys that were going to Vietnam. Like, I've had Vietnam guys on there, like, yeah, I got on a plane and, like a regular civilian aircraft, and they're flying either to or from Vietnam, and that's how they got there. Yeah. And then they spend their year on the ground.

They go through everything they go to. They get put under another civilian plane flying back with random civilians. It's wild. Yeah. And there you are with a saw. Yeah. Just certain in economy class.

That might be able to get you an upgrade and having that saw with you. And so you land in Kuwait. how long are you supposed to be on the ground in Kuwait for? So we were told just like a couple of weeks we were going to be in Kuwait until we go to Sauter City and I believe we were in Camp Virginia at first. And then again we were just kind of finalizing our stuff, right? We were finalizing, you know, confirming our zeros, making sure we were all locked on ready to go.

I mean, because I mean we're on the preface of getting going over there for like I would say half of the battalion, and this is just my estimate, I could be off, but I would say half of our battalion were just fresh, fresh guys who had never experienced war before, like myself. And then intermixed was a bunch of guys who just got back from the invasion. So, I mean, you had a bunch of guys from different units in the Army, and then, but the majority of them came from the 101st and came to this new unit, which was the 506 that had combat experience. At what point did you, Did you find out you guys are, you're not going to Sondar city? You're going to a different place.

It's another place called Ramadi. So we were in Kuwait and I remember waking up and like none of our leadership was there. Like we had like the sergeants and stuff there, but like all the officers like were gone. There might have been a couple there, but the majority of them were gone are like, where, where is everybody? You know, because we, you know, we still had a, you know, we still had a routine of what we were doing every day. So, you know, we didn't know if this was a test. We didn't know what was going on. So we just, you know, continued as normal as best we could.

And everybody just had no idea where everybody was. And when they ended up coming back, they had done like a leader's recon in Ramadi. And they came back. And we had to. So they were gone for like a couple days? A day or two, I would say. And we're in this tent in Kuwait. And Captain Sinti says,

take, you know, company formation. And so we formed up in this tent and he's just like, change of plans. We're going to Ramadi. And we're like, what? And we're like, yeah, we're going to Ramadi. And we just got back from there. And he had this, he had this projector screen in there. And he's like, where we're going is the most violent place in theater right now. We're going to the absolute most dangerous place in the entire world. And he pulled up this map of, there was a topographical map of R.A.O. of Ramadi, from the 29 or 6 grid line to the 5-5 grid line.

And I'm looking at this map, and it was a blank, it was a blank map. And then the next slide was, it just looked like somebody had thrown a can of blue paint on it. And it said all these blue dots, represent the last direct contact with coalition forces in the last two weeks. And you could hardly see anything. And then the next slide was, it looked like somebody had thrown a red can of paint on there.

And you could hardly, you can even see anything because it was just covered in red and blue dots everywhere. And it said the red dots indicate all the IEDs that have been found or blown up against coalition forces in the last two weeks. And I'm just like, where are we going? Like this, this is, this is, this is, I mean, this is going to be everything that we, we, we, we thought it was going to be. I mean, like, we wanted to go to the absolute worst place and we were headed there. And, you know, a little bit more, like, that's when I became like a little bit more nervous because I'm just like, all right, because I was, I was conditioned to go yellow zone and pissed off. Like, oh, I want to, I want to go, you know, I want to go kill as many bad guys. as possible. And then I'm like, man, I'm never going to get an opportunity, you know, to do this

in Saara City. And then to get to Ramadi, I'm like, man, you know, be careful what you wish for because now you're going, you're going to the big, the big dance. How were the rest of the boys? They were, it was kind of similar. I mean, there was a lot of dudes that were that were fired up. And, but, I mean, you could tell, like, the tone had, the tone had definitely changed because of, because like, I mean, this is, we were, we were getting ready to leave in a few days to go there when all we were thinking in our mind was one thing, and it changed to something completely different. How do you go, how did you guys get from Kuwait to Ramadi?

So they had told us, so we were getting intel briefs leading up to when we were leaving. And this is like November of 2005, right? Yeah, this is, yeah, November. Like, I think it went into December, like the early part of December of 2005. And so they said, hey, like these intel briefs, like once the enemy finds out that there's going to be a change, like they're going to start attacking you.

Like they're going to start, they're going to start attacking you. So we're going to do this, you know, zero dark 30 in the morning. And how we're doing this is half the battalion is going in by HomeVee and half of them are going in on Chinooks. And it was the Marine Corps version of the Chinooks. Was it CH 46? C.H. 46 is small. Smaller than a Chinook. They also have 53s, which may or may not have been used.

But yeah, if they were using 46s, that sounds about right. Yeah, we were doing, so I was assigned to go, we were going to, and I'm not sure if there was like a couple waves, but I remember being in the first helicopter in the first, like touching down first. Did you guys fly right into Craigor or did you fly into Camp Omadi on the other side? No, we flew into the cop. across the street from Crigador. Damn.

Yeah. So, because we didn't have an airfield at Crigador. You know, we didn't have anything. So this was obviously at night. This was at night. And so, and they said, and they were like, hey, you know, like, this is going to be a touch and go. I mean, I mean, you're, you're going to get, you're going to land enough to get off

the bird and then, and then the other one's coming in. And so you've got to get to your spot, you know, as quick as possible. But leading up to that, they are also giving us Intel brief stuff like, hey, they don't have like what you go there with is what you have like they don't have they don't have anything and so we were in while we were in Kuwait we were we were doing um recons in Kuwait trying to like steal ammo and uh and any piece of equipment that we could have to help us over there because we didn't know when we were going to get resupplied um and so like I I remember I mean I remember having 50 cow links sticking out of my um rucksack um as I was as I was as I was as I was

they were getting ready to board the bird. And I remember, like, I was, I was leaning back. And two guys had to help pick me up because my rucksack was so heavy because I had so much equipment in there. MREs, I mean, everything, because we didn't, we just had no idea. And I had so, there was so much weight on my back that when, when I was sitting in the bird going to Ramadi, I mean, I just, I remember it so clearly. it was we were all on we were all on nods and I remember the Marine Corps door gunner had a 50 cow

out of there and he he racked that thing and I'm like man are we going into like a hot else like what are we like I just I just remember it so clearly and I remember like I was the first one to I was the last one to board and the first one going to be off and and we when we started our descent I mean I'm looking at at the back of the Chinook and I just see him flying like the rest of the guys flying in formation behind me and like that's when I mean I'm starting to get amped up you know and I knew the I knew the spot that I was supposed to be at and so you know it's it was the same thing right like you know green light go and and the the ramp drops and we're and we're getting off but there's a I couldn't

see anything because it was so dark and there was like a little lip of like to birth so like It took me everything I could to stand up on my own. And when I stood up, I had so much weight on the back that I tripped out of the bird. And so everybody's thinking, I'm hit already. And so, like, my magazines fly out everywhere. And they're trying to pull me, but you can't hear anything because of the propeller. And so that's how I spent my first. Welcome to Ramadi.

That's how I spent my first steps in Ramadi right there. How long to take forever to get there? I remember everybody coming in, like, that night. I don't remember anybody, anybody. I don't remember. I think everybody came there that night. So now you, you, you, you get moved in. Where did you move into?

What building were you in? So the, it was right across, it was right across from the headquarters building. Okay. It was, you know, it was an agricultural college. And, um, I remember. By that he means that the, the, this whole place, Camp Corregador, Echo Charles, that you've heard us talk about a bunch over the years. before it was camp corrugador it was an agricultural college so they had like buildings with

classrooms in them and stuff like that and yeah so that's what that's what it was but now it's just this base for the first of the 506 and but and before you guys were there it was 269 armor they'd been out there so you get moved into your room yeah we walk I walk across the street from the cop. When we landed, walk over, they said, hey, this is where you're staying. And we were, there were still guys from 269 there. And they're just like, hey, you know, grab an open bunk. And there was just, there was a, I don't know, bunk for like 20 guys in, uh, in this classroom and grabbed a bunk and just kind of got the layout of the building I was at because it was still, you know, dark. And I didn't know where anything, I didn't know where anything was.

I didn't know how big this place was. I didn't know anything. I mean, it was, I was completely unknown to me at the time. Yeah, the 269 prior to you guys showing up, had lost six soldiers inside Camp Corregoror. So from indirect fire. Yeah. So they'd lost six soldiers from mortars.

And so Corrigo was gnarly. It was gnarly. Yeah. And, you know, Jack, I don't have any perspective other than, this, right? This is my one and only deployment. So I have no perspective on how this is, how this is supposed to go, right?

I have no, I have no, I have no idea what, no, no, no context whatsoever. None, none. Not just like this is, I'm kind of living day by day. This is what's happening. I'm like, oh, okay, this must be what the guys in Baghdad are living with. This must, this must be what's going on.

I'm glad you didn't get to see what that looks like. You know, I had no, I had no idea, you know, so. So, yeah, so it wasn't until, I mean, I didn't sleep at all that night because I didn't know what was going on. But, you know, I remember going into the classroom and there were just, there were sandbacks stacked from bottom to top inside of this one window, or that used to be a window. And there were no light. I mean, it was complete noise light discipline. It was complete. You wear your body armor everywhere you go, helmet everywhere you go.

helmet everywhere you go if you're going outside to have a smoke um if you're going to go burn your own waist you know whatever it is um you're wearing that body armor did what kind of turnover did you get from the guys from two six nine um it was just um you just got to keep moving like don't don't ever stay in one spot um uh i remember a guy telling me don't ever stay in one spot just always always move when you're out on the street just always move don't just stick don't just stand in one place, just constantly move, or you're going to get hit. And just, you know, he's like, good luck with the IDs, man. They're everywhere.

How long was it before you rolled out on your first patrol? Three days, three days. But, I mean, that very first morning that we woke up, we kind of, you know, we got our kid on and everything and we were just kind of, we were touring to see where everything else. Hey, this is where the phones are. This is, this is your, this is your chow hall. You know, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is,

PX, which was, I mean, it was a, it was, there's nothing in there. Yeah. You know, the, the Chow Hall had like six seats for, for us to sit down and eat. So most of us just took to go boxes to leave because he couldn't, you couldn't fill that in. Hey, this is, this is where you go to the bathroom. You know, this is, this is where, you know, it's, it's all outside here. You know, so we kind of got, though, this is where the, this is where the fuel is. this is where the water jugs are.

And so, but that very next day when we were touring, I mean, it was, we got indirect fire on us that day, and that's the first time that I heard that siren, you know, and sometimes it worked, but other times it just, you just didn't have a chance. It just wanted to pick it up for whatever reason. And, but, you know, it's just that bing, bing, bing, incoming, incoming, and we're, I mean, you just find a place to just,

so me and a buddy ran into that PX, and it just the mortars are just crashing in like right away and I'm like dude this is nuts this this is this is this is your first morning this is war yeah like these guys are these guys that's that's when I realize these guys are trying to kill me and um and and and we're not going to let that happen like we're going to try to kill as many of these guys as we can possibly can yeah that was another big thing about being in romadi was that the the former army base that the iraqi the Army base that was there was some kind of like artillery base. And so a lot of the insurgents actually were skilled at indirect fire.

So that's why they would be able to hit targets. They would barely even have to bracket them. They didn't have them all measured out. And they were just like the first rounds would be on target. Yeah. And we found out that out really quick. Because, I mean, we got mortar every day. I mean, two and three times a day.

They were just come crashing in. I mean, our child hall had a, you know, had a mortar fall into it. there was a video that was circulating around before we got there. I think of them, maybe it was them doing their leaders recon, but the signer was coming off and a mortar crash into the headquarters building. And so, yeah, it was every day that it was like that. What did the guys from 269, what did they tell you about IEDs besides good luck?

Were they giving you a heads up, like, look for this, look for that, look for everything? Yeah, I don't recall. They just said they're just everywhere. It's just, they're just, it's just absolutely everywhere. And it just kind of confirmed what that map showed. I mean, like at that point, because like you're trying to find, like later on, you're trying to find patterns, trying to find out how are they doing this? How are they, what is the pattern that's being established here that, or how do we keep getting

hit? And we'll probably dive into that like a little bit later. But at that point, at that point, it was, everything was so raw and so new that I was just kind of, I was just trying to learn as much as they were, they were giving. me in the short time that we had together of those guys who'd been there. But they, I mean, just like looking at their faces, you could just tell they went through it. Yeah. I can't remember if, I don't know if I have it in my notes or not, but I was reading some Ramadi stuff yesterday. And one of the things that Colonel Clark was talking about, maybe it was an interview or something,

but they had, there was, the, the Army had found, I think it was 269 had found 18 IEDs in some very short distance and cleared them all. Or maybe it was the 506. But anyways, Army unit found 18 IEDs in, you know, 300 yards or 200 yards or something like this. They clear them all. The next day they go back, 18 more IEDs. Yeah. Just reseeded all those holes. Like they, they were freaking aggressive and active in making this happen.

So now let's, so a couple days later, three days later, you're going on your first patrol. Yeah, three days later, I go on my first patrol. And you're a freaking turret. gunner and I'm a 50 cow gunner. Did you guys have the enhanced like Pope glass around your your turret or no? Not when we first got there. You had to build it out. Yeah.

So like when like the first I remember the first truck that I had was, um, I'm looking at, I'm looking at my space and you know, Humvee is a Humvee, you know. And, but we, it wasn't, I mean, there might have been some armor on it, but we didn't get, we didn't have the new ones yet at the time. And I mean, I remember like the, the piece of armor. I mean, it was like somebody on their spare time. had welded a protection around the turret that we had and it was like jaggedy and it would cut you and stuff as you were getting in it was just all you know rusty from some piece

of metal that they found I remember the when I was when I was setting up my 50 they they uh the the the box of ammo that they had because I was used to like like because we were like we had a certain way about like loading our 50 cals and and like hey you know once we go through this box like we know it we're going to come to this box to this box to this but we just had it we had it down through our workup and so I remember this this huge this huge box of 50 cal ammo that I had I mean this there must have been 500 rounds in this thing it was so it was so heavy that it was hard for me to it was hard for me to turn the turret as I needed to and I'm like well you know maybe they need all this

You know what I mean? You know, I have no idea like, like, I'm just going to ride with this for right now until I get my own groove. And I remember, I remember like we were going out at night. And it was to recover a vehicle that had been blown up and then entrapped in Constantine wire. So, you know, it's like the Baghdad International Highway route Michigan. That was our main objective to. to keep clear for coalition forces.

I mean, that's how we got everything. That's how we got food, mail, laundry, I mean, everything, right? And so it was just, it was a main supply route. And it was about a 70-mile stretch of road from Baghdad to Ramadi. And on one side of the road, you had coalition forces where we could only drive down. And then the other side was for the civilians and every day. Now, we could go on both sides of the road, but in the middle of that was the, the constantina wire that stretched all the way down.

And there were certain guard positions all the way down, Romani, because they would just, they would, they would, they would blow us up every day on that road. And so, um,

so they had, you know, at certain positions, you know, they had like opi graveyard, you know, that was, that was an over,

that was this huge graveyard, um, that was overlooking route Michigan. And they had, maybe it was a couple more humbys down the road that could get a stretch a road. And then maybe a couple tanks on, you know,

it just went all the way down. like that. And, um, uh, but you couldn't, I mean, with human nature and everything, you know, being so tired and everything, I mean, like you couldn't cover it all all the time. And it was just one of those things that you just kind of had to trust that guys were doing the right thing and keeping awake and, um, you know, smoking dudes who were trying to set up, set up IEDs. And so, um, so I remember this, this, um, um, truck had been blown up. Is this your first patrol?

This is my very first patrol. So a truck gets blown up and it's wrapped up in Constitina wire. Yeah, and we had to go out there and, you know how that Constitina wire is. It just gets around the axles and everything like that. And it had some sort of sensitive equipment on there. I can't remember what. But they were trying to, so, you know, we geared up and we head out. We get down there.

We set up our perimeter. We shut everything down. and we have this, and we didn't know anything about the 45-minute rule at the time, right? We had no idea about the 45-minute rule. You're about to find out. Yeah. And so we set up our perimeter and everything, everything, and like I'm ready to go, right? I'm thinking, just like when I arrived in Vermont the first time, I'm thinking, all right, as soon as I touch down, we're going to get in a firefight, you know.

So I set up and nothing happens. nothing happens and we couldn't get we couldn't recover the vehicle and so we were we were out there for about an hour and um they finally said hey we're just we're blowing this thing in place we're leaving it here we can't we cannot get to it's just what was it a hummer it was i think it was like a like a like a like a like a like a like where the troops are in that can't remember the name of it um where they they would ride right in the back of it like a map or something like a six by yeah okay yeah so it um so they're just like hey we're just going to blow it in place um and and And then we're going to head out.

And so we blow it in place. Are there guys from 269 armor with you? Or are you guys on your own? I think we were on our own. It was just my first platoon. And so the dirty first. And so we head. So we're heading back.

And how we had our formation always set up to where I was always in the third Humvee. And so it was 50 cow gunner, Mark 19. gunner 50 cow gunner mark 19 gunner so the 50 cow gunners always their primary weapon system was the 50 cal and then their secondary weapon system was the saw and then now with the mark 19s we had the mark 19 and then we had the 240 bravos so they could have a little bit of both too and so that's how it was set up so i had my i had my 50 cal and i was normally always facing towards the three o'clock position and just in the formation so you know number one guy's facing noon um number two guys facing nine o'clock i'm facing three o'clock and the truck behind me is facing six o'clock. So we have that 360 degrees coverage at all

times. And we were told by 269, it was like, hey, when you're going somewhere, go fast. You know, don't go slow. Don't be driving Miss Daisy. I mean, just, you know, drive fast. And so we were driving fast. And next thing you know, like, I'm sitting in the gun and, you know, I'm facing to the right and I'm holding on to the 50cow. All of a sudden, I see tracers flying over, over my head. and I'm looking up and I'm like oh there's tracers and my sergeant who was super like very aggressive like kind of reminds me of the Marlboro man it was his it was his second appointment and just a hard hard dude Sergeant Holbert he he he was like kids get up and shoot and I just kind of snapped out of it and I I remember taking my 50 cal in the building that I saw the tracers coming from I just

hammered down on that 50 cow. And I mean, I let that thing eat. And I was, but at the time, so with that big, with that big, um, ammo can that I had, uh, I didn't really, I didn't check to see what rounds were in there. Um, so they were, they were APIT rounds. So they were armor piercing incinerary tracer rounds. And I didn't, I, I, I guess I wasn't supposed to shoot those, but, um, I was shooting them. And, uh, I was catching everything on fire inside the house.

and just, that building was just crumbling down. And then so I, I mean, my Holbert was just like, all right, kids, all right, kid. Because, I mean, I was like, I was going from the three o'clock, like, heading towards the six. I mean, I was just letting them have it, you know? And then, you know, we get back to Corrigador, and I'm just, man, I am just amped off. That's your first patrol ever. My first patrol ever in Ramadi. You dump 100 rounds of 50-Cal.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, probably more. and in a short period of time because I knew everything about that I mean the M2HB 50 Cal I mean you could just oh God I love that thing it was just such a great weapon system

and I was really good on it I was really good on it and I mean I remember getting trained up on that thing and like one of my sergeants was like you know this thing was actually recalled in World War II because it was too accurate and it had to be wanted to be more cruiser so it could space out the rounds

but man I just I knew everything about that in that weapon system and I loved it. I was just a natural on it. I just felt good on it. And so when we got back to Corrigador, I remember we were doing, like, you know,

hey, how many rounds do you think you fired? You know, did you see it? Did you see anybody get hit? All that sort of stuff. And, you know, hey, how are our vehicles looking? Because we knew our vehicle got shot up. And so I remember looking on the side and the side that I was facing on the passenger side where the,

where the rounds were coming from. there was three bolt holes in the in the in the in the in the glass that had that had that the glass had that the glass had stopped the rounds and I'm just like man like this is my first patrol like how am I going to make it out of here alive what's your opt tempo turned into now you know day two like what do you start getting a consistent opt tempo yeah I mean we just we like you know uh captain sent he wanted um he uh we I asked him I said what was our what was our up tempo compared to compared to the other, the other companies that we had. It was just 10X.

We were a unique company in like being within the 506 because we mostly operated on Humvees. We did a lot. We did some foot patrols too, but the majority of our time, we were operating on Humvees. We were a heavy weapons platoon. And so we did, so we were doing a lot. We were doing, we were a QRF at some point. We were, you know, mission platoons. We were, you know, we had to, we had to man-guard positions along inside Corrigador and outside.

So we were constantly working all the time. And so from what I remember, it was kind of set up like this. Like you had, if you were a mission platoon one day, then the next day you were like duty platoon. And what that meant was like duty on the, on the, whether guarding on the guard towers outside of Corrigador or on route Michigan itself. and then you were secondary mission platoon and then QRF. And it just kind of rotated, rotated like that. So there was some sort of order that we always had.

But, I mean, you know, a mission comes down and third platoon is out there. It's secondary mission comes in. Now we're going out. You know, so, I mean, there was never any break. I mean, we were going out day and night, two and three times a day. What does the operation look like kind of from, so let's say you get a mission, like an actual mission? you're going to do, how's that taking place?

Are you getting a warning order? Are you doing the operations order? What are you doing for gear prep? And then what's your mentality going out? So let's start for like, like, how are you hearing about a mission that you're about to do? Yeah, so one of the squad leaders would come in and say, hey, you know, we got it, we got a mission coming up,

you know, standby. And that's kind of how it would be, you know, and we just knew that to be, hey, go start prepping, go start prepping. And I mean, we didn't have any, we didn't have any, anybody. know so like what we had what we had what we had is what we took out there with us and so we had to make sure that we were self-sustaining for for who knows how long so we always had we always had make sure we had to make sure our radios I was a radio guy too so like we had to make sure our

radios were filled because we were constantly you know doing stuff with the radios and making sure making sure stuff was was you know clean and swept out making sure things were properly marked and stuff just to make our jobs as easy as possible so we could just get to work when we needed to. And then, you know, after that was done, we'd go into, we had a, we had a war room, like, right as you walk into the front. I don't know if you remember that, but you walk into the front, it was to the right, and we live to the left. And we had just had a big, big topographical map of our AO, and it would just, a mission would

kind of sound like, it would be like, hey, we're going to go out and we're going to support, we're going to go support EOD on a route clearance mission. You know, we're expecting maybe 10% casualties when we go out. But this is what time they're getting ready to go out and you're going to be escorting them all night long. Or, you know, you're going to be going to do an omission at the hospital. And we think there's a weapons cache in there. First and Third Patoon are going to go out there. And this is what Third Patoon's mission.

is, this is what first platoon mission is, and we're going to try to clear that weapons cache. Did each platoon have their own Humvees, or did you rotate Humvees? Yeah, no, we had our, we had our own Humvees. We had our own home vs. So you had your, so you were on the same gun all the time. You had your little baby. Yeah, that was my, that was my baby for sure. Did you have a name for your for your gun? No, I didn't, I didn't name the gun, but, you know, our platoon name was dirty first, and and each platoon kind of had their own name like second platoon was jolly rogers um you know fourth platoon was the shockers and and so we just had like different you know different cultures inside of you know our our our company going out and you know you mentioned hey

we're going out to go out and do security for the route clearance that's going down how are you feeling rolling out on that mission now you know you're going to get there they're going to they're literally looking for IEDs and I wrote in those things I wrote in but I got the comfort of riding in like the Buffalo or whatever in the words up like I'm just like kind of along for the ride almost like I'm watching a show because it's so relatively safe in there yeah compared to a Humvee they did lose those mine clearance vehicles on our deployment but you know you feel relatively safe in there but and it was actually one the one of the cooler things because you know when you're in a Humvee your kind of vision is all terrible and you're

you're looking around, you can't move. You had pretty clear vision standing up in the freaking turret. I did. Yeah. Mediac. Yeah. But the interesting thing on those route clearances are when they find something, which they're going to,

they're probably going to find, you know, between five and ten IDs that they're going to have to stop and clear, which means you're sitting there. So when you're, you know, you mentioned the 45 minute rule earlier. We didn't really talk about what it was. Echo Charles,

you got 45 minutes and you're getting attacked. And it, got shorter and shorter over time, but that was sort of a general rule. If you were out there and you gave the enemy 45 minutes, they were going to be on you and they're going to be, they're going to be hitting you. And the more you understood that,

the quicker you would move. But on an IED clearance, slow going. You stop. And then they're going to spend 15 minutes poking at that IED, putting a charge on it, blowing it up. And then you move 80 yards down the road, they find another one.

And you're stopping again. That's exactly how it went. Are you ever getting out of your Humvee as a 50-Cal gunner, rarely? Rarely. I mean, like, if we were doing like a dismounted patrol to where, to where we were, you know, hitting a bunch of houses or something like that, like maybe one guy, maybe a couple guys would stay with the Humvees. So we didn't have like a lot of people.

I mean, so like, so when we got out, we needed all hands on deck. And so like a couple guys could guard the Humvees while we were clearing houses and stuff, doing hard knocks and things of that nature. but for the most part, I was in the 50 Cal. When I was a young seal, we had this thing, this 96-hour planning cycle. So you'd get, like, tasked with a mission, and then we had this whole protocol that we'd follow. And it was based on the military decision-making process. This is all coming from, like, higher headquarters throughout the entire military, this 96-hour planning cycle.

That was what the 90s was like for me. And then fast forward, my first deployment to Iraq were just, Kind of in the same mode that you're talking about where our gears loaded like we're in the same Humvees like we can roll and I remember my commanding officer. He wanted to brief up the chain of command how long it takes us to respond. He goes, hey, Johnco, you know, if we if you get tasked with something, how long do you need to to go and launch? And I said 15 minutes. And he and he thought I was kidding. Like he goes, no, seriously. And I said, oh, no, I'm serious. We'll we'll be out the we'll be out the front gate in. 15 minutes. That's how much time we need. All I need is a location. I need a frequency of the of the conventional forces that are running that A-O, and we're good. And that's kind of the mode that you guys got into. Here's the mission. Here's where we're going. Plus, you start to know the city. You know all the routes. You know the blocks numbering on the battle map. And it just becomes, all right, tell us where we're going and what we're doing. And the gear prep's the same.

The comms procedures are the same. The Kazavak QR. procedures are pretty close and that's kind of the mood that you get into and our debriefs were brutal so if something so if somebody didn't do their job or somebody overlooked something because they got distracted with something and we didn't have a piece of equipment that we needed or something like that or we didn't you know or the tank wasn't or if our fuel tank wasn't completely full at all times like we were letting them have it and you know I mean I remember being a part of some brutal debriefs of because of how serious the situation was in Ramadi and it was just a testament to our sergeants who kind of held that standard of a debrief to make sure that we were always on top of our stuff you're there you get there in early

December you actually sent me a speech it's a I think it's a Memorial Day speech your friend Jason McNamara gave this speech and it's covers an important event so I'm going to get into it right now. It says, this is Jason McNamara. He's one of your best friends and he says this. It was the night of March 13th, 2006. I was mounting the weapon system on our vehicle, not knowing I was preparing for a different mission that would forever change my life and take two of my brother's lives. My platoon is supposed to escort EOD to clear a route to the east for a battalion mission the next morning. As I was mounting my 240 Bravo, my weapon, a belt-fed machine gun, and my military, and my army, my Mark 19 belt-fed grenade launcher onto our vehicle.

Gunfire erupted about a click to the west in the Malab district. This was nothing new in a regular occurrence. I could see the tracer rounds lighting up the night sky. Then we heard chatter on our truck radio. Charlie Company had received contact and had several wounded that needed to be extracted immediately. This is what's interesting about this and I was just talking about being in Baghdad. In Baghdad stuff's going on, but it's going on. 12 miles away, 18 miles away, 14 miles away.

Because Baghdad's huge. In Ramadi, when there's a firefight going on in the city, and if you go outside, in any one of the combat outposts, any one of the either on Camp Ramadi on the west side or Camp Corregor on the east side, if there's a firefight going on the city, you know it. You can just hear it. You can see it.

You can see the tracers going. And so that is what this was like, where you'd be doing something, preparing for something. And if you were outside and a firefight breaks out, you'd see tracers flying through this guy. Yeah, it was wild. It almost felt to me like we were surrounded. It felt like Krigida, where we were surrounded by 400,000 people.

That's what it's, that's what it felt like to me. It felt like, like we were always being watched. And that's why we were running from place to place. And, but when you were setting up your equipment, I mean, you could, I mean, you could just, you know, stand on the Humvee and just watch it all. go down. Like you just had a front row seat to it. Continuing on, we were not the designated

QRF that night, but we were ready and would be the quickest option to get to them. Our platoon of four Humvees left seconds later with my truck being the second in line. I was in the gunner seat. My section leader Sergeant Dar was riding shotgun and my platoon leader, Lieutenant Cooley was riding in the rear passenger seat and specialist Dan was driving our vehicle. So again, this firefight breaks out.

These guys are preparing to go and do an EOD route clearance, kind of a standard. And then Charlie Company gets hit. And now in a matter of seconds, it's changed mission and we're going to recover a vehicle. QRF, yeah. Charlie Company had marked an area where we could evacuate their wounded with an IR Chemlight. Little did any of us know that we had just pulled up into a complex ambush. and the first truck and my truck were sitting directly on top of buried IEDs composed of anti-tank mines and 155-millimeter mortars. We didn't get a chance to start loading the wounded before both IEDs detonated.

The next thing I remember was being an excruciating pain. My face and goggles were covered in burnt ordinance and dirt. My body armor was shredded. I couldn't see my legs, but I knew they were severely injured. after I removed my soot-filled goggles, I could see my legs twisted and pushed backwards underneath me. As my legs quivered from the trauma and adrenaline, I could feel my bones grinding together. I didn't know if my legs were even attached or just held together by my clothing. I couldn't breathe with all the smoke from the explosion and my burning truck.

I yelled to Dan to shut off the truck and got no answer. The explosion had blown three of the doors off our truck, and as I looked out the driver's side I could see Dan laying on the ground unresponsive. The blast had blown Dan and Lieutenant Cooley out of the truck. Sergeant Dar was still in his seat, but the blast had bent his doorframe and he could not open his door. He asked if I was okay. I replied my legs were both broken. Every person in the first two trucks was wounded.

Moments later, our guys from second and third truck were outside our vehicle, now having to extract our wounded into the remaining two trucks. Staff Sergeant Hudspeth was behind me, trying to get out, trying to get me out. I was stuck in the gunner seat strap hovering about two feet off the floor of the truck. I took out my knife and cut myself free and dropped to the bottom of the truck. Hudspeth proceeded to grab the back of my body armor behind my neck and tried to drag me out. My broken legs kept on catching on the twisted metal of what was. remained of the floor of my truck.

The explosion had ripped a hole almost as wide as our Humvee. When I was able to get my legs free, he dragged me out, and as I hit the ground, my legs twisted up on top of me. Huddspeth wasted no time in putting his tourniquet on one leg, and I handed him my tourniquet for my other leg. This all happened while under fire from small arms and RPGs. They loaded me into the back of the third truck under specialist Casey Patterson. As we were turning around to get out of the ambush, another RPG exploded next to our vehicle.

With all the smoke and dust in the air, Private Perez, the driver of the third truck couldn't see. We ended up crashing into a wall. Luckily, he was able to back up and maneuver us out of there before the insurgents could fire another RPG. On our way back to Camp Corregador, I remember Casey looking down on me from the gunner seat. I kept closing my eyes and nodding off, but Casey made sure that I stayed conscious by shaking me and trying to trying to give me words of encouragement. I didn't know at the time, but Dan was losing his life in the fourth truck.

Dan died that night in Sergeant Dar's arms before we made it back to base. Dan, a brand new father that would never meet his baby that was born just weeks before that night. We passed the QRF on the way out. It was a platoon of M1 Abrams tanks from the Pennsylvania National Guard. They were able to evacuate the wounded

from Charlie Company and one killed in action. I would later find out while lying in the hospital bed that Staff Sergeant Silva was the KIA. He'd been attached to Charlie Company as a sniper. He was the reason I was assigned to Delta Company and was my very first squad leader. The blast had shattered both of my heels.

I had bilateral open fractures to my tibia and fibula. Shrapnel had ripped through the muscle and lodged in my legs. I had second-degree burns on my body and a traumatic brain injury. I was medevacked by a helicopter to a medical facility in Balad where they performed emergency surgeries. I woke in a hospital in Germany and doctors there gave me an option to amputate both of my legs below the knee. They said that I would more than likely never walk again or wear a regular pair of shoes. But they said you might surprise us.

I opted not to amputate my legs. I spent two years on and off at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C. I would end up having 12 operations done, including washouts, where the doctors would open my wounds up to clean any debris and an additional three reconstructive surgeries here in Minnesota with one more operation looming. I was hesitant to tell my story about that night because I am still here, and this day is about our fellow Americans that paid the ultimate price for our freedoms. My wife, Rachel, reminded me that if my fellow brothers were still here, they would want me to tell them. that story of that night. My conclusions was that I could tell it today

if only to give a brief window into the trials and tribulations that our country soldiers endured and in honor of Staff Sergeant Marco Silva of Alva Florida and Sergeant Corey Dan

from Norway, Maine whose lives ended too soon. I will never forget your sacrifice or your memory. So a lot to unpack there. That was, you know, we had gone from basically December till that night, March 13th without, I mean, guys were getting shot every single day. Guys were getting blown up every single day.

But that was the first night that we lost, that we had two guys get killed. and it was absolutely terrible because we kind of felt like, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, like we felt like we were just taking care of business every single day. I mean, we were, we felt we felt that we were eliminating the enemy at such a high volume every single day that we were kind of untouchable in a way. Yeah, you know, bumps and bruises along the way. But nothing as severe as this had happened. And it was absolutely terrible the way it all went down.

And there's just so much going on there. And, you know, Jason McNamara from Mancato, Minnesota. I mean, him and I were super close and still are. We still keep in contact to this day. And, I mean, his parents met me. my parents. So my birthday is in January. And so like before we left for Ramadi, like, you know, we had, you know, we celebrated Thanksgiving, Christmas, and my birthday all in one because they knew that I was, I wasn't going to be there for him. And my parents had met

his parents and they kicked it off right away. And they just knew the connection that we had. And they had their own connection. And so when my parents found out about it, they were equally as devastated as is what happened and and then just I remember watching that firefight go down and it just it just seemed like it wasn't ever stopping it just it just was going on and on and on I mean you initially heard the firefight go down and then second platoon goes out and then all of a sudden you heard like major explosions going off and then it's just nothing but of just a continuous was firefight seeing tracers going up and down left and right for several minutes going on. And then next thing you know, air support is coming in.

They're doing strafing runs on the buildings. Where were you? I was on duty platoon in a guard tower when this was going on. Which guard tower? It was on Corregador? Yeah, on Corrigador. So you're seeing everything. I'm watching it all go down.

And you kind of feel helpless. You can't do anything because, I mean, that's not. your it's not your mission but you knew that you knew it was going down then you're hearing the radio chatter that's going off and then you're hearing mortuary affairs you're hearing you're hearing hey we got several we got several wounded um then heavy QRF is is ramping up to go out the front gate because i mean it's a small camp that we were in and um you're just watching this whole thing go down and it just and everything i just there's you just felt helpless i felt helpless watching this whole thing.

And then when I got relieved, second one team was come back, and they were, I mean, effectively combat and effective at that point because, like, the one whole truck was gone. I mean, the lieutenant was there, but Sergeant Darre was now gone. Corey Dan was killed.

Jason McNamara was catastrophically injured. and then I remember getting debriefed by Sega Platoon, and they were just like, I just don't know how we made it out of there. I have no idea how we made it out of there. And just the heroic actions of Sergeant Hudspeth, as he's, I mean, I remember him telling me he was trying, like, it was nighttime, you know, and there's a firefight going on as we're trying to, like, get guys out of this burning vehicle, and he's trying to, like, pull Mack out of the turret, but he can't see anything, and his legs are getting stuck on the,

on the turret because there's not that because it because it was only so big and um just the just the actions of everybody and then you're and then and then you got to figure out how how are we going to recover these vehicles right how are we going to get these vehicles back so then that's where i mean your mission turns into um winning the fight right and then going to um going to recover these vehicles and then and then get get back in a safe manner and i want to say they got blown up on the way back out too. It was just a, there was a couple silver stars that were earned that night from guys and Charlie Company from the initial, from the initial engagement. But overall, it was, it was absolutely just tragic. And that's where really, you just, you kind of felt, okay,

anybody, anybody can get it here. I mean, nobody's, we got to, we got to stay locked in because we can't go out and, you know, be reckless at all because, um, those guys did everything right and were still, you know, like, and I don't know how many times Mac was blown up, because everybody got blown up, right? Like, I was blown up four times. So, but I often think I'm like, okay, like, I got, I was in four roadside bombs, right?

And two of them were direct hits, but he didn't even maybe get through one, you know, and just catastrophically injured. And then Corey Dan, like, He just showed up. He was there for four days. He was, he was, I remember seeing him passing by, but I didn't know him because like when we all, when we all, we all started this 506, we all started this 506 unit together. Like we build it up from the ground.

There's nothing there. And so like we, we hung out all the time. We went to Nashville all the time, hung out. And so we all knew each other so well. and because we were all brand new starting starting off together and then to not even know not even know him and just you know romadi took him in four days it was just terrible and then and then you know going to silva you know he he was a he was originally in delta company and then went to go be a sniper um but i mean he was a he was a he was a smaller and some smaller statured guy and like we always would tease him that the 50 the barit 50 cow that he would carry was taller than he was and um uh uh Just to know that he was killed was just absolutely terrible. Just terrible. How long was it before you went out on your next patrol?

Probably the next day, I would say. I think they kind of stood everything down that night, of course, after everything was secure. But I don't remember any lapse in, And I don't remember like anything where everything was on standstill. I think we just kept going. How did it impact the morale of the rest of the boys? I think everybody was the, I think everybody was the same because we just, we were so, all of us were so close.

And we all, we were all enlisted, you know, young guys and we all hung out with each other. So it was, everybody was just feeling the same. It was just kind of just depressing. It was just super, it was just, I remember just like, it was. dark. It was just a sad time. Because we didn't know at the time that Mac, because everybody was saying, Mac's going to lose his legs, Max's going to lose his legs. And I just couldn't imagine. I'm like,

here's this dude who's so good. I mean, just so good. Like, I remarked 19 gunners were really good. And I'm like, how is this guy? This guy is so good at what he does. And now we're talking about him losing his legs. Like, what? And we just all couldn't believe it. But we had, but we had, I mean, but this was March. I mean, we said, we had a long way to go.

He kept his legs. Kept his legs. He kept his legs. I remember going up to, uh, I remember going up to his wedding. And it was, uh, super emotional for me because it's the first time I've seen him since, um, since he was wounded. And, uh, I remember him telling me, he's just like, he's like, hey, I'm not going to, I'm not going to walk with my cane down the aisle. I'm going to, I'm going to walk by myself. And, um, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and.

it took him a long time, but he made it there, and it was, it was awesome to see him and everything, and he's doing really well now. He's still up in Mancato, just doing so many things for veterans and giving back. He's a great man. Outstanding. Still work to do. You guys are back out there. I've had this conversation with many people that when someone gets wounded or someone gets killed, the war doesn't stop, and you got to get your gear back on and go. And then a short time later April 9th, 2006, Sergeant David Collins of Jasper, Georgia, and Sergeant First Class Gregory Rogers of Cincinnati, Ohio.

They both get killed by ID. Sergeant Lambertson, too. They were all killed that day. So what they would do, they were so smart, right? The enemy was like really smart. So what they would do is when we figured it out, is I don't know if you guys were getting the same Intel as we were, but what they would do is they would burn tires in the road.

Yeah. And they would loosen up that asphalt. And then they would dig out that asphalt. And then they'd put the IDs in the hole. And then they'd recover it with asphalt. And you'd look at the roads. And then they'd sweep dust on it. And it just looked totally normal.

Because it's not like the roads are nice anyways. I mean, these roads are all jacked up. And so it just looks like another piece of road. Yeah. And then so even our IED task force team couldn't, couldn't, didn't have the capability to find them. And they were good. And those guys were good too.

I mean, they were amazing. They were, they, they had, I mean, every single night, those guys would go out and do such a fantastic job to keep us safe. Because like, you know, just like, you know, a rule was to, you know, don't go outside, you know, you're building without, you know, body armor or kit. same rules applied. You don't go down a road that hasn't been cleared.

You don't do it, or you're going to get blown up. And so that's how that enemy would operate. And I remember the third time that I was blown up. The same thing happened to me as it happened to Sergeant Rogers' vehicle. It was buried underneath the road. He rolled over it and is just completely. complete direct hit and just a devastating uh devastating uh devastating um iED to that humvee um but on my third time i was blown up it was the iED we were going to do a mission up in sophia the uh the uh the uh ed task force

team had had just cleared the route we were we were we were following um them up there and it was on the side of the road and i was facing i had i had the marine corps working dogs in the back of my home V with me and IED blows up and just I mean just jars me where my head's rattling back and forth in the turret and the you know the dog is freaking out I'm thinking it's going to bite you know bite me and you know a huge piece of concrete lands on my head and and and it was this it was the same it was the same thing but only his was underneath his vehicle and mine was on the side. Yeah. Yeah.

When we were over there so once we start of putting snipers out. And oftentimes we put snipers out, oh, after a clearance team goes through. So the clearance team would go through, we put snipers out, and when those insurgents would come to reseat those IDs, who'd kill them. And people were kind of surprised at how many people

we were killing, how many enemy we were killing. And it was like, no, this is, we need to kill a lot more, actually. And that's one of the things that I think endeared us to the Army and the Marine Corps was being able to, to kill those IED in placers, get them off the battlefield. And that's, I got so much appreciation

from all the battalion commanders, but then the company commanders, they were so happy when we could get guys, because we only had so many, we could only cover so many routes at any one time, but they would be so happy to hear, oh yeah, we're gonna come out and watch, you know, Farooq Way,

which is a nice long road to watch, which has, so many IEDs on it, you know, and they'd be so happy when we could watch route sunset. When we could get our eyes on those roads, especially after the mine clearance team went through, there's, you're guaranteed going to get kills. It's guaranteed. It's going to happen. I remember that worst intersection, Farooke and Easy Street, that intersection right there.

Oh my gosh, I made chills right now thinking about how dangerous. Because you're deep, you're deep into the Moulab district at that point. And by deep in the Moolab district. it's not that far no it's not that far when you look at a map you go what do you what is that you know how many meters is that I mean you'd measure it in meters you wouldn't measure it in kilometers you'd measure it in meters maybe it's a click I don't know but yeah it's not very far and yet that's deep in the muley that's very deep in the muleb so that was one of the that was one of the benefits of us no we got very lucky in in my task unit because we had 13 snipers

which is a high number of snipers for a seal task unit. We just happened to be lucky that our platoon chiefs were snipers, our LPO's were snipers, and we had snuck a couple guys, a few more guys into snipers and some legacy snipers. So we ended up with 13 snipers in the task unit. And that was just the perfect, the perfect group to have in an environment like this.

So how did you guys, did you guys develop that strategy on your own for the, um, placing the snipers after, after the route clearance team would go in? Because that's, I mean, that's brilliant. I mean, because you know they're going to do that.

Yeah, it was that. It was any time the coalition forces were going to do something, we would look at it and say, okay, how's the enemy going to attack this? So if you guys are putting in a combat outpost, we know the enemy's going to come. They're going to come in the first 24 to 48 hours before the combat outpost is built. So in that first 24 to 48 hours,

we'll be out there the whole time. And when they come to attack, we're going to kill them. That's awesome. You clear a road. Oh, okay, you've done clearing the road. Cool. When you're clearing that road, we'll put snipers out there.

And again, we didn't get to do this all the time, but as often as we could put snipers out there. Now the people come in and recede, enemy comes in to reseat the bombs, kill them. Doing a big clearance operation. Oh, you're going to be clearing for four hours. Well, we know we'd look at the area that was being cleared and say, oh, yeah, they're going to clear the pizza slice. They're going to clear the P block. They're going to care whatever conventional. And by conventional, usually I wrap.

vacu forces and some form of American. But we'd see, oh, you're going to be clearing in this direction through these buildings. Here's where the enemy's going to come from. We would set up on hopefully the longest access roads we could. And then the enemy would come to attack and we'd be able to kill him, interdict. And that's what we were doing. You know, that was where we, that was where we could best support what the conventional were doing.

So, and you got, you were over there with, we had the, is it? about seven guys that were over there with you all in Camp Corregador. Yeah. I'm sure you can't remember them all, but Seth Stone was, you know, the platoon commander over there. You know, it's funny, we would have put everyone in ACUs because those guys ended up in ACUs because we didn't want to stand out. We wanted to blend in with the conventional.

And, but we didn't have enough. We had like one set of ACUs per guy in the whole task unit. Okay. And what we ended up doing was the other platoon donated all their ACUs to Seth's guys so that at least them with the first of the 506 could blend in completely. Yeah. And you guys, I mean, what I remember is you guys maintain the same grooming standards as us too. I mean, I mean, I mean, you know, we had to shave when we could. and make sure we got haircuts and all that sort of thing from a rusty pair of, you know,

clippers and all that stuff. But yeah, you got, man, you guys were great. You guys, I mean, you guys just, you guys helped us out so much. I mean, I'm kind of embarrassed to say this, but like, again, not knowing anything. But I remember having a, I remember when we were doing a lot of, you know, hard knocks and clearing, you know, house to house. in order to get into some of these doors. I mean, they're reinforced with steel and concrete in this sort of stuff.

And so, like, I remember having like a thing of C4 duct taped in my right pocket. And then I remember having the blasting cap in my other pocket as I'm going down the road. And I'm thinking, I'm like, all right, well, the last house that I did, the deck cord I had about, it was about this big. So maybe I need to do it about this big. And I would plug in the C4 to blow these doors. And you guys are like, what are you doing? And you guys had all this like awesome equipment with you. And like you would, and so that you gave us like a brief demolition course, you're taking care of us because you cannot do that anymore.

You know, it was such an awesome brotherhood that was when you're going against an enemy like that, that's so determined. And you when so much is at risk on a daily basis, you learn real. fast, we better get along or we're all going to, we're all going to get killed if you don't get along. Yeah. I mean, you guys were man in the, you guys were man in the camp corrugidor just like, just like we were when, you know, we were, you know, when there was like a heavy, any presence that we were thinking we were, they were going to try to, you know, overrun or something like that. You guys would be right out there with us. I mean, every, every, I mean, you guys, you guys, you guys were outstanding, absolutely outstanding, have nothing but respect. And, I mean, just,

And the stuff that when we came home, that we maintained that camaraderie. And it was, I mean, it was almost like the stars aligned. The stars aligned for just something so great. Yeah. And again, when you have an enemy like that, you have a battlefield like that, and you're taking casualties like that. And there just is no room for, you know, to this day, I like don't, I don't, if someone, you know, tries to make a snide comment about the army or a snide comment

about the Marine Corps, like I don't participate in that game. Like it's just not, it's just, I can't do it. I can't do it. Not after all the, all the sacrifice and all the teamwork. Yeah. It's like it's just not gonna happen. My first team that I was at when I graduated from seal training was seal team one and when I got to seal team one, it was, they used to call it Stalog Team one because it was all

like following the rules and you get a lot of your DNA as a seal team one. from your first team and from your first platoon. And so my, there was this master chief, the master chief of the team was Mr. professionalism and uniforms and haircuts. And so that always kind of stuck with me. And then I worked a bunch with the Marine Corps because I did two amphibious ready group deployments

where you're working directly with them. It's working with the Big Navy and with the Marine Corps. And so as a seal in the 90s, if you weren't working with the Big Navy and the Marine Corps, you were kind of out on your own, just doing your own thing. And you kind of do kind of whatever you wanted to do. But for me, as a young seal,

I was always working with the Marine Corps and work with the Big Navy. So I understood how important it was and how they judged people. And one of the ways that they judged people is through what they look like. And, you know, if you can't put on a uniform, if a Marine looks at another human being and says, that person can't put on a uniform, there's no way I can trust him to do anything, right?

And then on my first deployment to Iraq, where I'm now working with the army, and I was like, yep, this is, this is the same thing, right? It's called the military. And the military has standards. And if you don't fit in with those standards, you know, people are going to question what you're doing. So that was kind of the, that was kind of the DNA for me of how I, like, grew up and why I always lean toward and listen like getting seals to wear a uniform period like much less a matching uniform is really really difficult so but I was able to pull it off and you know

I just explained why to everybody the other thing huge was like having a beard in Ramadi is terrible you know what I mean just as far as PID goes if you have a beard and you're carrying a gun, that's not, you know, you're, that's not good. That's not good for your survival. And just that extra second of PID where someone goes, oh yeah,

it's clean, shaven face carrying a weapon. Okay, that's probably an American. So you combine all those things together and it's not real, not real hard. And then also,

if you're running around in uniform that an 18-year-old, like a, or let's say a 21-year-old 50-cow gunner, Yeah. If he sees someone in a uniform that he's never seen before, and it takes him an extra half second to identify. And you remember they had,

that was one of the scariest things when I came to Corregor for the first time, was they were showing like uniforms and body armor captured from the enemy. And it was like, it was chocolate chip uniforms and coalition body armor. And then also the local Iraqi or the Iraqi Army wore chocolate chip camis. So anything we could do to help a brother identify that you're friendly, I was all about it. So that was all played into the clean cut uniforms and the regular haircuts and the no beards and all that stuff. And everybody kind of got it, you know, which is always surprising because seals are very fashion conscience group. You know, they really like to make sure they're looking good.

You know, they have the whole thing. Like if you're going to, if you, uh, you got to look cool while you're doing it, you know, that whole thing. So I never really bought into it. Like, I can't say never. Yeah. Because when I was a young seal, my first deployment. You know, all right. We're looking cool.

Is that what we're doing? Oh, yeah. So I had some long, long hair. Some long sideburns. Yeah. You know, there's, you can, you can have like a beard now in the Navy again. I don't know what they're doing in the Army. Are they doing the Army?

I don't know what they're doing. doing in the army now. Yeah. Well, in the Navy, there's people, I've seen pictures of them, and they just, like, have a beard. Now, that was also true in the 80s. In the 80s, in the Navy, you could have a beard.

And then they got rid of it when they tried to clean up a lot of the military in the 80s, because, you know, the post-Vietnam military was really, really lacked a lot of discipline. I'm talking broadly speaking, if you were a person in the 80s, I'm not saying you were undisciplined, but there was a lot of drugs because they weren't drug testing.

Right. They were trying to get people to stay in because the military was so popular after Vietnam. I should have said the 70s and 80s. 80s started to turn back around and they started, you know, implementing more control and all that kind of stuff. But it was a big deal.

And another thing, like when you meet Colonel Clark and when I met Colonel Clark and I'm like, oh, this guy's in the middle of a crazy deployment and he still looks squared away. All of the soldiers look squared away. We can look squared away. We don't need to go out here and pretend like we're freaking Colonel Kurtz, right? Out on the brink of sanity out here in North Vietnam or whatever.

It's like, no, we're actually part of the military, the U.S. military. We have rules and regulations. We can follow them just like the rest of these soldiers are. So that's kind of a little background on it. You start to lead. Like what was your leadership experience like as far as you personally? So, yeah, so I started off as a 50-cow gunner. I remained a E-4.

I mean, I went to the promotion board, I guess. It was in Ramadi in front of all the first sergeants and Sergeant Major Catterton. And so I was like an E-4 promotable or whatever. So my sergeant started, you know, tasking me with, because I went through that process to, to start, you know, stepping up and leading more and stuff. And at that point, I was kind of seasoned, you know, understanding the layout, the area of operations and stuff. I would try to memorize, I would try to memorize the roads, you know, to help me better. I mean, when you start getting into, like, you know, the subsections of this, that was a little bit more difficult, but as far as,

okay, you know, my left and right limits, you know, I got the five, five to the two, nine, or six, you know, right outside of, you know, Corrigador, I got canal, then market, then, you know, whatever they were, you know, Faruk and Easy, as we talked about earlier. So, I, because I always wanted to know where I was in case I needed to get out of there, you know, and, you know, to say, hey, we could just cut down this alley and swing back around because of how much contact we were receiving on a daily basis. And so I think my sergeants recognized that. And they started, you know, putting me into more of like a leadership role. And plus I was good with the radios too. I was, I was, you know, filling the radios and stuff. And I was always by my platoon sergeant,

like when we were on foot and stuff as an RTO. So, um, I just kind of like learned a lot from, uh, from him and, um, just seeing how, how my sergeants kind of operated. What was Operation Ridgeline? That was one of the notes that you sent me. You talked about Operation Ridge Line. Yeah. So Operation Ridge Line was a, was a, um, battalion size mission, but we were the lead on it.

And, um, what it was was we were going to, we were going to go out into the Moolab. And we had a, we had a group of houses that we were. tasked with with hitting and and ended up being like we were we cleared like 20 houses I mean we spent all day out there and um we just went from house to house to house um interviewing people talking to people um trying to figure out where the enemy was what they were doing how they were intimidating them um the local populace um and it was just a it was just like it was just like roughly like a seven or eight hour firefight just spurred. all day long because I don't know what I don't know what it is I don't know if if your guys had the

same experience as we did when you guys first got over there but when we first got over there um like the like the enemy always knew where we were they always knew like no matter how sneaky we tried to be it didn't matter it it it did not matter um we would do fake drops with humvies while another platoon would go and um and actually do a mission and they knew we're they knew where everybody was. And it was because they were calling. And they always, they always, they always, they always knew where we were at. And we were trying to figure out how are, how are they doing this?

And what the intimidation like, you know, what, because they would go into house. It was, it was commonplace for them for the, for the enemy to go in and say, you know, go to the mail of the house and say, if you don't go kill, you know, three Americans, I'm going to kill your whole family because I know where they sleep. and that's just how disgusting they were. And so that's what we were trying to figure out. And through all of that, that whole operation, we did an excellent job of gaining intel

and finding a couple cachets and nobody got wounded or hurt, but it was good. What do you remember about putting in copy? Necal's Nest. So that was, man, we really pissed them off when we did that. And, you know, something I want to emphasize, like, to you is like, I wasn't like Captain Santee or Colonel Clark. Who you're talking to right now is one, one guy who was in a minor leadership role.

and I didn't do anything great. I didn't have, I didn't understand a lot that was going on. I was just a, I was just an E4 in one of the most violent battles of the Iraq war. Yeah, just to really quickly counter what you just said. First of all, it's the soldier that wins the battles. And we used to look at you guys and I'm talking,

I'm going to speak on behalf of my whole task in it. We looked at the soldiers. the front line private soldiers that were out there in a 50 Cal turret on patrol every single day, sometimes, you know, not even, you know, not even getting any rest whatsoever, back on the street, back on the street, back on the street, back on the street, and doing it day after day after day after day, after night, after night, after night. So, and believe me, I mean, I've, you know, I had Colonel Sean McFarland on here that was in charge of everything. that ran the whole place.

And he knows. And he knows in no uncertain terms. It was you guys that were out there every single day doing what you had to do, stepping up over and over and over again to take the fight to the enemy. So it may not seem like, you know, you were in a leadership position or whatever the case may be. but what you guys did at your level is what made victory attainable. Well, thank you for that. And I recently spoke with Captain Senting.

He basically just said the same exact thing that you did. He was telling us that a lot of the information that they were implementing was because of the information we were providing to them of how to counter all of this, how not to get blown up anymore. How, you know, what patterns are we, are we seeing with the enemy that we can implement, you know, throughout the whole battalion? And what can we, what can we do? I mean, so like somebody had said, you know, hey, start driving on the sidewalks. And we started driving on the sidewalks because we knew that they weren't, they weren't going to be placing IEDs on there. And so, um, he so, um, he so, he,

Yeah, so he said the same exact thing that you just said there, which, I mean, it's pretty cool. But as far as O.P. Eagle's Nest, that was a, I didn't understand what we were doing because I was coming from just an individual soldier's point of view. I didn't know the whole C's build clear concept, if I said that right. I didn't understand that at the time. And so, but I'm like, man, you're going to set up an O.P. On Farooke and Easy Street?

Like, are you out of your mind? Like that plate, I mean, it's not, how are you going to build that thing? And, but whoever, whoever made that, that determination knew exactly like that, yeah, that's exactly what we're going to do. And it wasn't until, you know, afterward, I understand why we did it. but that to try to build that was so difficult and we got so many guys wounded on that so not only so not so not only are we doing you know mission platoon secondary mission platoon QRF guard towers on Michigan well now what are we got to do delta company is going to come out and start doing doing presence patrols on um well nothing was really present patrol was all a combat patrol um to uh to uh foruch and easy street 24-7 because we had to maintain the integrity of building that up. And so that same sergeant who pulled Mack out of the Humvee Sergeant Hudsbeth, he lost his ankle on an IED, trying to move some Constantina wire over and they had placed it right there. They had moved it and there was

an opening. And so he's just like, I got to go, I got to go move that. And he moved it and it took his ankle off. We had, they started throwing rocks at us. I don't know if they did that to you guys at all, but they started throwing rocks at us. And we were, and we were,

and we were like, because, so going back to the 45 minute rule, like you kind of felt okay when the shops were open and kids were out on the street and, you know, people were just doing their thing, right? In Malab.

Like, you kind of felt okay. it wasn't until when you go back to the patterns it wasn't until they started pulling their kids off the street it wasn't until the shop started closing up and you looked around and then like where it was once busy now it's empty and you're just like

and you get that feeling on the back of your neck and you're like something's about to go down and then it just pops off and that's what was happening but like at this time they were out but they were throwing rocks at us and we didn't understand like what was going on because that had never happened before. And this was like this was later on in the deployment.

And so we hadn't experienced anything like that, but they were throwing it right at, you know, the turret gunners and everything. So one night we go out, we like we, like my squad just had gone out to do the, do the patrol on Eagle's Nest for hours. No contact, nothing, nothing of significance happened at all. and our relief, our first squad came out to relieve us. So we went back to Corrigador and they came back out. Well, when they came back out, I mean, we didn't even get out of our Humvees before they got in contact. And what happened was, is so how we would do it on Farooq and Easy, if you remember, Farouk was, I don't know if, I can't remember if it was north and south or east or west,

but whatever it was, it was a straight road, right? And it intersected with. Faruque is east-west. We have the baseline of Ramada, yeah. So towards, so what we would do is we would loop. And we would always have Humvees kind of circling each other to cover each other and to always just maintain that integrity of nothing coming through. And so when the Humvee was heading back,

back towards the Corrigador way, the enemy up on top of rooftops through pineapple grenades down onto the Humvee and blew up my platoon guys. And so like the gunners yells out, grenade. And he's trying to button up the Humvee, but he's got, I mean, when you empty a Mark 19, you know like you're going to have like a couple of loose rounds like

floating. Well, that pineapple grenade cooked off. cooked off the other Mark 19 grenades and you had a guy named Chris Villalobos who lost a couple fingers in my platoon and I mean everybody got wounded in that in that Humvee and I mean it was a mass it was a mass casualty event and in order to get them back to corrugador to the to the aid station. This guy, this, this, the other sergeant in my platoon, Sergeant Ramon Melendez, I mean, I had never seen anything like so heroic at the time. Like he sent, like he got out of the vehicle, got the saw off the vehicle, said get back to Corrigador. And he was out on

Farooke Street by himself laying down fire while, you know, other, because he couldn't fit any other guys, because guys were laying down because they were so wounded in the Humvees. And he's laying down sawfire as we're rolling up and we're like, where is everybody? He's like, I sent him back and I'm like, we'll get in. And he's just sitting there by himself, 23 years old, just, just getting after it. And it was, it was, but they, what they were doing is they were probing us with those, with those, with those rocks that they were throwing. And, and it was just another way that, another thing that we had to deal with, another pattern we had to, we had to solve another piece to the puzzle.

Yeah, well, there you go, case and point with Melendez, you say. Yep. There's a case in point, young soldier making things happen, outstanding. And then when you talk about like the kids, the little kids and yeah, throwing rocks and this kind of thing, and this was the moose would make them do that. The insurgents would make the kids do that go out and they would try and figure out. They're trying to pinpoint where, in our case would be where our sniper overwatch positions were like send kids out there look around snoop around do anything you know what the moose is hoping

is that you engage those kids that's what they want they want you they're they're hoping and praying that you shoot a kid so they can put it on their al Jazeera and everything else so that's what they want and and you know you have to contend with us you obviously can't engage them so what are you going to do you know like so it's one of those things you got to you got to figure out that's what makes that urban combat so difficult. And we'd throw crashes at them, you know, that kind of thing to try and get them to go away and be scared enough. But again, one of the many things that is very difficult in these situations.

And yeah, what's crazy is when I had Colonel McFarland on or General McFarland on, his plan was to do one of those big operations like every three or four days. and we did. Like, when I think about how often those, those happened, and I had one of the task unit bruiser EOD guys on the other day, and I asked him, how long do you think it was between, and I named off like the emplacement of three combat outposts, and he goes, I don't know, two months?

And I was like, no, it was two weeks. In fact, it wasn't even two weeks. It was like seven days, and there was four major combat outposts went in. With, you know, each one of those combat outposts having two, 200 Texas barriers in place around them and Jersey barriers in front of that and 10 or 15 or 20,000 sandbags inside the building and Constantino Island generators installed and rewiring all those buildings. All that stuff was happening two or three days apart on each one of those operations. It was crazy to be thinking about that. And a cop falcon went in simultaneously. I think it went in simultaneously or it was offset by a day or two as or sorry, Eagles Nest and Cop Falcon were almost the same time. Like they were. both happening at the same time at the opposite ends of Faruque way which you want to talk about putting a squeeze on the enemy like that was perfect yeah what a what a brilliant strategy I mean like

I said I didn't understand it at the time but like now looking back on it I mean if that there's a and the Iraqi army was manning it we weren't we weren't manning it's like finally like after what we were going through with them like we finally saw them like stepping up and and guarding that place you know yeah we were able to establish enough of a footholes Like it's a lot easier to man an outpost for the Iraqi army than it is for them to go out and patrol and seize an output since they didn't have the capability of doing that. Right. But once we would establish it, get it built up, then they could at least man it. And it gives them a little bit of confidence and takes a little way, gives us a little relief on combat power to go set up the next one.

And the populace could go and talk to them and communicate with them about what is going on in the area. Yeah. Yeah. You were out, were you at Eagle's Nest when Mikey got killed? Where were you on September 29th? So I was close. I was like a block away because from my recollection, they were at, they were, you guys were operating at like near the train station when we had called in, I mean, we had called in airstrike after airstrike on that train station because they were using it as a weapons cache.

And, I mean, we'd have secondary explosions going off there all the time from that area. And, yeah, I remember we were right next to O.P. Eagles Nest as, you know, it was getting built up, or maybe it was already built. I can't remember. But, yeah, we heard that firefight going down. I mean, it was just, it was right there. And, you know, we saw the, we saw the Bradley's come in and come get you guys. And, I mean, but we couldn't, I mean, we had a, we had a route to, we had a route to man. But, I mean, we were, we were super, I mean, we were the club. I mean, we were the close. I mean, we were the close. this element to you guys when that was all going down. And I don't know, you know, why we couldn't go or didn't go. But I knew, I mean, but it was right there. Yeah, I mean, the QRF came out from, you know, from Corregor. And like you said, everyone's got a mission that you're doing out there. You just can't abandon your post to go do something else.

So when you're, you know, it's another thing to think of is, remember the, remember how crazy this soccer field? was. So Echo Charles, there's like a, in downtown Ramadi, there's a big soccer field. And it was just like a muster point for the enemy when things would start going off. They'd go there and muster had weapons, the weapons cash is there. And so they could kind of go in there. But the soccer field was just this total muster point for the enemy.

And I remember I, I, and we, you guys ended up not executing it. But there was a concept of operations that Seth Stone put up the chain of command through me. I approved. And it actually used the symbol, the operational terms and graphics for destroy, which you almost never get to see that. But there was a certain area of the soccer field. It was like a wall that was on the western side. And it was really easy for the enemy to hide behind, maneuver behind. and it really pissed off Seth,

and he was like, we need to destroy this thing. And we started ordering the massive amount of explosives that was going to take to blow this thing up. And I forget why it didn't get executed, but that's how bad the soccer stadium was as just a place for the enemy to convene and go execute operations. Yeah, it was kind of like in the middle, like not I want to say in the middle of nowhere,

but they had just had kind of open rain there because it was right off of Michigan and it was kind of like in the center if I remember correctly and like because OPE Hotel was was further down the road and Camp Crigger so it was kind of like in the middle of that but man they found a major weapons cachet there

and I want to say like they did like a couple A10 strafing runs in there and just yeah that place was crazy as you're getting through deployment now you know now we're talking like September October you guys are supposed to be going home in November. The only reason I say supposed to is because the 1-1-A-D all got delayed

an extra three or four months. How is you and your platoon and your company's mentality as more casualties are coming and the clock is kind of ticking? You start feeling like, well, hey, we're going to go home soon if we can make it. How's that mentality?

And how do you deal with that mentality? So that was that was kind of it is. So how I always try to explain it was the first two months were the worst and the last two months were the worst. Everything else in between is just in between. The first two months is just that chaos, right? It's just like you have no idea where anything's at. You don't know. You're not establishing any patterns of the enemy.

how you know like how are you going to respond to the enemy you know am I going to make it the next day like like that's that's how I was that's how I was thinking because of we were getting guys just hit every single day and then at the very end you're like I almost made it out of this thing virtually unscathed right and I mean I have all my fingers I have all my toes like I I'm looking at a platoon that was once, I don't know, 20 men strong, and now there's like seven original guys left in the my platoon. And now, like, we're getting close to the end.

But there was always this thing of, hey, everybody told us that when we first got here, that the Battle of Ramadi is lost, and there's no way you're going to win that thing. And what we had accomplished from when we got there in December, December of 05 to now October, November timeframe. I mean, it wasn't just, it wasn't just we were killing all the bad guys, right? I mean, that did happen. But, but like, we were also handing out pallets of water to people. You know, we were, we were doing things to try to help that populace,

fixing the roads so the kids could play in the street to have a somewhat of a normal, normal life. Yeah, that was a whole line of operations. I mean, the civil affairs efforts, the engaging with the Sheikhs efforts, the tribal engagements, the building the police force, the engaging with the actual government of Ramadi and the governor of Al-Ombar who lived in Ramadi. So all these, look, you and I sit here because we're a couple dudes talking about combat. And of course, what do we talk about? We talk about machine guns. we talk about 50 Cal, but all these other events were taking place. Now, it's important to remember that you can't do any civil affairs if you don't have

some kind of security. You can't interact with the shakes if you don't have some kind of security. You can't build and give away water. You can't build wells and give away water and repair the roads if you don't have some kind of security. So you had to, you have to establish through kinetic operations, control. some level of control. And the more control you get,

the more you can do civil affairs. The more you can engage with the tribes. The more you can engage with the local police. Like all those things rely upon the violence being at least mitigated to some extent. And the more we were able to mitigate the violence, the more you can interact with the populace and let them see that there's another way to live

and they don't have to live with these insurgents. So yes, even though, especially for someone like you, a straight freaking 50-Cal gunner in a turret or a saw gunner out on patrol, you don't get to see all those other things taking place. But there's whole other units where that is their primary focus. Their primary focus is not a machine gun. Their primary focus is a hammer and a drill or doing medcaps as well. I forgot about med caps. So you're going out there and you've got teams that are going out.

Their sole mission is to go out and give medics. support to the local populace. So all those things were taking place. And the longer we were there, the more they took place because the more enemy was eliminated and the more the local populace trusted us. And so, yes, very important point to be able to see that progress. And for me, one thing I always remember is going like cop falcon. So when we put in cop falcon and then going out from Cob Falcon over the coming weeks and actually months. The first time we went out and went into someone's house, like knocked on their door and wanted to find out what was going on in there.

The dad would take the family away and wouldn't even look at us, wouldn't talk to us at all, because they were so scared that the insurgents would see them talking to coalition forces. But fast forward another, you know, three, four, five weeks. and all of a sudden the local populace is like, oh yeah, there's a bad guy that lives over there. You need to get him. You need to get him.

Or they'd be sitting down giving tea to the Iraqi soldiers. Like the attitude of the local populace changed so much while we were there. And I think that's what, if I had any indication, because I left in October, if I had any indication of the positive things that were going to happen, it was number one, seeing the local populace actively communicating with coalition forces. That was number one.

And the other big one was when we put in cop sword, which was right on 20th Street, right just south of Route Michigan. And there was a bunch of intel from the enemy that they were going to fight for it. And no one was ever going to, no coalition force or whatever to get in there. And we went in there and it was,

it was like my guys didn't shoot, didn't engage anybody. And they almost always engaged enemy fighters. And here we go into this last combat outpost, no enemy fighters. There was other, the 137 killed some guys, but my guys didn't kill anyone. Why didn't they kill anyone? There was no one to kill. And so then I said, huh, that's pretty interesting that we thought this was going to be a hornet's nest, and there was no hornets.

And so that, again, when I looked back on it six months later, when, you know, essentially peace had broken out. I was like, oh, that was the first little turning point in this battle was, number one, the civilian populace kind of opening up. And number two, going into combat out post sword or OP sword. And it was actually myself and it was actually me and Colonel McFarland. We like, you know, I was with a couple other army guys and him and we're standing there. And like, this is actually pretty mellow. He also jokes about the fact that I was like,

hey, sir, can you, can you not stand like so close to that window right now? He's like, Roger that. I was like, there's no shooting going on right now, but we don't know what's going to happen. So that was your, as you're getting towards the end of deployment, and again, even though there's more of these kind of civil affairs types, it's still, it's still horrific. Yeah, we're not even, yeah.

I mean, it's, yeah, it's, it's just the same that's going on every single day. I mean, I mean, it's just, again, still going out two and three times a day, still getting shot at two and three times a day. Still, you know, as a 50-cow gunner, I'm just trying to, I'm trying to keep everybody in my truck alive. I'm trying to just, I'm trying to kill as many people as I can so I can keep my whole truck alive and get back home. And so did you end up with the Pope glass and everything on your, on your home V turret? Yeah, we ended up, we ended up getting those, I can't remember when, but it was like halfway through. Halfway through our deployment, we ended up, we ended up getting those. Bro, we showed up on our deployment.

The vehicles that we had were like the old school Humvees with like the one like machine gun shield in the front. I mean, just embarrassing. I was like, are you serious? No one's going to get this there. You're kidding me? Yeah, and I don't know how we ended up getting him. But like, I mean, I remember guys getting mad because like, because again, like my perspective for the majority of the time was Camp Corrigador. Right.

It's all I knew. Just an absolute absolute like worst possible living conditions you can you can possibly have because because of where we were at. But then like, you know, every once in a while, like, you know, I remember, well, the second time I was, the second time I was blown up, I was blown up with Colonel Clark actually. And we were, we were heading to, we were heading to the Gov Center for, for he had to do some meeting. They asked for some volunteers. And so, I mean, a couple of guys volunteered. I was driving at the time. And because two gunners volunteered.

So one, and the other guy was like, hey, if you're on the, if it's, we had a Mark 19. So I was like, hey, you're a Mark 19.

You're going to go ahead and get in the mark. And so I was driving. And so we had to go to the Gov Center. And I think we went to Camp Ramadi. And then I, it was my first time at Camp Ramadi. And I'm like, I'm like,

what the hell is this? Like this? Like this, you guys got showers. You guys have a chow hall. You can sit down. I mean, I remember walking into this chow hall.

And I mean, I probably hadn't showered in three or four days, and my, my, my uniform is just completely dirty. And I remember walking into this child hall, and everybody's just kind of looking, looking at us, you know, coming in, and we sit down, you know, by ourselves, and we, you know, we get, I mean, I mean, I went up there for seconds. I mean, I mean, you had, like, you had so much food there, and it was so good, and it wasn't the same thing every, you know, every single day, like it wasn't.

at Corrigador and you guys had, you know, bathrooms that were air conditioning. I mean, I remember like, you know, the ones at Corrigador, you had, you know, you had a shower curtain, you know, over you and you were, you know, taking a dump in a, in a waste can and then burning it in the daytime because you couldn't do it at night because of the night discipline. And so you had all this stuff and I'm just like, dude, this is, this is, this is, this is how the other half live. And what's really crazy about that is they're only four miles apart. I know. But that four miles was Route Michigan. Route Michigan.

And that four miles, if you were to say, all right, everybody, do you want, you know, do you guys want ice cream? Cool. Here's what's going to happen for you to get out. Here's what's going to have to happen for you. This is what's going to have to be. Like, it was serious logistics nightmare to try and get that four mile stretch of road covered on a regular basis. where and and I guarantee i mean look there's no one that's going to look out for their troops more than colonel clark and colonel macfarlane i i know those guys like there's no two guys that are

going to do more to take care of their troops than those two guys and what they i guarantee decided was well i would like to really like to give my guys some whatever ice cream or seconds do i want to risk their lives on three more convoys to make that happen every day. No. And they just looked at each other and probably said, nope. They couldn't. There's no way they could do it. I mean, not with the amount of IEDs that were out there.

There's just no possible way. And again, we didn't know any better. But it was like one of those things like where, you know, if you've been, you've been good for a while and dad's like, hey, come on, let's go get some ice cream. It's like, oh, really, okay. Let's go have some ice cream, you know, because you never really get it. But that's how it was. And so it was such a joy to go to Campromadi or Alta Cato to, in order to get those things because we, we just didn't have it.

But we didn't, but nobody, everybody was fine with it. Everybody, everybody was fine with it. It was kind of, it felt good to be so hardcore. It felt, it felt fucking great to be honest with you. Yeah, the, the, for my guys, you know, we went out to Camp Corregador within a couple weeks of getting there. We were doing a big operation with you guys. And we had the blue on blue happen, which was terrible. And then we went back and basically Colonel Clark had rolled out the offer of, hey, if you guys want to come out here, like, let's go.

And it was actually Claiborne who had told Colonel Clark, like, can I have seals with me on every mission? Like he walked up after our first patrol and he's like, can I take seals with me on every mission? So it was a really good kind of instant, awesome relationship. And then, so now I had everyone back at Camp Ramadi. And I told them, I told Colonel Gronski like, yes, I'll put guys out there. And then I wrote up on the board, hey. And so now three quarters of the task unit had just been in Camp Romadi.

And when we were staying, we were standing in full metal jacket. there's dirt floors, there's mosquitoes and bed like bugs everywhere. And it was just miserable. And I took a whiteboard and I said, hey, I need to put together. And actually Stoner, Seth Stone, he said, hey, you know, I want to pick my guys to go. And I said, don't. I said, get volunteers. Because if you pick guys, just don't.

Some guys, you might pick a guy that doesn't want to go. It was miserable out there. Like, it's so kinetic. It's completely hazardous. You need to, like, let's get volunteers. So I put out the word to everyone I said, hey, you all just got back from Camp Corregador. You know what's going on out there.

You know what the living conditions are. There's going to be casualties out there. And we need, like, a squad of guys to go out there. So I put a whiteboard up and I said, if you want to go, put your name on this list. And I walked out. And I came back 20 minutes later, and every guy in the task unit had their name on the list.

That's awesome. Let's go. So then Seth got to kind of pick and choose and figure out what would be the best combo. Sure. Yeah, man. Corregador was no joke. And that was probably what most people would think of a military deployment. Oh, yeah.

Is a lot more like Camp Corregador than it is like Camp Ramadi or, I'm glad you never went to, you know, Baghdad or something like that. you would have been seriously disappointed. Yeah. You know, some of those places, like, they had pools. I heard. It makes me sick. Yeah, like swimming pools, Echo Charles. It's crazy.

Like, legit gyms? Legit gyms. Actually, Craigdor had a, you know, had a kind of a hardcore gym. You know what I mean? It was a place where Rocky worked out. Yeah, it was a rocky gym. It was a rocky gym.

It was freaking legit. But some of those other bases, some of those big bases, bro, they had legit. I want to say hammer strength. Remember hammer strength? Hell yeah. Yeah.

Hammer strength was kind of top line stuff. And they would have the full, because you know how you could get, you could get a hammer strength machine for like your right forearm and then a different hammer strength machine for your left forearm. And then like one for your right calf

and one for your quad. They would have them all. Yeah, it was, it was kind of nuts. Luxury. Craigor? That wasn't happening. No. Makes me sick.

And you know, actually I had Colonel Dean on, who was the one three, commander and he was talking about the first meeting that Colonel McFarland, General McFarland had and he's up there talking about you know this is hey he's about to take over as the brigade commander in charge of Ramadi and he's standing there and like six mortars hit and like Colonel Dean said you know he's kind of like trying to find some cover very very clandestinely like lean back against the wall in case something blows up and he said colonel McFarland was like didn't miss a

beat just kept talking yeah and it's like that was right in Campromati getting mortared and as a matter of fact if I remember correctly a soldier got killed by those by those mortars so yeah that was bad Corregor even worse so your mentality as you're going out towards the end of deployment yeah you still had to maintain that that certain amount of aggression um because because it wasn't over. I mean, you, I mean, just you couldn't, you couldn't, you had to stay locked in the entire time and, um, because you knew what was waiting for you when you were getting out, the 45 minute rule still applied. Um, guys were still getting blown up. Um, but there was, there was a lot of me that was really excited like to get back home, um, because I almost had made it, right? It's almost like a, like, it's almost like, you didn't want to know, like when you're going home because like you're, you know, you don't want to do the, you know, you know, you don't want to do. a countdown thing, right? You just did not want to do that. There's a bad mental space to, to do that. But I also felt personally like the job wasn't done. Like you had all told, like, we had all just heard that, you know, the battle for Ramadi has lost. There's no way you can

win it. All that type of crap. But then like what we accomplished over there was so good. And we did an amazing job, an amazing work. And I just felt. like the job wasn't done and I just wanted to see it through. I wanted to see it through to say no because like I don't even think like a lot of people know that the 101st Airborne was in the Battle of Ramadi. I don't think like a lot of people know that the first of the 506 had played such a significant role in the Battle of Ramadi and we absolutely did. And and it's just like you know because like when we got back home, I couldn't believe the stories I was hearing from Ramadi about like having battalion runs down Michigan.

Or I'm like, what? I couldn't, it was impossible for me. Like, I couldn't, I couldn't picture it. I was like, there's no way. There's no way that's happening. And, but that's how, in the, in the one year that I lived over there, that what we accomplished as a team over there, I think led to it.

No, no doubt about that. Did you, I always told myself, or I wouldn't tell my guys like, this is the last mission you're going on. Oh, yeah. Because I felt like that was a jinx that no one wanted. So I just, hey, we're working until we go home. Yeah.

And then it'd be like, oh, we got a plane coming. All right, these guys are out of here. And just put them on a plane and they're out. And that way they never, in their mind, they never went on their last mission. It just, oh, they looked back and was like, oh, I guess that was my last mission there. Is that the way it was for you? Or do you remember like, okay, we're leaving in two days and I'm going out tonight? Yeah, no, I don't remember, I don't remember how it happened.

But I remember, like, so, you know, when we first got, when we first got to Corrigador, there was like we had, you know, a six-person chow hall table. know, you know, we were, we were taking a dump outside and, like, but then we had Porter Potty's, we had an air, we had a, we had a landing pad in Camp Romadi. Somebody had built, like the C-Bs had built us a better chow hall where we could, we could fit more people in there, and then they, they had built a helipad on, on, and the backside of, of Corrigador, where it was real dusty, like moon dust back there. And, um, And that's where I, that's where we took out off of, um, as opposed to like when I remember first

coming in. And, um, uh, I just remember, I remember, I don't remember my last mission. I don't remember, um, how it all, how that all happened. Like, now that I'm thinking about it. But, um, I do remember getting on that, uh, getting on that helicopter for the, for the last time and lifting off out of, out of, out of Vermont and just being like, holy shit, I made it. I made it. And that was it.

So where'd you fly to TQ and then jump on a bird to Kuwait and then jump on one of those civilian? Did you have, was it, was it the 506th together? Yes. Yeah. So you were redeploying as a unit? Yeah. I mean, as much as possible. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm sure we did it by company by company. But then, yeah, it was the 506th as a unit redeploying back home. And I remember we. We left Kuwait and got to Bangor, Maine. And then from Bangor, Maine, we flew into Fort Campbell. And that's where all our families were to greet us, to greet us back home. From your platoon, how many guys that you deployed with?

How many of the guys, the same guys, were on the flight home? Nine. Out of how many? 20. what's the what's the protocol when you guys get home what do they do they do they do they do they do they do they do they do they do they put you in a off site for a little while anything like that yeah so you um from what i remember is we had to do like like some debriefs um and things like that we had to uh um you know go talk to different um doctors um and then um But then there was like a lot of leave.

We had a, we had a, we had a mandatory leave where we were home for like three weeks. And then we had to go back. But then like after that, it was, it was kind of like when I first got to the Hunter and first, it was a lot of three and four day weekends that they would, that they would give us to, to help us slowly get back into, into the groove. What was your plan at this point? Like, how much time did you owe the army? So I was, so, let's see, I got home.

home in December of 06. And so I had until August of 07 was my ETS date. So, um, oh, so like you had another six months, seven months. Um, and were you planning to get out? Uh, yeah. So like, um, I, I wanted to go to school. Um, I, um, did you think that all deployments were like the one you just went on? And you're like, yo.

I, I just, you know, I, you know, I just, I think my, it, it, you know, I thank my almighty father in heaven for protecting me and putting a hedge of protection around me during that whole time. Um, and I just, like, I had, I had, I had, I had, I had been through so much. I had, I had been blown up, you know, so I just didn't know how much, I didn't know if I could, you know, keep rolling the dice. And, um, I just said, hey, you know, I, I felt like I did my time. I felt like I served my country well. Um, and, um, I was ready to go to school. I was ready to, I was ready to, I was ready to get on, ready to get on with my life. I just, I think I was, like, just so tired, too. I was just, I was just so exhausted from war, um, just the constant, um, battles that we were in. Um,

I was just, I was just tired. And I think, I thought it was just a good time to get out, um, before, before, if I re-enlisted. I just didn't, I, the re-enlistment just didn't sound, um, appealing to me at the time. I just never even thought about it. What was it like driving down freaking main street USA like whatever 24 or 48 hours after you came home from driving down Farooq way in the easy street. I mean I was I was a wreck man I like I felt like I was always forgetting something because we had to wear our body armor everywhere we went you know so like I felt like when I was leaving I remember like leaving like the dinner table you know and I would I would try to pick pick up my body armor and my rifle you know and I could

because that's what you had to have at all times. And, you know, just driving down, driving down the road, you know, any piece of debris that was in the road, I was over to the left. I was over to the right. I was never driving in the center. And I was, I remember my, I remember my, I think it was my mom picking me up from the airport, if I remember correctly. And we were driving, we were driving back home on the interstate.

And I remember her being like, she was like tailgate in this car in front of us. I was like, what are you doing? Will you stop? Will you please stop? And she had, you know, she was totally oblivious of what was going on. But, you know, I was just like, I was like, hey, I was like, just, can you just back off just a little bit for me, please? And there was like a, there was a lot of adjustment that I had to do internally because of just what we, what we had just gone through in that whole year. How long did it take for that to start to fade a little bit?

I would say, man, I would say it took, you know, it took a year. I mean, it took a long time for me just to get, just to get through it, just to understand, okay, like, you're fine here. Everything is good here. But, I mean, you got to think. I mean, nothing ever stopped when I came home or when we came home. You know, nothing, nothing, everything was just going on. The world was still turning. Everything was going on.

while I was while we were killing a lot of people and and in trying to avoid IEDs and getting blown up in the process and like there was a so but nothing ever stopped here and that was that was the hard thing that was the hard thing to adjust to yeah that was definitely a weird thing and and I remember I came home and man I was just walking I live in a little sub community here and in in in San Diego and I was just walking down the street and and like you said nothing had changed for them like everything was just it's all kept going and I remember seeing some you know some just whatever people that are clearly totally oblivious totally oblivious to the war whether that was you know it's kind of like looking at everyone I looked at like some some high school kids you know some 15 year old kids walking down the street I'm like these they have no idea the war it's going on and then some soccer mom I'm like she's not thinking about the war and then some business still can do it I'm like oh he's not thinking about it and I realized none of these people are even thinking about something that I had been completely immersed in and they're not it's not even a factor in any way in their world it's not a factor in any way maybe they see it on the news maybe maybe if they watch the news they'll catch a sliver of something that's going on in Baghdad maybe these people are completely oblivious to what's happening right now and that was a

That took me a little bit of mental jiu-jitsu to be like, to look at that and say that's not a horrible thing because that's what we're supposed to be doing. Let's let them live their lives. We're trying to protect this way of life. It took a lot of mental gymnastics. I didn't get there, obviously. You can't get fully there because people should recognize what's happening

when the country's at war, when Americans are getting killed, when Americans are putting themselves at risk every single day. They should be thinking about that. And the fact that they don't think about it is wrong. The mental gymnastics I had to do was to not allow that to, like, make me mad at everyone. Yeah. Because it's real easy to get everyone like, you know, you see your wife's friends who, you know, you've been gone for six months.

They were awesome support to my wife, right? Because I don't have any family around here. So everything was supportive. by her friends. And so they were at least, they at least understood what was happening. You take one step outside of my wife's friends. Like my wife's friends, friends,

they don't have any clue what's happening. None. So it took me a little bit of mental gymnastics and jujitsu to figure out like, oh, it's okay that these people aren't paying attention to this right now and don't be mad at them. That's, don't be mad at them.

So it took a little bit of, of gymnastics to get through that. Yeah. I learned really quick, like, through, like, everything you just said is, like, I can't, like, I can't share, I can't, I can't even talk about this unless it's with, you know, the guys I was with. I can't even, because I, like, trying to explain this to, like, you know, just a, like, like, a, like, the best man in my wedding, right?

Who's a great dude. And trying to, trying to explain that to him is, you know, is. It was just like, oh, okay. You know, and it just, you weren't getting the feedback that you needed, like, to kind of, like, talk through that. And it was only, like, the guys that you served with who really understood, like, like, what, not just like what the battle of Ramadi was, but just like the whole, with Corrigador and everything that we went through. It was just, I learned really quick that, like, I just need to, like, there's people I can talk about this with and there's people that I'm just not going to because I don't want to, I don't want to. I don't want to have that that reaction from

them. Not that there's not that they just don't know. And that so that was that took me a little bit too. So your last six months in the Army, what are you doing? So last six months in the Army, like we're getting a lot of new guys in to replace the guys. And then we're starting to, do like another workup in because we were they were getting ready to go to

Afghanistan and and and so and but I ended up I ended up like start I started applying for for for colleges back home and got accepted into Western Illinois University and and then so it was just a just a matter of time until I until I got out and I and I didn't feel I didn't have any, um, I didn't feel bad about it. I just, I just, it was like, it was just like the right time for me. Yeah, Colonel Clark, this is one of the biggest lessons I learned. Um, I was going to see Colonel Clark in, in Corregoror and we had some kind of a mission going up with them. And I was, uh, waiting outside of his office there to talk to him. And he has a soldier in there. And I can't really hear what they're saying, but, you know, I'm not going to like ease drops.

So I'm just standing there and then the soldier leaves. And I go in and, you know, he says, you know, he just made some comment like outstanding soldier. And I was like, oh, you know, whatever, what's happening with him? And he said, you know, he's leaving the army. And he said, when someone is leaving the army, he said a lot of times commanders will say, hey, you need to reenlist. You need to stay in longer. You can't leave us. We're only halfway through deployment.

What about your brothers in arms? What about your comrades? And he says, you know what I tell him, Jocko? And I was like, no, sir. And he said, I tell him thank you. Thank you for what you do. Thank you. Thank you for your service.

We appreciate it. Your country appreciates it. Man, what a great man. And I was like, that is so next level. And, you know, I can't imagine that. A lot of guys didn't walk out of that office and go, wait a second. I'm going to re-up. I'm going to stay here.

You know what I mean? It was such in the opposite. Here's another thing going back to my, my upbringing in the SEAL teams. If someone was getting out of the SEAL teams, they were a quitter, which in the SEAL teams, like the worst thing you can be as a quitter.

So if someone was getting out of the SEAL teams, they were a quitter. And actually, when I first got to the SEAL teams, they would take SEALs that were getting out and put them on GateGuard across the street. And gate guard normally, oftentimes would be like a punishment for so a normal sale gets in trouble like oh dude you you you messed up you're going to be gate

guard and so now you take a guy that's served his country honorably and put him on gate guards because he's getting out and it was just such the opposite attitude and that's just a a great learn learning moment for me from from colonel clark one of many many learning moments from me from from colonel clark and the way that he interacted with with his soldiers and how appreciative he was and how it wasn't about him. It was about the army and it was about that individual who had served. So for you to get back and be like, oh, I did my time in the army. I served.

I served in a freaking rough scenario and I'm going to move on. Did you, you know, a lot of guys come back and all of a sudden they're like drinking. What about, was alcohol any issue for you or were you not that into it? Yeah. alcohol was an issue for me but it was I got it was weird because like I knew it was I knew it was I knew what I was doing wasn't right but like I just I just was doing it to do it I don't even I don't even really know why and but I but I but you know just with the support system that I have with you know my family and like it you know it wasn't it never got to a point where it was it was it was it was

devastating for me at all but um i just needed to i just needed to you know find that find that thing you know to to get me through um just because um i don't know maybe maybe i felt sorry for myself a little bit but um but yeah i mean alcohol was a thing when i when i first got out but um but i'm it it was it's no factor anymore you know what's interesting is you know before we hit record we were talking about jiu jihitsu and and basically echo was like yeah you know if if If you, if me and Echo are doing jiu-jitsu and you're hanging around with us, eventually, you're kind of going to start doing jiu-jitsu too. Well, guess what?

If Echo and I are just drinking and you're hanging around with us, what are you going to start doing? I'm going to start drinking. And I was in a college environment. Yeah. I was a college environment, but it was unique because I had, I was four years older than everybody in my class. And so I was with a bunch of 18-year-olds, you know, opening up a textbook that I haven't opened in, you know, four years, you know, know, learning algebra, you know, and then like, you know, you're kind of creating your own, you're, you know, you're creating your own schedule and, and, in, in, and, in, and, in your thing,

but I was a lot, I was a lot more focused, um, that was in high school, to say the least. And, um, uh, and so, but yeah, you're exactly, you're exactly right on, on that. If, if, if all your friends are, are going to be doing that, then you just kind of, you're, you're kind of falling on. Yeah. Yeah. Man, hang out with some people and if you can in your your friend group, man, get your friends. started doing some jiu-jitsu or some lifting or doing something that's like smarter than drinking that's it drinking doesn't help you it's not going to help your friends in fact it's going to hurt everybody so uh you're going to college so now you're going to college so you did you

have like a like legit college experience like dorms and all that stuff yeah so i um i uh got a waiver for for some of those things um what school was it uh western illinois university okay um and uh so i got I got a waiver, and so I didn't have to stay in the dorm, so I could just, and it was more of a, like, Western Illinois is just kind of more, like, like, residential area. So like, you just rent houses. Cool. And so that's, that's what I did. And I just got with some people that I knew. And, yeah, rented houses all through, all through out college. And so how did you steer from? Because there's, there's one particular story here, which goes, you get home from. Ramadi you show up at college and you turn you know you are going to live the craziest life that you know that you weren't allowed to live that you hadn't lived before you're lucky to be alive you know you're lucky to be alive and I'm going to go in that direction of getting after it as opposed to like you know what I actually see a future I actually want to be squared away

like what do you think because not everybody when those two roads diverge in the woods Not everybody jumps on the road that leads to a good place. Yeah. So I met a girl. And, well, reconnected with a girl. And I knew right away. She was the one. So, yeah.

So like I didn't want to. Just like that, though. Just like that. I didn't want to lose that at all. And she's the best thing. ever happened to me and and um so you did you grow up with her so so so so i was in catholic grade school and um i and she was um so i was i was it i went i played at st joseph school in in peak in illinois and she was in the same grade at st marks in peoria and then was

yours all boys no it was yeah it's co-ed and like just like hers and and So she was, you know, she was a cheerleader and I was on the basketball team, but like there was always this thing. You know, she took and then, you know, she took me to, uh, she took me to a vice versa dance, uh, when she went to her high school and then, so I went to a public high school and, uh, what's vice versa dance? So it's like a Sadie Hawkins, uh, thing where like the girl takes the guy out. Okay. Got it. Um, and so she, you know, so she took, uh, she took me there and then that was like freshman year. And then, you know, we, we, we couldn't drive. I mean, we were, you know, 14, 15 years old or whatever it was. We lost contact. Unless it was like tractor. Yeah. You'd hook that out, Jason.

Man. So, yeah, so we just kind of lost contact. And then, like, you know, I get home from Amadi. I'm at a bar talking to another girl. And next thing you know, she comes up to me. And she's like, are you Jason? And I was like, yeah, I am. And she's like, I'm Melissa.

I'm like, no way. And then so, and then like, the, like, the, rest is history. Yeah. And so we've been together ever since. And that was that was basically right when you got to college. That was in 2007 January 2nd. I was on mid tour leave as a matter of fact. That was on mid tour leave as a matter of fact. Yeah, I remember like she had she ended up taking me to like after after we hung out that night she ended up inviting. Wait, that was mid tour leave. No, no, no, no, that wasn't just tour. I'm sorry. I misspoke. That was post appointment leave. Yeah, I'm sorry about that.

yeah and she ended up taking me to church the next like the next day and it was just again like you know God has a plan and and I knew I and like I just knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her

boom yeah dang that's outstanding but I needed I needed an education I mean I needed an education I needed I needed a job in order to support her because there's no way I was going to be asking my father-in-law you know I was like hey can I can I have your blessing to marry your daughter and not have an income. Like as a man who just went through

something like that, that ain't happening, you know. So did you have a plan on what you wanted to do? Did you know you wanted to go into law enforcement? I didn't know at first. So I wanted to get some like general stuff out of the way, but I started like leaning towards, leaning towards law enforcement route. So what did you get your degree in? Law enforcement and justice administration. Okay. With a minor in history. At some point you realized you were going to be ordered law enforcement. Yeah, which was, I mean, like looking back on it, I mean, the degree is the degree, but it kind of helped me like with through like constitutional stuff. But like, but as far as you don't really need a law enforcement degree to go into law enforcement, you know, like I didn't know that at the time, you know.

So, but Western Illinois has like, you know, one of the best law enforcement programs out there. So, but if I mean, I should have done something to me like, I look. come back. I should have done something like in business or something like that to, you know, I don't know. I got some news for you. Guess what? Just like you don't need a law enforcement degree to be in law enforcement, you damn sure don't need a business degree to be. Yeah, that's right. To be in business. I can speak from experience. So you get through college, any major challenges in college, you're focused, you're a 24 year old dude. You're just no factor. Yeah, just, just, yeah, I mean, it was no, it was no factor. I mean, I always wanted like the early

classes, you know, wake up early and, and get it done. And, um, I mean, just like with, yeah, there was, there was really no, no issues. It was just like, that's when I, but I, that's when I, that's when I, like, I couldn't hear as well. Um, like my, like, in a, in a, in a, in just a silent room, you know, I can hear my, you know, the ringing in my ears, you know, that, like that, like, those little things are, or the stuff that I noticed. And, um, but no, I mean, it was a good experience overall. I was a lot more focused, and it just took me, like, I just wasn't, I wasn't, it just took, I wasn't ready for college, like, going in, like, coming out of high school in any way.

So, so having the discipline that, that the Army gave me and, and things like that, I was a lot more ready to, to start, to start that, and be more focused. How long did it take you to get through college, four years? Oh, like three and a half, because a lot of military credit. it's transferred over. Okay. Yeah. And then you got a job in law enforcement right away?

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it took me, took me about, I'd say eight months, but yeah. At what point did you ask

Alyssa to marry you? Did you ask dad first? Yeah, had to ask dad first. Yeah, had to ask dad first. I remember, because, I mean, she was ready. I mean, we're at the same age, but she was already starting with her career.

You know what I mean? So, like, she was ready. And, but like, I couldn't, I couldn't tell her that like I wasn't, right? So, like, because I needed an income first. And so, so, yeah. Were you just stalling it this whole time? Yeah, man, it was, it was so big. You're like changing the subject.

I know, you know, you know, Jessica got married. You're like, hey, how about, you know, how about those bears and that whole thing? Yeah. And I was just like. And what about her dad? Was he starting to pressure you? No, no. They like, I got, man.

I got, I have, I have absolutely awesome in-laws. And, and, but it was, you know, always the bridesmaid, never the bride type. I remember hearing that all the time. And, wait a second. What did that mean? It's like what Charles helped me out. It's like a second place scenario, right? Where it's like, it's almost happening, but never really happening for me, you know, kind of a scenario.

Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Oh, so that's how she was feeling. Yeah. God. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which, I mean, I, I, I don't know.

I, I just couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't do it. without an income as a man. I just couldn't do it. And so yeah, so I remember, yeah, just taking, going over to her parents' house one day. And yeah, I just said, hey, can you come, can you come like look under the hood of my car with me? And he's not a mechanic or anything.

He's like, yeah, sure. So he comes out and I was like, hey, I really didn't come out here to ask, you know, to see if anything's wrong. My car's fine, but I was just asking you to, if I can take your daughter's hand in marriage. And he said yes. Right on.

And then you asked her. Yeah, then I asked her. She said yes. She said yes. And we just have a beautiful family. We're so blessed. And how many kids you got now? Three.

Three kids. All doing Jiu Jitsu. So tell us about the, so you go into law enforcement, and at some point, maybe in the future, we'll talk about your law enforcement career. And your federal, you went from, you went from being a sheriff's deputy into federal law enforcement. Into federal law enforcement. And that's another story. when did you start training the jiu-jitsu? So it was about 2016, I would say.

And what triggered that? The men sitting right in front of me. You just got sick of hearing us talk about jihitsu, and you're like, all right, there's something going on. I've got to try this. Yeah, there's definitely something going on. I just needed, I needed more. I just needed more of a challenge, you know,

like when you don't have that every day, you just, you know, you're looking for something, or at least I am, you know, now I'd get bored, I'd just do triathlons, you know, I remember, you know, it was just something like that. And, but, but then, like, after hearing you, hearing you guys just talk about jujitsu all the time, it's just, that's all I needed was just, just that little extra push. And I remember going into the gym, so I, so in Illinois, I was training at the Peoria Athletic Club, which is a McVickers, Jiu-Jitsu, Jack McVicker. And so, so I go in there.

And, you know, at this time, I mean, I'm lifting and I'm running, you know, and I'm like 230 pounds and. Around here we call that jacked. Yeah. Yeah. Which is the perfect thing to be when you're walking into the Jitza Academy for the first time. Yeah.

So I remember talking to, I remember talking to my, my buddy Nick who, who grew up in martial arts his, his whole life. And I remember, like, parking outside of the gym. And I remember looking, looking inside the glass. And I'm just like, what am I doing? Like, what, like, what are they wearing? What am I doing? Like, so I call it.

So I called it. So it's kind of weird, right? Yeah. So I call him. No, no? Doesn't seem a little bit weird? I guess now that he mentioned it. Like, picture him, like, he's looking, you know, he's an army dude.

He's now in law enforcement. He's looking in. There's people wearing funny outfits. Yeah, but kind of rolling around on the ground. Yeah, but there's like Taekwondo, you know, back when you're young, there's like Taekwondo, judo. I mean, you know, it's like you're not, it's not like you're looking in there and be like, what are they wearing?

No, you know, that's a martial art. They wear that stuff. I think we collectively, meaning you, Echo Charles, are kind of forgetting like what because we all know Jiu-Jitsu. Even from the UFC, we kind of get it, right? We get that there's this ground thing that can happen. But back in the day, man, you know, it's kind of like, this looks. a little strange.

I never thought that, to be honest with you. Only because I took, I took I keto when I was a little kid. I took judo when I was a little kid. And then some of our family friends were, Ikeido was, not Ikeido, sorry, Taekwondo family. So it was like,

the ghee to me was like, okay, even when I felt when I first put on the gear, I was like, oh, it's like a judo ghee. It's like tough, you know? So I was, it was,

I did not feel that at all. There's a Charles Bronson movie. It's called the mechanic. Sure. And I was a real big in that Charles Bronson when I was a kid. Sure. In the movie,

the mechanic, he does judo with some guys. And he's wearing a ghee. That I always remembered that. When I put a ghee on for the first time, I was like, wait a second. Charles Bronson.

Charles Bronson. Hell yeah. All right. So you're standing outside. So, yeah, so I call my buddy Nick and he's like, just walk in.

Just go in. And I was like, okay. I remember going in. And they're like, yeah, he's like, first class is free.

you know, come on in. And he's like, they're getting ready to start. I'm like, okay. And I was like, do I need anything? He's like, no, shorts and a teacher, it's fine. And I was like, okay. So I get in there and there's this Purple Belt who's getting ready to teach the beginner class.

And he's, I don't know, 5,8, 175 pounds maybe. And we start learning the technique and everything. And then we start going into live work. rolls and and we went into live rolls he came right over to me and I'm like you know I'm you know six three two 30 and um jacked just just just lift just lifting weights and uh this guy is sweeping me um arm barring me choking me and I'm like what like how how is he doing this like I mean I mean it's like so exhausted my and you're a cop too like this is crazy yeah and I just couldn't couldn't figure it out and this dude was

just having his day with me. And then there was a blue belt that came in. That was more, that was my size. And I think that was even worse. And, uh, it was, it was, I was like, what is going on here? And, but I felt like, I felt really good at like, after doing it. And, um, and so I thanked everybody and, um, they invited me back. And so the very next day, I showed up again. And, um, and, uh, they said, yeah, come, yeah, come on in, you know. And I was like, well, I didn't, you know, you said the first class was free. He's like, just, just go in there again. I was like, okay.

And so the same thing happened. Just, it made, but I had a blast. I mean, I was just having so much fun. I mean, I was getting choked out in armbard and all this. And I went up to, I went up to him. And I just, to the instructor, Brad, Brad Pepolo. And I said, hey, I said, I'd like to, I'd like to. Commit my entire life to this game.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'd like to do this. And he's, and he just said, yeah, let's. You know, let's sign right back up and get you a ghee. He got me a ghee and he came over, gave me a big hug and said, welcome to the family. And then that started. I mean, really, I mean, you guys had kind of changed my family tree because now I have all

three of my kids in it. My wife is coming to tournaments. I mean, it's a whole thing. And it's really cool to watch. And so, yeah, so I started off there. And I mean, I was just, I mean, I was just, I mean, I, I don't know what my wife was thinking. I mean, like, she's like,

ah, he's just doing this thing or whatever. And because she had no idea. I was just gone, you know, for a couple hours. And then next thing you know, I mean, this has turned into a lifestyle. And, and, and so, and so, yeah, so, yeah, I'm going up the ranks and, and just doing really well, understanding, like, a lot of things.

And just, I'm just having a ton of fun. And now it's, now it's just a part of my life. How much has it come into play in law enforcement? So, when I was a sheriff's deputy, so I used to get in a lot of fights, like, I worked third shift because I like,

I like to, I like to be what the action is. And so I worked, so I worked nights a lot. And, for like six years. And I used to get into a lot of fights, like,

you know, just not knowing how to control, like, even pre-jiu-jitsu. Oh, yeah. Oh, so we're talking to. The majority, yeah, majority of the time was,

was pre-jitsu. And then, but once I learned Jiu-Jitsu, like, it was like almost I'd never got into a fight anymore. There was this one time, though, and it was like everything I'd been waiting for. And so it was, I was on second shift working in overtime detail. And I remember I get this call. It was like, like our shift ended at like 10 o'clock. And it was like 9.30th call came in. And that was like right next to my house.

And we had take home cars. And so I was like, all right, I'm going to go handle this real quick. And so it was like two minutes away from my house. I get there and there's this guy sitting in. How deep into jih Tzu are you at this point? I'm a blue belt. And I'm a blue belt. And the guy, this guy, super intoxicated dude.

And it's, and it was colder in Illinois at the time. So he was wearing. We call that geese. season. So he was wearing, he was wearing, uh, like a coat and a hoodie. And, um, perfect. And, uh, and so there was this older female, um, elderly female that was sitting in the driver seat of this, of this car with her windows locked and she was like white knuckling

this steering wheel. And this guy's like, I, you know, we parked down the road, you know, before we go up. And so like, like, I, I, I, I go up there. And, um, I just hear. this screaming from this guy saying, you know, get the fuck out of the car. Get the fuck out of the car right now. Let me in the house. Let me in the house. And I'm trying to look and I was like, hey, and so I'm like looking around and I finally see him. And I see the female first though in the in the car. And I see him and I shine my flashlight at him. And I said, I said, hey, I was like with the sheriff's office,

get on the ground. And he's like, fuck you. What are you going to do? And I was like, and so I was like, hey, it was like, get on the, just get on your belly. And he says, you want to fucking go? And I was like, yeah. And so, and so, like, his eyes lit up. And I started, I went in there for a double leg and I went in there to go, because I couldn't tase him. I mean, he had all this, that thick clothing on.

I already knew that. And, and so I go to double leg him, but I double leg him into the garage. And so he starts, he starts, he starts, like, thrashing at me. And so he had ripped off my radio. So before, before the fight was. really on. I had said, hey, step it up or fighting because they knew, and like, you know, rule number one, he always got to sound cool on the radio. You know what I mean? So like, so like nobody, like everybody was super surprised that I had said this on the radio, but then he had ripped my radio

off. But I didn't know that at the time and my gun belt was hanging open. The only thing that was keeping it open was my belt keepers. And so I just gave him like just a basic trip. I mean, it wasn't anything because the double leg didn't work and we were pinned up against the wall and so I just I just gave him a basic trip to the right and I landed on top of him and he and he just he was laying on his back and and I remember getting on side control on him and his arm was just laying like this I'm like oh Americana I got a Americana and I just sat there and I and I'm you know it was pressure no pressure and he's like get off me I can't breathe so I would let go and then he tried to get up and I give him I'd give him a little Americana action and then he'd stop and then I just kept doing

that back and forth and I'm like this is fucking awesome like I'm like this is so like and I was like where's my backup like I like where is everybody because I'm close enough to the city because it was like we were actually in the country club when this was going when this was going on so it was kind of close to the city but it was a sheriff's office jurisdiction and I had no idea where my backup was because he had rip off my radio and and so it was you know it was wintertime so like the leaves were off the, off the timber, and so I could see, I could just see red and blue lights, you know, coming down. I knew they were coming from me, and, but I'm like, dude, I could sit here all day. I mean, this is badass. Like, this is the moment I've been waiting

for for so long. Like, I was just going, I was going heavy. And, uh, and he didn't get, he didn't get hurt until like every, because they all thought I was hurt. Like, so they, so all the officers from the city and from the county were coming in, and, because I wasn't answering status. And, uh, so they had, they had all come in. And then when they all came in. They came in, like, ready to go, and that's when he got hurt. And so, so, but yeah, I didn't have to, you know, throw a punch or kick or do anything like that. Man, I just maintained eye control for like, for like four minutes and I was good to go. Freaking outstanding. Yeah. Yeah, man, that's how it should be. People got to,

law enforcement got to train, man. Training that jujitsu. How much, how much time did you get when you were a sheriff? How much time did you get training in defensive tactics? Oh, it was, it was pathetic. It was, and it's, and it's, you know, it was like you did the, you did the basic, you know, once a year, four hours, four hours mandatory training. And, you know, I would, I would go up to, you know, the sheriff and in the command. And I would say, hey, like, we need to do jiu jutsu. I mean, like, we need, like, even, you know, they have a Gracie law enforcement program. They have all these different programs that we can do. And it was, nope, nope.

And so I was just like, I don't mind spending my own money to do this. because one, I'm having a blast doing it. And number two, I'm learning a skill that is proven, right? And I even use that example. Like, I didn't have to, I didn't, I didn't tase the dude, I didn't shoot the dude. I didn't punch him. I didn't throw a kick. I didn't slap him.

I didn't do anything. It was a basic trip and just maintaining pressure. And it was two years of jiu-jitsu, two and a half years, something like that when I, because it was right after I got my blue belt. Fucking outstanding. And how did the kids get into it? What have you learned about getting your kids into it? You know, just the confidence.

The confidence that I wanted them to have growing up is what I really wanted. And I really wanted. And I knew just watching our kids program when I was in Illinois, how good it was. But man, when I got to California, like I thought we had a good kids program in Illinois. bro like dude this california jiu jutsu out here is no joke so i'm i'm training so um so i got so i go to pacific martial arts in fresno and uh-huh and um which outstanding gym and i walk like we go from the kids program to illinois and there's nothing against my old gym at all like they just you don't know what you don't know right and so i go into um i go into pacific

martial arts and my daughter his like my my two boys weren't old enough to to do it yet and so but my daughter was and my daughter was was really good and um so so so i was like hey it's her first class you know she wants to try and like just the warm us alone was was just intense and I'm like dang man this is this is unlike anything and like the way they had like how many kids were in the class um how many people you know were doing it how many instructors they had the kid ratio um uh uh And the techniques that they were doing, it was just, it was, it was, it was awesome. And then like, they go up, then so she had, she had gone from a, from a gray and white belt, or she was a gray and white belt. And when she showed up. And, um, the coach, super, super nice guy. And he was just like, hey, do you want her to have a hard role or like, I, you know, how is it? And I was like, oh, well, yeah, you know, you give her a challenge. I don't want her to get like, you know, you know, beat up or anything, you know.

And she's like, okay. And so she goes against this another gray in white belt and just gets absolutely destroyed. And so I'm like, man, what is going on here? So the only thing I can think of is maybe just like not, I mean, like, so there was one was an attendance-based school. And another one is, hey, what kind of skill do you actually have? And so my daughter actually humbled herself, went back to a white belt and then got. A couple stripes right away. Good for her.

Yeah, it took, because she hadn't competed at this point. And then she, and then so, yeah, so she's close to getting that great. She's still not gray and white belt. I mean, and this has been almost two years. And she's been doing judicial for a long time. She's almost there. But, yeah, she's done a tournament's placed in every tournament. I mean, she's, man, she's so good.

She's so good. And the boys are doing it now, too. And the boys are doing it. My son has competed too. I mean, he wants to get in there all the time. And there's something about like a, like just like your son, like just wanting to do it. You know, not somebody saying, hey, like, what do you think about competing? You know, you know, he wants to get in there and do it.

So, yeah, so he recently just won gold in a tournament. And then my, and then he won silver in his first tournament. And then my youngest, he's just in the little kids class. How old is he? He's four. Yeah. I found there's only one four-year-old boy. I taught kids' classes at Victory for probably like five or six or maybe even something, seven years, something like that, maybe six years.

But there was only one four-year-old ever that was actually like could take a class for real. Boys. There were some girls that would pull it off more girls, like more girls than I could remember that were four and they were kind of squared away. boys are knuckleheads. And so like even my own son, he wasn't, I mean, he was in there through forced labor to be in there, you know, just like, that's just what he was doing.

But he wasn't actually actively, mentally participating in the class, actively, does that make sense? Like actively mentally participating in the class until he was like maybe six. Now, you learn by osmosis and you learn things and even a four-year-old, I think it's best maybe for a four-year-old,

especially the four-year-old boy, like just wrestle around with them. Just do jiu-jitsu with your kids, you know, just mount escape, get the back, do the arm locksick. You're doing that stuff for 10 minutes, five minutes. You have mats at your house? No. Not yet.

Okay, so we'll just have mats at house. I mean, it's cool. You know, you're on the bed, you're on the carpet. Like, it's all good. You're just rolling. And trying, and this is the biggest mistake that I made with my kids was I didn't make jiu-s-suit-funk. I made it into what it was for me.

You know, discipline and winning and all these other things that you don't want to make it that for a kid. Some kids are going to be that way, by the way. Some kids, they're just, they want to win at everything, and that's just the way they are. Some kids don't really care. Some kids don't want to do it. You're going to have this whole spectrum. And I'm talking with any kid anywhere in anything. Like you have some kids playing hockey, some kids going to want to win.

You could have, you know, some other kid doesn't care. That's just, it's not that they don't care, but maybe they don't care much. Or maybe they just legitimately don't care. So the best thing you can do is make it fun. And I'm really talking to the parents of the world right now because it is such a gift. It's the best gift that you can give your kids. The best gift that you can give your kids is jujitsu. It is the best gift that you can give them.

Because if they have jujitsu, they can protect themselves. They have confidence. They have friends. They have a skill that's going to last them a lifetime. There's always that question in the back of a conversation that you're having, even as a grown man, of like, wait, if Echo like stands up to me right now, there's really nothing I can do about it. Or if Echo wants to, you know, push me around and I don't know how to fight, I just kind of have to accept it. And that impacts your whole attitude in life, right? Yeah.

Look, am I sitting here saying that everybody I see, I'm sizing up like, well, I don't really care. No, I'm not saying that, but I'm kind of saying that. And as you mentioned earlier, like you get into the military in a single platoon, there's a pecking order. No, yeah. You know, what you were talking about when you showed up at that first unit, there's a pecking order. And if you show up to a job site, there's a pecking order. There's a pecking order and part of that pecking order is physical. I'm sorry to tell you this.

I'm sorry to tell the world this. There is a subtext of physical combat in all situations. I'm not saying that's right. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm saying it's the reality of life, especially for a dude, especially for a boy, a seven-year-old boy. A 12 year old boy, a 15 year old boy, that is there. And you got to learn how to not use it.

And that's one of the beautiful things that jujitsu teaches you. You don't have to. Look at all the time. You mentioned being a police officer, you got in all kinds of scraps when you didn't know Jiu-Jitsu. Once you knew it, you were happy to get in one. I can't explain it. I don't know why that is.

I don't know if it's the way I carried myself. I don't know if it's the way I talked to people or if I respected somebody. a little bit more. I don't know, I don't know what it was, but I can't explain it, but there was only one. And it was that one that I,

that I just told that story about. And it's, I mean, it's been the best thing for my life. It's helped me, it's helped me so much. And it's, I'm seeing it.

I'm seeing the benefits of, of my kids. And, and, you know, just learning with what you guys are talking about, um, through podcasts.

I mean, I would, I mean, I would listen to your podcast from start to finish to the supplements, right? Because I just loved it. I loved every second of it. I didn't want to

miss anything because there's so many lessons in there and so um and so like you know with you i i remember you telling that story in one of the podcasts about about how you would push yourself or like you you ended up putting your your son into a higher weight class or whatever the situation was and um i you know i i learned from that like okay hey maybe that not i might not want to go that aggressive and just kind of let let it be kind of a natural thing of whatever their coaches are thinking and so it's i think it's what you guys are doing to tell the world about jih Tzu. I mean, that's the whole reason why I got in. That's the whole reason my family tree has changed because of jih Tzu, and it's been nothing but benefits. I mean, my kids are so well-behaved. They're eating all their dinner at night

after jiu-jitsu, and, I mean, they play their instructors. They role-play their instructors at home when it's, you know, when the TV's off, you know, for the day. And so it's, it's just, it's awesome. I don't know how much I'm allowed to talk about this, but I'm going to talk about it anyways. There's a movie coming out called Way of the Warrior Kid. It's being filmed basically now. And Jiu-Jitsu is a central character of this movie.

It is, you could go so far as to call it the central character of the movie. and what was interesting earlier you mentioned karate right echo charles and and we all at our age group maybe not how old do you uh i'll be 30 i'll be 40 in january did you watch karate kid i did okay karate kid was a big deal right here's the thing when you watched karate kid if you were a kid and you said oh i see karate karate karate's cool i'm gonna go to karate school i'm gonna go to karate school want to train karate. Then you show up at a karate school to train karate. First of all, that meant a million different things.

And a lot of those schools that someone might have gone into was not cool. You know, it was you're not doing the thing that you saw in the movie. You're not fighting. You're not doing whatever that crane kick. Like that stuff, it was movie stuff. When kids see this movie, they're going to go, I want to try out that jiu-jitsu stuff.

And then they're going to go to a jiu-jitsu academy. And when they go to a jih-too academy, it's going to be what they saw in the movie, and it's going to work. Oh, man. And I think the amount of jiu-jitsu in this country after this movie comes out is going to exponentially increase.

Like I said, jujitsu is the central, one of the central characters of the movie. It's kind of the star of the movie. And I'm talking scene by scene. It's the star of the movie. So when you have that and it's dramatic and it's impactful

and now all these kids are going to go from that movie theater to the low, and there's jihitsu all over the place. I mean, you had it in Illinois. You had it. There's jih Tzu everywhere now. There should be.

It's getting close. So when kids go from, you know, same thing with like boxing. You know, when Rocky came out. Now, Rocky was an adult movie. And it didn't convey this positive message, really. It portrayed a positive message to us as dudes. We're like, kick ass, you know.

It's based on everything I just said, which is like, I can fight, you know, like that was kind of the thing. It wasn't a positive message for kids. Karate Kid was a positive message for kids, but it was kind of hollow because, let's face it, again, all respect to karate. but karate's not jujitsu, not by a long shot. Now we're going to give kids jujitsu, and then they're going to go from a movie where they see this awesome thing. They see the hero of the movie is jujitsu,

and now they go, or one of the heroes of the movie is jujitsu, straight up. And now they go to a jihitsu academy. And they learned that thing. They recognize it from the movie. And they get to be the star now. They get to be this thing. So it's going to be kind of next level.

So awesome. So awesome. My kids love the Warrior Kid books. They have all of them and they love them. They read them all the time. And one thing if I may add, so with that, so like my daughter,

she was super easy to get into, like she just was like, okay, we're going to do this. And like she just fell into it just fine. My son, on the other hand, I mean,

it was a battle. And I mean, I remember having to, as a purple belt, having to take his, hand ask ask the coach back hey do you mind if I just get on the mat with him you know and just just be with him to get him comfortable he's like yeah man sure and so I remember my son I remember taking him by the hand having all these parents look at me and just I was taking

by the hand he is bawling like just crying so hard I'm like hey we're you said you're going to do this we're going to do this and then just and like I'm feeling terrible like man am I pushing him too hard you know my daughter was a little bit older maybe I'm pushing him too hard but then I just stuck with it and he stuck with it. And now he went from crying, didn't want to be on the mats to like, this is all he wants to do. And because he's got that confidence, he knows it works, he's competed, he's gotten gold, arm barring people in tournaments. I mean, from where he was to where he is now, it's, you just, like as parents, you just got to stick with it.

Even if your kid is scared, just have them stick with it because it's going to be beneficial. another little outlet I've been giving parents or little tactic techniques and procedures is oh you know hey kid you don't hey Johnny you don't want to do jujitsu okay that's fine we only have to do it twice a week hey oh no you don't want to do it's cool you only have to do it twice a week you know so that's kind of like

just the minimum standard for our family you know not my family but like you know you're saying like oh hey no you don't have to do it you don't have to do it just like hey oh you don't want to clean your debt room every day that's no problem But, you know, at least you have to put the dirty clothes in the hamper and you've got to pick the toys up off the score. You don't have to clean your room. You have to dust everything. You don't have to vacuum.

But we do have a minimum standard. Oh, you don't want to floss your teeth in the morning and the night. It's okay. You can just floss it at night. That's just the, you know, that's what we're doing. Oh, you don't want to, you know, you can make, you can go through anything. And you as a family have got a minimum standard. You know, the minimum standard is, you don't want to spend all dinner.

You don't want to sit with us and talk after dinner. Okay. But you at least have to stay until we're done with the main. course, that's the minimum standard, then you can be excused. You know what I'm saying? So you got these minimum standards. One of the minimum standards you can have is like, yeah, you know, you don't have to do Jiu-Jitsu.

No, you don't have to do Jiu-Jitsu. That's fine. You don't have to do it. I mean, you've got to do it twice a week because that's just the minimum standard. But if you don't want to do it, that's fine, you only have to do it twice a week. That's another thing because eventually, like you said, eventually they go, oh, this is kind of fun. And another piece of advice that I used to give to adults was, because I'd have people

say, I don't, two things. Number one, I don't like fighting, so I don't want to do jiu-jitsu. My answer to that was, if you don't like fighting, you should do jih-too even more than someone that likes fighting. That's number one. And number two, you don't like it. Keep doing it at least until you get a submission on someone. That's going to give you a certain feeling that you've never had before.

You're going to get this certain feeling that you've never had before. And when you get that feeling, you might realize, I want to pursue this a little bit more. Now, if you get to that point where you've been training for four months, and you finally submit another human. And you go, this isn't for me? Cool. You can go down to the minimum standard twice a week just to maintain.

You know what I mean? But most people, once they get that one, they kind of like, they're going to keep it going. So those are some good, that's real sound advice. You know, if your kid, also your kid's crying, like, I don't want to go, I don't want to go. Same thing that we talk about all the time. Trust, listen, respect, influence, and care.

Oh, you want to take a day off? Hey, no problem. I'll take the day off. You don't have to go today. But you're going to go tomorrow, right? Because you got to go, you know, we've got to do twice a week. So if you don't want to go today, it's okay. But, you know, we got to go, then we're going to have to go Thursday and Friday.

If you miss Tuesday, so we're going to have to go Thursday, so you just listen to what they have to say. What's that word? You appease them. You allow yourself to be influenced by them. Oh, you don't want to do it today. That's fine. You only got to do it twice a week. So it's, you know, you can do it Friday and Saturday.

if that's what you want to do. I can't take you on Wednesday, but I, you know, so that's what you do. You listen to what they have to say, even as a little kid. And the other thing is, we already said this, but man,

make it fun. And how do you make it fun? Am I doing it with the old man? You know? Let's just do some jihitsu. By the way, that gets them ready for what they're about to go do in class. And now they already know what an arm walk is.

They already know what an al-a-unpe is. They already know what an elbow escape is. So all of a sudden, it's like they're ready to go. And just like that book, outliers, the book Outliers by Malcolm. him Gladwell. One of the things that happens in Canadian hockey is the kids that are older.

You know, you got one year. The league is made up of a bunch of people that are the same age. But some of those people were born in January and some of those people were born in December. The people that were born in January are a year, 11 months older than those other kids. So they're a little bit bigger. They're a little bit more coordinated. They're a little bit smarter. And they score more goals. and they get the puck more and then the coach leaves them in longer and so now they get even better

and it just compiles over time and by the way since they scored goals and they had fun while they were playing they like it so what are they doing they get home they practice and those kids get better and it compounds itself whereas the kid that is

the youngest kid on that team he's a little bit smaller he's a little bit slower he's a little bit less coordinator he didn't score any goals his coach isn't giving him the playing time and that kid is going in the other direction. So keep that in mind with your kids. Another thing is, which I, this is one failure that you mentioned that I did with my kids,

was like, oh, I'm going to put you in a tournament. Oh, by the way, I'm going to put you up a weight class, up a belt level, and up an age group. And in my mind, like an idiot, I'm thinking I'm making them tougher and better. And in their minds, I'm just making them hate Jiu-Jitsu because they're getting crushed. You know, they spend all this time training And then I put them in there with a 12 year old When they're nine

Like you're getting crushed That's all there is to it Yep So you gotta watch out for those things Is that get us up to speed? And again, I know we have a whole You know, federal law enforcement thing Yeah

We can talk about sometime in the future We've got to get a little bit of Maybe some permission to do that at some point For sure But on the rest of your life Does this get us up to speed? Yes, sure, that does Um, Echo Charles.

Yes. Any questions? Yes. Whoa. First off, how big was the guy that, that you got, um, you know, apprehended? Um, so he was, um, so he was probably probably about five or six years older than I was. And, um, I don't know. He was, um, probably six foot, um, probably 190.

Yeah, yeah. So still pretty big. A threat will say that. Yeah. Six foot 190. And just drunk off his ass. Yeah. That'd be shitty.

You're 6-3? And at the time, what, 2.30-ish? Yeah, maybe it had cut some weight because, you know, competitions and stuff. Let's say 220. Yeah, it was probably around that. 6-3, 220, side control. That's a problem. Americana.

Right? You're not going nowhere. Yeah. And I mean, I was even thinking at the time, like, now that I'm kind of reflecting on this, is I don't even know the last time I was doing Jiu-Jitsu at that point where somebody just had their arm out like that. So like when I saw it, it just took me. I'm like, oh my gosh, it's right there.

And then it was just beautiful. Yeah, it is that experience. And then so it kind of ties into, you know, when you say, hey, do jiu-jitsu until you get your first submission. Where that's kind of the feeling even when you get your first submission, because you're almost like surprised that it works so good. So I remember one time, remember Tyrone Glover? Not Jeff, Tyrone.

Okay. So I met him. I was a white belt still. And I knew who he was or whatever. And I met him and I'm kind of this big buff guy. It was a white belt. He's, you know, accomplished black belt at this time. He's like, hey, come train at city boxing in PB.

Remember the city boxing in PB? And what's Tyrone way? Like 170? Yeah, maybe. I did not roll. He probably competed at a lesser weight, but I bet you he walked around 170. That's my guess right now.

Yes, a solid dude, but he's not 6, 3, 2.20. No, he's not. Nonetheless, he's like, hey, come train. I run a class at city boxing down in PB. I was like, cool. And I was like kind of into it at this time. where I'm so, you know, but still a white belt completely. Yeah.

Bro, that's, that's called lunch. Oh, yeah, for me. Blasso was kind of big too. I was like 210, 215, that's like, oh, white belt, you know guys, you get a bigger payoff when you beat up the bigger guy, right? So I was, oh, that's a good way to put it. You are a lunch.

Straight up. He's like, oh, come home with me, I'll pay for you, I'll pay for your cab ride to come down there. Oh, yeah, you're right. If I was like 135, white belt, it's like, no one really wants to roll with you for that reason though, you know?

And by the way, just as a caveat, Tyrone Glover's like super cool and chill right like I wasn't trying to make it out like he's looking at you like I'm gonna get this guy because he's super well here's the thing he wasn't yeah that's super cool and chill here's the thing I get I get that even now people would be like yeah come train and you see it in their eyes you're like bro you just want to see if you can beat me I see and I dig it man I dig it but this is not what Tyrone was doing he was just super nice because yeah come train I ran a run a class I'm on white belt let's face it accomplished black belt some white belt he don't care you know and so anyway um I go to the the class and the classes ran a little bit different. So, you know, different schools have different ways the classes run or whatever. So anyway, we did, you know, warm up drills, technique drills. And then we have this before open mat rolling, they have like these lines, like three lines. And you basically go down the line to face the guy in front of the line, right? So it's like kind of like the- You got lines facing lines?

No, line facing one guy. Okay. So one guy's facing a line of people. Got it. So you face the guy, it's like a three-minute roll. So if you get tapped, you go to the back of the line. Got it. No matter what.

So if you don't get tight, you do the tapping, you stay there, right? So I'm like third or something. And the guy right in front of me is big. He's like bigger than me. But white belt, we're all white belts in there, right? So I'm there. This was like my first taste of, it was like before any tournament. So it's my first taste of rolling with guys I don't know, you know.

So it's like, it's a little, it's like an in-betweener tournament, kind of a mental scenario. So I go in, boom, I start rolling with this. guy because he won he beat the guy that was in front of him so so I was like okay I got to go against this guy so I'm a little bit nervous to be honest with you so I go and pull more rolling I go and it's just like how you were saying his arm kind of came out I was like oh shoot Kimura and I got it and he tapped real quick I was like bro this is the best thing in the world you know big guy didn't know him so it's like bro this is a legitimate proof you know so every time you say that where you say um tap your first person then see if you like it that that is the ultimate like test to see

whether or not you like Jiu-Jitsu. And I'd be surprised if you don't like it after that. Yeah. And that other comment about people that don't like fighting, they're the ones that even more than a person that likes fighting that should train because it's going to be easier for you to get. You don't have to fight if you know Jiu-Jitsu. And if you do have to fight,

it's going to be over-quick for your enemy. Yeah. And sometimes even when you get more advanced, it's surprising how easy it gets. You know, even in the situation outside of training, like, you know, your friend wants to be over time. to mess with you. And you're like, bro, I'm not in the mood to like mess with you.

But then finally you're like, okay. And you're like, bro, why did you even try to mess? It was so easy. Like it wasn't, you know, you're like surprised sometimes. But yeah. Okay. What's a weapons cache, cash. What does that look like?

Yeah. So weapons cache is like where the enemy goes to hide weapons. So they can hide them underground, they'll bury them, put them in walls or cabinets or whatever. I mean, just a massive amount of weapons to where they can easily. go to everybody all the enemy knows where that weapons cache is and so they can immediately go there and get get their um get their weapons um in order to attack us um i mean it can have everything from r pk machine guns AK 47s explosives bomb making materials um and i remember one major one was

like right next to the euphrates river um and they right in sophia and uh they they had they had buried a huge weapons cachet and we somehow we got intelligence that it was was up there. So I'm trying to like kind of imagine. So they don't have like a base that they go to. Is that why? I mean, so it's like a secret hiding spot for all their weapons that they all can kind of visit

or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's different. Yeah, because they know we would go house to house. And like if,

I think they were allowed like one AK 47 or something like that for personal offense that they had anything else. They're strong on the second amendment. As Colonel McFarland said, they're allowed to have one AK 47. Yeah. Yeah. But if they had any more than that,

or if they had like some weird bomb making materials, they know that we, we take them with us and we, and, uh, we take the prisoner to go get interrogated to figure out what's going on. But they, and they, they did kind of like,

at one point, like the, the Romadi hospital was kind of a headquarters for them almost because it was a big tall building. It was just off of route Michigan like it, but it was a tall building so they had communications, line of site communications, so they could use radios and talk back to them.

And they would, you know, I forgot to ask you this, but the enemy, they were good. Like they did things that we did. They had quick reaction forces that would come in. Like that 45 minutes, part of that 45 minutes is how long is it going to take for the enemy to go, oh, yep, here they are. Let's get our reaction forces in there and go attack. And then if they start taking casualties, they had QRFs that would come in and extract wounded and bring them to the hospital.

So they did the kind of things that we did as a fighting force, combined our. arms, which is a really complex idea, but they wouldn't just attack with just an IED or just an RPG or just mortars or just rockets. They would do these complex attacks where they're starting with machine gun fire to get your head down, hit you with RPG, hitting you with mortars. And then all this time, a vehicle born IED is driving and getting to the target when everyone is distracted by other things. So the enemy was really good.

But yes, in order to... But different. As far as like that, because even the hospital, I mean, let's face it, that's not a base,

you know? That's not like some place, comparatively speaking, is what I'm saying. Not a base like where you would have. And just like the U.S. is not going to have a weapons cache, cash, cache.

They're not going to have like a weapons cash somewhere. You know? Or I mean, maybe, but it's like... Well, actually, technically, we have massive weapons caches. but they're just, they're not hidden. They're just like on our base.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah. So they got to, it's like more of the guerrilla insurgent, tricking methodology. And they were strategic. I mean, they were, they were in separate places. I mean, like I had mentioned the train station, the Euphrates River and the Moradi Hospital. I mean, that's like a triangle, triangle difference of, of where, where they would keep

their weapons. And they, and they knew where those weapons were. And so, like, when we were getting close, it was, you could tell, like, we were getting close and they that's where like the the intensive fire would start coming from because like they didn't want us anywhere near that because they knew that we were close and snoop because like why else would you be in that area you know why else would you why else would you um be snooping around that area you know in in any way so like like they like they knew like because you are like the one thing that I also failed to mention is like the like the enemy knew our rules of engagement better than

we did they knew what we they knew what we could they knew where that line was. because they knew, and they knew how good we were. We weren't doing things the wrong way. We were doing things the right way. And so they definitely knew, they definitely knew all that. Yeah, and they made adjustments to like the escalation, or not the escalation, but one of the things that they changed noticeably was they started using grenades as an offensive weapon more towards the end of our deployment.

And one of the reasons was because if you see a guy maneuvering tactically and he's got an AK-47 or he's got an RPG, he's getting killed. If you see a guy that's walking down the street and he's acting suspicious but he doesn't have a weapon while you're not engaging him and you can hold a grenade in your pocket or whatever

and you can perform a really good attack and so that's one of those but that's an example of them adapting to our ROEs right? Oh they figure out oh if we're carrying an AK-47 or we're carrying a machine gun or an RPG and we're maneuvering tactically, we're going to get shot.

But if we're out there and we're just walking and we're maneuvering but we don't have anything on our hands, then that's going to be okay. Or Echo, if we pre-stage weapons in this building in a cache, now we can walk down the street free and clear. Enemy can walk down the street free and clear, go into the building, pick up a weapon, fire it at us, and then put the weapon down,

and leave. So they were good. You ever watched the movie Predator? Yes. Same thing. If you don't have any weapons, Predator's not going to mess with you. See what I'm saying?

Is that true? Oh, yeah. In fact, Predator One, if you remember correctly, Jason. The girl picks up a weapon. Arnold says, hey, he yells, kicks the weapon out of her hand, steps in front of her. Seems insane.

Predator doesn't kill the chick. Jack. And you've been told the chick later, or it might have been earlier, I think it was later. He said, hey, don't pick up that weapon. He's like, he didn't kill you because you weren't armed. Same thing. So the predator has rules of engagement.

Rules of engagement. I'm here to tell you. They adapt. Good to meet you, my brother. Good to meet you as well. Thanks for having me. Right on. Jason, any closing thoughts?

No, just thank you so much for what you guys are doing every day. The content that you're putting out, the books, everything like that. I mean, you're changing lives. and you've changed my life. And it was an honor to serve with you. It was an honor to finally meet you. And I just can't thank you enough for the opportunity to share. Like just from one soldier's perspective of, you know, the 101st Airborne and the first of the five or six of how proud we were and how hard we fought in the Battle of Ramadi.

And it was just an honor to share a battle space with you, sir. Yeah. I mean, first of all, I didn't change your life. You did it. And you did an outstanding job. And as I mentioned, you know, it was you all. It was you all that were on the front lines that were making the stuff happen day to day that were going out every single day, every single night, making these things happen.

And we've heard us cover on this podcast, the frontline soldiers because they're the ones that win the war. And so awesome to meet you. here. Thanks for coming on and and thanks for everything that you did in the Battle of Vermont to support the 228 to support the 11-A-D and of course the incredible support that you and your entire battalion from the first of 506 provided to my seals from task unit bruiser the bond formed through the blood sweat and tears on that deployment. It's never going to be forgotten. That was one of the hugest honors was going after deployment to your battalion and seeing Mike Monsor's name on your wall of honor for your fallen soldiers. And to see Mike Monsor on that

wall as well, it'll never be forgotten. And we'll never forget the service and the sacrifice made by the band of brothers from the first of the 506. So thank you, Jason. And thank you. to all of the soldiers of the magnificent, the revered, and the heroic Red Curhey. And we will never forget you all, and we won't forget your heroes that did not come home. Thank you. And with that, Jason, Kedger has left the building.

Pretty awesome to get the, context and the perspective of General McFarland the brigade commander in charge of the entire Battle of Armadi and get Jason's perspective a 21-year-old or 22-year-old

frontline soldier out on the streets on a daily basis getting after it. So pretty awesome stuff and yeah, pretty cool to hear all those different perspectives and definitely a lot to learn from those different perspectives.

And also to hear his perspective being inside the first of the 506, which was just an outstanding outstanding unit. Also, good to hear that he got on that jiu-jitsu train. He's brown belt, by the way. Yeah. He may be the first kind of. Jocko podcast, Brown Belt, he was saying when we were in the, before we hit record. It's possible. I think, uh, Vic, Vic, Rvic.

Our Vic. Yeah. Because when I met him, if I'm not mistaken, I could be wrong. If I'm not mistaken, he was a white belt when he started and he started you just to because of the podcast. And he's a black belt. He's a black belt now. Yes. Okay. Well, there we go.

There you go. Good to go. But brown belt, very impressive. Yeah. Actually, I don't know if he said that. Plusy 6-3, you know, kind of strong. That six, you know, that's a, it's a long, lanky thing. The height, and I've always said this, and I'll say it again,

I still maintain that height as far as natural attributes to have in jujitsu that are beneficial, height is, is ranked number one, I think. More so than strength, more so than flexibility. Well, you can get stronger and you can get more flexible. You can't get any taller. Yeah. Unless I guess technically you could cut weight and go down to where you're tall. or four.

Yeah. But for sure. Yeah, yeah, that's true. But it's still different. That's different. So I can put it this way, it starts at about 6.1. Where now you're high, now you have a for real advantage, I think. You ever roll with Craig Baker?

Yeah, yeah. Craig Baker. Hell yeah. So I'm going to go ahead and throw this out there. If you go to the other, how tall is Craig Baker? Oh, five. Five eight, seven, yeah, eight, we'll say. He's compact.

Maybe, yeah, he's compact. There's a lot to handle with Craig Baker. Yes. And my point in saying that is, I think there's a bell curve of height. And if you're in the middle of the bell curve, it's not an advantage in jujitsu. Obviously, it's just, you're just normal. If you're either taller or shorter than normal, it's problematic for other people that have to roll with you. Yeah, that's possible.

I think, I think they both are true, though, at the same time, if, in fact, that is true. Because, yes. Do you not think it's true? I don't know. Maybe if I thought about it. Yeah, this, I would say. say I agree with that for sure. I still do think that height is as far as natural attributes because Craig Baker freaking yeah, he's a freaking handful because he's Craig Baker because he's good at

jiu jiu jitsu in his very specific way. Yeah, but that very specific way is but based on his body style. Yeah. And I think most of us have that where our game kind of like is formed around our body stuff for sure. But coming into jiu jih Tzu, I think, and this is why there's a technical reason why, because you can do all the moves, all the regular like base like fundamental. tools of jiu jitzy you can do them all like so let's say we know just off the top of our head three two moves we'll say that's shorter stockier guys are going to have a harder time with then let's say it kind of tall guy who's six two six three six four something like this so what triangle choke is the obvious one um certain uh other chokes you know like a dars or anaconda

is going to be harder for a short you know but tall guys don't really have that problem have you roll with brailer yes sir yeah yeah because he he's how tall is it brailer I give him what six, eight, eight, six, six. But he's actually also long. To me, once you're past six, four, no, if you're past six three, to me, you're all the same height. No, I don't agree. Because Brailer, not only is he tall, he's also like has long limbs for someone who's already tall. You know how John Jones, John Jones had the mega wing span.

I forget what it was. but his wingspan was abnormally long. That's what Brailer's like. It's not just tall. It's tall, abnormally long legs, abnormally long arms. That's such a horrible compound. Yeah. Compilation there.

Yeah, they got, okay, so the height, well, you can do all the moves, and then when you start to really get tall, you can do all these other moves, like just flagrant, like a lot of potty locks, like that kind of stuff, you know? Like, for instance, there's people that can't do a buggy choke. Yeah. But there's, if you're long, the buggy choke is not just an option. It's like a pretty obvious straightforward option.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So you always see that these real tall guys doing these moves that, like, kind of no one else can do, you know? So that's why I say that. And I get it that, like, you know, when you're super strong, you know, for sure that's, that is a good helpful attributes when you're strong versus not being strong. But I think the guy with a height versus the guy with just. this job you know if you kind of compare them I think that's my hypothesis can we prove it I don't know

but I think well we know we can't get any taller no right do you ever seen the people that get surgery and their legs yeah opened up and and like extend their legs yeah yeah so I guess technically speaking you could get taller if you really wanted to sure but I don't recommend that no it doesn't seem like a good sacrifice yeah you know and hate to each their own but yes I agree with you. I think kind of formulating our whole life game around our body type is probably going to be the best scenario for sure. And even though we can't get taller, barring that one exception, we can get stronger. Yes, sir. We can get more flexible. Yes, sir. We can get better at Jiu-Jitsu. Yes, we can. We can lift more weights. We can have better cardio conditioning. Better metabolic conditioning. Can do all those things.

As long as you're willing to go to work for it. Yep. And if you decide to do that, guess what you're going to need. What are we going to need, Jocko? What are we going to need? We need some fuel. Hey, check out Joccofuel. JoccoFuel.com. We're out there. We're out there in the world. We can go to joccofuel.com. We make everything that you need. The hydration. We make energy drink. We make the best protein in the world. By the way, we make the best energy drink in the world. By the way, we make the best hydrate. We make the best protein powder. We make the best joint supple. We make the best of everything. So check out joccofuel.com so you can train and you can stay on the path. You can also get it from Walmart. We're expanding into Walmart at this time.

So keep your eyes open in there. Wawa, vitamin shop, GNC, commissaries, Afees, Hannaford's dash stores, Wakefern, shopwright, H.E.B. Meyer in the Midwest. So you got Meyer. and they're doing awesome with Jocko Fuel. And it's performing really well in that area, which is like the Midwest, like Michigan.

They're just doing a lot of great stuff. So if you're up in that area, check out Meyer. Wegmans out there in Pennsylvania, they're putting pallets on the floor. Do you know that? Like a big pallet full of Jocko Fuel. So you can just grab a case of whatever did you want, grab what you want.

So check that out. Harris Teeter. Oh yeah, H.EB. I went to HEB down in Texas recently. Giant wall filled with Jocko Fuel. That's because it's Texas too. You know, these are our people down in Tejas. Yeah, they're getting after it.

So Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields, small gyms everywhere. By the way, we went to the CrossFit games, and a bunch of people came to talk to us about bringing Jock Fuel into their CrossFit gyms. Jiu Jitsu gyms, same thing. We're at Jiu Jitsu competitions, whether it's CGI or ADCC or 5 Grappling or World League or Jiujitsu World League. I always messed that one up.

But we're there and people say, hey, I want to get this stuff out. You're at our gym or we get this at our gym. So that's cool. If you want this stuff at your gym, check out JFsails.com. Also, if we're doing jujitsu, which we are. Yes, sir. You need a jiu jih Tzu ghi. Go to origin USA.com and get an awesome American-made jiu-jitsu geese.

Check this out. Look, we have adversaries in the world. One of them is China. We're not in a hot war right now. There's no missiles flying back and forth. There's no troops on the ground. But we are in an economic war with them. And at some juncture, we may become engaged in a real war with them.

So in order to avoid giving them money that they will use to build weapons to kill our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, instead of buying something that's made in China that will be utilized to attack our country, instead just go to origin USA.com keep the money here good idea I mean would you give money to your enemy I would not want to do that enemies might be a strong word right now

yeah but let's face it are there are there is this our potential actual enemy in a war yeah we got Taiwan sitting out there they think Taiwan is theirs the people of Taiwan thinks Taiwan

is theirs Could that turn into a war? Yes, it could. Are we going to pay, are we going to fund the war against ourselves? Yeah, we are. If you keep buying stuff from China, that's exactly what you'll be doing.

So instead of doing that, buy some stuff made here in America. By the way, it's not just, like, it's not just, oh, I got a pair of jeans and they're American made and that helped because it kept the money inside the economy. On top of that,

it brings manufacturing back here. It lets other companies know that it's feasible to manufacture things in America. They say, hey, wait a second. Why should we buy this thing in China? Why should we manufacture this thing in China? Why don't we just do it here? So other companies are doing that, and we're happy about that. And the American public knows that they don't want to buy bullets.

They're going to be used to kill their sons and daughters. So buy American. OriginUSA.com. Get hunt gear. John Dudley now on the hunt team Cameron Haynes on the hunt team You see what we're doing These are the best in the world

So check it out Origin USA.com Get some American made jeans Stop putting money Into the hands Of our adversaries That's what I got It's true

Also a jocco store Discipline equals freedom No matter where you go Or do when you're working out by yourself have you ever worked out with a partner before? Oh yeah, many, many years. I had a, I had a, I did two platoons

with a guy went through seal training with and we were workout buddies pretty much that whole time. Yeah, I was, I had a buddy that I talk about a lot who I don't say his name, but we were running mates for three platoons and seal training and SQT and working in training cell. But we knew we would work out together For lack of a better way of saying it

We would like we would like socially work out together Yeah, you know what I mean like you know you ever hear people say like social drinking? Yes You know like I just I'm just a social drinker we would work out together like as a social thing like we both be going on on Saturday Yeah, yeah But he would be doing some and he was a very strange workout dude Which which Which worked because he's such a sick athlete You know he's a much better athlete than I was I was or

and am so he could go in there and just do weird stuff and still just kind of perform at an exceptional level. Just genetically, look, he worked out too. It wasn't like all genetics. Right, right. But one of my other buddies who I did Buds and SQT and two platoons with, we worked out together, workout buddies. Yeah, like workout partners.

He's the long, and that's the longest running workout partner I have. So that was probably like five years. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, five years. Yeah. So that's a legit work. Well, maybe four years. Yeah, I think it was four years.

So, but we also like developed a lot of the game together, you know, like the workout game. Yeah, just like we at the time, you know, you don't really know what was what. There wasn't a bunch of information out there. You could look at a muscle and fitness and be like, well, I guess what we need to do is freaking whatever. Four sets of chest with drop sets and all this stuff. But we, but we figured out that we needed to work out in a different way. You know, we were, he and. I were doing pull-ups, you know, tons of pull-ups and push-ups and dips and doing squats and

running. And so we, we, we had a pretty well-rounded kind of early version of maybe like a cross-fit-ish, functional fitness-ish, that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. That's good. So you know the difference very distinctly of working out with a partner and no partner. Yeah. And so I would say, and this is fresh in my mind,

because recently I've not had a partner a few years, but it's different. It's more challenging with no partner. Oh, yeah, for sure. So, so you ever, okay, so 20 rep squats, right? I didn't want to get too deep into this, but we're talking about it. And I think this has some value.

So 20 rep squats, right? So now, okay, so my squat routine now, thanks to you, by the way, is like kind of a, kind of a siege. it's a battle. It's a struggle. So I do my first set, after I warm up, my first set is between 15 and 20 reps.

And I try to get the good weight where it's freaking hard. It's not just like let me bust out a quick 20 here. So that first set is already like my heart's beating all fast. It's like, you know how you get all like freaking nervous, you know? So it's a big struggle. So you do it and then you rest and then you do a set of eight. I'm going to tell you something right now. You ever sell any real estate?

Me? Yeah. No. Okay. If you ever see a listing for a house. Yeah. And they do something called listing the house like in a range. Yeah.

Right. And it's between, you know, $400 and $450,000. Yeah. What do you think the offer is going to be? Or let's take negotiation. I got a couple examples. Let's take negotiation. If you come to me and I say, Echo, I'd like you to work for me.

And you say, okay, I would like to work for you. Mm-hmm. And I say, well, what do you need to make? And you give me a range of, you say, I need to make between $55,000 and $60,000 a year. What do you think you're getting paid? 55. Exactly.

So my point in telling you this is, oh, by the way, if you're trying to sell your house and you put between $400 and $450,000 for the house, what are you going to get for an offer? $400,000. So my point in telling you this is, if you tell me right now, which you just did on this podcast.

Yes, they did. that you have a range of reps that you're trying to hit between 15 and 20? Yeah. We already know the outcome of this story. No, because that's a bad analogy. Unfortunately, because of the goals or what I see. I understand what you're saying. I do.

I worry about you. You don't got to worry. When it comes to, you know, the lifting scenario, I know it's squats. I know more new to the whole deep squats and the 20, right? Look, I'm newer to that than you are. But the approach still stays the same. When I say, and I've said this where else, say it again and I'll keep saying it and just know this or whatever anytime I say a rep

range this is what it means let's say say 13 to 15 no I actually I said 15 to 20 right all this means is I'm going for 20 you have an out yep kind of in a way but not but it's in a legitimate way in fact forget the the 20 okay because everything my whole workout is like this so if my rep range is 13 to 15 I'm going for the 15 the reps is 15 but if but I have to go as hard as I can for the 15. Every set, by the way. So if I fail at 14, that's fine. I still did a good workout for that workout because the rep range is 13 to 15.

If I fail at 13, that's still fine, but that's a heads up, though. If I fail at 12 outside of the rep range, I didn't do it. Or I did too much weight for that range. There's kind of a difference here, though, is because when you get into the 15 and 20 rep range. With squats, by the way. With squats, very specifically. Yep.

You can do 20. You just choose not to. So actually, you know what, Brad? You're actually, I didn't even really realize this until right now. You are kind of, not fully. You're kind of right. Because that's true, because I haven't done the actual 20 in kind of a while, probably like a few months.

But I've done 15, actually not only a few times. I usually get minimum 16 and then a lot of times I'll do like 18. And you're right. I could get the 19 or even the 20 probably. But bro, I get scared. I don't know what it is, brother.

It's like this weird struggle, which is going to be part of my point, by the way. So be patient with me. Bear with me. So in that struggle, especially when I'm not used to like 20, you know,

it's like, bro, that's a for real struggle. That's why my heart's beating all fast. Like, oh my gosh, like, you know, you get there and you get up to like 14,

15, you get 16, 17. And you're like, technically I did the workout. I did the workout But like the strain The struggle the hell The torment that you have to go through for three more reps is like

Sometimes mentally and emotionally like it's hard to face that It is hard is very hard Yeah it is very hard So wait here's the point So when you're there without a workout partner Nobody cares if you get those extra three reps By the way nobody Yeah if you lack integrity

Exactly right That's the whole point. That's the whole point right there. It's like, and really the point put in different words is you're on this path by yourself sometimes. Sometimes like if I, if I, let's say I said, you know what? Because I thought about this in like, I've thought these exact thoughts before where I'm like looking at this way.

I'm like, freaking, I got to do this 20 times. And I'm looking right now and I'm looking at, I'm searching my emotional state and it's not checking out, you know? And I'm looking around like. if I literally say, you know what, I'm not going to do squats today. I know I warmed up. I know I did all that. I'm just going to skip squats today.

Hopefully I feel better and more up to this challenge next time. I could skip it. Not one single soul in this whole world would care. Not my wife. What about your own soul? Exactly right. There's only one. And that's why I say you're on this path alone sometimes.

So of course you do and you feel better all the stuff for sure. But I'm saying, oh, and then, okay, so I do it. I do it. I do my second set, third set, four set. Right. So usually I go, I go 28, and then I do pause squats where you pause at the bottom. I go six and six. So four sets and it's hard. It's for real hard. The kind of like I'll be making noise by myself kind of hard.

You know something. And then at the end you're done and you're like, oh man, that was like a battle. Like that's why I'll text you sometimes for real. Like that's literally because I got to share it with somebody. I can't feel that lonely. So anyway, so when I'm done and sometimes, I won't text nobody. I'll go inside and I'll freaking lay down or whatever.

And then let's say, for example, this happened many times where I'll lay down. I said, we got it done to my wife who's sitting there. And she goes, oh, good job with this lighthearted, nonchalant, like she doesn't care at all what I just went through. You know why? Because she doesn't care. She doesn't care. And I'm on this path alone. Here's the thing.

Sometimes even if you're on this path alone, you want to represent. I'm saying? Because discipline. Discipline brings you through and that's the only way you can be free from all these this this bad stuff Anyway when you want to represent on the path go to jocco store.com is where you can get this when equals freedom shirts Hey you want to wear hat good. I don't really wear hats at all me You want to wear a hat you wear a hat discipline equals freedom boom we got you also But what did I miss anything? Were you gonna say something else? Yeah the shirt lock oh

It's okay, it's okay, you know you got to know about that one you do take it for granted because you have you know full access to these things not everyone does and not everyone knows it let it so let them know shirt lockers a new design with discipline equals freedom and good themes undertones if you will but they're different types of designs you get a new one every month subscription scenario click on the top where says short locker boom take you to the page you see some past design see what it's all about so yeah check that out it is available it's all available jocco store dot com also primalbeef dot com and colorado craft beef dot com if you you need steak in your life, which you do, go to one of those websites, hook it up. Coloradocrafbeef.com, primalbeef.com. Awesome steak from awesome people and awesome companies.

Also subscribe to the podcast. Also jocco underground.com. Also, YouTube. Also psychological warfare. Also, flipside canvas.com. Also books. I've written a bunch of them. Check them out if you want to. Also, echelom front, leadership instruction, leadership guidance, leadership consulting. Go to ashlamfront.com if you need leadership help inside your world. Also, we have an online training academy so you can learn the skills of leadership that will help you in every aspect of your life. Go to extreme ownership.com. If you want to help service members active and retired, you can help their families. You want to help Gold Star families.

Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an incredible charity organization. Helps out so many of these veterans. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's Mighty Warrior. Warriors.org. Don't forget about Micah Fink also taking our veterans, which you heard a lot about veterans today. You heard a lot about people that served.

When they get home, it can be a rough transition. Micah Fink helps with that transition. Heroes and Horses.org. And finally, Jimmy Mays got an organization called Beyond the Brotherhood.org, helping SEALs transition from the SEAL teams into the civilian sector. So check out those charities if you can.

If you want to connect with us on the interwebs, go to jocco.com. Also social media. Echoes at Echo Charles. I'm at Jocco Willink. Just watch out for the algorithm because it's trying to ruin your entire life. Thanks once again to Jason Kedzior for joining us, sharing his lessons learned. And thanks to everything that you did for me, for Task Unit Bruser, for the first of the five for the Army and for America and what you're still doing for America today.

And thanks to all our service members tonight with a direct salute to that entire battalion, the first of the 506, who stood alone together with us, with the rest of the 1-1-A-D, face down a determined enemy and achieved victory on that battlefield. Our units are forever joined through that shared history and we will never forget. And also thanks to our police law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all other first responders. Thank you for what you do to keep us safe here at home. And everyone else out there.

We heard a story tonight from one man. in one platoon, in one company, in one battalion, in one battle, in one war. And there are thousands and thousands and thousands of stories like that, of thousands of thousands and thousands of men and women who stepped up and stood together, stood alone together to protect us and our way of life and many of them did not come home

and it's a gift for us to be here alive and blessed with the freedom that we have so do not squander this gift go live life and that's all we've got for tonight and until next time this is Echo and John Marco out.