Jocko Podcast - 467: All It Takes Is All You Got. Risking it All For The People. With Chad Robichaux

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

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This is Jocko Podcast number 467 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. The previous day we'd visited mass graves. Whole sections of forest cleared of trees with long, deep pits carved out of the soil and filled with bodies. As many as 1,500 people in each. Nearly all that I saw were women and children with their hands bound behind their backs. They'd all been shot in the head. Some of the bodies had been burned, or at least someone had attempted to set fire to them, which is what people do when they want to cover up a mass execution.

But bodies don't burn well. Crimes like that are hard to hide. Having seen those mass graves, I appreciated having a few moments to pause and think about and pray while we waited in our land cruiser at the side of the country road. But the quiet buzz around our little internet cafe was interrupted when C-spray's phone rang. In addition to gathering evidence about possible war crimes committed by Russian troops, we were looking for a wounded and captured U.S. Marine. America wasn't in the war, not officially at least, but my guess was that there was as many as 4,000 former U.S. servicemen doing what they could do in Ukraine. Some like the Marine who had been caught by the Russians had come to fight. Others like Sea Spray and me had just come to help.

We carried no guns and rode around the country in our specially modified vehicle, rescuing people who couldn't rescue themselves and providing Ukrainian troops with whatever support we could. Sometimes that was as simple as free medical supplies, some of the fastest free Wi-Fi on the planet, and a double-strength espresso. Sea spray's call didn't last long. He said nobody knows where he is now. It was not the news either of us wanted to hear and the Marines' chances of rescue were now practically zero.

But there wasn't time to discuss it. Almost immediately we heard the familiar whistle of incoming Russian artillery, followed by the devastating wumpf as it exploded behind us, shaking the ground beneath our feet. Then seconds later, another one, this time even closer. The troops scattered in Sea Spray and I. took cover next to the nearby building. Another round came in, then a third and a fourth. The indirect fire was getting near with every explosion.

Soon it was close enough to our position for us to see clouds of dirt spraying out from the blast. It was heavy artillery, the kind where every impact sends a blast of pressure that rattles through your body, shakes your brain, and takes air from your lungs. Neither see spray nor I spoke. unarmed and protected by only level four ballistic vests and gator ballistic eyewear. We pinned our backs to the wall and watched carefully as the Ukrainian soldiers organized themselves to repel the attack. None of them appeared anxious, but the Russian gunfire got closer still, so close that the Ukrainians engaged in small arms fire, and I could hear the sound of AK-47's springs functioning as they fired. The Russians couldn't have been more than 100 yards away, maybe closer.

And that right there is an excerpt from a book called A Mission Without Borders, Why a Father and Son risked it all for the people of Ukraine. And it's written by Chad Robeshoe. Chad was a force recon Marine, who also served in Afghanistan as part of a joint Special Operations Task Force. J-Socke. He's the founder of the Mighty Oaks Ranch Foundation, which helps a veteran and first responders overcome combat trauma.

He's the co-founder of Save Our Allies, a nonprofit that focuses on the evacuation of Americans and our allies and other vulnerable people from war-torn countries or hostile environments. He helped coordinate the rescue of 17,000 people from Afghanistan, including his interpreter and friend, Aziz. He's written books, a book called Saving Aziz, a book called An Unfair Advantage,

and another one fight for us. And he has a podcast called The Resilient Show. He is a black belt in jujitsu. He's been on this podcast before, episode 375. And if you hadn't listened to that, go have a listen to hear his background and his origin story. But he's back here with us tonight to share his experiences from his latest lessons learned

and his latest endeavors around the world. So, Chad, thanks for coming back, man. Thanks, brother. Thanks. Glad you're here. Yeah. Glad you avoided some of this incoming heavy artillery coming your way. Yeah, I did not expect that when we went into Ukraine. But, I mean, obviously it wasn't a surprise.

It's a very hostile environment as soon as those 100,000 troops crossed into Ukraine. And we just felt really burden to go. And initially, just to help Americans that were left behind. You know, when this first started, Putin put 100,000. troops in the border and and we flex one of the things that happened was the white house made the decision to remove our embassy our consulate and uh and our our u.s troops that were there only 160 but enough to to be a threat to a article 5 violation and keep Putin at bay and uh I believe the white house gave a green light for Russia to come through and uh when we seen that happen we knew that

they were moving out our our our U.S. government officials before our civilians and that's the fourth time we've seen that in the last couple of years and so we knew we need to be there to to help Americans. So originally the effort was just to go and remove Americans off of what we knew would be a battlefield. Yeah. And you talk about in the book, you know, you talk about, you basically like, hey, this isn't a book about the politics of Ukraine and there's a bunch of different arguments

and a bunch of different directions on that. Sure. But from my perspective, what I get from you is it's like where there's war, there are people that are hurting, there are people that are suffering. And obviously the Americans is who you focus on first, but then even after that, There's more people that need help. There's more people that need food, water, transportation, life, medical treatment, all kinds of things. And that's what you guys, that's what you've seen.

That's what you know. And that's what you go and try and help out with. Yeah. When we first, you know, I made it a real big point in the beginning of that book to make a point of the not being a geopolitical book, not sharing that side of the issue. Because I'm a very strong conservative. I'm a Christian. So a lot of people from my world were writing me like, what do you do? in Ukraine like zewinsky's corrupt as we're sending hundreds billions of dollars there and it's

being putting this corrupt machine like what are you even doing helping there in them and my point is zewinsky probably is corrupt and so is every politician most politicians since the beginning of time like read a history book so we shouldn't be surprised by that but if we ever let our politics get to we have our compassion people then we should probably change our politics right i mean the people that are victims of the corruption that people are against which i'm against it as well or or innocent human And in Ukraine has been over 100 million, I mean, over, I'm sorry, over a million deaths at this point. And these people are innocent. They're the victims of this corruption.

And I believe this war can be ended in 24 hours. I believe that by the time this podcast releases, it may be over. It may be negotiated and be over. But look, I didn't go there for President Biden, President Zewski, anyone else, and went there to help people that couldn't help themselves. And so did our team. And that was we put all that aside. In fact, we worked with our U.S. government to do a lot of this stuff as a surrogate, as a fourth option.

One of the efforts I do this under is called fourth option. For those that don't know, the U.S. government has a protocol for people, Americans, there are people vulnerable people that are trapped in other countries. First option would be diplomacy. Second would be military action. Third option would be covert action. And a fourth option would be a surrogate outside the government in an unofficial capacity. And those things happen all the time by great patriots who have access. placement in different places around the world, create that, and work with the agency,

the central intelligence agency through the solo special operations liaison officers, through the Pentagon to say, hey, we're in this area, we have this capability. We could either do what the government can't or won't do. And we work in liaison with that. So it's very important for NGOs that work in that capacity to have those relationships in order to de-conflict because the last thing, an NGO, not-government organization, and humanitarian rescue effort wants to do is go into the front door while

the group's coming in the back door and create a conflict. So you want to be deconflicting those things. So we work very closely with our government. Our government has been a strong partner with us. In Afghanistan, they're in evacuations and Ukraine and other areas around the world that we're working right now

that haven't written books about and talked about. Yeah, it's another vote against bureaucracy because a lot of times what slows up the government is just government bureaucracy. They just can't make things happen fast enough. Whereas if you have a very nimble organization like yours, you can just flip and make things happen, which is... I could do things faster and I could do things cheaper. A lot cheaper.

But, and, you know, much more effective. You know, we talk a lot in this book about, about, I mean, we were in, we were in, we were in a crookoe, Poland. And the special mission unit in Poland was Delta Force. And they were, we knew a lot of the guys. So we were sitting down, hanging out with them having dinner. And they were just chomping at a bit, wanting to grow up. across the border. So our guys want to go across the border in Ukraine,

but the White House was not allowing them to. And so we're able to do this, an operation comes up, a rescue. We're able to just coordinate right with that solo, the Special Operations Liaison Officer roll across the border and go get that done where it would take days, weeks to get approval for them to roll across.

We were able to just hop in a car and go. It's the ultimate red tape avoidance. Yeah, especially because, you know, when you're in the military, you could do something like, in five minutes. You're like, oh, I can go outside and grab this thing or do this thing right now.

Take us five minutes to go do it. But once you start running that concept of operations up the chain of command and it's like, oh, well, they're gonna start asking questions that don't really matter and making requests that don't make any sense. So it can be really problematic. Just any big bureaucratic system

is gonna be really hard to work and really hard to maneuver and they're not gonna be nimble and they're gonna need permissions because they're not willing to take risks. And there's also a huge, difference between, you know, some guys from the U.S. Army get rolled up or shot up. Yeah. That's a, that's an international incident to escalation of war. Whereas, no offense, bro. Yeah. Some random, uh, you know, American that's over there doing God's work gets blown up. It's like,

yeah, that's too bad. But it doesn't really interfere with international politics. Right. Yeah, he chose to be there. He's, it was his choice. And yeah, it's a very convenient thing. When I say that fourth option, that's a very convenient thing for the government. There's no contractual. a relationship. There's no money exchange. As soon as money would be exchanged, a contract to the government, now it's not afford the option anymore because now it comes with the restrictions, the red tapes, the bureaucracy. So that also gives them a complete, like, a disassociation with it. And they like that. The best example I could probably give out of the whole book was The Rescue at Benjamin Hall, which, you know, I'm not sure if you want to talk about it. Yeah, we'll get into it. Let's get into the book then a little bit. So this whole thing kicks off.

And obviously there's a huge underline theme in this book, which is you're going to war with your son, which is pretty crazy to read about. So we'll go to the book here. On October 14th, 2022, two days after the announcement of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Ukraine, Biden flinched for a second time. He announced the closure of the U.S. Embassy in Kiev and evacuated the last of the American diplomats after months of Putin's flexing on the border. It seemed inevitable that Russia would invade Ukraine.

That's when I got the call. The moment I saw Sarah's name on my phone, I knew what she would be calling about. Sarah Varardo was a co-founder of, of Save Our Allies, this could only really be about one thing. You're going to Ukraine, she said. Is that how she talks to you? You know, Sarah? I don't know her, but I know about her.

Yeah, yeah, that's how she talks. Yeah, yeah, that's how she talks. She said, yeah, sea spray's there. He says the invasion's going to happen any day. We want you to be there to prepare for when it happens because when the invasion starts, we're going to want to be able to move people out. We talked about the details a little,

and I told her I'd talk with C-spray as soon as I could reach him, but there wasn't any need to say much more at this point. I could feel my heart burning with that old familiar feeling to take action and help to serve. What I need most of all was to get on my knees and pray. And you go on to say you also had to talk, talk to Kathy, your wife about everything that you have going on. She's got to be getting at least a little bit tired of you just rogering up for this stuff all over the world. I mean, we're just coming off Ukraine. I mean, we're just coming off Afghanistan.

I was still like, I was still like burnt out from Afghanistan. Afghanistan was a, the withdrawal was just, yeah. It was emotional, physical, emotional. Yeah, I was just burnt out. And so I was not expecting I want to do anything like this. And plus you have stuff going on at home. You got the Mighty Oaks Foundation, which is an awesome organization. You know, and actually it's, you know, I have called you multiple times and said, hey,

I got a situation going on with somebody. I need help. And you guys are sort of my fourth option. You know, I run out of my options. I was like, well, do you talk to the VA? Do you talk? You know, of course, I try and help people and talk to them, but I don't know what I'm doing.

And then, you know, my fourth option is like, all right, I got to call you guys, and you guys have done a great job of reaching out to people, going to get people and taking care of people that are really not in a good spot, veterans that are not in a good spot. So I appreciate that from the bottom of my heart, what you've done for some of my friends. It's been awesome.

So you have that going on. Yes. And the rest of your life going on. and meanwhile you get a freaking random call that says hey you're going to ukraine how does your wife feel about this when this happens uh she know what she got into when she married your dumb ass or what i think so i mean we i was you know we met when we were 17 18 so she saw me go through you know b or cid and become recalarmor and she been through all the deployments and all that stuff so i think at the end of afghanistan and i talked about this last time i was on a show she was like

after the H. Kaya and, and, uh, in Mazuririr part, when I went to Tajikistan to do the river operation, she was like, you're pushing it too far. And, and I, I talk about this in a book. Like, I get, just like you, like get asked to do a million different things. And what people read about is like me or me, you know, what I talk about is the things I do do. People don't see all the things I say no to. I say no to a lot of things. So I don't, I'm not opportunist that's, you know, war kicks off and I'm like rushing over. I didn't go to Israel. I was asked probably a hundred times like literally probably a hundred times to go to israel i haven't went so i don't just do things to just jump in but if i really feel my heart's burden and god's burden in my heart and uh and you know

i have a process to go through i pray about it i talk to mentors and people have around me in my life that this good accountability i'll talk to kathy and and and uh if all those things check and i feel like god's opening the doors then i'll go if the doors are closing i don't force my way through it that would be my ego i would my desire to want to be involved in these things and and look i don't have anything to prove I've done my deployment in Afghanistan. I've got to do all the things I want to do. So if I feel like I could be have help and it's not for me, then I'll do it. And with this, I really felt burden to go. I really did. And C spray is someone I'm very close to. I love the guy. He's one of the most incredible human beings ever. And I knew he was out there days before like the invasion in

Ukraine. He was out there by himself. He wanted me to be there. And he's one of those guys. I'm sure you have brothers like that. They call and say you go. And, say you going yeah I'm gonna go and and that was the circumstances and Kathy actually in this one she didn't push back she was pretty supportive she was not so supportive when her comes into the picture uh so fast forward a little bit you talked about sea spray sea sprays um you know sounds like a sounds like a real character i've never met him before but he's a green beret yeah he was uh he did a bunch of stuff with the with the paramilitary inside of our oGA so he's a real Grown Branch, Ground Branch, Morton Branch.

I tell you, to let you know who he is as you hear these things, he, to get to Ground Branch, a Maritime Branch, doesn't matter how qualified you are. It's like a lottery too, right? You got everything that's the line up. Oxford, educated, incredible human being, gets the dream job, you know, to be a precision rescue operator, a paramilitary officer at Maritime Branch. And then he goes to Afghanistan to help us with the withdrawal. He took vacation to say he was sailing.

gets caught there by the agency and they tell them hey you have to go home like we love you slap on a wrist you got to you can't be here doing this humanitarian rescue like you got to go home and the guy he resigned from this career that like most people would chop their handoff for him included to help people that couldn't help themselves in a country not his own i mean the guy in 10 days at h kaya he lost 37 pounds because he wouldn't stop the drink water him this guy named sean like walked out the gate to get these little girls to Taliban shot two guys right in front and they stepped right over them kept going

like he's like one of the most selfless human beings I know and so when he resigned from that job to do that like we've kept them employed ever since and he's he leads all the all the stuff that I get to do and I get the credit for because I'm the kind of face of it it's really him like he's the he's the guy

he's the brains behind it he's the workhorse he lives in a hammock or at the back of a truck. You know, it's, I don't even know where he's at right now. Every few days I have to check in where you're at, like, because he's just, he's not a very good communicator. But he's just incredible human. That's the kind of people I get to, you know,

it's such a blessing, man, to be around people, human beings like that. Yeah, that's awesome. You guys link up on the phone. Hey, brother, when are you getting here? He said when he was finally able to return my call, rush is going to cross. It's happening.

What makes special operations special is you always look to, you always look to do something that no one else could do. It's not an ego thing. It's practical and pragmatic. If you're doing something that could easily be duplicated by someone else, what's the point? So any planning for any operation always starts with a clear question, which is exactly what I asked C-Spray. What's the unique need that nobody else can do, but we can? C-spray paused to beat, then gave me his answer.

It's not going to be a mass medevac like Afghanistan where we're moving thousands of people. Anyone can drive a minivan or a bus over the border from Poland and haul a bunch of people out. it's those who can't get out that are going to need help. Injured, sick, incapacitated, trapped Americans, my brain was already firing. Yeah. So it's going to get bad real quick, he says.

When kinetic combat starts, there are going to be people who should have got out already but didn't. We've got to build a capacity and a capability to help. So that's how it kicks off. That's all you need to hear, apparently. Yeah.

Yeah, that was it. I went into two things, operational planning and fundraising. These things cost a lot of money. And this is everything you do when you write about this stuff in the book, it's all just donations from people. Yeah, I have an incredible network. I think my superpower and all this is not my military experience, is my networking ability.

I have built a network of relationships over time that when I call for something like this to support it, we're able to get the resource in place. permissions, which are important for access and placement and in the financial resources because this stuff costs money. And I've been speaking a lot of corporate events on this type of thing, networking and integrity. Like how do you pull something like that off so quickly and raise that much money so quickly for Afghanistan, tens of millions of dollars in three days? We don't do it in three days.

You do it over 15, 20, 30 years of demonstrating you have integrity. You can be trusted. You have the ability to execute and produce impact. So you do that over years. And then when it comes time, they really have the need. That's when you cash in on it. Yeah, at National Enfront, we say you can't build relationships once the emergency starts. You can't just be like, oh, you and I are friends now.

You know, now that I need something from you, I want to be your friend. It's like, no, we had to have been friends. And now I need something. And, of course, you take care of me because you know I'll take care of you. that's awesome. So fast forward a little bit in the book. And by the way, everyone get the book. Once again, books called The Mission Without Borders. I'm going to read some highlights of it today. But get the book. There's all kinds of awesome details in here about about life, about the war, about the path. So pick it up. I'm going to fast forward a little bit March 4th, 2022. Did you say Krakow? Did you say it Krakow? Did you say Krakow? Did you say Krakow? Did you say Krakow? Did you say it's weird. Like even Ukrainians will say it different. And you go look at different maps in a spell different. Okay. And I'm also very bad at pronouncing anything other than English. And even English, I'm marginal. But any other language, I kind of suck. Yeah. Same here. So it's been two weeks since Sea Spray and I had spoken. Russia had invaded Ukraine, obviously. Too many people had already fled. At the airport, I linked up with Roman, a Ukrainian-Russian national who I had brought on board through a trusted NGO partner. He'd been heavily vetted and was fluent in Russian, Ukrainian, and English.

Together, we headed to the Sheraton located in the center of Krakow where Sea Spray had based himself. So again, this is the kind of stuff that doing this on such a rapid turnaround and having the money to start executing this stuff. Do you keep a fund of money that's ready for this or do you have to raise? I have a fun ready for the for initial phase. Emergency phase. Yeah, but, but you don't keep, I can't keep tens of millions of dollars in the bank and sometimes, you know, some of these things cost that.

And so, but a lot of the relationships I have could turn around really quick. So, and man, it's, it's, there's like amazing like patriots that really that have wealth, have capacity that really, you know, want to do stuff like this. They just don't know how. Yeah. And so give them the ability to build to contribute to something like this. Yeah. And they jump on board. That's awesome.

You got another guy named Bo, another special operations guy that worked with C spray before. He's a medic, professional. And you say he polices up like Clark Kenton here. But you show up here. Both were dirty. Their eyes looked like they hadn't seen a decent night's sleep since you last spoke to C-Spray. Fast forward a little bit. I figured to take a day at least a day for C-spray and Bo to recharge.

So you go on the train station and you're going to go check things out for yourself. And you're starting to see the people at the train station that are fleeing Ukraine. This had to be pretty impactful. You talk about them. They're breathing, but they're scared. They're waking up to the fact that they're fleeing. There's no next step for them. We're going to the book here.

I've been around refugee programs before in Africa as well as other parts of the world, and there's something instantly familiar about people gathered in the train station. I guess the trauma of being forced to leave your home and your homeland is so deep and fundamental that it makes people respond in similar ways. Parents hold their children tighter. Children let themselves be held. Both of them keep their eyes open alert and possible to any danger. There is so much uncertainty and fear that you can not only see it, you can practically feel

it with your soul. President Zelensky had recently ordered that all males of fighting. age were barred from leaving the country, so there were no men waiting on the concourse. At least no man between the ages of 16 and 60. As I walked among the groups of girls, women, and boys, I couldn't help but thinking of all the father's husbands and sons left behind. That had to be eerie. Yeah, it was just different than anything I've seen before, you know, and you've been in

all the world and seen war zones, and it was just different. And there's always a transition that, at least for me, there's always been a transition when I go to different war zones around the world. I go for one reason, right? Afghanistan, 9-11, retaliate for the attack on September, September of the 2001. And so I go there for, but I immediately fell in love with the Afghan people and feeling the pain of their oppression and wanting to help liberate or bring stability to the Afghan people. That's kind of what happened here. I went there to help rescue Americans and I'm walking at train station and seeing what was happening to these Ukrainian people. And I'm like, these people are like not much different than us.

I've been to lots of third world countries. Ukraine's not a third world country. I mean, you drive around, you see pizza parlors and ice cream shops and shopping malls and people dressed like us and just very modernized people. And so that really caught me and to see that. And then to see them alone without their husbands. And I'm like, what would I feel like if I was, if my wife and children had to leave to another country and I'm back behind fighting? We've never been in that situation. Our wives and children are always safe at home while we went out and fought.

But they're staying behind and fighting, and they're sending their wives and children off with no communication. And it just really, it just really struck a chord in me. Yeah, it was really wild to watch that stuff on the news and see, like you said, the, the visualization of the first world country in a full-on war. And you're thinking, wow, we haven't progressed at all. You know, that was my thought. I'm like, really? This is what we're doing. Uniform or uniform.

This is not terrorist groups, like uniform or uniform. But ballistic missiles, the size of telephone poles flying in the apartment buildings. This is an IEDs or this is mig fighter jets, you know, firing in the neighborhoods where only women and children are left, elderly communities. This is like, I mean, the news has not captured it at the brutality that it really is. Fast forward a little bit watching the crowd as they collected and ate their food. I was struck by another difference between these refugees and those I'd met before. Without their winter coats on, the people looked just like folks at home. This is my first time seeing refugees in the first world country.

And they looked just like the people from my neighborhood, just like the people I lived among. If it wasn't for the buzz of Ukrainian being spoken, I could have easily been in some church meeting attended by Kathy and her friends. You meet a person named Sasha. I asked Sasha if we could pray with the people. She agreed and so Roman and I spent as long or as little with people as they wanted. I didn't have any magic words to say and didn't expect to take away the pain or fear. Mostly I prayed that they would know that God loved them and that he was going to be with them every step of the way, especially in the middle of such hardship.

A lifetime of being around people who are living in the shadow of war has taught me that's the best way to pray. She gave me a look and told me she understood perfectly what I had said, but that she also thought I was just plain wrong. When Russia come, will America help? This is the question this one asked you. I thought back to the previous summer to Biden's decision to withdraw those 160 National Guard troops and shut the embassy in Kiev.

If I was going to give her my honest answer, it wouldn't have eased her fear. So I chose to offer comfort instead. If that ever happened, if there's enough compassion and courage in America and among her allies to come here, to come in and drive Putin all the way back. But what I really want to say to you

is that it's okay that you feel scared right now. It's normal to feel fear when war is close by, but look around. We're all here for each other. So they knew. And they were questioning what we were going to do. Yeah, I mean, they were questioning that, you know, if we allowed Russia to push all the way to the eastern European border,

because that's what we're talking about pulling the eastern European border, you know, where would it in? You know, where would it in? If we wouldn't step in now, when would we step in? And, you know, there's a lot, that's a very complex question because there's a lot of, like, I mean, does America want to put troops in the ground in Ukraine? I'd say no, we don't. But there's a way to stop it without doing that. And I felt that way now. And I felt that way from day one, we could have ended this without ever putting, you know, a U.S. boot on the ground in Ukraine. I suppose we'll find out the coming months. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, it's one of the things that President Trump said in the debate that he would end this as President-elect that provoked a response from Putin and from Zawinsky. Yeah.

And just that statement from President Trump on the debate stage led to conversation. And now that he's president-elect, he's had conversations with both. And I think he has, I think, I think, well, I say he has. I think any strong leader in the White House as the commander chief of the United States. States military and then the leader of the real world has the ability to negotiate a ceasefire in Ukraine. I don't think this is a very complex issue. I think it's been allowed to happen for several reasons and a lot of people get rich, very rich awful wars. Afghanistan was shut down. Conspiracy or not, the industrial military complex of the United States is one most

profit is the most profitable, you know, line item in the United States government and people make a lot of money off a war. And there's a lot of pressure, you know, if a political figures to allow stuff like this to happen. And sadly, uh, it is. And that's what one of the things I hope to see in the student administration is that corruption, uh, to be ended because, uh, you know, those kind of decisions lead to, uh, our military, our young men and women who put on uniforms that are going to trust the commander chief to lead them to do in the being involved in just wars, to be involved in in conflicts that are unjust for personal profit. And we've, we've been part of some some of those things. And we've lost friends through some of those things. And, you know, my sons,

both my sons served. And, you know, my family served for 80 years. I don't want any family to be part of serving that way. And, you know, and it also risks our national security. We'd deplete our surplus and spread our troops then and that jeopardize our national security. And so I just hope and pray that we have people that will go into this new administration and make decisions that will keep America out of these, you know, these wars in a way that we don't need to be involved in through just good leadership. Well, that's a real high hope you have. And I'm right there with you.

Yeah. And I mean, this is definitely, I would say that right now, you know, the way this, the Trump administration is shaping up with the people that he's bringing on board to his cabinet, I'd say it's the most radical group to be coming in. And, you know, one thing that I think is, you know, you look at like what we learned in the Vietnam War. And there were so many lessons to be learned and so many lessons that we did not learn in the Vietnam War. And you can now say the same thing about Iraq and Afghanistan. And so hopefully this new, you know, the new administration will pay attention to those lessons that we should have learned in Vietnam,

lessons we should have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, and they'll make more prudent decisions. And that's the best we can hope for. They are different. They're different. They're not coming from the institution. Most of these picks, including like Pete, I know a lot, I just talked about this morning, Pete Hex,

after a lot of people like, why did President Trump pick a Fox News host to be the secretary of defense? Well, he's not from an institution. You know, he doesn't have this strategic level, military leadership experience. You know what you see in 06 and higher. But if I'm going to be hired to be a CEO of a construction company, I don't need to know how to swing a hammer.

I don't know give vision. I need to know how to lead. I need to know how to assemble the right team of subject matter experts of construction guys. And I need to be trusted by the investors. President Trump trusts Pete. He does have military experience. He did 20 years in the reserves, which is he never led at a strategic level.

He's an infantry officer. He's led at a battalion level. but never let it at a strategic level. But he's not going to be sitting in a situation around him in a silo. He'd be sitting there shoulder, shoulder with the commander chief and the joint chiefs and the head of St.com and Sox South and all those people. And they're going to make decisions together. And he recognizes the most, and I think President Trump recognized this,

the most crucial decision on national security right now, or the most crucial factor in our national security right now. It's not our strategic ability in the battlefield. It's our morale, our recruitment, and our retention. And so a guy from inside the institution of the military right now has proven not to be the best choice of that and it burned President Trump last time. So I think he wants somebody from outside the institutions

and Pete's just an example. But that's kind of what he's done. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And what? Pete went to Harvard and Princeton and then Harvard or something like that. I mean, he's smart.

He's well spoken. Yeah. And like you said, he's not part of the institution right now. And so. He wrote that book, A War on. Warriors, which is about DEI and wholeness and our morale and recruitment, retention, which is, I think, is the biggest issue in our military right now. I mean, if you have a motivated military who could recruit the America's best and brightest

and can retain them to stay in and keep that experience moving forward, especially all warfighters who are leaving at rapid rates, you have a capable military. And you could bring in subject matter experts and assistance to help with the strategic leadership stuff. I said, I think it was, I think it was a wise choice for what President Trump's doing right now. Yeah. Pete's a patriot too. Oh, for sure.

A while ago when all this recruiting problems were happening, I was kept meaning to to put some words together and write an article and the title of the article was going to be called Why Didn't Become a Ballerina. And Echo Charles, you like that? Yes. You want to know why didn't become a ballerina? Why? Because I wanted to carry a machine gun.

You see what I'm saying? I do. And that's what I never. was like, I never looked at a pair of ballet shoes and was like, hmm, that seems like a good option. Nope, never had that thought. But as soon as I knew what a machine gun was, I was like, that's what I want to do.

So there's a bunch of people that feel that way, a bunch of young men that want to carry a machine gun. And so when you tell them, hey, you want to carry a machine gun? We got the spot for you. Just come on over here, sign up, we'll pay you money to shoot that machine gun. And you go, oh, cool, I'm in.

And that's exactly what happened to me. I was like, want to be a commando. I want to put camouflage paint on my face and swim across the beach and go kill bad guys. That's what I want to do. That's it. And so the recruiting at the time was like pretty solid, you know? Oh, you want to be a commando? Cool.

You can go in the Army. You can be a special force guy. You can be a Ranger. You can go in the Marine Corps. And the only the branch of the Navy didn't have the best recruiting, which was kind of good recruiting at the time. Because if you knew about it, you're like, oh, that's kind of the deal right there. Was that video that was filmed under Strand? I didn't see that until I was already in the DEP program.

Okay. In the, what was it, delayed entry program. I didn't see the video until that, until I was already in. But yeah, there's a video, Echo Charles. You can watch it on YouTube. It's called Be Someone Special. Yes, that's it. And it is not great.

It's actually pretty funny because it's like a super low budget, 80s video. So there's fake explosions. and cheesy soundtrack and whatnot. And so when I, I'm kind of lucky, I guess, that I didn't see that before. Because the Marine Corps always does like kind of the best job with recruiting. Yeah, like slaying a demon with a sword.

Yeah, just slaying demons. I want to do that. Exactly. So my point in saying all this was for a while, do you remember these commercials that they were putting out, the military was putting out these recruiting commercials? Yeah. And their recruiting commercials had nothing to do.

with carrying a machine gun and putting camouflage paint on your face and going across the beach and killing bad guys. The recruiting commercials were about like just really weird things. I was raised by two moms. Yeah, those things where you're like, I don't understand what this is. I don't, that doesn't appeal to me.

This, whatever they're showing me, it doesn't make sense to me. I don't wanna do that. Just like if I would have seen a recruiting poster for the New York ballet when I was 14, I wouldn't have been like, oh, that looks sick. I wouldn't have done that. If you showed me,

a freaking guy coming across the beach with the machine gun. I'd be like, that's what I want to do. What I signed up for that? So the military started putting out these advertisements and new recruiting posters. We were like, well, I don't, any 18-year-old dudes looking at the going, oh, I guess I don't want to do that. Because that doesn't look like what I wanted to do.

I want to carry a machine gun. They didn't even show a machine gun in that commercial. What's happening? So I don't, I'll go somewhere or do something else. And so that's my point in saying, I didn't want to be a ballerina. And that's why I didn't become one. I want to become a commando.

And all they had to do was show me there's the commando place. Like go down there. This is the commando thing. You want to be a commando. Go down there. Yeah, we got you. You get paid money.

Or you get paid money to shoot machine guns, blow things up, and jump out of airplanes. It's the best. And when you're 14 years old, if they show that to you, you're like, oh, you show me a picture of guys jumping out of airplanes, shooting machine guns, and blowing things up. Okay, cool. Where do I sign up? If you show me some random weird things, you go, oh, that doesn't really look like my jam.

There was actually a while echo where I was thinking you and I should just start making recruiting commercials. I told you that, didn't I? We were just going to go rogue. It was like the fourth option. It was going to be the fourth option for getting people in the military. I was like, we'll make some sick freaking commercials.

You know what, though? Here's the problem with that. I don't want to recruit people that don't want to do it. Yeah. Because, and listen, I've recruited a lot of people. I've recruited a lot of people You're influential and people are going to listen I meet them all the time

I meet them all the time and it's awesome I'm super stoked but occasionally you're like hey this person their life didn't go the way they wanted it too they didn't make it through the training

or whatever and so it doesn't make me feel good that somebody kind of went down a path that they maybe shouldn't have gone down so I was a little I'm a little nervous about making recruiting things because we'll get people that

it's too much brainwashing you know what I mean where it should be if you want to go in that door you should be able to find it. But we need to at least tell them about the door. We need to at least tell people that it's there. Hey, go through door number two or door number three.

Door number three, there's a machine gun. We should have on it. So that's the way it works, man. All right. You are at this place with all these refugees. And you end up going to a florist and getting a bunch of flowers and walking around just giving flowers to people, giving a little light to their world. Man, that was...

Pretty moving. It was actually worried. We passed past us floor shop and I'm like, hey, what do you think about, like, all these women are going to get freaked out. Their husbands aren't there. They're scared. Now two dudes come in with a bunch of flowers. Like, is this going to be creepy?

They could think we had bad intentions. And Roman was like, no, no, let's do it. And so I just started ordering these flowers and the ladies were like, at the floor shop, was like, what are you doing this for? And we told them they were just like all in, throwing extra flowers in. And we went in there. We were just giving these flowers to these ladies, and they were like literally take it ball up and was crying like smelling these flowers. And so we had time and it just felt like an opportunity to do something nice.

Yeah, and I imagine a lot of those, a lot of those women and children lost their husbands and sons or husbands and fathers at this point. For sure, for sure. Fast forward a little bit. Next morning you drove out to the Ukrainian Polish border. You see a line of cars disappearing in the distance for people waiting to get. to Poland. Some people were waiting five up to five days to get in there. That was days, days. Days. On the, go ahead.

It was days and it was cold. It was cold and wet. Kind of defying physics. You know when it's like cold enough and wet enough to where it like should be snowing, but it's like freezing temperatures, but it's not snowing. Right. Rain is 33 degree rain is worse than 10 degree snow as far as just being freaking cold. Yeah.

And this is coming from a place of experience, echo drums. You're over there in Hawaii, but you don't know nothing about this stuff. And these aren't jaco human beings. These are women and little girls coming across, dragging her stuff, soaking wet. And that's gray, the gray sky.

It's just cold, man. Yeah. And, uh, you say on the polar side of the border, the expressions on the faces of those who had just crossed told of their journey so far, exhaustion, relief, sorrow, confusion, fear, and hope. Many people displayed them all. Tens of thousands of refugees were there,

Hundreds of volunteers, NGOs, kind harder people who had turned up to help, everything. Like people giving them rides, people giving them cell phones, people giving them SIM cards. And these are all NGOs. Not one government agency that's represented that border. Yeah, that's the point that you make. He's like, is like I recognize most of the names of the nonprofits who had shown up. And many of them were from the Christian community, but not one single government was represented there. Not one.

No. Man, it was a I mean There was a one thing that stood up most There was this group of guys from India Oh yeah, you talked about in the book There were Sikhs right? Yeah, they were Sikhs and they just had a food truck out there And they were making a they were making cauliflower curry

And it was like people were lined up Just having this bowl of hot I mean imagine being that cold for that long You've been there and having something warm go inside And hit your internal parts of your body like They were delivering the goods man It was really cool I mean the Sikhs is a warrior culture

right there big time. So these medical NGOs, you end up, there's a field hospital. This was pretty moving. There's someone in there. You go into this field hospital, and you can hear someone just like crying hysterically in the back. And you say, I introduced myself to one of the medics

and was told to wait while the team leader finished up with someone. The sound of the person weeping, gradually eased, and eventually the doctor I was waiting for emerged from the back. John Cooper was my age, American, and had the air of someone who'd been in places like this before. I knew a little of his bio. He was a former U.S. Navy surgeon who had worked in the cash on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's a combat sport hospital.

He had chosen to come to Poland to see if he could provide emergency medical care for those crossing. He'd been there only a few days, but he was clearly disturbed by what was going on. We're seeing a lot of people like that. John said quietly, nodding in the direction of the back cubicle where the woman was still crying. She was held captive by Russian soldiers who killed her husband, and then raped her repeatedly over five days. She said the soldiers forced her children to watch. We paused and both sat in silence.

What gets me is their strength, he continued. They've been through such trauma, but they don't crumble. They keep it together long enough to reach the border and get their kids to safety. It's only when they get here and realize that they're safe that they do let go like this. Yeah, it's amazing strength in these people, especially these women.

And you got to think like these women aren't, they're not warriors or not fighters. They were from first world country. They're housewives and moms. And, you know, but in this moment, they just rose up and protected their children. Some of them got their children safely and went back across the border.

They went back to hell. Sure. You end up at a, go back to your hotel. And this is where you talk about. This is kind of a key crux of the story. You guys are going through like a brief and you said, I don't know who said it first, but as soon as the word communications was mentioned, everyone's focused, intensified, and the conversation became a tumble of ideas.

If Russia takes out the phone grid or the power grid, those NGOs will be in trouble. They won't be effective and they'll all be vulnerable. They don't have sat phones, not enough. Interesting. We could help with that. Set up an alternative communications grid. Exactly. Get them the right equipment and teach them how to use it.

Satellite phones and HF and VHF radios needs to be encrypted. These are all just comments from your team. Yeah. And with solar panel charging stations, it'd be complicated. and expensive. The room paused. Since when his money have been a problem for God,

I said, if it's God will. If it's God's will, it's God's bill. That's been my motto for quite some time. You'll find the money. But the reason, again, I'm skimming the book, but the communication thing is huge.

Obviously, in war, you have to be able to communicate with other people. And if they're relying on their civilian network of communication and the Russians take that out, it's a disaster. Yeah, it was one of things

in that moment we identified as a vulnerability. point. We felt like, hey, this is something we could do that's being overlooked by others. We were watching how the NGOs were working so well with the Ukrainian government, Ukrainian military, but it was all based on their ability to communicate. If that goes down, then, you know, people are just going to be blind and not able to continue this coordinating efforts that were successful. So we knew we needed to step in in that role and build something. Jack. Fast forward a little bit. Our contracts within the U.S. Polish and Ukrainian governments were able to give us helpful information about the operational threat environments on the Ukrainian front lines.

Most important, we learned that Russia had been sending its own special forces teams into Ukraine to identify possible targets and call in airstrikes. These guys, mainly in their 30s and 40s, were rumored to be athletic looking and confident, had been given blue American passports and were wearing high-end adventure gear and posing as humanitarian workers. In other words, they looked exactly like us. That's sketchy. Yeah.

This was bad news, but it wasn't necessarily catastrophic. She spray had already told us how nervous some of the people. the Ukrainians were on their checkpoints and at least now we had a little more understanding as to why. Most of the country's makeshift checkpoints were manned by everyday citizens armed with hunting rifles, shotguns, and machetes. It was easy to imagine how nervous they would feel and how suspicious they would be if a bunch of middle-aged humanitarian workers look like us. So you guys double down on trying to look as low-key and unthreatening as you possibly could. Fast world. In addition to buying high-vis fluorescent yellow jackets and covering all our vehicles

with prominent red crosses. We created official looking laminated ID cards with a QR code that linked to our NGO's website. We also added a little extra flourish by visiting a local stationary store and getting a rubber stamp made for an organization we'd made up, the International Association of Humanitarian Services.

Little trade craft tip for everyone that said rubber stamps work everywhere in the world. You had a rubber stamp on something most places in the world. You get by. Lamination? Lamination's good. Fast forward a little bit.

Finding the vehicles that would serve as ambulance was a challenge. Building comms network packages was proven to be a big undertaking as well. You finally come up with a list of what each comms package should contain. Arridium's satellite telephone with year-long subscriptions, a reliable extensive satellite network, very high-frequency radios for vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Go-Tenna, 264-bit encrypted closed-loop network, allowing a group to create their own secure cellular mesh network and track each other's locations in real time. PPS units so we could track each package and be easily notified if any user got if they got in distress

Gold Star solar panels and power banks to keep everything working if the power grid went down. So you put these kits together that you're thinking about they're going to cost about 10 grand Fast forward. There's only one real solution to our problem and that was have someone Buy the gear in the US and bring it over to Poland in person and there's only one person I could think of who I trusted to attack a task like that in such a short time frame my oldest son hunter so you you're talking here about your your family has 80 years of service world war two Korea Vietnam finally Afghanistan both your sons Hunter and Hayden both went into Marine Corps hunter ends up in Anglico so was he out by this time he was out he was out he did his deployment to

Afghanistan he did eight years and he was working with me at Mighty Oaks he was part of Afghanistan withdrawal. However, I kept him benched in Abu Dhabi. Yeah, he didn't get to go forward. Right. Dad didn't care of his son, be a little overprotective, but it's like, what are he going to do? Right, right.

Take him and swim him across the Panjay River in Afghanistan. Like, I wasn't going to do that. So, yeah, you talk about that. You talk about some of the stuff that he did and being bench. You talk about him being bunch. So fast forward, you give him a couple. call. Hunter, I said when I called him from Krakow on Wednesday, March 9th, it was 3 a.m. in Houston, but there was no time to waste. Do you still want to be a part of this? Sure, what do I have

to do? I'm sending you a list of comms equipment and a $300,000 budget. I need to buy everything on the list. You're going to have to search the whole country to pull it off because much of this stuff won't be in one place. Then you're going to have to get everything bagged up flight here and turn around and fly home. It's not super sexy or anything, but I'm telling you this is super important. This is literally an opportunity to change the course of history and how we help stop World War III. Okay, he said, calm as ever, when you need me to bring it to you. I paused for a moment. It was Wednesday already.

Saturday. Hunter didn't skip a beat. Okay, he said, send me the list. So your boy's just ready to rock and roll. He's like super stoic. He's like, he's real, he's not really easily like excitable. And he just, like, that's just him. And he's very competent.

You know, coming out Anglico's, all those kids in Anglico, I say kids, they're just calm. Nords. Yeah, and they're, they're calm's guys. They're not just calm. emotionally they're calm as guys because they have to talk to radios and stuff talking to radios to aircraft and ships so he knows he's familiar with communications equipment and whatnot yeah yeah and he's like he just geeks out and all that stuff and and he's he's kind of a gear head yeah he just uh he just like

him buying that stuff and getting that stuff together like I trusted him to do it and man he pulled it off he pulled it off um you say we added a couple more members to the team Sean Lee who was a former 82nd Airborne soldier, work for Sarah and Dr. Mike Simpson, who'd served over 30 years as Greenbrae, Airborne Ranger, and a doctor on the premier special operations medical unit in the U.S. military.

Mike had a couple of the doctors with him, including Richard Jadik and Will Dutton. Am I saying that right, Jadik? Jadik. Jadik, yeah. So you're getting more people on the team. Yeah, you know, subject matter experts in their different fields, and that's how you build a team like this.

When you're doing something like this, everyone wants to come on. And so I'm always so grateful and like flattered that everyone wants to come on board, but you got to pick the right people that you need and you can't clutter their team and, you know, just subject matter experts in different areas you need.

Does your phone just start blowing up when something goes down globally? Yeah, it does. I wouldn't even go into Israel whenever. It's like, sign me up, I want to go, I want to go. I'm like, I'm not going. We had guys there, but I wasn't there. You talk about some of these other NGOs,

seeing guys from on the payroll of the World Health Organization in the World Food Program lounging around the Sheraton restaurant feasting on steaks and red wine, while I knew for a fact there were still doing nothing at the borders of Ukraine itself really boiled my blood. Yeah, I think anyone that's seen that would. That's not to piss anybody off. Yeah. It's disgusting.

Then you had an encounter, one of your favorite NGOs, Samaritans purse. You link up with those guys in this particular meeting. There was no talk about congregation numbers, building programs or outreach events. events. Here was all about the war and what the churches within the network were doing to help keep people or help people that were in need. So tell me a little bit about Samaritan's purse. Well, I mean, a lot of, there's a lot of big organizations, right, big in like Red Cross and always, but Samaritan's purse, I'll tell you firsthand from Afghanistan to Ukraine, all the, they are legit. Like people that, I mean, I raise money from, but I'll tell you, like, if you ever

want a good place to donate to Samaritan's purse, they're absolutely incredible what they do, their capabilities and their integrity and how they operate. They're always like right there in the front of everything, every crisis around the world. And, you know, Edward Graham, who's who is an Armour Ranger. He's the grandson of Billy Graham, the son of Franklin Graham, just incredible human being. He actually worked forward to this book. And Ken Isaac, Ken Isaac's the guy at Samaritan's person, no one knows about. He leads all the international operations.

Incredible human beings, one of the smartest human beings I know. And that's who we were liaison. I went there. And they really like build networks really well. And so they had built a network with the local church in Ukraine. When I say local church, I mean just like pastors. And that was the most trusted, reliable network because it was a liaison to communities. And so we needed a tap into that.

And our partner to tap into that was Ken Isaac. And he brought us in the tap because we wanted to get these communication systems networked to trustable, reliable people that were doing good work. and that was a local church. And a smartest person was the one that liaison that for us. Yeah, you say the Ukrainian church had formed its own underground network

and was playing a vital role in getting the aid that the NGOs were providing across the country to the troops themselves. So there you go. Yeah, they're getting after it. Meanwhile, fast forward a little bit. Hunter walked through customs

at Krakauer Airport at 2 p.m. on Saturday, March 12th. He freaking kid pulled it off. Pulled it off, yeah. Somehow managing to push three trolleys with a combined total of 14 bags and a little under 100 hours, he'd been able to locate, acquire, pack, and personally courier everything we'd ask him to bring.

We hugged. Like, yeah. Now, he's like, hey, you want me to set this stuff up? Of course, you guys don't know what the hell you're doing. Exactly. And so for three days solid, he worked pretty much without sleep. I resist the urge to play dad and tell him to go get some rest, so he's just making things happen.

I mean, we're setting this stuff up. You're like, I mean, just setting up an in-reach, like or you know GPS like getting it get and then getting it connected onto the flat screen because we're building like a talk now so now we have flat screens around you want to see where all these things are going to be distributed throughout Ukraine like he's building all of that it's like you know stuff that I can't do this is not stuff for the boomers exactly uh fast for a little bit late in the afternoon March 15th the call came in the moment sea spray took it he held up his hand for silence and crouched over a powder paper we knew it was

on. What's the extent of their injuries? I asked. He asked in his voice calm and clear. I could just about hear a woman's voice on the other end. What was their last known location? Anyone they spoke to recently? Cell phones. All have U.S. passports. The call ended in C-spray, added final notes to the pad before turning to us all. There's an American journalist Benjamin Hall, worked for Fox News. Appears the rest of his team were killed. He's severely wounded, and with his injuries possibly only four only has 48 hours to live he won't get the care he needs in Ukraine and won't survive if he stays there he paused he's likely in kev which is currently under siege by the russians he's an american he's got a wife and two little girls at home and no one's

going to get him if we don't go for him right now he won't make it who wants to go there are 11 people in the living room of our safe house that night without hesitation every single man there including Hunter said yes. Yeah, and just to reiterate at this point, like, Keeve is under siege. That's the moment that they're trying to take Kiev. Like, it's about 80% encircled, infantry, mechanized vehicles, migs, ballistic missiles. That's why Benjamin Hall was hit because he was hit in the middle of that.

And, I mean, we're in a phone, that phone call, we're in a phone with the Pentagon talking directly to Solo, and the White House has said no, like they're not going to go. They're not going to go. So we were literally his only, his only option. And yeah, I mean, it was, it was a God or deem thing too because we talk about when you're doing things like this, access and placement is the most crucial. Like you could be the, you could be dev group or CAG and one of the most capable

units in the world. But if you don't have access and placements in area, you can't put those skills to solve the problem. Especially now here, you know, you got like. you guys are you guys are actually the perfect solution because you're low vis low profile like it's it's the fourth option it's the fourth option but like well i say it was god ordained is because to belt to have that access to placement it happened about an hour before that phone call we got the ambulances we had got all the jackets and you know everything that we were we were we were we were

equipped to bell to pull that off only for about the hour previous to that call and uh and you know Have we not been equipped? This was late at night. Of course, everything happens like this late at night. You never get the call at like 9 in the morning, right? You always get it at like, you're about to go to bed and now you get the call, right? So now we have to go, you know, 18 hours through Ukraine, through these checkpoints and stuff like that, past curfew. And those ambulances and passes, you know, was what was able to get us through.

But, um, 1055, nine of us in three vehicles rolled out of the talk, leaving Hunter and Sean behind. We were going to get Ben Hall and bring him home to his family. Hunter stayed he gets radio watch and you know you talk about his attitude in here of course he wants to go like everybody else wants to go yeah and he realizes he's the guy with the best Cability to be in the talk making sure all the comms works and so he does what the team needs him to do yeah and he did it gratefully I'm sure he was it was eating him up but and then uh I think another really important note with that is the solo actually came to our talk and work shoulder to shoulder with oh really so that was kind of like shows that real true collaboration with our government the fourth option yeah he comes comes in there our talk, shoulder, shoulder, Sean, Solo and Hunter kind of run the talk. And we're on with the Pentagon. The whole time we're working with the Pentagon and the Solo and liaisoning with the 80-second airborne.

So they're staged at the Polish border waiting to receive. Yeah. So the 80-second airborne with a black hauled helicopter, the aeromedical C-130 on standby and launched two adjournary is already knows he's coming. So they're standing by for us to do this. So it's kind of neat when you talk about a fourth option because, We take it from a fourth option Back to a second option Right, we hand it off and now it's back

We hand it off to them Yeah, there's just a sketchy zone Yeah, in the middle. I mean, like I said, if you can imagine If rescue, an American rescue force gets rolled up or gets shot up Or even gets accidentally, you know, shot out of the sky It's just there's a bunch of terrible things

That are going to create global catastrophe Right. And that's why the government goes, They're risk averse and they go, I, well, it's a Fox News reporter. We don't really, you know, we're not doing anything.

So it's, the fourth option is a real thing and it's necessary. It is, yeah. Started on this mission a little bit. I've been held at gunpoint at checkpoints many time in my life. I've never liked having a gun pointed at me. And it's not good to feel out of control in the situation where people are tense and armed, but checkpoints are unnecessary part of the job. If you're going to visit that kind of area where we work,

you have to learn how to talk. We have situations like the one we were facing. So this is sort of a nightmare. You're going into these checkpoints and everyone's on edge. And you've got to basically not provoke anybody. You've got to explain what's happening without explaining too much of what's happening. Like it's serious business. Yeah, Civil War in America and you're in Oklahoma, backwards Oklahoma.

And you pull up next to three dudes at Mullets next to a barrel with a machete and a shotgun. And you're trying to convince them that you're there for the right reason. I haven't seen the whole movie, but there's a movie called Civil War, and I've seen a clip of it. And there's some dude with like bleached blonde hair and pink glasses on. And the guy's like, we're American. He's like, what kind of Americans are you? And you go, oh, damn, this sucks. So that's what I was thinking of when I was thinking of these checkpoints that you're rolling through.

Because there's Russian special operations guys that are saying, hey, we're, you know, we're here to help. We're Americans and we're here to help. And he's like, what kind of Americans are you? The Russian kind of Americans? Yeah. They're scared. And, you know, scared people hurt people. And so you've got to be smiles, hands up, you know, and a totally cooperative.

You want to give them things, but you don't want to sound like you're trying to bribe them. Because then you're, you know, so it's a balance. And you got to, and it's like time consuming. They got to take your bags out, dump everything out, maybe rob you. Like, it's, yeah. You go into a lot of details. Get the books. You can get the details.

I'm going to fast forward through some of that stuff. Oh, no, I'm good. Okay. It was light when we finally approached a small town on the outskirts of Kiev. It had taken us 15 hours to get there. Yes. God. Dozens of checkpoints.

You finally end up in the safe house. Sea spray bow, Doc Jadik. Jadik. Jadik and Roman were to go ahead to the military hospital where Ben Hall was. Go ahead. Fast forward a little bit. Ben Hall had lost his legs in the attack. His eye and hand injuries were serious and he had suffered significant burns,

but the main problem was the shrapnel in his neck. Dr. Jadik said that there was a risk of it coming loose and severing an artery. That made driving potentially fatal, given the bombed-out state of the roads around Kiev, not to mention the fact that Ben didn't have the 20-plus hours it had taken us to drive from the border in the first place. The only options were air or rail, And neither of those were actually feasible. Flying was out of the question unless you wanted to be immediately shot down and the chances of trains running in the middle of a war zone was practically zero.

All through the night, sea spray Sarah Risco Risco, and I had been contacting people to find a solution. After hours of getting nowhere, a possibility emerged. We learned that a secret meeting was taking place in Kiev between the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia, who had come for a high-level security talks, with President Zelensky. They traveled by train accompanied by the Polish Grom. Yes. Yeah.

Forces and equivalent, they're equivalent to the US Delta force and were due to leave that morning. As soon as we heard about the train, we got to work trying to secure permission for Ben and the team to be on it. It was kind of frantic and relied on a bunch of things happening that were way beyond our control. We needed God to be in the director's chair.

So there you go, you got the Grom coming in, Grom, let's go Grom. Do you ever work with the Grom? No, except in Ukraine. They're solid, man. Yeah, they're freaking outstanding. I actually like worked a lot with the Grom. Really? Because my first deployment to Iraq,

we were linked up with them and we lived with them. And so we did ops with them all the time. I mean, I didn't even know how many ops I did with the Grom. And, you know, sometimes they would be, sometimes they would be like driving and we would be assault. Sometimes we would drive them and they'd be assaults.

Sometimes we'd both be assaulting. It was just, we just did all kinds of stuff with them. But, and then my friend Drago was the liaison with the Grom for like, for like half the war or something crazy. And so, yeah,

love the Grom. Fast forward a little bit. Eventually, we had good news. Kind of, Ben and his team had been granted permission to ride on the train, but they only had 30 minutes to get to the station. It was a high risk journey requiring them,

not only to navigate checkpoints, where soldiers were, operating under the shoot on-site order, but also avoiding the advancing Russians, all while keeping Ben Hall alive. And they had to do it all in an ambulance that could still not go faster than 15 miles an hour. Yeah, it was breaking. Yeah, because it was dying. Again, get the book. The story is so awesome to read.

Somehow, C-spray and the others made it onto the train with Ben alive as an incredible achievement, possible only by the grace of God and commitment of our team. Soon after, we heard from the talk with an update on the Russian, assault on Kyiv. They had yet to gain complete control the city, but their python grip had tightened. In the hours since we'd left, they had captured more land to the south and west, including one significant building, a hospital in the same neighborhood as the facility sea spray had found Benin. The Russians were holding 500 patients and staff hostage. Yeah. The mission wasn't over. Four others have been killed in the attack. Pierre, Ben's cameraman, and Sasha Fox's Ukrainian

correspondent as well as two Ukrainian soldiers who were their security. I've been thinking about all of them during the drive back. I guess we all had do you know anything about the other bodies? I asked, are they recoverable? Sea spray shook his head. Not Sasha. All they could find of her was a piece of her arm. Pierre was hit by shrapnel that severed his formal artery. So yes, there's a body and Fox wants us to go out and get him. So the mission's not over. Yeah, my response was no. I mean, you know, Russia was making a second attempt to take care of. that by the time we got back and uh and we were just like i'm not going to risk the team to go recover a body i mean this guy fox loved this guy he'd been 25 years with fox pierre zesgeski he's

he he did afghanistan he was just amazing everybody like loves this guy and so we had said no and then they said hey we have someone on the phone and let's talk to you it was his wife michel and she said guys i want my husband and we were like yes ma'am changing plans and uh and we made a decision to go back and get Pierre's body. Yeah. Yeah, that was, it's a powerful part that you write about in the book. Just get hearing her voice on the phone. Yeah.

And then the part about the flag, like, I get really, I get really shaken up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. With that flag. And just like really, something about it just really rocked me. Yeah. No, so you guys go out, you have to, you have to, you meet with a hearse because you're going out to kind of get Pierre once you kind of located where he was.

and then you have to check on the body to make sure it's him. Yeah, because moving a body out of a across the border is like a big deal. So we had to get all the paperwork, which was very complex. Seaspray had done this before. So he knew exactly to get all the paperwork. So we had to pull a lot of strings through the agency to get the pay. So we had all the paperwork, but one of the things you have to visually identify the body. So we opened the casket, identified the body.

And he was pretty, you had him really real dignified. He was clean. And then when I put the. the lid back on, I've seen this Irish flag in the corner. He was Irish. And immediately my mind went back to our guys. You know, when we bring them back, like, when we bring them back, we put the, the stars over their head and the red and white stripes go down to their feet.

And we, like, put that flag crisp on their casket to return them home with dignity. And I'm like, we have to put this flag on. So I literally Googled because cell phone service works better in Ukraine that it does here in San Diego. I literally Googled, like, is it green, white, orange was an orange, white, green. And to get it right. And, and I was putting it on. And, and I think I was shaking at sea spray came and he grabbed my arm.

And he's like, you okay? And I'm like, actually, no, I'm not. And he's, let me help you. And we put that flag on like super crisp. And then we, and I actually drove the hearse because the guy wanted to, he wanted to drive out because he wanted to escape the war. And that was a long, you know, story of getting him, you know, getting the hearse. But we, you paid, you bought the horse from them.

Yeah, it's like, hey, either you make the deal of your, life with Fox News right now and sell this Hearst or we're taking it like we're stealing it from you. So here's the phone. Make the deal of your life and he did. And so I drove the Hearst with Pierre and man, I was so tired like I hadn't slept in days. I was like driving. His hearse was like having a hard time standing the road and we crossed, went across the Ukrainian border. Fox News had a, they had like two vehicles in front of us and his wife was that Michelle was in it.

But we didn't want to stop because we didn't want her to come out. So we just kept moving and they kind of jumped in. And so they're in front of me. I'm following them. Sea spray and bows behind me in the in the ambulance. And I'm like trying to stay awake. I'm like, Pierre, like help me out, man. Like I'm like just like trying to stay awake this whole drive back to Krakowl.

And we get back to a, we put in in a morgue and we take him out and deliver the body to Michelle. And she was really sweet and grateful. And we just spent a moment with a few moments with her and with Pierre's body. And yeah, it was, it felt like, it. really felt like it was the right thing to do even the risk it felt like the right thing to do to do that yeah no it's the way you write about that the whole transaction and and the flag and everything in the book it was it's it's i could getting choked up reading it because you know um what that's like um with for americans and the fact that you are you don't want to do it the right way was just

it was powerful to read about man um fast forward a little bit what were russia do next the answer was revealing itself before our eyes. We were contacted by a church leader about a large group of civilians who were leaving the city of, how do you say the Jimpro? D-N-I-P-R-O. Oh, N-P-R-O. When the Russians blew out a bridge, the civilians were trapped on the eastern side of the river and their leader sent pictures showing the crowd of 100 women and children hiding with nowhere to go. Sea Spray was on a call with one of our senior military generals at the Pentagon. Bridges, he said when the call was over. That's why. So we need contingency for.

If Russia starts taking them out or puts checkpoints on them, they'll have people trapped that we need a way to manage Evax without bridges. So you guys start trying to figure out contingency for that. The contingency you figure out is the F470 Zodiac, which is the boats that we used to, they don't actually use Zodiac anymore. This is a different brand. But it's what you and I were raised on.

Yeah, the F470 Zodiac. Yeah, combat radar, Water Raidercraft. Yeah, combat rubber rubber raider craft. Yeah, CRC. Yeah. So the CRC. I've heard people call them Crix.

Oh, I never heard that Crix. Which is interesting. It's interesting how some things get morph over time like cricks. And then another funny one is the guys in Vietnam, like when I see like a fob, Fob, I call it Fob. They call it Fob. They don't call it Fob. Like Tilt was like, what's it? Fob.

And I go, F-O-B, oh. So. Oh, just like a C-R-R-C or C-R-K. Yeah, like I never heard C-R. We never called it a C. We called Z-E-Birds for some reason. But which was the brand. Yeah, which is the brand.

But the crick, I think the first week I heard to say that was Marines. Okay. It was like, we got our cricks ready. I was like, what's a crick? Yeah, something new. So there you go. Yeah. So you guys get this idea.

You guys got to get the cricks, the zodiacs. You guys got to get them ready. And once again, you have a great network of people, and you need to get them bought back in America, wherever else you can buy them, and then you've got to fly them. You figure out the best way to get them there is to fly them. And, of course, in order to do that, you need a plane.

So how did you end up managing this? You have a freaking private plane. Call someone that, you know, fortunately I have a lot of relationships that have people with private planes. And you need one big enough to put four cricks in and gas engines and the bladders and then electric engines and the batteries. And so we literally like this, my friend who's this plane, this is like a $70 million plane and it's brand new and it's really first mother-in-law.

And so we're like trying not to tear off the trim and keep this thing. This thing's so pristine and the pilot's like loving the pilot's like, I'm used to fly and got a bunch of rich jerks around the golf and now I'm getting to do this guy's a Marine Vietnam veteran so he was like loving it. He's all fired up. Yeah, he was all fired up to sneak these things into. But damn, if I would let anyone get near my 70 million dollar plane with a bunch of freaking zodiacs and engines and gas platters? Oh man, that's we're just like, you know, and his plane supposed to be comfortable, right? But now we got all this stuff in there. So we were like sleeping on the floor to get, you know, get there. And we had Tyler Merritt from a nine line was he was going

on a different trip. So we get, he hitched to ride with us. He hitched to ride right on. No, that's awesome. Good for that dude. Put Corey Scott making that happen. Yeah, Corey's incredible human being. He's a Marine as well. But yeah, he put his mother-in-law's playing on the line for us. That's a big risk, man. That can ruin your Christmases and Thanksgiving.

Eiff, boy. Fast forward a little bit. In spite of everything that was happening in Ukraine, the work of Mighty Oaks at home continued. Before heading to crackout, Corey and I took a trip to Camp Pendleton, California, the West Coast base of the U.S. Marine Corps, where I had the honor of addressing the graduating class

of basic reconnaissance course class two, tack 22. This was my third time as a guest speaker at a BRC graduation, and while I felt the same burden to say something that these warriors would remember for a lifetime, with everything that I'd seen so far into Ukraine, fresh in my mind, my desire to encourage and inspire them was even greater. As reconnaissance, Marines, and as men, you will continually be given the choice to do what is right, to do what is wrong, or to do nothing, I said in closing.

Remember this. there is never a wrong time to do the right thing. I trust when the time comes, you will follow the giants who came before you and you will do what is right. I ended with a BRC saying, quote, all it takes is all you got,

end quote. Is that like their motto? Is that their motto? It is. All it takes is all you got. That's the BRC motto. That's all it takes is all you got. That's all they look for there.

I mean, it's not as... Yep. Just give us everything. That's it. That's the way we roll. I've seen guys there that, you know, have more than others, but they're not giving it their all and they want the guys that could give everything. You know that.

Yeah. Hell yeah. I never heard that motto until I read this book. Yeah. All it takes is all you got. I've fought that before. Like, hey, you just need to like get, just want you to give everything. Like, that's it.

Just give it everything you got. That's what the instructors look for there. They don't look for the best athletes. They don't look for the guys that's going to leave it all on table. And because, you know, then you know, because recon's a small community. It's just like teams. Like, you know that that guy, once you give him that MOS and he becomes a reconnaissance Marine, he could be in your platoon.

He could be in your petun. He could be in your friend's platoon. And when you're going to walk through a door with him one day and you don't, you don't have to look over your shoulder and wonder if he's going to be there. You know that he's going to be there because when he earned an MOS, he gave it all. Yep. Keep the standards high. Yes.

Keep the freaking standards high. No slack. You hear that Pete? Pete's listening. Hold the line for us. Back to Krakow. There were signs of Russian change in tactics. From the start, we've been aware of the rumors that Russian kill squads going into Ukraine,

posing as American humanitarian workers. Again. But as the war had entered its second month, whispers began that Russian special operations snipers were actively targeting genuine U.S. humanitarian workers in Ukraine, people just like us. None of us were surprised by this, but it was something we were factored into each mission undertook over the border. Dude, what are they thinking? They probably just don't want people coming and help. And just kill a few aid workers and it was like that problem is going to go

away. Well, it's one of those most effective things in the battlefield. Like, I mean, without the NGO community, the Ukrainian military would not have been equipped to resist the Russians. So, I mean, if you're, I mean, it's, if I, if I was them if I was a Russians said you're you're a you're a combatant at that point like we're providing we're providing you know support resources well just yeah so you I mean you can't blame them for targeting I mean if they're if you can blame that for being engaged in a war but if they are going to be engaged in a war you can't blame them for kill logistics train and the NGOs were a threat to them and so yeah it's a

we're legitimate targeting a battlefield now I mean it was horrifying too I mean it was a I think I were about this there was this when I went to the border that first trip there was this German bus it was all German volunteer paramedics and and EMTs and they and somebody sponsored this bus anyway out there and they were cruising around they showed us their bus because we were trying to build a medical vehicle and and we had spent like the day with them they were just amazing people they're doing the right thing and they were going their front line and Russian sent a rocket inside that thing and killed them all I mean were they were they fighters

Or were they like medical people? They were just medical people. They were just providing medical aid in front. And look, like, I'm sure if they would have found a wounded Russian, they would have treated him too. They were there just to help. And, but they were, you know, those resources, those NGOs, those, that's a threat to the Russians.

It's improving the capability of the Ukrainian military. Yeah. Meanwhile, while all this is going on, you got this question in the book, will I ever let Hunter go with me on a trip over the border into Ukraine? I didn't have to wait long before the question was reality. So there you go. It's coming. I couldn't avoid it.

Going to, how do you say, Lviv? Is that right? Lviv, yeah. Lviv. Going to Lviv was a relatively short distance on the map, but a slow journey and reality, driving a few hours. You approach the city.

Did I miss what this on was? What are you guys going to do here? We're just going to deliver some, one of those communication packages. Right, there you go. So you're going to do that. As you're approaching, the column of black smoke up ahead as we approach, we saw that it was the aftermath of a Russian strike on a fuel depot. From the thickness of the smoke, I guess it happened the day before, maybe two.

It was a brutal attack. One of the main ones to hit Leviv since the invasion had begun. By this stage in the war, the Russian's use of ballistic cruise missiles had been well reported, but this is my first time seeing the aftermath of a strike with my own eyes. Two missiles, both roughly the size of a telegraph pole, had been used in this particular. particular attack, there's nothing much left of the depot or the shopping mall or the grocery store or the rows of houses nearby. Nobody was searching for survivors. Hunter drove slowly as we passed by part out of curiosity, mostly out of respect. He was doing great. I on the other hand could feel the first wave of doubt. What kind of a father takes his son on a road trip into a ward zone?

Was Hunter ready for this? Was I? All right. So how do you make that decision? Well, So. And how do you freaking explain that decision to your wife, Dathy? It's one thing for you to make that decision by getting on the phone like, hey, hey, babe, you know your son that you birthed and raised? I'm going to put him in harm's way. Yeah, that you trusted me to protect. Yeah, I mean, look, this Hunter's was raised by me.

He's grew up around people like you. I mean, he's his friends. He's an old soul. So his friends were my friends. Like he was around Seals and Recom Marines his whole life, M.M.A. fighters. He started jitsu at threes. never want to be anything other than Marine.

He had been a Marine. He'd been in that combat already. He's proven his worth in Afghanistan withdrawals and so far in this Ukraine operation. And so I was pushed in this corner to say like, okay, as a father, I want to protect him. I want to control this situation. I always want to, I'm very controlling, right? I want to control the situation. So as a father, I want to control and protect this situation.

But I had to come to this realization that he's his own man. God burdens his heart just like he burdens mine. He's a strong believer. He's very personally convicted as a Christian. And he has a real heart, compassion, humanitarian heart. So I had to do this dilemma like I, and come to this conclusion, this is the conclusion I came to. I love Hunter, but I don't love him more than God loves him. That's much so I love my son.

God loves him more. I could protect Hunter, but God can protect him more. And while God's burdened his heart to do these things that he's burdened my heart to do, I had to realize that there's probably no safer place for my son to be safer than being in a couch in Houston or in the front line of the Ukrainian war, the Russian Ukrainian war. There's probably no safer place for him to be in the will of God. And if God's burden is hard to do that,

who am I to keep him from doing those things? I could steward it and protect it, but I should not keep him from it. That's really easy to say right here. It's a very difficult thing to say when I had already been to the front line. By that time, I'd already been to the front lines. I'd already seen the dead bodies in Ukraine. And I've seen, I had a reason, by the way, eight deployments to Afghanistan.

I'd never seen more kinetic combat than my time in Ukraine. Me personally, I'm, you know, where you had both sides have the weapons. Like, this is the next level type of war. Yep. So I had never seen anything like that before. So I'm recently exposed to this and having to make this decision. So it's a very, sounds easy to say that, but it was a very difficult decision to make. but I just felt like I could take something from him that he was like ordained to do

and be part of him and growing him into being, I think the person that God created and be. And I didn't want to get in the way of that. So I had to make this decision to relinquish my fear and control into a trust in him and a trust in God. And I did. And it was probably one of the hardest decisions ever made. However, on another side of it, quickly another side of it,

it was probably one of the most incredible things I got to witness this, witness some of the things that I've got to see. see my son do in Ukraine. And he, you know, we could go through some of them. But he just, he did some incredible things there that made me see him in a different way and have a tremendous amount of respect for him and just be proud. I'm just so proud of him. Like some of the things he did there was just incredible.

It reminds me that story of John McCain when he was over in prison camp and his dad was the admiral in overall in charge. And so he's in present camp and the admiral has to make the decision, do we continue bombing like around Hanoi. Oh, I didn't know that. My own son is in a prison camp there and there's no like, you know, you don't know where he's at.

There's this is, this is, you know, back in the day, there's no GPS guided bombs. So you start dropping a lot of bombs. Then there's a chance that you kill your kid. Yeah. And he dropped those bombs, man. And he never like treated his son any different than he did. The rest of the people that were there,

that he was trying to help win the war, broadly speaking and taking a risk strategically with his with the prisoners of war but yeah that's a very similar scenario that you're in right here I did not know that story and and also John McCain they were like the

the Vietnamese North Vietnamese were like hey you can go home they wanted him to go home early because they wanted to be able to say like you see the admiral's wanted his son to come home and they took care of his he took care of his kid why isn't taking care of you but John McCain did not leave he was

Like, nope, I'm not going home. So credit to the McCain's freaking heroic behavior on all fronts. So you say this, too. This is like a little bit of a life review for a big, and some of this we talked about before, but for a big part of Hunter's childhood, I was not in a good place. By the time he was 13 years old,

my life was unraveling fast after eight special operations appointments to Afghanistan. I was deep in the pit of PTSD, and I brought my family along with me. Hunter's younger brother Hayden and their sister, Haley. I'm saying that right? Yeah. And Kathy, too. I pushed everyone away as far as I could tell.

The only option ahead of me was killing myself and becoming another veteran suicide statistic. It seems that some of the biggest changes in life happen only when we're pushed to our limits. That's how I was molded to become a forced recal Marine. And now, and it's how I became a father and a husband again. I was ready to give up on myself, but there were a handful of people around me who weren't. They refused to be swayed by the man. become and they still had faith in the man God had created me to be. It took a lot of prayer and a lot of tears, but six months after being suicidal, my life had been transformed, not changed, not

improved, transformed. I was a new creation, plain and simple. It was though it was through these new eyes that I saw my wife and my children clearly for what felt like the first time ever. I saw their gifts, their character, their potential, each of them blew me away. I decided to make up for lost time and threw myself at the task. I was obsessed reading every book about parenting. I could get my hands on. It was like I was planning for the most significant mission of my life, which I guess is exactly what I was doing. I read Captivating by Statsy El Ridge to understand Kathy and Haley, better as women. After reading one book in particular, Raising a Modern Day Night by Robert Lewis, I got real deliberate about everything with my boys who were becoming

young men. Over several weeks and months, I followed the program that taught them what it meant to be a man of God. The whole thing culminated in a ceremony in which I got to tell Hunter and Hayden exactly what I saw in them. And you go through that little ceremony type thing. Very, very cool to read about. In the 13 years since I hit my rock bottom, God has taught me so much. He's surrounded me with people who love and care for me enough to fight for me.

He's given me mentors who have disciplined me and taught me how to recalibrate my life. Most important of all has been the second chance and grace that God gives us all. it turns out that rock bottom is a pretty good foundation to rebuild your life on so yeah there you go yeah transformed not just changed not just improved but transformed your life yeah that was a mess i mean when i came home and i talked about a lot in your last episode i was i was a complete train wreck and i felt like i had you know a completely lost identity purpose and uh you know and and and uh there's a lot of things that tried in my route to recovery, medicine and VA programs, civilian programs, and professional success, financial success. I had been success in that rock bottom moment I was in

professionally, but my life was, you know, was dead. And, you know, there's a lot of things that helped him a road to recovery, but probably nothing was more profound than restoration of my faith and becoming a Christian and really kind of trying to identify, build my identity and something bigger than myself and uh and and my life had really took a took a big turn up to be burdened towards a service to others different than i was in a uniform and that that's what led to the building of mighty oaks foundation and some of the work that i do now and uh and man i loved my job as forced recid marine like i never would like i'm extremely proud of that and it's important thing but my identity was tied to that job and not the cause or the service it was a

my identity was tied to that. So the problem with these jobs, you know, being a police officer, being a school, whatever you're proud of, like those jobs are noble and we should be proud of them. When your identity is tied to those, it's dangerous because at any moment, those can be taken away from you. You get injured, you get sick, you're going to retire. And when you lose those things, if your identity was tied to that, then you feel like you have no identity purpose anymore. That could be detrimental. And that's what had happened to me.

So their transformation for me was really understand my identity was bigger than any job as as cool as those jobs may be is bigger than any job my identity relies on my eternal purpose to be a servant and and so that was really a transformation to me well you've been getting after it so yeah servant levels have been high going back to this mission after several hours of driving you guys go through some of these checkpoints again you go through good learning for anybody getting these like how you guys handle these checkpoints really good information in there and it's also a good read because it's freaking tense fastball a little late in the evening we reached

our destination on the outskirts of the laviv we're visiting our visiting friends of pastor bodon uh this is a husband and wife and you talked about pastor bar down i didn't i didn't cover it um in the book get the book to read but he's a pretty powerful figure he is he is he's incredible guy and one of the ukraine one of the hundreds of thousands ukrainians they went back that chose to be back there. Everybody talks about Ukraine. He was like living in America, right? Yeah, everyone talks about the Ukrainians leaving and fleeing.

Yeah. But there's hundreds of thousands, I think like two or three hundred thousand that have chosen to go back to participate in defending their country. Yeah. And he's one of them. That's pretty, pretty noteworthy. Yeah, very noteworthy. Yeah, that's a great part of the book.

So you're visiting some of their friends. They're kind of using them and, or using their house, like a safe house type thing, staying for the night, getting in some shelter. And then she lets you know about her son. Yeah. You know, her son, when the war started, he was sent to Kharkiv. Which is a very bad place in front line. Yep.

He ended up getting hit. There was a missile. He gets strapped on to the formal artery. His name was what was the name, Andre? Andre. Is that how he said his name? I think that was it. Yeah, Andre.

Yeah. One of the men who was with Andre phoned me after he died. The man said that he'd called for a medic, but none of them was around. He said Ukrainian soldiers are not given any real medical training or equipment, and that soldiers are not to do first aid on each other. Only doctors can treat a wounded man, even if he's dying. So even if he had a bandage or anything like that, he could not have used it to help Andrew without knowing how.

All he could do was hold him as he died. So this is this mom that's telling you this story that her son got hit with shrapnel, It hits a formal artery, which is really bad, but if you know how to apply a tourniquette, you know how to stop the bleeding. Like, you can absolutely save someone's life. You've got to do it fast. Yeah. But in our war, you know, that you and I fought in, the global war on terror, you know, there

was all kinds of guys that had formal bleeds that were saved. Sure. Yeah. And so you hear this story. Like, and by the way, by a mom at a table in her house while she's making us breakfast, Yeah, well, she just cooked us breakfast, and she's telling us, you can't escape that. You're sitting there face to face with her, and you're like, you don't want to tell her, but like, he could have easily, he could have easily been saved where by a tourniquet and ratchet it down and with some, you know.

So as you say goodbye to them, you drive away, as you're driving away, finally Hunter said exactly what I've been thinking. We have to do something, don't we? And that's how you guys sort of come up with your next, next focus of your mission, not the full focus, but it's definitely another line of that you get into, which is doing training for people. This area we can help. Yeah. It wasn't difficult to decide to pack up our operation center in Krakow and leave Poland entirely. The Ukrainian military hadn't just resisted the Russians advance on Kiv.

They'd pushed the invasion way back, which meant the city was now relatively safe and stable outside of rocket attacks. Made sense for us to be there. So again, you go through a bunch of details in the book, but Kiev had pretty much been held by the Ukrainians, which was amazing to watch from the outside. And it was weird too, like they were living. Like, it's so weird. Like you go to a restaurant and have dinner.

You might hear a rocketeer every now and there, but I mean, they just were like, they were so defiant. They were like, we're not going to live cowering in our basements. There's a, I think I write about in there. There was this moment that really just defined their resilience. This guy's like, his house is burnt down, there's smoke in the background and is a bright, fresh Ukrainian. flag up on this building and he's mowing his lawn. It's like a big F you to the Russians. Yeah, you can do it.

You could blow up my house, but I'm going to mow my lawn. Yeah. Fast forward a little bit. As we drove into Bucha, am I saying that right? Buka. What I saw was much worse than I'd expected, worse than the story the media had communicated. Parts of Bucca had been decimated.

Whole streets were reduced to rubble from holes in several parked and burned out cars. I was pretty sure the Russians had been firing 25 millimeter or 30 millimeter rounds, most likely from tanks. If the attack on the previous house had been designed to instill fear, what I saw could have been planned with only one goal in mind and evil intent to terrorize. So this sounds like it's absolutely horrific, worse than anything we were seeing on the news. Yeah, it was definitely terroristic to break the morale of the Ukrainian people.

I mean, it would be like a military complex here, and they were like ready to go totally, total to fight the Russians, and the Russians would move over here and destroy elderly community because that's how they break them, right? They could fight the troops, and they're going to, you know, they might take big losses, but they're ready to fight for their freedom and their homes. They're going to fight until the end. And so why fight the Ukrainian troops when they could totally break their will by killing their parents or their wives and children? And so, you know, we see apartment complexes that were no military target in sight. And, you know, rock, like bombs dropped from the sky. Like three buildings is not inter, this is not like collateral damage. Like three apartment buildings with a bomb in the center of each of them.

You know, where only women and children are in, or in Buka, that elderly community that we went in and was just leveled. Fast forward a little bit. Between April and August, we were busy. We made a number of trips to rescue more people, distribute medical supplies, provide more resiliency training for frontline troops. At one point, I made a trip with Dennis Corey and Jeremy Stallnecker, a former Marine Infantry Commander and co-founder of Mighty Oaks, to Kiev, to liaise with Samaritan's purse,

local chaplains and other NGOs, and providing frontline medical care. It was an ambitious project working together to turn our six-wheeler into a mobile field hospital to treat troops injured on the front line. Meanwhile, you say I was ready to let someone else take charge of the planning and preparation for the upcoming operation. Andrew stepped up and spent weeks putting together a detailed plan for a 14-day trip into the red zone front line of the battle area in eastern Ukraine. So you're going to go on another, what would you consider this like a mission, an operation to go up there for 14 days?

Yeah, this is more where Mighty Oaks steps in. It does what Mighty Oaks does on our international side, training them to do. That's where we're Hunter and his team really do is such a great job. I've got a lot of soft veterans that went through Mighty Oaks that found you, purpose again and they want to go out to other countries and ally partners and train them what we do at Mighty Oaks. And so we wanted to be able to to bring that ministry type aspect to them. But no one really cares about that. A lot of these commanders are like we don't want to be ministered to right now. What we need is this. So part of that's building relationships and what do they need most is they need medical training and medical care. So we were bringing really good medical all that's billions of dollars that we were sending there, but guys still didn't have tourniquets on the battlefield. So we were bringing turnicates and first aid kids. We were bringing turnicates and first aid kids. kits, IFACs, you know, individual first aid kits that we were the really good ones that slide inside your, that slide inside your body armor that you could just pull out with a tab off your, and teaching them how to use it. So we're bringing guys that were like doctors from

who had, who teach at 18 Delta school. So we're bringing high level instructors to able to not just give them the equipment, but teach them how to use it. And that would build rapport, allow our guys to share their stories and help build some spiritual resiliency on the battlefield for them, offer things like some of our resources we have Mighty Oaks, audio Bible sticks to encourage and encourage them. So those are the kind of things that the Mighty Oaks said it to do. One of the things I was really proud of Hunter was they came up with a plan based on the void of chaplains in the Ukraine military.

They didn't have a chaplaincy. And so they had all these pastors. Imagine a pastor going to church one Sunday. He has half men, half women. The next Sunday it goes. It's all women, right? The men have been conscripted or drafted. And so these are small communities.

So the pastors would be like, hey, I've been knowing Little Abahn since he was in, you know, Sunday school. And I care about him. I want to go to the front lines. But I don't know how to be a chaplain. I don't know how to sleep in the woods, poop in the woods, like provide first aid or anything like that. I'm going to be a burden to them. And, you know, being a pastor doesn't equip you to be a chaplain. The average lifespan on the front line of Ukraine war is four and a half days.

So like, how do you minister someone like that to someone that their buddies are dying? And so Mighty Oaks and Hunter had this effort. They trained 300 pastors, converted them the chaplains, equipped, and deployed them to the front line and helped distribute them in the front lines. And so that was a really, 300 might not sound like a lot, but when you talk about like 300 chaplains, that's pretty impactful. So for this, for this mission, you got some of your guys from Mighty Oaks, like you were mentioned, Dennis Reed Hasty, Hastie? Hastie, yeah, Reed Hasty. He's a combat engineer. and two former seals,

Lou Rivera and Colin Fields. You know Lou, right? Yep, very well. Yep. All four were Mighty Oaks instructors. In fact, we're supposed to have Lou on the podcast. I think I talked to you about that. We're going to get one here.

Yeah. Did you read in there about Lou doing breakdancing? Yes, I did. I did. I never saw. He kept that, you know, concealed. Oh, man. His breakdown.

At least I never knew his breakdancing. We were really had bombs going off and he's breakdancing competition with Ukrainians in the middle of the, we posted a video and people were saying that it's fake like guys don't do that in a war zone I'm like that actually they do yeah just shout out to field craft survival and summit point training

these and you guys did tactical combat casually care with them to get ready for this trip just cool driving training foreign weapons familiar out like they did a good job training our guys get our guys up to speed yeah fast forward a little bit of Kharkiv had been home to 1.5 billion

people it was a major city built for modern living yet the Russian missiles had dragged it back decades. High-rise apartment blocks have been decimated, shopping malls turned into twisted piles of metal. Ice cream parlors reduced to broken signs and piles of rocks. Kids playground equipment charred and melted. Dead bodies were trapped beneath crushed homes and apartment complexes. Even if not one more bomb felt, it would take years to put Kharkiv back together again.

Yeah, Carqueef is like apocalyptic. Like we were driving in. And first of all, at nighttime, if you have a light, it's going to get hit. so you go lights out. Are you guys on nods? No, no. We were just, I mean, we had some nods, but we were, we had nods, but we didn't have everybody driving at nods.

We were just, there's like that night that we drove in, that particular night we drove in, it was pretty, pretty ambient. And, but we were, we were driving in and just, I just remember how like, everybody got quiet because it just looked like, it was like you were driving through like downtown Houston or downtown San Diego and just seemed like just decimated like buildings knocked down like high-rise buildings broken in half it's just like so apocalyptic and one of the Ukrainians came over the radio and he said welcome the carcief the only thing that lives here is will Smith and his dog in the movie i am legend and uh it's just it was exactly right how

it felt it was crazy um and what you guys were going up there to train people that was the that was yeah yeah we're going to provide provide uh medical equipment and and copy my casual care training. You say from time to time, Vitale, he's like one of your guides, pretty much. Vitale, he's former Secret Service for Winski's detail, but also a chaplain. So he ended up taking the role of a chaplain.

Just really like, I mean, he had started a nonprofit to rebuild people's homes. He's just an amazing guy. And so he's very networked and connected. So he ended being pretty vital to both to have access to different areas of Ukraine. Always well named then because his name is Vitaly and he's very vital to the situation. Take photos he'd say, show people what's happened here. We did as he said, walking slowly and quietly, staring at the carnage all around us. Eventually someone asked the question.

We'd all been thinking, where is everyone? Vitaly stopped and turned around like he was convinced he'd seen people if he only looked hard. If he only looked hard enough. Almost everyone has gone. Those who have stayed live among the ruins and know how to hide. Fast forward a little bit. That evening, I found myself talking with the woman who had been leading the worship earlier that day. She told me her name was Anna and she was around my age. She looked and sounded like a regular

soccer mom and I told her that I'd enjoyed the service. When she responded, her words were nothing like the typical conversation I'd have over coffee after church at home. There is evil in this world she began. There is danger and violence and people who want to hurt and destroy you. And just because you put your trust in God for your children, your loved ones and everyone else that you care about, doesn't mean that they are going to be safe. You understand? I do. I started to share some of my experiences, but stop myself.

This was a moment to listen and not speak. People say they trust God, but what they actually say is I trust that God will. They have a contract all grown up, all drawn up. And they expect God to come through for them exactly the way they want him to. But really, trusting God means letting go of the outcome. It means giving up on getting results that you want.

And when you do that, everything changes. That's what you saw today. Almost everyone here is learning what it means to truly put your faith in God. And when the Russians came, we all started from the same place, telling God that we trusted him to do what we wanted, to protect our children and loved ones. But everyone here has lost someone they loved. Some of the people you are worshipping alongside

have seen their own children shot to death, blown up, or executed. But they're still here. They're still believing that God exists and is with us. And they're finding that God can take their rage and their sorrow and their pain. He can take it all. Every tear and every shout. He is enough. This was a lesson I desperately needed to learn.

it was also one that I would soon be tested on. Yeah, I walked away and wrote that down after her talk show. I was just so moved by it. That morning they had asked, we had got bombed that night prior. And in that morning, they were having the church service. And this is like people, like she said, lost everything. And they're having a church service. It asked me to speak.

And I'm like, what am I going to say to these people that lost everything? And the only thing I knew what to say is like, I don't have the answer. like I can't explain what's happening here. I can just tell you that people care and we're here. We're here because if anything else is a representative that people around the world do care, you're not alone. And if anything God sent us here to let you know, you're not alone. And when she said that, I was just like so struck by it.

Because at a moment that I was in dealing with Hunter and some of the other things I was dealing with that time, it spoke directly to me and I wrote that down. Yeah, it's kind of what you were talking about. about making that decision with Hunter earlier. It's like this was the verbal. She kind of verbalized the thought process that you had. It was like trusting God isn't like, oh, he's going to give me the outcome that I want.

Right. That's not what you get. Right. You're going to get what's supposed to happen. That's right. That's right. Fast forward a little bit. We drove South.

Vitale had arranged for us to stay in an inn for the night. and then he explains that you're going to go work with this group of Ukrainians he says they are called safari he explained to me when we stop the next morning to buy a load of pizzas in the nearest town and they are not like other units

they are special the unit was created by a guy called baton baton baton which means concrete check he's like the Dana White of Ukrainian MMA and former Ukrainian special forces from the 2014 war When the invasion happened, Baton was asked to create a special unit that would cause chaos among the Russians, basically a hit squad.

He used his influence and contacts to reach out to all the coaches for MMA fighters, boxers, wrestlers, and martial arts grapplers. He brought them and their athletes together and the level of camaraderie that they have is hard to find. But, Vitaly paused, like he wasn't sure whether what he was about to say was okay. Safari is tough, but they need military training. That's why Baton and the men of Safari are so excited to meet you. You are a professional fighter from Strike Force and Bellator, and you are special operations who fought in Afghanistan. If they like you and the team,

maybe we can come back and help them some more. I think I'm most excited. I think I'm most excited about this interview right now that you got to read this story. It's freaking epic, dude. This is like a movie, man. I'm like, are you being for real? Like they put together.

Could you imagine like Victory MMA is a company? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not just Victory MMA. It's like every freaking badass MMA gym in America. Just like, all right, we send us your best five fighters. The coaches and a platoon sergeant's.

Yeah. That's freaking awesome, man. Very cool story. Fast forward with the next two days, our guys were spread among batons unit. All of us spent hours hanging out, talking, sharing gear, giving advice, training, demonstrating things that we picked up through the years of training in combat. Hunter spent a long time demonstrating

how to use water filters we bought. And of course, Hunter and I got to do a little wrestling with some of the men, trading techniques and sharing old stories. There's a cool story. I didn't read the story, but there's a story where basically you guys have to earn your respect through a freaking sniper shot.

Yeah, sniper shoot off. And you've pulled it off. We did, yeah. Which is freaking epic. Yeah. I imagine it was a little bit of that with the jiu-jitsu as well. Oh, yeah.

They're trying to kill you. All these guys are call off out here jacked, like jacked guys. And they wanted to, they wanted to scrap it, Hunter and I. Nice. We were right in the dirt. And then Dennis Price did that shoot off with that Ukrainian sniper. Freakingly. It was great.

All throughout the time there, I could hear our Mighty Oaks guys. Dennis, Reed, Lewis, and Colin and Hunter sharing parts of their own stories and talking about the importance of being spiritually strong. Just like I'd heard them all do countless times in our programs back home with the American veterans and service members. So you're really trying to not just give them military training, but give them some spiritual training as well. Yeah. It was really great. You know Luis Lou. He just so, he demands respect right away.

I mean, I think in teams they call them Mamaloo, and we call them Mamaloo at Mighty Oaks, but he immediately like has this like kind of fall their figure and he just stepped in it. Rolls so well. Colin Fields was a team guy and he's 18 Delta, so he was providing medical training. All that team, Reed Hasty, those guys just did such a good job. job on that trip and earned a respect to this unit safari and many other units but that one particularly was one that I wanted to connect with and they just did such a good job yeah it's freaking outstanding um yeah like and you do you get the job done and uh you know those there's a part

if i remember correctly you had like the sticks with the bible on yeah the audio Bible sticks yeah and you didn't like say like hey you didn't issue them no you just left them out yeah and the guys took them in there and uh uh vatale his son said they've been there before with those and never took any. And it was like over a thousand between those, between those two units we went to, they were all gone. And they weren't able to give away any before.

And it was just through that relationship, right? It's not there just evangelizing, pushing, you know, pushing faith or pushing whatever on them. It's just like getting to know them on a personal level, connecting to the building a relationship, building their rapport and trust and sharing our personal stories, being vulnerable with them. And here's the things that we've been through.

We never, we never experienced this. I remember telling them like, hey, I've never had someone invade my country. We had 9-11, but then we left and went to Afghanistan, but no one's, I didn't have to worry about my wife and kids at home. Like, I can't relate to you guys, but we're here. And, you know, and we're going to be here for you. Fast forward a little bit. You were, you say back at home from much of September. Ukraine launched a rapid counteroffensive in Northeastern Kharkiv.

So there's, this fight and it's just escalating, keep going. You decided you're going back to Ukraine. It's going to be your last visit. You arrived to talk in Kiev. C-SPAY received a call that there was a U.S. Marine who had been fighting for the Ukrainians. Reports suggested that he'd been shot in the abdomen and was captured, but there was credible intelligence to suggest

there was potential for him to be rescued if we were willing to go in and get him. So you got that coming down the pipe. And then on top of that, within the hour, we received another call. There's a report of mass graves in Izzym. Azoom. Azoom. Yeah. 1500 women and children.

Reisco wants to go get eyes on and verify. With billions of dollars flowing into Ukraine from the Biden White House, there was clearly an incentive for Ukraine to embellish or falsify reports of atrocities. So our government contacts wanted to verify, wanted independent verification. If it was true, we needed to know. The world needed to know. Both the rescue of the Marine and verification of mass graves felt exactly like the kind of thing we were there to do.

But saying yes to both of them would mean leaving Hunter to carry out. out his mission without me. Do I leave Hunter to lead the operation without being by his side? Or do I give into my desire to be a hovering dad and say no to sea spray? There's a question of trust, but not my trust of Hunter. It's about my own trust of God. Was I prepared to let go? Was I willing to put aside my own need to be there to protect my son and ensure his safety?

Or was I okay with handing him over to God? could I accept that the safest place Hunter could be was in the center of God's will, not under my own supervision? After all I'd seen in Ukraine, I knew what I had to do. It was time to let go. Deep down, deeper than the fear I was sensing, I knew that I trusted Hunter and I knew that I trusted God even more. As much as I love Hunter, God loves him more. As much as I want to protect Hunter, God can do it better.

So yes, it was time to risk it all. It was time to trust God. So you and C Spray end up heading for the mass graves and Hunter goes to try and recover the wounded Marine Yeah, well the wounded, actually the wounded marine in the mass graves were me and C Spray the oh did I get it backwards Well, and Hunter was doing the original mission which was providing medical supplies oh okay so he's bringing medical So I had to break off from that one to do so she spray and I were doing that that was both in a zoom which is zoom had been occupied for six months by the Russians So that that that was part of the that's why the mass grazer

were uncovered because the Ukrainians had pushed them out. And that was a Risco as a pseudo name by the way as for the solo, the special operations liaison officer. So that was the agency asking us to validate those yeah and it was a big decision

right. And you know they had some good guys in his team he had a 4thrikan guy and a Marsa guy he had a I can't remember the fourth person yeah but he had some good guys in his team but sending him off to do that without was a big decision and uh see sprae and i you know we we set off we set off before them and

and we drove through the night and uh headed out to zoom picked this up we parked near one of the pits and followed vadeem is that right yeah vdeme he was the he was the chief of police for the entire country of ukraine which is like the it's kind of a weird position it'd be like almost like the sec deaf the the director of the fbi the attorney general like all in all the world one position Yeah. He walked slowly toward it. A few soldiers were gathered around at some working, some staring into space and taking a moment Hardly anyone was speaking. Someone had put hazard tape around the edge of the earth mound that surrounded the pit, but I didn't need the tape to tell me it was a crime scene. I could smell it in the air, the stench of decomposing bodies. I wanted to take a moment before walking in there, but no matter how much anger or sorrow I wanted to feel, I had a job to do. I needed a focus to observe what the Russians had done and report back. We needed to bear witness to what we were seeing. The earth mounds were mass graves. As I watched the Ukrainian soldiers were working through each pile, pulling out bodies, transferring

them to a waiting open grave, then burying them in individual graves that they were digging nearby. None of the bodies could be identified, but each was buried with a cross bearing the name of one of the missing people from the town. The Ukrainians had been working on the site for six days. In the mass grave I was standing by, they had found 475 bodies. Another grade, they had found 1,100 bodies. Most of them had been burned likely to try and hide the evidence. Many had their hands tied in front or behind it.

A clear sign they had been executed. They were all civilians. All of them. Children, women, elderly. It was a war crime, an atrocity, an act of evil. And from everything I'd seen and heard, this wasn't the only masquerade in Ukraine, and it wasn't a rogue act by an individual commander going behind the backs of his superior officers. What had happened here, the invasion of a town, the six-month occupation that ended when

the civilian women and children were rounded up with their hands bound and brought here to be executed. This was a pattern. This was a strategy. This was a logical final step for an invading force that it targeted civilians from day one. I assured Vadim that I would tell the right people about what we witnessed, but it didn't feel like enough to simply file my report back with intelligence agencies who'd commissioned us in the first place. I wanted to bear witness to the rest of the world,

so I recorded a video and sent it to Fox News who broke the story. Later, while we were driving away, one of the reporters called. I put her on speaker so C-Spray could be part of the interview. When she was almost done, she said she had two final questions for us.

Why are you guys out there helping these people? My answer was equally as simple, because it's the right thing to do. her final question was directed at sea spray his answer will stick with me for the rest of my life is it worth it she asked it doesn't have to be said sea spray not skipping a beat those five words summarize everything about our time in ukraine it doesn't have to be worth it to do the right thing sometimes we just do the right thing simply because it's just that the right thing to do there doesn't always need to be an r o'clock We don't have to calculate what we will get in return if we choose to expend our time, money, energy, or resources. We don't need to worry about who gets the reward or who deserves credit. Forget whether it's safe, forget about whether it's safe, popular, or dangerous. When it comes to helping people in need, the world needs fewer people who are calculating what they're going to get out of it and a whole lot more people who will simply do the right thing.

That's from a guy that says it doesn't have to be who gave up everything, right? When you think about the context of who he is and what he gave up, is it worth it to a guy who gave up his whole career? Yeah, it doesn't have to be. Yeah, these, um, those, those mass graves and everything is just freaking horrific. Yeah, you know, I could see why, you know, our government will want to, eyes on validation. I mean, that's a great way to get, you know, more sympathy and more.

But those, you know, I can say it's a firsthand, you know, first-hand testimony. It was real. And the Ukrainian forces that came in to recapture a Zoom that we were with. In the beginning, we talked about that gunfight that we got into those guys. That was their families. That unit was local to the area. That was their wives. They were children.

They were in that area. And so we were with them. We actually one of the, I don't think I write in a book, but I'll show you the video later. if you want to see, they captured some of them, and we got a video of them jailed and, you know, some of the ones the Russians said they captured. That's not going to be a comfortable prison sentence. No, no, yeah.

Fast forward a little bit. Seaspray took the call telling us the effort to rescue the Marine had hit a dead end after a couple days with no updates. I wasn't surprised that they'd lost comms altogether, but I was troubled by it and sea spray was too. We'd been a long shot, but still, a shot. I doubt the Marine would have any more chances at rescue even if he was still alive. Then we heard the familiar whistle of incoming Russian artillery. Round after round was shaking the

ground. Sea spray and I took cover as each explosion crept closer to our location. The Ukrainians had it under control and I felt calm. At least I did until the moment I phoned Hunter and heard the explosions going on around him too. We're taking indirect fire too, Dad. Don't worry. I'm driving like a bat on a hell. We're good. I'll call you when we're clear. Hunter disconnected before I had the chance to respond. That was a crazy feeling. That made me in that moment kind of questioned that decision, you know, didn't make the right decision, you know.

I was totally fine what was happening with us. Yeah, of course. And then I wasn't fine when I got that call. And well, luckily, you know, Hunter did make it through that. He did. He's still with us. Yeah. And I'm going to fast forward to the epilogue here,

which is actually written by your son, Hunter. because he did survive that indirect fire attack. And he says this. When I was six years old, I had a dream. I didn't know what country I was in, but I knew it was overseas. My six-year-old brain recognized the dusty streets, the men wearing their long and flowing robes,

the women in their black veils. But I wasn't there alone. My dad was with me. And in my dream, I knew that meant everything was going to be okay. We were doing some kind of work that I didn't fully understand, but I did know that wherever we were

and whatever we were doing, we were helping rescue people who need it. I liked being there with my dad working side by side like that. Suddenly there was chaos and we were running, heading toward a bunch of people who needed our help.

Bad men were shooting at us and trying to stop us from rescuing the people. We were in the fight of our lives and had no weapons to defend ourselves, but we still continued to rescue anyone that we could. The dream ended soon after. And the thing is, my dream wasn't a nightmare.

I didn't feel, didn't even feel much fear knowing that those bad guys had the intention of killing me and my dad. All along, I just felt like I was okay. I was where I was meant to be, helping people who couldn't help themselves standing up to evil. That dream never left me. It was in my head when I enlisted the United States Marine Corps, and I thought about it often when I was deployed to Afghanistan, too. but even though there were plenty of times when I could have helped when I could help people as a

Marine it never felt like the fulfillment of my dream I always had this sense that at some point in my future I'd be doing exactly what I dreamed about when I was six helping rescue people with my dad while bad guys tried to stop us I'll close it out with this says when God puts a burden on your heart it's like a seed it can take a long time before you see any signs of life up above the surface and even longer until it starts to bloom. But if you water it with faith, if you put your trust in God, that seed will grow. It might not look how you thought it would or sprout when you want it to. But when he is ready, it'll grow. And eventually it'll produce fruit in the perfect season of life. And when I read that, when he wrote that and sent it to me, like I just got

Teared up and start crying, man. It's like... Yeah, that's wild. That epilogue. And, I mean, you guys got it done. You're able to serve together with your son. Yeah. He's went to Ukraine more times than me, by the way, now.

So I did 10 trips. He's did 13 trips there. And he's doing a lot of the stuff in South America right now. He's, yeah, he's, he really, this is kind of what his heart beats for. You raised him right. Outstanding. So he's on his 13th trip. You're on your 10th trip.

You did 10 trips. So what else you focused on right now? What have got going on? I know one thing you got going on is the resilient podcast. The resilient show. Yeah, the resilient show. Yeah, the resilient show. Yeah, which is your podcast.

That's right. Yeah. You're getting ready to record one with me here in a little while when we're done with this. And what's that all about? What's the resilient show all about? You know, I just, just like you have access to some amazing human beings. And I get to hear their stories. And I just feel like, you know, the world needs to hear more stories like that.

And a lot of my veterans have incredible stories of overcoming. Don't really have a platform to do that. And I so want to create, make sure that they had an opportunity to help share their stories and share stories of resilience and overcoming. And then I also feel like I have access to a lot of people to have a lot of information that could inform the listeners. And the mainstream media seems like they've lost the desire to share true journalistic stories and informed American public.

And, you know, watching guys like you, Sean Ryan. And especially has really shared a lot of information with the public that's helped make people resilient because they're informed. I believe, you know, being resilient is part of being resilient is being informed. And so because of have access to these people, I just wanted to create a platform to do that. And so we're 30, right now, 34 episodes in. I've had incredible guests, Terry Cruz, Sean Ryan, have Marcus Latrello and Dr. Stephen Greer, the UFO guy. Like that's some great guests and just sharing stories that are. I'm interested in that I want to know more about,

so I'm having fun with it. And just sharing incredible stories that people never heard before. I just shared a story with a guy named Aaron Hall. Never, never been on a big podcast before or anything. He lost his total vision, total hearing and IED blast. And they interview him at that.

He had a cochlear implant that barely he could hear it through. You have to wear a microphone to talk to him. And he's just incredible human being runs ultramarathons. Yeah. You know this guy is? Yeah. Yeah. Ultramarathons,

whitewater kayaking. But he makes, he makes, He makes like, he's a chocolatier. Yeah. Like, makes, what's his fudge company called? Oh, do you know? Oh, wait, wait, wait.

What is it? Yeah, it's EOD. EOD. Extraordinary, extraordinary something delights or something. Okay. Yeah, not EOD. Yeah. What an awesome.

Extraordinary delights. I think that's it. Extraord. EOD chocolate or EOD Fudge or something like that. Yeah. All right. So that's awesome. And then, and then you also wrote a new book, like a series of books,

Right, but it's a fiction type scenario. Yeah, I was approached to by Tyndale that asked me if I'd be interested in doing fiction. And I always had interest in it. So it was just right away, I was like, yes, I'd love to. You know, a lot of my career, I couldn't put, I mean, saving disease was like extremely redacted by the Pentagon. So a lot of stuff I can't write about. So I figured I could kind of mimic the character a little bit enough to my career. And it's called Silent Horizons.

It's a program name, the SAP program that he's in. Silent horizons. Echo Charles, you like that? Yeah. I can already tell when Echo's nodding his head vigorously. Yeah, that's right up Echo Charles's alley. He likes some silent horizon activities over there. Yeah, so Foster Quinn is the character.

He's a. Foster Quinn. That's the character. What'd you come up with that? Well, uh, Foster was one of my best buddies. In fact, he got his bracelet on right now. Foster, Foster Harrington, uh, who was killed in, uh, in 2004. And, uh, you know, he served him a wedding.

Was there and all three of my kids were born. We did 10 years together. So he was the first big loss I had. So a lot of the characters in the book are named after Seth Stone as a friend of yours. He's, so a lot of the characters in the book are after KAA guys. But you have a straight up character named Seth Stone.

That's Seth Stone. We just use first names. Oh, okay. But the book is dedicated to, because my with author, that helped me write it. Who's from, Jack Stewart? He was at, he served with him as a, because Jack was a, is a top gun pilot,

top gun instructor. but his ground time he worked with Seth. Okay. And so we had dedicated to two guys each and Seth was one of them. Freaking outstanding. Yeah. So yeah, but the book just really about a force recomb Marine who goes to Dev Group as an AFO, advanced force operator doing cladescent logistics.

And yeah. Gee, interesting story. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, not Afghanistan, Pakistan, Africa, Iran. And he stays on as a contractor there and does some great stuff. But he's really tall and handsome, so. So do you have to get it?

Do you have to get, oh, yeah, that's right. He's six three. Yeah. Do you still have to get it Pentagon reviewed? You know, it's up to the publishers. And the publisher chose not to. And like guys like Jack Carr, they don't do that anymore. You could.

I had, I kind of picked the independent panel to read it and review it. I had some guys that are at, you know, the unit at CAG at Dev Guru, Ground Branch to kind of read it and tell me. I got a guy is. former Intel officer, Marine Corps 06, colonel, and let me know if I'm passing lines with TTPs or means and methods. And so I feel pretty good with it. But one of the things I did the book is even those fictions, I wanted everything to be extremely accurate. It was so important to me. Like I do a chapter, about half the chapters of free fall job. And so I use my experience to write it as a military free fall parachutist. However, I had like a guy at ground branch, a guy

at the unit right now who's free fall jump masters read it and it's just dialed them perfect. Like the dive stuff, the dive equipment, everything's just dialed them perfect. And even if you're if I see who helped you with the dive stuff Sea spray more time more time branch guy Because a lot of the stuff he's using he's using a civilian rebreather's and stuff so yeah Yeah, you stop up in the civilian rebreaters boy Yeah so if he's like if he's like in Iran and I'm like this you're in this street in Iran and there's a coffee shop here that coffee shop's really there So it's I wanted to have that accuracy that's cool

Yeah that's one thing uh you know jack car goes into like level 12 detail on stuff yeah weapon systems and belts and like watches and all this stuff. And it's funny because when we wrote extreme ownership with Laif, Laif was like adding all this details like, bro, no one cares about this stuff. I was like, no one cares what, you know, which rifle this guy's carrying or what scope this guy's using. Like, no one cares. And we literally legitimately like pulled stuff out.

Like we just, it was just too much detail. Then, of course, they're obviously different. But the fact that Jack Carr will tell you like what type of knife a dude has on his E&E kit, you're like, okay. But it's a thing. People love that stuff. People like the detail in it, yeah. Especially in those type of books, right?

Obviously, extreme ownership's a different genre. Yeah, yeah. But it is pretty wild to see that people are so interested in that stuff. Yeah. So it's three book series. So book one comes out May 13th. It's actually for sale now. So people that want to support it can pre-order right now on Amazon.

Silent Horizons. Silent Horizons, yeah. And then every year, every year you want to come out for three, maybe more. But right now we have a contractor for three books. I've already written the first two. And you like them? It's really fun. It's been really fun writing.

And Jack's amazing. Jack, Jack Stewart, the guy right with. He's, you know, he's brilliant. Obviously, he was a top gun adversary instructor.

He's just a really smart guy. And so, and it's difficult writing with you, you know, it's difficult writing sometimes to two people when you're trying to master one voice. But we've, we have a system in place.

And so we'll probably keep working together for a while. Yeah. I mean, Leif and I actually didn't really do that because I wrote chapters and he wrote chapters and they're they're set like they say like who wrote it okay although you know when we write like a forward or something like that you know if we do it there's some of the parts of the books that we've written together is a little bit of that you know like I said like the

forward or something so yeah yeah you get you get a little system going so yeah the resilient show writing books speaking I'm still speaking a lot and um definitely uh you know very involved with this international stuff making sure that our teams are in place just to save our allies uh no uh fourth option is oh so Tim and Sarah and I'm they still running save a several allies and you know for not any bad reasons we just we just did we're doing different new it was different focuses yeah and so doing the fourth option is what we call it so also and then Mighty Oaks mighty Oaks of course so is the fourth option now like a charity it is it is a nonprofit okay we're really like I mean I could say it

here it's not like it's but we don't like publicize it or advertise it got that out soliciting support for it. It's just a thing. It's a thing running in the background, saving people's lives. Yeah, but it's a 5.1c3. You know, people can donate it too, but we just,

we don't have to run like a charitable campaign for it because when, you know, when we need something, people step up in a bigger significant. And save our lives, or sorry, Mighty Oaks is still going strong. Mighty Oaks is still going strong. Save our allies is too.

I mean, Tim and Sarah are still running that. Nick Pommasano, they're still running, they're still doing great. They just did some great stuff. out North Carolina and Florida. Oh yeah. They were freaking awesome.

Yeah. And I was talking to Tim right before I got here. He's said to say hi, by the way. Awesome. But yeah, there's a lot of great heroes of humanity, Samaritan's Purrists. So many great organizations out there doing great things. Fourth option, we specifically are focused internationally on, you know, rescuing Americans or people that are in war zones that the government either can't or won't get.

And so it's very specific kind of niche area. And then Mighty Oaks, how many people are you? running through Mighty Oaks a year? Well, Mighty Oaks on the resiliency side that's speaking on bases, which is primarily me doing that. I've spoken about half a million troops now on bases. A lot of them right here next door at San Diego, MCRD, speaking at Burinko Boobo Camp. So I speak to the troops on resiliency, you know, the four pillars of resiliency, mind, body, spirit, social, speak at spiritual resiliency conferences, suicide prevention conferences.

The recovery program at our ranches, we're doing about $7 to $8 million a year in programming there. We've had 6,000 graduates, but we're doing about $1,000 per year. Now, we pay for everything. For active duty, service members, veterans, first responders, spouses, even pay for their travel. And so that is an effort that people want to support financially get behind. Donate to you, Mighty Oaks definitely needs support because of demand on it's so huge. And if you by listening, like you said earlier, it needs help. No strings attached.

We pay for everything, include travel, go on the website, fill out application, someone to get back to you right away. You don't have to be a train wreck to go, by the way. if you need some life course corrections, get on it early. Yeah. And it's just amazing program. We've got great people to work there. Yeah.

I've had a most incredible team. Yeah. And like I said, I mean, I've literally called you and sent you text. And I've sent Lutex too. I've grouped text you guys and stuff. But, you know,

because sometimes people, by the time they're talking to me, they're pretty hurting. And they really need some help. And you guys have been freaking amazing. So I really appreciate what you guys have done there. Yes. And it's a mighty oaks program.

dot org. Myde-Oaks programs with an s.org. Oh, programs. Yeah. And then we also do it like, I'm in DC a lot, testifying before Congress, doing advocacy work. We get some great team guys in Congress. Derek Van Orden, Morgan LaTrell. I think there's more coming too. Yeah. I mean, Corey Mills is, is there, Eli Crane. Eli, yeah. Yes, all those guys, like, I've been working with those guys a lot on policy and legislation for veterans care. And one of the things that I'm a big advocate for is alternative treatments, including faith-based care, that currently right now, the current administration only allows, the VA can only do programs that are approved by the FDA, which is crazy. And so I've just got back from Congress testifying on that.

So, Mighty Oaks, because the successes we have in independent doctoral studies, we've had on the success of faith-based programs and give us a voice and credibility to testify before Congress. So Mighty Oaks is a strong voice in that. I'll probably serve under this administration again as a, like as a chairman of a coalition, which is not a huge task, but it's kind of. leading some efforts there. Once again, you're stepping up and serving. Yeah, we've got to do, man.

Everybody has to contribute something right now with much as they can. And the last thing we do at Mighty Oaks is the international stuff, right? Mighty Oaks really participates in a lot of international stuff. And Hunter and his team there do a great job. Aziz is on a team there now. Oh, really? Yeah. That's right.

It's frigid awesome. And like I said, people can find Mighty Oaks programs.org. Save Our Allies is just save our allies.org. See our allies. That org. People can find you if they want you to come talk. Chad Robo Show It's R-O-B-I-C-H-A-U-X.com.

That kind of links to all your different stuff. You're on Facebook at Chad Robo Show On Twitter, Chad Robo, on Instagram, Chad Robo official underscore official. Instagram's our most active. Okay. And then you've got your podcast, which is out now, which is also, it's got a YouTube place for it as well.

Yeah, please subscribe to the podcast. We have incredible guests and conversation. And like, we got you coming up. Yeah, yeah, right on, right on. We'll get that done. Our New Year's episode. Echo, anything we missed? No, how old is any questions?

Hunter's 28. He has, he has two daughters and a son in the way. Oh, dude. I have five, I have three adult kids, five grandchildren, and we just adopted our new baby girl last year. So we started all over again. So I was empty-dustin, like six years. years and our niece got pregnant and we stepped in and so a brandy baby girl.

She's a, we've had her since she was, since she was infant and now she's, she's, she's 22 months. Right. Oh man. Wait, how old are you? I'm 49. Yeah, so same generation. Yeah, yeah.

I like the, she's same age as my granddaughters. Yeah. Legit. I like the name, uh, fourth option by the way. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of like the third measure. Third measure.

A little. Echo's got a little side project called third measure, which is, you know, what is it? Faction. What is it? Faction. See, it's a long story. But it's basically a repository of all my CGI projects that involve robots and stuff. So it's unrelated to your thing.

But I like the name. You see what I'm saying. Well, I'd say the name is exactly what it is. It's the fourth option. It's the fourth option. Yeah. When I was a young teen guy, there was a guy that was like a awesome seal. and no one wore seal anything back then.

And actually in the seal teams, like people don't, you don't wear seal team stuff if you're in the seal teams. But this guy was just legend, legend guy, and he had a freaking hat. He had a hat with a trident on it.

And then underneath the trident, just said, silent option. And I was always like, and I was a new guy too. I was a new guy, so I was just like, yo,

that's where it's at. That one day hat, yeah. And it was a bull shirt's wearing. everybody. Oh yeah, back in the day. Bull shirts.

It closed down. It closed down. All our class shirts for BRC and buds. Yeah. Buds were there. I used to have a T-shirt for your class. I don't think they, they don't do it anymore.

They don't have class T-shirts anymore. There was a store in Coronado that you'd go and get T-shirts made for your class. And I don't think I even had one. I know our class had one because it had like a really dumb saying on it. And I can't remember what it was. Road hard. It was so stupid. It was like one of those things where they made like the class,

voted on our t-shirt and it was dumb and I was like you know it's just when you get done with hell week so I didn't have like any kind of voice or anything I was like well that sounds dumb to me and some other people thought it was cool when we will we'll be able to find it one of my friends will probably text me and be like this was the saying what was it was freaking dumb yeah um I wanted to be he who suffers remembers because one of the instructors like we were suffering at some point You guys are going to remember this? And I was like, yeah, yeah. But it was like, it rhymed.

It rhymed. It was like, once we were crushed and now we're super tough or something like that. I was like, yo, I'm going to wear this thing. Jackassery is this. But that's pretty normal. I think, right? Well, we had that for football too where we'd have like a shirt. If you went and we finish camp.

And then they give it. And I remember one of ours was, I survived camp Get you better Get you better That was really what it was And everyone was laughing My son went to this camp

The J-Rob intensive wrestling camp And if you They have a whole like grading system And it's really strict It's like boot camp The guy was a Vietnam Ranger J-Rob But they were doing it You'd try and get this shirt

That just said I did it And they had a video And everyone was just freaking hyping up And they're like I did it I did it and you get this teeth That's all You're just doing it for this I did it.

My son had like a real bad ankle injury and you have to do a 12 mile run to get the shirt. Like you have to do all the things. Then the last thing you have to do is a 12 mile run. I think it was a sophomore in high school or in between a sophomore and junior year. And I talked to him on the phone. I'm like, hey dude, you go get the run tomorrow. Like your ankles jacked up.

You know, you can barely walk. What are you going to do? He's like, I'm going to tape it up so it doesn't even move and I'm going to get that shirt. I guess that's how we're rolling. Yeah. Awesome. What else?

Did we miss anything that's going on right now? now, Chad? No, man. I just appreciate being here, man. You know, you get to see you. I'm super proud of all the things you're doing. Get a voice. Get awesome voice right now. Appreciate it, man. We're going to go do jiu-jitsu after this. We're going to do a little open mat activity at Atos. Andre Galvow opened up the school. When you're doing jiu-jitsu, by the way, you need fuel. It's true. I recommend Jocco-Fuel. That's what I recommend. So we got Jocco-Fuel. We got protein we got hydrate we got go drinks we got joint warfare we got super krill we got greens got creatine you put grating in your greens it's a good way to be jacked and healthy i just stole echoes

milk uh banana milk it was so good it's freaking tasty right you know people going a little catabolic in here um check out joccofield dot com if you need any of this stuff you need to be stronger faster smarter, better. Also, you can get at Wawa, vitamin shop, GnC, military commissaries around the world, around the world, by the way. I know people that are overseas right now,

they're like, yo, we're getting it done. Hanford, dashed towards Maryland, Wake Fern, Choprite, H.E.B. down in Texas. That's from my neck of woods. That's where, dude, HEB is active in Texas. H&B is awesome.

You got to get in Buckees. Yeah, Buckys is an interesting, it's an interesting dynamic. We've been talking to Buckees. We'll see. We'll see where it lands. It's really hard in that, in that environment with Buckees. There's so much competition.

And the people that we're going against are, you know, billion dollar companies. Right. And so they will literally come in and just buy your space from a shelf. Just to keep you. Just to keep you at pay. So it's all good, though. Well, we're winning. I'll just pack my malk on the road.

There you go. I stopped at Buckees other day. I was going on a hunt for Smith of Weston and I packed it. I mean, I stopped at Buckees. I look for. Yeah, it's unfortunate, man. I apologize for that. Next time stop at H.E.B.

Yeah. That's what we'll do down in Tehaws. Myers up in the Midwest. Wegman's, Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness. Shields. Shields, too. Shields is a big, freaking awesome store. And small gyms everywhere.

You know, so Jiu-Jitsu schools, CrossFit gyms, powerlifting gyms, wherever you're at. If you're in one of those schools or you want, you're in one of those gyms, email J.F.S. at joccofield.com. And we can hook you. up a little wholesale activity. You got your gym

down in Houston still? Yeah, Carlson Gracie Southern headquarters. In fact, in fact, I don't even know if I can announce it, but I will. Junior might get upset, but he's moving from Chicago to us, so he's taking over our school. We've got a guy named Juan Lopez, who's a world champion, like produces tons of world champions out of Rio. He's

learning English, but it's jihitsu. You know what he's talking about. He's jihadtsouss incredible. So Juan Lopez is there. Kind of like 20 black boats under me that are out there but we're gonna have junior at a school full time amazing yeah so check that out also if you if you're doing jiu jitsu you need a ghee then you need a american-made you don't buy a communist gee a communist gee don't do that buy an american-made geek go to origin usa.com get american-made gie and while you're there get american-made jeans

American-made boots American-made hunting gear joggers sure I was just out at Walmart the 434 tour and I had to borrow a pair of joggers from Joe Mouse because it was a little kind of cool. Yeah, a little chili woo, as they like to say. And luckily, you know what he had? American main joggers from the origin USA. So look, don't buy stuff that supports slavery.

You support slavery, ECHOTR? No, I don't. Chad, do you support slavery? I don't think anyone over here supporting slavery. We stand against it. Next level, Echo, you stand against it? We stand against slavery. And yet people all over this country stand against slavery,

and yet those walk down and buy. a pair of jeans literally made by slaves literally made by slaves so don't do that go to origin USA.com get American made freedom pants you see what I'm saying you shouldn't get nothing that's what we're doing yeah it's true all right what else don't forget about Jockel store we're representing on the path on our apparel what we wear or whatever I'm saying discipline equals freedom's true by the way chat rober show yes more discipline comes from more freedom also or anyway we got shirts hats hoodies on

on there also we have what we call the shirt locker the subscription scenario new design every month on a shirt it's good people seem to like it a little bit outside the boxes first designs and ideas but again people seem to like it check that out it's all that joccal store dot combe get there also we got some you need steak you like steak I love steak yeah I'm carnivore so oh oh you are you straight up carnivore straight up corner well I say that I'm cornivore mok is cone of yeah I'm carnivore and berries so carnivore and berries yeah some kind of Cornagore-ish.

Yeah, yeah. It's like carniberry. So when you're eating steak, I recommend you check out Colorado Craftbeef.com or primalbeef.com. We got awesome people with awesome steak that can deliver it to your door. Colorado craftbeef.com, primalbeef.com. Get the good stuff. Also, subscribe to the podcast. Also, check out jockel underground.com.

Also, the YouTube channel. Also, Flipsidecanvus.com. Dakota Meyer making cool stuff to. Hang on your wall. We got books. Look, Chad has got four books. A Mission Without Borders. We talked about it today, saving a D's.

We talked about it last time. Fight for us. He's also got a book called An Unfair Advantage. Check all those books out. They're all available, wherever you buy books. And then I've written a bunch of books too. You've heard too much about at this juncture. You're pretty much ready to just stop.

You've got the warrior kid books. Get a little kid, like a neighbor across the street. Maybe it's, you know, a nephew that you got. I hear more about your kids books than I do even about extreme ownership now. Yeah. Everywhere I go, maybe it's a circle them in, like a, you know, a lot of, you know, kind of very community or to speak at churches and stuff. Everyone raves about your kids.

There's a movie coming. I know. Yeah. And the movie's done filming at this juncture. Oh, wow. Yep. Yep. And it's going to be a very powerful film.

It's really, really, like, just, it's going to be awesome. It's so due. It's so due for that kind of message. Yeah. The world's waiting for. it right now echo charles has been up there he's in it by the way got a real significant i mean a pivotal pivotal a lot of people say that's the that's kind of the the whole scene like the whole epic scene echo charles just keeping it with his excellence and legitimacy i'm doing the best they can

that's great so he was in the background of a scene and there's an mma going on and um he's in the back in a cage with his gie on doing jiu-jitsu in the background and as he's filming the director guy named mcg terminator salvation yeah who directed terminator salvation and charlie's angels and we are marshal just a bunch of really great movies the oc great guy and in the middle of this while we're filming this scene like there's a bunch of stuff going on he goes hey everyone hold on And he goes, hey, you too. And he didn't really know who Echo Charles was yet. He thought it was just, you know, thought he was just another extra.

He goes, hey, you two in the cage. You're doing great up there, providing us with excellence and legitimacy for this scene. And I heard that. Hey, you can see Echo, he just puffed out. I was like, oh, day, okay. Excellence and legitimacy has arrived. Completely correct. He was completely correct.

Yeah, but they're super stoked. Obviously, Chris Pratt. He's playing Uncle Jake and all that. So looking forward to that. Anyways, get those books for your neighbor, for your nephew, for whoever, your niece, hook them up. Eschlonfront, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Go to eschlonfront.com for details.

Next muster is going to be in Dallas, or sorry, in San Diego. The Dallas one's done. It's sold out. We got San Diego coming up February, 23rd and 25th. We got San Antonio, April 29th through May 1st. Just if you want to go to these things, go and register because everything sells out. And then these things sell out to where. the fire marshal is like no one else can come in it's not like hey jocco last minute and i'm like

oh yeah cool come on down it's not like that it's like hey last minute jocco and i'm like no you can't come so don't do that to yourself um don't make me do that to you if you want to come to this stuff at esplanfront go to islamfront.com and come and get it and extreme ownership academy we got a way to learn this information that we put out through an online platform go to extreme ownership.com you can learn these lessons you can apply to them to every part of your life family, everything that you're doing, we can help you. So, extreme ownership.com, go and check that out. Also, if you want to help out service members, active and retired,

you want to help their families, you want to help Goldstar families. Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an amazing charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's mighty warriors.org. Also, Micah Fink's got Heroes and Horses.org. And then Jimmy May's organization, beyond the brotherhood.org. And then, of course, we talked about today,

Mighty Oaks Programs.org. Chad's great organization, as I said, they have personally helped my friends and they will help thousands and thousands of more. So if you want to help them, go to Mighty Oaks Programs.org. And then if you want to connect with Chad, Chad Robeshow, and that's R-O-B-I-C-H-A-U-X.com.

He's on Facebook. He's on Twitter and he's on the gram, the Instagram, YouTube, and the podcast is called The Resilient Show. For us, I'm at jaco.com. I'm on social media too. And I'm at Jocko Willink. Echoes at Echo Charles. Just watch out because there's an algorithm on there. And it'll destroy your life if you're not careful.

Echo, anything else? You got any other questions? You got any questions for today? No, that was it. Prima. Also, I like the last name Robes Show. Oh, okay. He's getting credit just for his last name.

Yeah, just the whole aesthetic is really good. It's like, you know what? It's different. Because there's other words that end with the X, right? Like that, right? And it's like, you know, what other word has like X? It's like, it's like a sophisticated. I don't know, it's a feel kind of thing.

But anyway, I've always liked that. I meant to tell you never got an opportunity. But, you know, we are. It's a strong Louisiana name. Yes, sir. Good to see you again. Thanks, man. Yeah, great to see you.

Right on. Chad. Anything else? Any closing thoughts for today? No, man. I'm just, like I said, super thankful to be on. And, you know, this book to me is, I appreciate you kind of break it down like that. This book to me is like, there's a lot of special things got to be a part of. And saving his ease in this book is, you know, a way for me to share some of the things that I got to be a part of.

It's awesome. Especially with this one, so special with me and my son. So if people want to father, son book, that's a good one. In the Father's Day coming up? Yeah, it is. Well, no, not really. It's in June. Oh, yeah.

Swinging to miss on that one, Chad, Robes Show. You know, we'll work through. Every day's Father's Day. How about that? Yeah, I like that. Yes. Every day's Father's Day, Chad. Christmas is coming up there. There you go.

Awesome stuff. Thanks again for joining us, man. Thanks for sharing your lessons learned. Thanks for your service in the Marine Corps and special operations. And thanks to what you're doing today with Mighty Oaks and everything that you do overseas now with fourth option. It's just outstanding. And thanks for raising some warriors yourself, man. Really appreciate it.

And thanks to all our military personnel out there around the world right now. that step into the fray every day to protect our freedom and protect our way of life and to protect innocent people around the world. Thank you for what you do. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service. Appreciate the hospitality this past weekend. Much appreciated as well as all of our other first responders

who step into the fray to protect us here at home. And everyone else out there, I think an important message from, Chad's book is that there's not always an immediate positive short-term return on investment for doing the right thing you you can't count on reward or praise or even reciprocation right you can't even count on reciprocation if you do the right thing it doesn't necessarily mean someone's going to do the right thing back to you but you will know you will know that you stepped up and you did the right things the right reasons and if you do that in the

end you will win and that's all we've got for tonight until next time this is chad and echo and jocco out