Jocko Podcast - 503: Norm "Hoot" Hooten. Blackhawk Down & a Legendary Career in Army Special Operations

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

>Join Jocko Underground< Norm Hooten was a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier (a Green Beret) who became well known because of his role in the Battle of Mogadishu in October 1993, the operation later depicted in the book and film Black Hawk Down.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko Podcast number 503 with Kerry Helton and me Jocka Willink. Good evening, Kerry. Good evening. So October 3rd, 1993, I would say the most definitive battle for the United States of America of that decade, Mogadishu, Somalia. And looking back from this vantage point now, that battle seemed to, for lack of a better word, redirect special operations, the way we, conduct business, the way we train, the way we fight. It led us to great success in the global war on terror. I've had two soldiers from that battle on the podcast, Mike Durant, who's a helo pilot from TF160 Nightstalkers, and his aircraft was shot down. He was captured. He was eventually

recovered. He came and shared his story. And also Jim Lechner, who's a ranger officer, who was pretty badly wounded. And I eventually served with him in the Battle of Ramadi. I guess 20 something years later. And today we have another soldier who served in special operations and played a pivotal role in that battle. His name is Norm Houtt, Hootin. And this is an individual who joined the Army out of high school. It may have been a very good decision.

We were just talking about it may have been a very good decision for him. Became a special forces soldier eventually spent over a decade at the Army's special operations Tier 1 unit. And it's an honor to have him with us here tonight to share his experiences and lessons learned. Norm, thanks for joining us, man. Hey, it's an honor to be here with both you guys. I'm a huge fan. So thanks for having me here.

Well, I appreciate it. Yeah, and we just talked for, I think, over an hour just before we even heard of course. Yeah, I will do that. So just give me the hook if I go off on a tangent. No, no, that's awesome. It's just, it's so cool to hear your perspective. and what you lived through and the things that you saw. You know, I was in the Navy in the 90s,

so, you know, that we have some overlapping time and service. And as I told Mike Durant, you know, when that was going on in Somalia, I was at Sail Team 1. And I'm watching as that stuff's going down. And you're just, there's nothing you can do. You know, you're sitting back here and there's nothing you can do. But watching it unfold was crazy.

And then to sit here with you guys that lived through that is, It's kind of a very strange thing to have happened that I literally was watching you guys on the news as a young seal. And now here we are sitting here getting a solid debrief on all that, which we'll get to. But before we get there, let's just let's talk about your background. What was growing up like for you? Yeah, so I grew up Texas kid, West Texas. So I'm born in Dallas, but very shortly after, you know, a couple years, I moved to a little town called Brackaville, Texas, in Kenny County, about 15 miles from the Rio Grande River.

My dad took a job on the Anacacho Ranch, which is a big historic ranch down there in that area. And so I spent my first couple years down there on that ranch, kind of free-ranging, you know. But my basic rules, really, before I was in school, was, you know, be back before it gets dark and don't play with rattlesnakes. You know, so by the time I was five or six years old, I was on Super Bowl. with a 22 pump rifle running around shooting cans and snakes and and um and uh just no range safety officer no no range safety officer i was telling somebody when i was in the in uh um in special forces i was like man the army spends weeks training to do stuff i'd do off the cuff when i was 70 years old you know um but uh um but uh but uh was very blessed to to grow up out there like that

And then, you know, somebody went away, whipped me up and said, hey, we're going into town. You're going to school. And so it was horrible. I mean, I remember my mom took me in. I wouldn't go into the school. And so she brought me back home. And my dad was like, what the hell is the problem? And she said, he won't go.

My dad took me back in. So what are you, like eight years old or seven years old or something like that? Yeah, seven years old in first grade. And you just refused entry. I wouldn't go in, man. You know, I mean, because I didn't know what it was, and I was so used to doing whatever I wanted to do, which caused me problems for the rest of my life, by the way,

and that I just didn't want to be in there, you know, looking at a chalkboard all day. It was brutal. And then my dad finally took me out, and he drugged me down the hallway, pushed me in through the door of the school, and I can still remember my cowboy boots sliding on the floor as he pushed me down the hallway.

and then he pushed me into the classroom, and I'll never forget the teacher's name was Ms. Veltman. In a town we grew up in, it was kind of like a little house on a prairie kind of school, you know. And I saw, as he pushed me through the door, I looked, and there was an open window. One of those things you roll up, and I went across the classroom, out the window, and down through the playground and into the woods. And, man, he was furious. But anyway, he took me back into school, and she said,

all you got to do is sit here, and there was a big wooden airplane in the corner and play with that airplane. And for the first couple days, that's all I did. pushing airplane around in the corner. And then, you know, I had to adapt to it, but I remember asking her, I said, how long did I have to do this? And she says, well, what do you mean? I said, how long did I have to go to school?

And she goes, well, you've got to go through elementary school, middle school, and then high school, and then you're done. And I said, how long is that? She was 12 years. For a seven-year-old kid, that's two life sentences, right? So I was like, oh, my God. And I never fit. I never fit.

It was just every day I spent in school. was absolutely horrible for me. And especially, I think, if I hadn't started out doing whatever the hell I wanted to do, I might have been able to adapt a little better. But when you have no rules and all of a sudden now you did nothing but rules, it was a difficult transition.

But I was glad when it was over. And I made it all the way through, graduated high school. First guy on that side of the family would do that, by the way. So obviously it wasn't just my problem. A lot of bad problems with it. But come from a long line of people trying to stay out of school. Long lot of people that, you know, didn't like a structure.

But my dad was a ranch worker. And, you know, for a time, he worked on the ranch. And then he took a job as a state tick rider. So he rode the border on horseback looking for livestock that didn't belong there. So livestock to cross the river. And I used to go riding the river with him when I was a little kid. and, you know, and enjoyed that part of living out there in Kenny County. But he also had to make a little money on the side,

and one of the things his family did was make bootleg whiskey, so along with a lot of other things. And so grew up around that environment. He actually brought that in from my grandmother's side of the family who came in, you know, back in the 1840s from Texas. Just straight up old school bootleggers? Yeah, they would make it. And, you know, they weren't, they weren't.

popcorn sutton or anything like that. They didn't make huge amounts of it, but they made enough to, you know, put gas in the truck and enough for friends and family to have a little bit of moonshine laying around the house when they want it, which caused me a little issue later on in life. But, yeah, he was in and out of jail, man, that's, you know, if you want to talk about my childhood, that's what I remember most about it. What was he getting rolled up for? Everything from bootleg whiskey to,

bar room brawling to homicide. He went to jail for a homicide when I was about 10 and I didn't see him for a few years there. He never was never convicted of a felony. He beat it but we just couldn't bond him out. So he was in, and I'm doing us off, you know, memory best I can as a kid, but he was in Meridian, Mississippi and something to do related with probably bootleg whiskey and they He killed two guys in a parking lot. And I remember when I was a little kid, the sheriff came to the house and told my mother, and I remember her dropping down to her knees and crying

because, you know, what do you do? But that was kind of a story of his life. I mean, if it wasn't that, he was down in Laredo, Texas, getting in a knife fight or something I can remember early on, you know, seeing that violence in that side of the family. And the violence, the violence. doesn't scare me because I got used to seeing it, but the consequences do, because I know

what it did to my family, my sisters and me. But that's just the way to handle things. I remember, you know, when I was in first grade, again, hate in school, I can remember the first time I got my ass kicked in school. You know, I was a first grader and got in a fight with a kid named Jesse Cannon, and he was a big, tough kid, and got punched in those. That's the first time I ever got, I think, knocked out. I definitely got knocked down, and all I saw the stars, and the nose was bleeding, mouth was bleeding, and I went home crying, you know. And my mom met me at the front door, she said, oh, my God, what happened?

What happened? You know, and my dad was in the bathroom sitting on the toilet. And he said, shut up and get your ass in here. And he said, what's going on? And I said, Jesse punched me in the nose. And he goes, whose fault is that? I said, it's Jesse's fault. And he goes, no, no.

He goes, that's your fault. move your nose next time. Right? So you're accountable for it, right? So, and then he gave me a spanking for crying. And the next day, he had a ball bat in the back of his truck. It was sawed in half. And I had a lantern on it.

And he said, take this school we today and take care of business. And I was like, six-year-old, seven-year-old kid. I was like, oh, this is so serious. So I went to school, I didn't do it. And I came back home. And he goes, did I do what I told you to do? And I said, no, sir. He goes, why?

And I was like, I don't want to hurt him. And he said, then you've got no business fighting. He goes, don't come home crying about it again. And that was my first lesson of that, you know. But, you know, I saw a lot of it growing up with him and his buddies and his cousins and stuff like that. I can remember being in a place called Keiz. And my friends down in Brackerville, Texas, if you've been there long enough, you know what Kaiz is. It was the local honky ton.

And owned by a. buddy of his named Johnny Fritter, whose dad's name had been Kajs Fritter, you know, and notorious little town honky ton. And I think we were down there from a birthday or something, and a bunch of guys came in from outside of town, and that's always a bad, bad combination. And I can remember it started getting a little heated, and my dad grabbed me, pushed me up against the jukebox and said, stay here, don't move. And then knives and guns came out. And, and, and within a period of 30 seconds. There were dudes laying all over that place, shot and stabbed and everything else.

And seeing that in an early age, you know, and really the sad part of that is you get used to seeing it after a while. But it taught me a couple of things, you know. One is I never feared the actual act of the violence. But I saw what it did to us as a family, and that really scared me. You know, I, so as I grew up, I like to think I had a little more sense, you know, because I would, there was times where I would put in that situation, I would go, hey, there's got to be another way out of this, because I know what's going to happen, right? And I know what happened to me as a kid and my sisters as a kid, and I don't want that to happen to my kids, you know. So it's always best to try to move out of that thing diplomatically if you can.

you exhaust every means you know but and then if you if you can't then you have to really do something really really quick but the thing that stood out to me was that it was never there was always some sort of weapon involved in it always on the street always some sort of object involved in it we talked a little bit about how important hand-to-hand and our compatives is to us you know we both have some common roots in it but um but i learned a lot of lessons watching that early on so but i grew up there and so what was your plan you know you're growing up in this kind of chaotic violence what what was your plan did you have a plan did you like you know you're looking for for a path to follow you see what your dad's doing there's a lot of kids that just followed their dad's path your dad's out there getting in

trouble causing chaos but you looked at that path and said uh yeah I don't know if that's for me. Yeah. Well, how to work. I didn't have a plan. I was really surviving day to day. You know, we didn't have a lot of money. We were, you know, by most standards, impoverished kids.

You know, we didn't have a lot of money. Of course, especially when your dad's, you know, in jail for a couple years, and he's not there. And my mom was a single mom at the time, you know, basically. And you think, well, she knows everything. And I look back on it now. She had me when she was 18 years old. and so she was in her late 20s, mid to late 20s, and you think she knows everything,

but I look back on it now, I've got a daughter that's 22, and I'm thinking, man, you know, that was my mom, you know, but, and my dad was young, he was 17 when I was born, so again, you think they got all the answers when you're a kid, but you look back now as a 65-year-old man, and you realize, man, they were just, they had a lot of responsibility on them.

But I had no plan. You know, I worked odd jobs out there in Kenny County, He worked on the ranches and drove delivery trucks, did whatever I could. We used to call it dove picking. We'd go out and hunters would come in from all over the world to hunt white-wing dove out there, and me and my buddies would go out and clean the duck, get the dove. We were like human retrievers, really. And you wouldn't believe how many times I was being shot being a bird boy.

But anything you could have made money. you know, with no, no trajectory to anything different. Did you have any military in the family, any grandparents or anything that you knew about? Yeah, my grandfather was in the Army in the South Pacific in World War II. So he was in Guam, Philippines, and the Guinea, regular soldier, you know, did his thing. He never talked about it. But he never got out of high school. came back to Texas and after the war and had a family and went from there.

My dad was in the Navy. He was in the Navy probably before the Korean War. So between World War II and Korea War, so never really saw any action. But I actually think he was out here in San Diego. But as a sailor, I don't know what he did. But was the military on your radar at all for a career? You know, I grew up like every kid, I think, every young man at the time, every young boy, you watched the movies and you kind of romanticize it. I remember watching the Green Beret when I was a kid thinking how cool that was. But I watched all the old, at that time, you know, 60s. So I'm born in 1960. So when I was really at the age where you're interacting with other people outside your family, you know, seven, eight years old.

small town America I'd go down on the barbershop and you had guys from World War II, Korea and Vietnam was kicking off at the time pretty good so a lot of the kids in high school you know high school football heroes and stuff like that

were going off to fight in Vietnam and I remember a couple times these kids would go off to fight and they would come back and they would bring it back and they used to have a funeral procession down the street and a lot of times they'd put it on a buggy and a horse and they'd pull it down the street

because it's what, you know, local West Texas town. But I remember that being very impactful. I remember how it affected the community. So growing up in small community America back then, you know, there was a lot of respect for the military. And at the same time, often the cities, I guess, you know, because we didn't really have TV or anything,

but they had the anti-war movement that was starting to pick up steam. But I was never really exposed to any of that. You know, so I had a very positive opinion of the military. I used to sit in a barbershop and listen to these guys talk, you know, guys missing legs and stuff and talk about, you know, being in third army in Germany or being in Guadalcanal and stuff like that. And, and I just loved it. And I'd sit down there. And they

were, they were just my heroes. And at the time, I'm like, these dudes are really, really old. But if I look back on it, they're probably in their 40s, you know. And, and, but that was a cool place to grow up in a cool, cool way to grow up. I think, I always look back and I think, you know, I've had bad and good in my life like everybody else. But one of the most fortunate things, I count my blessings for being raised in Brackaville, Texas. I mean, it was just a cool place. I loved it. And, you know, a lot of the guys that would come in there to get your, you know, it was a garrison town.

So you had Fort Clark, which was built for the Indian Wars down there when they were fighting to Comanchee. And then the Mexican-American War. Beautiful little post right on the border. And so I'd have kids that I went to school with that were descendants of the original soldiers that would serve there back in like the Indian Wars. but they just never left when they got out of the army and just built the house next to the basin. And some of them were the descendants of Buffalo soldiers and Seminole Indian Scouts.

It's a really cool little town. So if anybody ever gets a chance to go down and check it out, and most people would go to Brackaboo are lost. They find their way there because they're lost. But yeah, it was a cool place. But I had no plan. And I would just live in, and I looked around at what people did.

And, you know, nobody in my family had ever been to college. college. Nobody I knew in the town had ever been to college because I'm sure there were kids that went to college, but they never came back to Brackettville, Texas. But people there were salt to the earth. So you graduate high school? At what point do you decide to go in the Army? So I left Brackettville when I was 14. And my dad was in jail at the time. And my mom was trying to make it work there in Brackable, Texas, and we were starving to death, to be honest with them. My uncles came down, and they picked up my mom, my two sisters and me.

One of my sisters went and lived with one family member. One went and lived with another family member. I went and lived with my grandfather, who was a preacher in Oklahoma City. So when I was 14 years old, I moved to Oklahoma City and live with my grandfather. And so I didn't see my dad for many, many years, probably five years there. And went down to Texas, went to high school, last year of school in, near the Houston area. Then I took a job driving a lumber delivery truck. And two trucks, actually.

I drove a Tupper delivery truck and a lumber delivery truck. And I take the Tupper delivery truck any day a week. One, because it's a lot lighter to lift. two because I was 18 years old, long blonde hair, green-eyed kid, and all the people I delivered to were like 30-year-old tough wear a female salesman. So, so, but that's another podcast all to itself. But, but, but, um, but, um, but, um, but, uh, I, um, had no idea what I was, uh, had no idea what I was doing. And he, and he, he had, uh, kind of straightened his life out. And he said, I hadn't seen you in a while.

I'm at the Houston Livestock and Rodeo show. Why don't you come down and let's go get lunch? And I remember going down there to get lunch with him. He took me to a place called Angeles Fisherman's Dwarf right there near Houston. And when we got the bill, it bounced. He couldn't pay to pay the bill. So I said, that's all right, I got it. So his credit card didn't work.

But that should have been a... Shouldn't be a clue, yeah, shouldn't be a clue. But he said, come down to bracket and spend some time with me. He said he was still down in Kenny County. And so I went down there and I knew he made whiskey and, you know, all those other stuff. Dog fighting, chicken fighting, man fighting, any kind of, you know, any kind of fighting was his thing. But so I went down there and spent a couple weeks with him down there and really good to reconnect with him. I don't judge my dad.

He was a product of where he grew up, you know. And I had to go back to work. I was like, I'm running out of money. I've got to go back and, you know, get back in a Tupper work drug. But he said, hey, if you're going up that way, can you carry some whiskey up to, you know, some buddies in Houston? And then a buddy of mine named Floyd Boudreau over in Louisiana. I was like, sure.

I'm glad to do it You know And you know When you're that age First of all An adult Especially your dad I should do something

You don't really think about it You just Yeah I'm going that way Why not? And his name was Norman Hootin So was mine

And so I went and Saw a guy named Bobby Hall And Houston Gave him some whiskey Then I was headed to Louisiana And got stopped On traffic Traffic stopped

Back then we didn't have GPS And so I got I got lost And up going down a wrongway street in East Texas. I pulled over, get something to drink,

and got stopped. And a nice, nice guy pulled me over, and soon as I pulled my license out. He said, you're related to Norman Hinton down in Kenny County? I said, yes, sir, I am. And he said, well, some back of pickup truck.

And so, and one thing led to another, and there I was. I was, you know, standing in front of a magistrate, and they was like, you seem like a really, really good kid, you know. I was. I was, you know, just a hardworking, honest West Texas kid, you know, and very respectful of law enforcement.

It had a genuine respect for people in law enforcement. And he said, what's your long-term plan? It's kind of like what you just asked me. And I didn't even know what that was. You know, I was like, I don't know. You mean for Friday night? Right. Right. And so... I'm going to be out serving some Tupperware ladies.

Yeah, right. But I didn't really know how to answer us. I don't really know. And I had actually a couple buddies of mine when we graduated in high school, had joined the military. A couple of them went to the Marine Corps. I had one of them that went to the Navy and was a rescue swimmer. I take in the Navy. Another one that ended up being a Navy diver. And we were all talking about it together, you know. But I was kind of the last one sitting on the fence.

You know, I'd gone down to the recruiter. actually I was telling Carrie earlier, I said, you know, went down, first guy I talked to was a Marine recruiter and talked to them, but I was kind of like, I don't know, it's a tough of work gig, pretty good gig. And so I told him, I said, I've been thinking about joining the military.

And the guy said, man, today would be a good day if you think about that to help a lot harder, you know. And so I did. And then I went back and I, and I, I joined a delayed entry program. And the other thing that was triggering it was that, you know, there were a couple things triangulated.

The Eagle Claw had just happened. And it was all over the news, you know. And so every young guy was like, you know, we're going to go kick some ass. And so, you know, not knowing that, you know, probably just going to join and go to, you know, Fort Campbell, Kentucky and sit there, you know, and shoot with blank adapters.

But anyway, at the time, you know, we're going to war, you know. And so it was a good time. You know, but I remember going back to, I joined the DeliDentry program and went back to my mom, and I told her what I'd done. And she had always been saying, don't join the Army, don't join the Army. Because it was right on the hills of Vietnam. The military didn't have a great reputation in the community in the country at large.

And she was, you know, mom was always thinking, you're going to go off and get hurt. You know, so don't do that, don't do that, you know. But when that happened, having known my dad's background and his trajectory in life, she's like, son, whatever you got to do to get to hell out of Texas, you need to do it. And if that's the way out, then take it, you know. And I went to my dad, and my dad said, man, why'd you do that? Why did you join the damn army? And I said, I kind of had to.

And he said, oh, man, he goes, you would have got two years max. And he said, you probably would have done less than a year. And he goes, Army's four, that's four years, man. And I was like, I was like, that was the way he thought, you know. And, but, but I went in and, uh, um, immediately loved it. I was like, man, this is really cool. Got, you know, got to do things and, um, you know, left the state of Texas. I flew from, uh, you know, Fort Sill, Oklahoma to, uh, Atlanta, Georgia on an airplane,

first time I've ever been on an airplane. So I got to do things to me. It was like, that's what rich and famous people get to do, you know, but, um, um, um, But it took me about eight weeks to get in trouble in the Army. So I was in basic training, and we had a gap a couple of days off on the weekend between basic training and advanced individual training. So we got to pass on the weekend. Worst thing you could have done for me.

And the other thing that was bad was that my two best buddies in basic training were from South Boston. And so you take those two guys from South Boston and put me out of the Noasis strip in the same room. and it was just a recipe for a disaster. So we went out on that weekend. We were down in this area in Fort Seale called the White Wolf Recreation Area. It was a training area.

And it said, off limits. Of course, we just went right to it. And we were down there swimming and jumping off cliffs and drinking beer. And one thing led to another. There were some guys down there fishing. They were a permanent party. And, of course, the two guys from South Boston, you know, you know, the jawing began and then it turned into a fight and one of them hit my buddy and then it was on, you know, and we were in a brawl.

And I didn't think much of it because I've been, you know, around that stuff all my life. But that's just the way it was, you know, if you're with somebody and somebody hit somebody, it's, you know, you get the drop and go. And that's just, that's what we did. And we all got arrested. First weekend off. Yeah. No, if I've been in Army eight weeks, I was in the brig, man. And my platoon sergeant at the time in training

was a guy named Sergeant Eichord and old Vietnam vet. He came down and, you know, got us out of jail, took us back in for the commander. So I had my first solid in Texas when the guy said, you know, you got caught doing something wrong with doing the Army. Eight weeks later, you know, or after I delayed the program, so a few months later, I'm eight weeks in the Army. I'm standing in front of this guy.

I think his name was Captain Richards. You know, if he's still around, oh, I'm a great, great thanks. but he goes, man, he goes, what hell are you guys thinking? And I was like, you know, they started it. And he goes, you guys weren't he supposed to be in there, you know. And he said, I'm just close to throwing you out of the damn army, man. Because, you know, I was a trainee. You know, trainees don't get a lot of grace.

And he goes, do you like, do you even want to stay in? Two guys in South Boston were like, fuck though. And they were gone. And I was like, yeah, I want to stay in. And he's like, okay. And I got a summarized article 15, eight weeks in the Army. I didn't know what that hell that was. But it was like $50 fine, and I had to pay the parking lot for two weeks or something like that.

And then when you enlisted, did you know about, did you enlist for special forces? I did. So I went in, actually, you know, like I said, I went into the Marine Corps, as I was telling Carrie earlier. And I really liked the Marines, man. I had buddies that were in a bunch of guys that I really had held up on a pedestal in a small town in Texas. because we're, you know, Marines, really sharp dudes. And, um, um, but I went in and they, um, they were like, uh, a buddy of mine to join the army. And he was like, I got airborne school. I got this. I got that. I got that one in the

Marine Corps. I was like, hey, uh, you guys got any of schools or cool stuff. You know, you're going going to be a Marine. You can be a Marine. Yeah, that's it. And, uh, what about, what about jumping on it? But you're going to be a Marine. And if you don't like that, you can go join the Army. And so I joined the Army. But I went into the Army and I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was like, know nothing about the Army. You know, my grandfather had been in the Army in World War II, but he never talked about it. You know, and they had all the posters all over the wall, you know, different things,

you know, helicopter pilots and stuff like that. And I looked at this one poster and it had a picture of a Green Beret with a rope across his shoulder. And it said, if you don't think you can do this, don't even. try right and um i was like man gun you know gun and all all that sexy sexy stuff right and i was like that's pretty cool and so i talked to a recruiter and i said uh what i got can i do that and he goes yeah he's you can do that we have a program you can sign up for and um i said um well i want to i want to shoot guns and jump out airplanes and stuff i can go scuba dive and all that stuff and he's like that's a place to go bub you're set and so um i had no idea what i was getting into you know no idea and

But it was, you know, it was part of the recruiting spiel. And I didn't know the difference between different MOSs or anything. I didn't know that, you know, I thought Green Bray was a Green Bray. I didn't know you had riflemen, weapons guys, commo guys, demo guys. So I said, well, I want to be a guy with guns. I want to shoot. You know, I'm a good shot. I like shooting guns.

I've been doing it since I was a kid. He goes, well, you can do it, but you're going to go in. They need a combo guy, and that's the only slots we have open. So I went in initially as a commo guy. I went to Fort Silicon for my basic training but had no idea what was coming my way.

Nothing. I mean, and basic training, you know, was so easy. And we talked about this earlier. I was like, man, they would plan for weeks to do shit that I was doing when I was six years old. And I was like, you know, I mean, guys and my family used to rob convenience stores

with less, you know, I mean, The time the Army takes a month, you know, and they go ahead and do it and like, oh, we've got five minutes. Let's go hit this place, right? So, but, but basic was easy. And then my grandfather told me, that one thing he did told me when I went in, he said, those paratroopers are bad dudes. He goes, in his frame of reference was World War II, and they were bad dudes, right? And so he goes, jump school's hard. He goes, it's going to be hard.

I went to jump school, and I was like, man, my feet hurt from running so slow, right? It's like, man, you know, you're doing this shuffle around a thing. It was just miserable. And then got to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and they cycled through training was at Camp McCall. It still does. But that was where he ran the Q course, Special Forces Qual course. And it was seven weeks, five days long.

I know because I marked every day off of the donut calendar. And I think probably 20 minutes, you know. But they had what they call pre-furt. phase for SF babies. So it was maybe a month long, workup, basically taught you how to put straps on your rucksack and, you know, lace your boots up and, and basic land-nav and stuff like that. I got there at the end of a pre-phase cycle, so I didn't get any pre-phase. I just got there, went straight from, moved in the barracks. A couple days later, I was on a cattle car headed to Camp McCaw. I mean, way behind the curb, Bub.

How old are you, like 18 or 19 years old? 19 at the time. And most of the SF students were already in the Army for four or five years? Yeah, it was a good mix of guys. So there were, and the course was not modified for SF babies. It was what it was, right? And so it was designed for seasoned Army non-coms. And I would say most of the class had been in the Army before.

So I had guys in there from the Ranger Battalion. I had guys in there from 82nd Airborne all over the Army who were coming. had been in the Army maybe five or six years, now they were going to Q-Course. And then you had a good mix of S-F babies, guys like me, young guys. Funny shit, man. I mean, we were lost, you know, but

and got out there, and man, dude, that was the first time I was like, well, this is hard. And the guy, I'll never forget, the first real green bribe I ever saw. It was a guy named Major Howard. He met us, but we got him off the bus. He looked like a G.I. Joe.

And I was like, dude, man, what's this dude? He's the guy on the poster, right? And so he was standing there when we came off the bus, and still to this day, and I've met a lot of cool dudes, you know. And I guess maybe it was my time of life or whatever, but if I had to pick one guy, if somebody said, what's the baddest dude you ever met in your life?

That's the guy. You know, and he was nominated for the Medal of Honor three times, I think one at once, you can only win it once. But the stories, and the cool thing about him was, there were a lot of stories about him, but he never told them. Everybody else told them. And so that gives us a little bit more credibility than a lot of the guys you're out there to know our horn.

And he was just a quiet stud, man. And he was probably in his 40s, then I'm guessing. But he used to skull drag us all over chemical. And I would not have made it, though. you know, we talked about this earlier. That's the one course that I was like, because I was so well prepared for it. You know, they pulled every joke in a book on me, man.

It was like, I thought the gridlines were actually drawn on the line. I was like, on the ground, you know, I mean, on a compass course, it was like, I weren't an icy grid land lately. You know, I was like, where is this thing? You know, I mean, every one of them, because I was so naive to the world, you know. And, and I was radioactive to the Army guys

because they were like, They didn't like SF babies. You know, it was like you hadn't paid your dues in the Army. And you're basically, you know, screwed up, you know. And that shit might be contagious. And I don't want any of it to get on me. So they were trying to get through the course. And they didn't need to spend any extra time helping somebody else get through the course.

Because, you know, you're probably getting two or three hours of sleep a night. You're getting a skull drug all day. And then you're having to learn how to read accomplice and do all that stuff. But there were two Marines. They were from force recon. One of them was named Rich Stickle, and the other one, I can't remember his first name,

his last name was Armstrong. He had been an Anglico, I guess that's gunnery, right? Naval Gunnery. Yeah, yeah. But he was an Anglico guy going, but he was a force recone guy coming through the course,

and then Richard Stickle. And Richard Stickle looked like a Hitler's wet dream. And he was like six foot two, blonde-headed, blue-eyed, chiseled, looked like a statue, like somebody grabbed him. I mean, he was, I remember seeing, I'm like, man, this dude's a beast, man.

And really a special guy. And one of the funniest interactions I've ever seen in my life was, and it was really mutual respect, but it was between Major Howard and Richard Stickle, who was in the hand-to-hand pit, right? And Major Howard goes, say, hey, okay, who wants to come in and basically train, right? And Stickles like, oh, yeah, I'll get a piece of this.

And Major Howard said, come here, Marine. And he said, you think he can get it done? And he was like, oh, yeah, he goes, listen. He goes, when I was in Vietnam, and again, knowing Major Howard, you have to know he's joking completely because he wasn't a bracket. But he says, I used to walk in a bar, and he goes, I'd kick one Marine's ass, and the rest of him would kick their own ass just trying to get the fuck out of my way. Right.

So, but I thought that was fun, you know, but anyway, Richard was a good dude and Armstrong was a good dude. but they saw that I was struggling. We were dropping people like flies. I mean, especially guys that had come off the block. You know, we would, I mean, literally dropping 20, 30 dudes a day. And they came in one night, and again, these guys are doing everything that everybody else is doing, and they're getting two hours sleep a night.

And they go, hey, bud, come here. We're going to tighten you up, right? And they took their time to help me. And had I not gone through it, had I not had them there, I wouldn't have made it through it. Ended up graduating on a common-ounce list. And I didn't even know what that was at the time. I was like, what is that? And they're like, you know, it's the top 10% of your clay.

Yeah, you're done good. And I was like, yeah, what the fuck is that? They're like, you're done good. And so, but had it not been for two guys in their leadership, especially Richard, Stecco, I would have been probably back on the ranch in Texas somewhere because I don't know that I would have been a good guy in a regular army. It would have been going back to the first day of school in Brackerville, Texas again. You'd have been out the window.

Yeah, I'd have been out the window one way or the other. Either if my own accord or somebody else's, and then back on a ranch and probably in prison. And I know people say that, but I'm telling you, that was where I was headed. And again, I was a good kid, but good kids can end up at bad places. You know, I was an impressionable guy. And I know the way I was raised.

It was kind of like being in that fight when I was in eight weeks in the Army. I was like, I didn't want it. But once you hit my buddy and it's on, I'm not going to run, you know. And that's how you get pulled into, it's almost like a, I tell my sons this. And we talk to you, I have three sons and a daughter. but be careful who you commit to. Because once you commit to them, you're committed. Right?

So be careful when you choose your friends. Because if one of them comes to you tomorrow and says, hey, we're going to, it's like the line off the town. Yeah, whose car we take it? And so make sure you want to get in that car with them because sooner or later you will have to. Friendship dues. Yeah, right.

And that is what got me in. Most of the trouble I was in when I was a kid, I never wanted to do it. It was always somebody saying, hey, you know, this guy, this guy did that or this guy did that, and we're going. And it was like, okay, we're going, you know. But, yeah, the two Marines, I'm a little bit tangential, so I apologize. I'm going to say two Marines that I, one, respect them as people, but learned a lot about, leadership from two Marines that were just awesome, awesome men. So you get through the Q course and then,

and then you become 18 Echo, you go to comm school? I did. So I went to, I went to comm school, and back then it was Morse code. Nowadays, I can't imagine what these guys are using nowadays, but back then they're not. Morse code, well, HF is coming back. Really?

And I had to learn Morris Code too. As a young SEALCOM guy, I had to learn Morris Code and sat there with headphones on, write groups out yeah no it's or whatever

yeah the old the old dinopad with the trigraph yeah yeah

yeah and then we used to call it the Angry 71 was the ANGRA 71 where you had to wind it up

to send code over a over a box and you hope that the spring lasted through the message but

but um so it's different phases of Q course all the physical stuff done in the first seven weeks five days

and then you go into comm school and at the time time, the highest attrition rate was probably in the medic course. We lost a lot of medics in the goat, goat, live tissue train. And then probably second highest with comma because of Morse code. A lot of guys can't pick that on. Yeah, it's like a weird, natural thing that you, some people can't, they just can't get it. Yeah. They don't have the year for it. It's not an intellect thing. It's a skill. And so, because I certainly was the smartest dude,

you know, to ever pop out of Brackenville, Texas. But, um, but, um, but, um, but, um, um, I, um, I was a code savant. Ah, you had an ear for it. I was, and it was like guys would come in and, um, struggle with it. And it was one of the few things that I ever ran into my life where I was just, man, this is not only easy. It was because it's easy. It's fun, right?

And so, um, went through there, did, did, uh, did good in code school. And then went to course phase three, Robin Sage, all that stuff. And then, um, as a Kamel guys at the time, it was kind of a random draw when he finished the Q-course. Most guys went to Bay Station. So they were up at the battalion or, you know, the battalion headquarters receiving messages from A-teams all over the world. So they'd sit back and they'd write copy code, break it down into text, and then, you know, so messages moving back and forth. So the base station comma. and I was one of the lucky guys.

I went to a company. So I went to the company, B-team, and was the radio operator for the commander and the sergeant major at the time. So I wasn't assigned to an A-team initially, but I was a B-team couple guy. And I was on Sante Road, back when fifth group was on Fort Bragg.

So before they moved to Campbell, they used to be at Fort Bragg on Sante Road, a bunch of wooden shacks. and all the team sergeants in a company first of the fifth had been Sante Raiders. And then a lot of the guys in the battalion, and the battalion worked very closely together. Our buildings were basically adjacent.

So you had guys like Joaquinco, you know, old stud. He used to come down, sit down in a team room. And he had Kamaroski, and you had Major Howard would come down there and hang out with his buddies. And so being a young special for, horses guy. I mean, I knew I was around legends at the time, but now it's 65. I was like, man, you should have asked him this. You should have asked him that. You should have done this. You should have done that. We had a Sante raid guy on the podcast. And he, he showed up for that

mission, but he hadn't been to Vietnam yet. And so he was on, he was in Vietnam for like 20 minutes. His welcome to the, he's welcome to Vietnam. He got off the, he got off the helicopter and like shot a guy in 10 feet, 10 feet away, like drilled the dude. And then that was it. He did the Slaunte raid and, you know, that was it. It's kind of, kind of wild. Yeah, we had, I was lucky, man. Again, lucky, you know, and sometimes better to be lucky than good, right?

Always. But I was raised by those guys. Yeah. And they were a little standoffish at first, but once you're around a while and they, and you went them over, they were the best, best guy. They were like big brothers, you know. And again, old-ass dudes, probably in the 30s, right? And, but, I mean, the evolving door legends, you know.

And I was on the B team. And one of the, Francis Kamaroski-Frank came down from the scuba team. Back then, it was called ODA 511, and they since changed the number to 515, but it was 8, 511. And he came in and said, hey kid, he goes, you think you could pass school? And I was like, yeah, I think I can pass it. And he said, I need a demo guy.

And I said, I'm a commo guy. And he goes, I've been trying to get a demo thrice through school for the last couple years. I haven't been able to get anybody through it. And he goes, but if you go as a commo guy, come back, I'll send you to demo school. And you'll be my demo guy and you can be cross-trained as a commo guy. I said, well, let's go. So I went down there and I thought, at the time, I'm a good swimmer.

You know, I used to swim to Frio River all the time when I was a kid. I can hold my breath. You know, I used to, you know, when we were kids, we used to go down to the highway and the river ran down on the highway through a culvert pipe. And our cool thing to do was to go in one end of the culvert pipe and shoot out of the other end, you know. And so you had to hold your breath maybe 30 seconds at the most. But I thought I was pretty much a stud, you know. And then it took me all about 30 seconds.

in scuba school and realized, man, dude, this is a different kind of swimming, you know. And so, but I, I went through pre-scuba, made it through it. Pre-Skuba back then was, you know, you had guys from pretty much all services except the Navy because you guys, you know, you guys are the world-renowned masters of the ocean. But everybody else comes to Key West to go to school. So I had PJ, CCT guys, had some ForceryCon guys there. and a lot of Rangers and, of course, SF guys went through. And I can't remember how many we started with,

but it was close to 100 people. And I think we graduated with 15 total out of school school. And it took everything this cowboy head to get to scuba school. I felt like I was in the pool with cowboy boots on because it was not intuitive to me. And one of my buddies in scuba school was a guy named Art Glass. and the old dude he was 28 I was 22 and um but we hit it off as friends and

um which becomes kind of important later on in life I talk about relationships but he was a really really solid dude stud you know a beast um but both of us drowned on the same day and went to the hospital on the same day so last last day of pool week which is crossovers they um they push it to the point and he turns into basically a melee underwater because guys are just you know it starts out of organized and then it turns into a garage sale. But both of us, all I can remember was on the last crossover, you know, everything turned

a little green and then the next thing I know I'm laying on my back, you know, we set of 2080s under me and looked to my right and there's our glass laying there with me. And so, but we went to the doctor that clears us to come back to train. Nowadays, I don't know if they clear it, but back in the day, as long as you, you know, you don't have brain damage or something, you're going back in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And but while we were at the doctor, we, everybody else was doing there, I think it's a 3,000 meter surface swim. And so we went, we came back and it was like, boy, you got work to do. So, you know, the last thing you do is feeling like going out in the middle of the ocean swimming 3,000 meters. But we did it together, you know, and became friends. And then I went back to, you know, and funny going back a little bit. So trouble again, right? I go to, while I'm in preschool at Fort Bragg, Tucker Fieldhouse, I was married at the time of my first wife, and we're driving down the road, not without going to any detail, I had a

disagreement with the road guard from the 82nd Airborne. And he basically dropped trial and pressed his house up against the window when my wife was sitting there. And he was like, oh, okay, you're a tough guy. So I pulled the truck in. And again, it's 4 o'clock in the morning, pitch black, pulled a truck in, you know, and parked in, and I told my wife, sit here. I'll be right back.

And I take off running and I found that road guard and he was, he was oblivious at what was coming. And I blindsided hell out of him, you know, and it started and it was 50th signal group. And of course, you know, you're not thinking at the time. You're just like, this is the dude. And then you don't realize he's got, you know, 50 dudes behind him in a formation. And it turned into basically I'm going to drag Norm Houton up and down Arden's Road. And finally, they hadn't been for the first. company commander, they probably would have killed me.

But so I go back to Pre-Scoba, and he took my name, and he called the boss. And my boss at the time was Jack Curtis Penny, J.C. Penny, oh, been in Vietnam. And so I'm in Pre-Scova, and I'm in there training. You know, I'll beat the shit. And a guy comes over and goes, hey, your commander called. You need to go back to company.

I was like, all right. So I'm back to company. I walked in and he started laughing. And he goes, what am I doing? And I told him what happened. He goes, man, you can't do that shit. He goes, go back to training. And today's army, I guarantee you you wouldn't be there.

But anyway, I ended up on the dive team as a demo guy. And so what year is it now? So I got out of the Q course in February of 1982. And then I forgot to tell you, I went to DLI for a year. So I got, I took a language, Turkish. So I took the D-Lab test And I didn't know at the time The plan was if you wanted to stay on an A team

And go right to a team You had to fail that thing Nobody told me that I can get the memo So I just took it And they came in and said You're going to language school I said I don't want to do that I want to go to a company

And they were like You're a bar to re-enlistment If you don't go to language school So I went out there I went to Monterey for 47 weeks Turkish And again, one of those things where I, you know, so code is a listening thing.

Language is a listening thing. It's not an intellect thing. It's a skill, right? Because, you know, you can have guys very, very low IQ that speak perfectly good English. But I was the distinguished honor graduate. I had the highest score ever in a history of Turkish language school. Damn. I graduated with a 4-4, and I said, you would have been a 5-5,

but you have to be a native speaker. You have to live in Turkey to be a 5-5. So, graduated with a 4-4. And again, it was one of those things where it was like, what does that mean? I don't even know if it was good or bad, you know. And went back to Bragg, and that's when I went to my company B-team. But so by the time 1982 graduated language school, May, would have been May. Late spring of 1983, I was on the B team.

Summer. I went to scuba school in the summer. So in the summer of 1983, scuba school. And so now you're in an A team, and what are you guys doing for, what's like, what are you doing? Yeah. Oh, I remember the first thing I did is a Green Beret, and I was thinking, man, this is really cool. We picked up pine cones on Fort Braille, North Carolina. So, yeah.

So, yeah, that was beautiful. Because there wasn't a lot of shit going on back then. A little police call. Yeah, yeah. That was the first thing I did when I got to Steel Team Wonder, like, yep, I'm all fired up. just got done with buds. I'm thinking I'm this most special of the special, right? Yeah, go clean the sugar.

Yeah, exactly. And then I went on deployment, get done with workup going to deployment. And we had beepers, right? So we were high speed. We're on deployment. We had beepers. And we get the 911 page, like, get to the freaking unit right now. So we haul ass down to the unit.

And it turns out we hadn't picked up the brass when we had shot on the range the previous day. They were pissed. So they recalled us to go pick up brass. At that point I was like, all right, my dream is over because when I was young, dude, I thought I was going to Vietnam. You know what I mean? I was going on deployment in 1993.

I thought I was going to nom. Dude, like, it's odd. So now here I am getting recalled to pick up brass. It's not exactly what I was signing up for, but that's what we're doing. So I guess it was much the same picking up pine cones. Oh, yeah. Well, I remember I lived in the barracks,

a fifth group barracks at the time. Because, you know, most guys were in COs, lived off post, but I was still a PFC. And I was still a young dude. dude in the army and uh um living in a barracks and i had staff duty one night and um uh one of the uh the non-cons on the scuba team in uh beco uh i won't tell you tell his name but but good dude but he was a big harley rider and uh you know an animal savage and um but uh he um i was staff duty he came rolling up on his on his on his Harley the big custom Harley parks it right on the right by the

sign that said fifth group. And so he comes walking and goes, hey, who can you watch my bike? I said, yeah, you know, no problem. And back then, you got to remember Army was way different. So fifth group barracks, we actually had strippers living in one of the rooms in the barracks, and it was just like a zoo. And crazy shit was going on there. But I said, yeah, I'll watch it.

And then an hour or so later, you know, the battalion and sergeant, Major comes up and his name was Force K. Foreman. Vietnam bet. Good, good guy, but he was the smatch, right? And so, and we used to call him Force Gander, right? So instead of Sergeant Ranger Foreman, but he came and he goes, hooting. He goes, whose fucking motorcycle was that on my grass? And I said, I don't know.

And he goes, whose motorcycle was that after on that grass? I said, I don't know. He goes, okay, well, here's what you're going to do. you're going to call a tow truck, and they're going to come get that thing, and you're going to get it off this barracks, and you're going to do that in 30 minutes. I said, Roger, that's a hard manager. And as soon as he walked out the door, I run down on barracks, and I get gardener, I said, you got to move that bike, dude.

I said, I'm calling a tow truck right now, but if it's gone when the tow truck gets here, then all good. You know, we're good. And so that's what happened. And then Foreman comes back when the tow truck's there, and he's like, where's that fucking motorcycle? And I was like, I don't know. I went out there with a tow truck.

It was gone. and he goes okay that's your story i said roger that's our major and he goes all right so i went and did my staff duty tour and staff duty ended i think it's six o'clock in the morning you know and and then at the end of staff duty you had post uh police call so that's when you did your pinecone duty so you'd do your staff duty all night then your last uh hour or so you'd walk around by the px picking up cigarette butts and pine cones and um so um i walked around and i walked around and I came back and he called me in at the end of the police call and he said, how you doing? I said, good.

And he goes, you got anything for me? I was like, no. Did you do a police call? I said, yes. And he said, well, go back and do it again. And I was like, okay? So I went back, did a police call again, came back. Long story short, I did that thing like 10 times.

And so, you know, you've been up 24 hours already. So that next day at 1,800 hours, I'm still doing police call. Right? And then finally I found it. It was a it was a can he put up underneath the bush and it said hey asshole bring this can back to a Sarcomit Major Fort. And I walked back in and I said this is what you're looking for. So I mean he goes good job and he goes now What do you think about that motorcycle? And I was like Okay, and now you know learn my lesson there. So you know you get your licks in but so do they Right. And so,

but yeah, it was a good, good tour. Did you guys go on deployments anywhere? Did you guys do like training trips or other countries and do J-sets or anything like that? We did.

So I can't remember exactly the year. It would have been, so 80, 84. Back then there was a, and I think I'm good saying this now because it's old, but there was a, um,

a project called roof shingle. And it was a fifth special forces group over in Saudi Arabia training, basically given the Q-course or watered-down version of the Q-course to the Saudi-Arabians. And there were some people embedded from OGAs with us who were doing their thing. So really a roof shingle, because I remember time, I was like, man, we're giving these guys a special forces course, and they really suck. You know, and we're giving them certs and all that stuff. And I was talking to one of these old And the legendary dude, by the way, his name was Tom Roberts.

And it had been a POWD at Castorine Pass. When he escaped, linked up with a British unit, they took him back to England, and then they threw him on a boat for Normandy. Right? I'm like, man, you know, super dude. But he was an OGA guy at the time. And he was old. And he was in his time.

It would have been in the 70s or whatever. But he goes, yeah, we'll get it. He goes, you know, this really isn't about the Q-course. You know, he goes, but you do your thing and let me do my thing. And so we did that for a year. It went from roof shingles, what they call Royal Oak, so the name changed. But I spent about probably close to 18 months in Saudi Arabia. We go over six months, come back for a couple weeks, go back over.

So that was kind of the focus for you guys. Yeah, that was my first enlistment in the Army. It was really, um. Did you pick up any Arabic since you're naturally good at languages? I did. So I was in, but you know, later, I picked up Arabic when I was over there, a little, you know, enough to talk on a radio. So I could talk to him on a radio and we're out on the range and stuff like that. And then later on and later, later in life in the Army, I was in Lebanon. I was there for about six, seven months. And I picked up Arabic over there. Then I spent time in Jordan. And then after the Army, I spent five years in Jordan. So I picked up a good amount of Arabic, never went to formal training for it. Arabic is a lot different and a lot more difficult than Turkish. Turkish is a year, one year, DLI school? 47 weeks, I think it's a, and it's...

Because Arabic's a year and a half, right? And you can kind of judge how hard the language is on by how long it takes it to teach the knuckleheads to the language. Like Spanish is like four months. Yeah, yeah. And then we had dudes who went out there, Spanish that were fluent Spanish speakers. I was like, man, dude, what do you, you know, I mean, how did you get that gig? But Turkish is, uh, is part of the oral. Altaic language group.

And a lot of the languages, you know, like how do you say radio and Turkish radio? You know, how do you say automobile in Turkish automobile, right? I mean, so they've adopted a lot of the modern language. And the script is the same as English, right? Arabic, you know, you're riding backwards and it's Martian, right? So, and you have to all the, all the stuff like that. And it's difficult. it's a lot more difficult

so Turkish is fairly easy to pick up not as easy as Spanish but like I said I had a buddy out there Balderas he's out there grew up speaking them Spanish and now he's out there on a language course for six months

basically surfing every day and I'm like dude you know you got the good deal but yeah I did pick up some here and so what was after that ODA 515 511 became 511

511 and it became 515 when I was there and and they were just starting the warrant course, the SF warrant. I think they called the 180A course. I'm not sure. But guys were, you know, up to that time, you had an officer on a team, and everybody else was an on-com.

And very rarely did I have an officer on a team. You know, we had sporadic officers, but we didn't, first of all, you know, they didn't run as many through the course. and but in the Army at the time there wasn't a you know like if you were on a a team as a demo guy you were 12 Bravo you weren't 18

they didn't have that career field so officers didn't go there because it was kind of like the dead end yeah yeah that was all a special operations yeah like back in those back in the 80s and 90s like a seal officer in the early 90s I should say like a seal officer that was like a dead end you weren't

gonna really have and now we got you know like so many admirals it's ridiculous oh yeah yeah and same thing with the special forces like special forces now is a great career path yeah it was not for an officer back then and truly for an nCO it wasn't either because you know um you were competing against a very small pool of people and they were all really good whereas if i'd been in like the 80 second airborne you're competing against a whole army yeah right and there's a lot more positions for you but um but for officers it was kind of like uh the death nail, right? So we didn't have a whole lot of guys, you know,

jumping in line to be an officer. And the other thing was scuba school back then, you didn't have scuba pay, right? So guys would be like, well, I'm not gonna go go get tortured to get, you know, nothing. And but once, and that was the non-coms too, right? So, but once they started paying people, I think it was 2.25 a month, it was like,

that was, you know, I made four and eight. $83 a month they pay. So I was like, you know, a hell of a raise, man. But anyway, we didn't have O's there, but we had a warrant. So one of my buddies, his name was Tim Kennedy, not the current young Tim Kennedy, but an older dude. Savage. And he went to the warrant course. And he went over to, when he came back for the warrant course, he went to a second battalion.

And it was ODA-5-45. another scuba team but it had an additional duty it was a sadam team so it was a nuclear weapons team oh yeah yeah and so he went over and he called me up and he goes hey man you want to come over and be my demo guy and I love to do that's some serious demo yeah

that's the most serious you know what that is carry nuclear yeah so it's like a man-packed nuke that you would jump in dive in whatever plant and then leave damn yeah no it was it sounds sexy but really it's a pain in a ass I mean it was like You spend a lot of time training on that device, and it becomes the center of your world for you.

So you don't get to do a lot of cool stuff. You know, it's like, you know, okay, you're going to go down here, you're going to work your protocols for just getting it running and taking it down. Getting it together, taking it down, you know, movement with it. And it's highly regulated, man. You guys always, you know, checking you, you know, and it's just when I got there, I thought, oh, that sounds something. cool. And then by, you know, a couple months into, I'm like, man, dude, I liked it better on 5-11.

But how often does that actually get deployed? Well, it's never been deployed. Yeah. Yeah, never been deployed. We haven't dropped any, we haven't used any nuke since WWI-I-I. Yeah. We got to do some cool exercises with it, you know, so you would jump it in like we'd jump into the desert and then you hump that 100-pound piece of crap over the mountains

and then you go set it in on a dam or a bridge or something like that. And the whole deal is it's not a, it's not a massive nuke, I think. And it's been 40 years, but I think you can dial it in based on how you put it together. It can either be one kiloton or point one kiloton. And my memory fades. I'm sure there's somebody out there running a sharpshoot and shit out of me. But all I know is that thing was heavy. And I remember when I got to the team, I nobody wanted to jump it.

And I was like, I'll do it. And so we jumped it out of a Chinook at Mot Lake. in a water jump. So we were going to do a capabilities exercise where we were going to jump it out of a Chinook, hit the bottom of a Mott Lake, which was like three foot deep, you know, and then bump stumps all the way to the stands

where the guys were watching. And so you've got twin 80s on your back, a parachute on the back of that. You've got a 100-pound nuclear device between your legs, and you've got your fins strapped to your side of your legs, and you've got your mask, rubber banded to the top of your reserve, parachute, and then you can't even stand up. That is freaking ridiculous.

So you sit there and your buddy's grab your body by the arm, you know, and you see watching the jump master, and he's getting up, and then they pick you up, and you waddle to the ramp, and then you just fall out, you know. And I fell out. Was it static line? Static line. Okay. We were, I think we're 12,200 feet.

And I never haloed that thing, but I did static line a few times. And then you just fall out. And I remember probably after a couple of flips, I looked up and I didn't see a lake anywhere. And all I saw was pine trees. And by that time, I think I was a couple hundred foot off of the deck. And crash did the trees. And of course, then the ambulance comes over. I didn't get hurt, but I missed the lake.

I mean, because I was just dead weight. Basically, that was a bundle with a bunch of shit on me. But then we got, you know, we did a few more times and got better at it. But it was cool. I cannot imagine a freaking land landing with 2080s. 2080s of parachute and a 100-pound rucks back between legs and fams. That's freaking ridiculous. And I felt ridiculous, right?

But I was showing myself. But, you know, in my defense, it wasn't like you could drive that thing. That's crazy. You could see the higher-ups, you know, some brilliant general. I know what we can do. Yeah, I'm sure they were over there going, oh, and over here, we have the vehicle, right? God. But, yeah, it was so.

But, you know, I look back on it, it wasn't as sexy as I thought it was going to be. But those are the things that, you know, I look back on and laugh. And we still get together and laugh at all right. I'm laughing right now. But yeah, and the guys were awesome guys. And it was kind of at that point we started having guys that were my age. It had started to really kind of become more common on the teams. So they were my counterparts.

And a lot of the older Vietnam guys by that point were starting to retire and move on. So I don't want to say they were Gen 2. We were probably Gen 3, Green Brays, you know. So the guys that hadn't been to Vietnam. I would call the Gen 1 guys. the Jedbergs, the guy that weren't Grand Burrys, they were like before. Like the O-O-S-S-ty.

Yeah, yeah, those guys. And then you had the guys that were post-Kennedy. So after, what was 63, they got the beret. And then they had the new guys, the frat boys, you know. And that was one of those guys. But, yeah, cool. I love being on the team. I loved it.

It was fun. And when you were on the scuba teams, there's something about the water that's a separator of guys and I got respect for all the guys on the company and stuff like that but there was nobody could hang with those scuba teams

even later on in life when I went to my tier one unit I would go down to those teams and I never said it but I was like boy you don't want to go down there and train with those scuba teams no not physically

I mean there's some studs over there but you know those dive teams were tough yeah the water's tough to do it's a tough environment man It's just tough environment.

Makes everything harder. Yeah. My son, when he was going through training to do his job now in a Marine Corps, they did a lot of water training, a lot. You know, obviously not near as much as probably the still teams, but a hell of a lot more than the Army SF training. And it's not just the dive teams, it's all of them. So it's because of virtue of their environment they live in.

So you go to the kids. Q course, you don't see the water unless you're on scuba team, other than maybe a, you know, a confident swim or something. And, but even in the Green Beret community, you know, you would have guys that would be studs on the other teams and they would go to that scuba school or pre-scuba and water sorts that shit out real quick, you know, and, um, but Marine Corps now and their special operations, you know, all those guys are getting skull drug in the water because I remember used to call me every day and holy, you know, this sucked.

And I go, well, go back in the next morning. And he would tell me, I know, I know the feeling. I know you probably do as well. But when I went to scuba school, it was like the easiest gentleman's course in the Army. I mean, nobody was, it was like, hey, dude, let's go for a run. And, you know, you know, it just happened to be a five-minute mile, five-mile run, you know. Or, you know, let's go swimming. You know, the only thing is you're going to be underwater the whole time, you know.

And you got off every day at five. and I could go do whatever you wanted to do, but nobody did because I used to sit there all night. It's one of the courses I've been in where I'd sit there all night thinking, oh my God, and eight more hours, I'm going to be fighting for my life, right? And then you get that nervousness, you know, and you sit there all night, you can't sleep because you're worried about the next day. And so my son was going through that, and I was like, man, dude, you just got it got it out. But water makes a difference. Yeah, water, that lack of oxygen can get to you real quick.

Yeah, you can't, you can't fake that. Right. You can't just walk around with your head, you know, up your ass. You got to be fighting. And so then after that is when you tried to go over to the Tier 1 unit? Yeah, so I spent probably a little over a year on that team. So by this point, I've got about five years in the Army, maybe a little less. And I remember, you know, I told you about the guy I trained with in Scuba School, got him Mark Glass.

So I got a letter. It was kind of a standard recruiting letter back then. And back in the day, that unit really, they started in 77, so a Tier 1 unit. Nobody knew anything about them. You knew they were out there, but, you know, they hadn't been around long enough for you really understand anything about them. And I had a couple of guys who had gone to. So their recruiting brief and then ultimately went to selection, and they were guys off the dive team and other teams in the company.

And savages, you know. And they came back, you know, very quickly from the selection process. And they would never tell you anything. First of all, I hadn't been there long enough from learning or anything about it. But whatever they told them back then, I know what they told them, but they read the, I put the fear of God in them. You don't go talk about this to anybody because you'd ask them what happened. And they go, I said, make it.

What was it like? I can't tell you. And whatever they, you know, they did a good job of scaring their shit out of them. And so the word on the street was, you know, nothing, you know. I think there's a little more information about it now. But back then, you kind of, and they were in the post-stockade. So that's what their building was on Bragg. They initially, before they built their compound now, which is crazy, you know, big.

But back then they were on the stockade. And the teams were actually in the cells. That was their team rooms. The cells for, and I was like, yeah, it's probably where you guys belong. But, um, but, um, I got a letter. So, hey, look, you, you, you're been identified as a potential candidate. Didn't say what.

We're having a briefing this time, this place in, um, uh, post theater, uh, Fort Bragg, uh, post theater. Went there and the guy that I went to school school with was there, art class. And, um, so, um, um, He said, how are you doing? I said, good. And he goes, gave me the spill and said, you should do it.

You know, and so I went. And I was probably 19, that would have been 1980, spring, spring of 86, spring of 87. So April 87 is when I went to the course. And reported to the, to the, to the, to the gun teams in November, 1987. So it wasn't too long after. So Panama was 89.

Yeah, so I had been there. You know, you get there and you go through West Virginia, and you go through the training part of it, and then you go through, you're still, you know, selection never ends. They tell you when you get their selection is a never-ending process. But your first 18 months in the building, your own probation.

And they're continually evaluating you. But you're now, you're out of the training unit and now you're on an active team. So you're under, there are certain things they do. They send you out by yourself. I went to Beirut,

so about a year in it, went over there, spent about, actually flew over there. It was December of 88. Because I flew over, landed in Athens and stayed in Cyprus waiting to go into Beirut. I got a call, said, hey, we lost a guy. And if you remember back what was going on in Beirut back in the 80s,

you had the bombing of the embassy, you had a bombing of Marine Barracks. And then you had the assassination, the kidnapping and assassination of Bill Buckley, who was the station chief, and he had been a former Green Beret. So it was personal, right? And so we were over there,

you know, all right on the heels of that. And it was a, Bayer it was a mess back then. I think it stabilized a little bit, still probably a mess, but back then it was a real mess. But when I landed, I was,

my counterpart, the guy that had been over there before me, was on his way home. And he was booked on the flight, is it 103 that crashed in Lockerbie? He was on that flight. So he was supposed to be on that flight. Yeah.

He was booked on that flight with a State Department guy. And so we're thinking that he was on the crash. But at some point when he got to, I think it was Frankfurt, and again, it could be, you know, burly on, I don't know. But he got on another plane. He probably met some girl or something. I don't know this.

But he got on another plane and wasn't on that plane. But the State Department guy was on it. And he died in Lockerbie. So, you know, hit there, hit, Beirut that day and it was like a beehive you know and um and then um came back i think it was may or june so it was whenever in december came back in june um but um um by myself you know and as a young young dude came back didn't get fired you know so so i guess it went okay um and then um um next thing at the time would have been probably yeah panama

how far out did you know panama was going down a long time we were clearing like doing a big clearance in remoddy and you know we're just moving through the streets and um you know i'm the ground force commander so you know kind of outside of a building let's you know move to the next building get inside you know check with it just doing just doing that kind of command and control stuff and my breacher's like well one of the breaches you know he comes up he's like hey there's a safe in this building can we blow it and i'm like yeah yeah all good you know let's like yep go ahead and then, you know, whatever, three minutes later, he goes running past me. And I go, oh, I like got inside of a building and boom, I'm like, yeah, okay, I should have been a little bit more a little bit more thoughtful when I said, yeah, you're cleared how to blow this safe because he, like, yeah, he went pee for plenty as well.

Yeah, I had no format. There was no, I was like, hey, I've done this before, but everything I got and then everything the other guys had, bring me your shit, right? So we started to stack it on there, but literally it took his roof and just peeled it back. And I was like, in my story, he was like, looked at me like, dude. And I was like, I don't know, I'll tell you. But that was my first cigar. So it was Christmas.

And around Christmas time, a couple days before Christmas. And I had never smoked a cigar before. I drank a lot of whiskey growing up, but I've never seen a cigar. And so my team at a time was like the biggest Mexican ever born. His name was Mike Beltran. Ended up being the best man in my wedding.

But he was six foot six, like two. 270 pounds like 10% body fat. And he was, you know, look like a, look, the typical, look like an operator. And I look like a kid, you know. And so he goes, we're going to, we're going to open up his Christmas presence, and we're going to, we're going to smoke his cigars next to his tree. We're going to give these pictures to like the guys that were running music and running information so that he knows that, hey, we missed you, but we got your stuff.

And so, so we went into his desk and he had a box of cigars on his desk that said, it were gold bands and it said M.A.N., Manuel Antonio Noriega, his own private stash. And we stood in front of the Christmas tree. This is like Eagles nest out. Lid it up. Lid it up

and took pictures. And I told Mike at a time I said, I don't smoke cigars? He goes, yes, you do. And so I guess I do. You do now. Yeah. And so So we ransacked his house, blew the roof off of it, messed up his safe, and then caught him a few days later. And I remember when we finally got him, he ran into the papal nuncia, which is like, I'm not Catholics, I don't know, it's like a, it's like an embassy for the, for the Vatican. And he sought refuge in there.

So he ran in there and they, yeah, we couldn't go in, but he couldn't come out. And somehow through negotiations, the Catholic Church was like, you got to leave, you know. And, but I'll remember when we posted up around there, I had to, I can't remember which side it was, which cardinal direction was. But on one side, I was next to the bathroom window where he would come in every morning, brush his teeth and comb his hair. And I remember he came and looked at me. He goes, how you doing? I said, Felice Navidad. And then a couple days later he came out.

And then we could turn him over. But, yeah, I look back on some of the things. And we did a lot of, I think we did 33 buildings or something back than looking for him. And some of it was super funny. I mean, like we had a building where his girlfriend's mistress was living. And it was like 40 stories up. And so, you know, you're not supposed to take the elevator, right? You're supposed to just take the stairs.

My team were about trying to take an elevator. So we're all kidded up, you know, total. kidded up and we take the elevator up and the door opens up and it's a it's a husband a wife and like two little kids are like we'll take the next one i was like okay and so uh um but um yeah we got his uh his mistress there and prick her in and started running some side but uh yeah that was my first uh first uh first uh first uh gun fight yeah yeah i did the elevator thing we were we were hitting a target in in Baghdad and it was like in a hotel where there was contractors were staying there was kind of like a nicer hotel and but there was a bad guy there and we knew what Romeo was in and it was on like the

14th floor or something like this and so we wore plain clothes and we just dressed up like we were American contractors right and but we rolled through the same thing like we just rolled through like we lived there got in the elevator 14th floor went up and it was it was pretty funny to be sitting in the The music playing. You're like, all right. And then, yeah. We would have, it would have been quiet, but that door was like indestructible. And, you know, the, the turp was like knocked on the door.

And he was like, yeah, you know, let us in. And the guy's like, no. And he's like, no, like room service or whatever the hell my turf was saying. And then I was like, hey, step aside. And so I start, I'm going to kick this door open. I've kicked open like, I don't know how many doors are kicked open. So I, you know, turn around and give this thing the big. big mule kick that thing doesn't move so I kick it like three or four more times five more times

and my breacher he had got out a little extendable hammer that he had in his uh in his in his in his gear and he's like hammer hammer hammer and then I got out of the way and he started hammering the door like it didn't come off as and just when we finally got in there I was like what the hell was that and it had a big giant metal like pull post that went down the entire door yeah it to lock it into the floor it was like there was no way that thing was coming open. Yeah, we had a similar thing on that mission in Panama. And we went up to Vicki's house, was his mistress's name. And we used every door charge. And, you know, the thing is, you know, our charges are all made for doors that are made to code. There's no codes in these third

countries, man. They can build whatever they want, you know. And we had a similar thing, and we used every one of them. And we would run up the stairs and they'd go, look, go to charge. And then, because, you know, the door was at the top of the landing. And so you would, and there was no place to to take cover so you'd have to run down and charge would blow you'd run up and we're like give me another charge then you run down and we just done like 10 times and finally um there was a little door that looked like a closet door and we're sitting there you know hammering right at this door and this uh the door opens and it's a maid and she goes what are you guys doing we're like get in and she was come in and so we're like oh shit so we went in but uh um you know they

you do learn man but uh yeah for all the badass uh videos uh videos there are of operators clearing, you know, CQC kill houses. It'd be really cool if you had, you know, how many of the canes is just the pluper reels would be classic. No, we had that. When we went into Noriega's house, the first time we were using Helos, but after, you know, after we lost the element of surprise, we rolled in on the back of one-one threes because we used one-one-threes, I think from task force, Gator, I think was what it's called, to go

recover to the helo they crashed. So we go rolling in to Altus to Golf second time with on APCs, you know, and that's the first time I'd ever been on an APC. But anyway, I was looking forward, you know, sitting on the front of the vehicle looking forward. Then we had teams, you know, guys on each side kind of looking out left and right. And then we had a rear security guy on the back of the vehicle in his name was security guard and he's an old dude. He'd been there for a while. And he was facing backwards. And we turned the corner and it was like you only had like a second, you know, we turned the corner and pulled it in their drive.

driveway and there's archway over the thing and the archway was about that high for the APC. So I, literally a split second decision, I just jumped up and over the archway. The guys on the side jumped off. Freaking Jackie Chan over here. I mean, it was instinct, right? It's like, here it is. You know, it's on you. And the guys on the side jumped off, but Gary didn't know it was coming.

Oh, we got cleaned out. Oh, my God, dude. It wiped him out. But it was on video. And it was like getting hit by Lawrence Taylor, you know, from behind and it flat, off the top of an EPC face planting on the pavement, you know. But those are the things that, you know, you don't want people to know about it, except for, you know, your buddies.

But I never thought of that calling it the blooper reel. Because I've always thought like, dude, there's so much shit where you're like, that was, that looked terrible. A Keystone cop activity going on. And, but yeah, just a full-on blooper reel of dudes. Yeah. Because everyone looks good in the kill house. I was like, oh, yeah.

Hell yeah. But yeah, you could make a hell of a movie with the blooper reel. And then it, so how did you guys do like after Panama? You guys must have been like freaking pretty damn proud of that whole thing. Yeah, it was a great learning experience for me. I got to, you know, be down there for. watch it go from being a four or five guys to like, you know, okay, now we're going to, you know, this is a D-Day invasion. And so I got to watch the progression of the thing and trained.

So when we first went down there, you know, we were training for basically taking out of vehicle or motorcade. And so we did a lot of work on motorcade work. They stopped in a motorcade. And you learn all those things you're learning for that particular thing, you're going to show up later on in life in your career. So it helped out in the Balkans. So learning that when you go out and you try to shoot a motorcade, a vehicle that's moving and you're in 90 degrees of that vehicle and you try to hit it with an AT4 or a law,

if it's going faster than 15 miles an hour, it's about 80% chance you're going to miss it. Right? So learning how to manipulate a motorcade into where you want to kill a zone, hit it from the front or make it stop or stuff like that that you hear about and read about. But there's nothing like that. going out and trying to do it and then having it go go south on you you know and um so and then it progressed

to the next phase okay now we're going to get bigger it's more than five guys it's trooper guys it's a squadron guys and so it's kind of like you know um to use an analogy that we're both familiar with it's like starting out and learning arm lock and then how do you position that and then it's still useful but now you got this move and and um so i'll learn the progression of kind of of a lot of the progression of special ops through that, through that, uh, um,

particular workup. And, and the other good thing is like, like you said, a lot of the Vietnam guys are starting to retire, you know, and in, in,

in, in, yeah, 89, 90, you know, because they had done 20 years, you know, they came in in 1970 or 1968. So a lot of those guys are retiring.

So it's good to get some of that combat experience. Yeah. And, um, and it was different. Right. So things changed. So the Vietnam guys were,

you know, jungle patrols and stuff. stuff like that. And the stories they used to tell were like, we'd go out 30 days at a time with four dudes with no support. And one of the stories that stands out was where this team went out, Green Berets, and there were five guys that were doing reconnaissance work. And they posted up in the jungle, and then a battalion of Vietnamese soldiers moved in and set up camp right on top of them. And I'm thinking, man, dude. And it was a couple days. So they're sitting in there underneath some bushes,

and guys are posted right up on top of them walking within meters, you know, feet of them, inches of them. And that's, I don't know if I, you know, I'd probably just pass out. I don't know about that. But they didn't have vehicles, right? They were all on foot and they carried a lot of weight. And they were really into, like, camouflage and concealment and it's operating in the jungle.

And it was like they'd come through the old scene where I think it's a platoon where the guy goes, you don't need that, you don't need that, you don't need that. That was real. You know, you would jump up and down and they'd listen for, you know, things that rattled and stuff. So, and I think it's a different psychological, you know, psychologically it's different. You know, guys are hunting people that are hunting them. And it's not like they had a bunch of assets that we have now where guys are going to fly in, you know, in Black Hawk gunships and bail them out or you didn't have a specter. You know, they were kind of on their own. a different breed of man i'm telling you and not that the modern warrior isn't but there's different

um parameters oh yeah i mean i've told the sock guys that have come on the podcast like like that we tell me about a mission i'm like yeah i was a troop commander there's no way i would have approved you to go do that like yeah you're gonna take you and one other american and four indige and you're going how far into louse and you're gonna you know set up uh i i couldn't in good conscience be like yeah go ahead and do that and they did that over and over and over and over again. And they were, they were,

I don't know how to explain it, but there was an iciness about those guys that I didn't have. So I'm going to say we as a generation, my generation of special operators in the Army, we didn't have that ice water in our veins. We were good. I mean, we were good at what we did, you know,

unstoppable. But there's some different about those guys. And part of it, too is like, you know, when I think about like those operations, I say I wouldn't approve them. But like I had one of my, one of my buddies who's one of the platoon chiefs named Tony Afradi. He's a great dude. He's a freaking, he's just a stud. But one time he came to me, he said, hey, I want to go down here with like by myself and I want to set up a thing over here. And I'm like, yeah, dude, I love you. Can't do that. Like, it's not happening. You can't do that.

But the reality is he probably would have been. been perfectly safe going to do that. And my comparison is my first deployment to Iraq, we had guys going out and doing like low-vis operations where they would go out and do reconnaissance, right? Go out, because we'd take cars off a target, like we'd go catch a bad

guy, we'd take his car, right? And then we'd take his car and we'd rig it up with cameras and stuff like this. And then those guys would go out and drive by the next target and get footage of the door and the fence and the whole nine yards. And I would start getting questions from like,

the leadership, like, you know, these guys are out here. They're, they're, what happens if they get rolled up? And one time I was like, come and watch one of these videos. Because you'd watch a video and you'd see just normal people in Baghdad walking around. And this car's right there driving by them and like, no one cares. Like no one notices, no one cares. And so even though it seemed like it was less safe. Yeah.

The reality was it was actually kind of more safe to do that. Yeah. And it's just a little bit of perspective because, you know, you talk to the saw guys and like, It seems so crazy to do what they did, which is 20 miles insert into Laos or Cambodia or North Vietnam. And you're like, what's your support? Well, hopefully if the weather's good, we'll have aircraft over it. And if it's not, then we'll suck it up for a day

until the weather gets good. And it seems like we would just never take that risk. But at the same time, it's like, mm, yeah, those guys were freaking good at it. They knew they were doing. And they had limited resources. they didn't have the capability with like Task Force 160 or, you know, I went to us, got to fifth group. There weren't very many vehicles in the group.

I mean, I think the battalion had a couple of jeeps. Yeah. And when we would go jump at Sicily, Drop Zone is 12 miles, I would pray that it was an aircraft. So we could go to Pope Air Force Base, get on an aircraft and fly out. Because if it was a helo, it was like, okay, three o'clock in the morning, we're going to ruck 12 miles of Sicily. We're going to jump for a couple times. We're going to rock back. Damn.

Because we didn't have trucks, you know. We didn't have vehicle. And that was, but that was the, that was the, um, the culture back then. And I can see it physically, um, with the guys. Um, when I first signed into my company, they could ruck all day long and they could run like deer, but there were a lot of big bulky guys there. Um, because what they did is run and ruck, right? And as, as I got to, you know, older and we started focusing more on.

on, you know, and we got more vehicles, right? We started doing, you know, there was a time where we were a lot of Hilo and the X type of stuff, you know. And we could ruck and run and stuff like that, but we had more time to spend in the gym. We got booked up, and we looked a hell of a lot better. I had a lot more handsome than those guys. But those old dudes could rug, man, and they could do it.

I mean, I had, you know, my team started a man. He was like chain smoker and could, you know, he used to show up for a PT test. He'd light a cigarette, take a couple of puffs, run the two-mile run be back before a cigarette was out. You know what I mean? He was a,

you know, I don't know how he did it, but they were, they were different, different guy to human. Different guys, man. And, and, um,

and, um, I just, I don't know how to describe it. And it's not that it's better. Um, because are certainly, our guys in the last,

over the last 20 years have been, you know, accounting for themselves very well. But they were different guys. And, and, um, I think it's, it would be a lot more stressful to be in the environment where you

didn't have any support where, they flew you in in a Huey, kicked you out in the jungle, and said, see you in a month. It's different. Till was talking about weighing 140 pounds out there, 150 pounds, carrying 80, 800 pound total. That's wild, jungle. Yeah. No, and, you know, you have to take care yourself. You got to, you know, your feet, you're getting bug bites.

know yeah Vietnam David Hackworth you know he he said like because he was in Korea and he was in Vietnam and he was at the tail end of World War II he didn't fight in World War II but you know he was like one of the occupying forces and he and he said Vietnam was the worst Vietnam was the worst it was just like yeah the jungle mosquitoes the foot rot the the lack of food he said it was like terrible yeah just terrible you know you never feel good you know um dis and tree the whole line yards and I haven't done a lot of of jungle work but I did some I did a jungle school down in an army jungle school down in Panama Panama yeah JARTs or so I got enough of it to know that I I don't like it and I remember

when I went down there for jungle school it was like I got a packing list and I was like take all it all this shit mosquito net you know all this and I was famous for like I don't need that I don't need that I don't need that I don't need that and when I got there and I saw the first initial brief about the bats and the snakes and the and all the shit I was like holy shit and so I hit that jungle, man. My first order of business was building like my Swiss family Robinson. It was 10 feet off the ground. But it's a different environment.

Yeah. Yeah, the CQC and even vehicles. Like when I first got to Steel Team 1, 1991, if we had to use vehicles, we would call it a helo truck. They'd be like, oh, we have to use a helo truck because we don't have real heloes. But the idea that we would use vehicles to go on an operation was like it was, It wasn't a thing. And when I was in Iraq, I mean, I never actually went on the helicopter operation in my life.

I only took vehicles, man. Only took vehicles to do ops. So it's like a totally different, totally different mindset to think, yeah, actually, it's like you, you said the first time you're ever on an APC was going on a freaking combat operation, you know? I'd never been on. We've never seen one. And, but yeah. Yeah, cool. So what came after Panama?

Um, so, um, you mentioned, were you, were you doing, one of the Piffwick operations over in Bosnia? Yeah, but that was after, that was in the mid-90s. So after, so first, it would have been Desert Storm. So, um, shortly after Panano, we had Desert Storm. Okay. And, um, um, that was my first exposure to life on life as a sailor. So, um, we put on a ship somewhere. Yeah, put on the Guadalcanal.

Get some. Yeah. And, um, we got into all kinds of trouble, man. We were all over. I didn't know there were certain stairwells that couldn't go up. I just went everywhere. And, you know, I didn't know you weren't supposed to be up on a flight tank. But I learned enough on that trip to know that when I joined the Army, I made the right call.

I was like, shit, dude. I would hate to be a guy that joined the Navy thinking I'm going to be a seal and not make it through buds and then up on one of them butts. That's the biggest risk in the seal pipeline. You know, if you don't make it through the Q course, you can be an infantryman, a freaking badass machine. gunner in a freaking infantry platoon, which is awesome. Yeah. If you don't make it through seal training, you can be on a ship. And look, there's some people that's what they want to do.

And God bless them. Like, there's some people that are totally into that. They're motorheads. They like freaking engines. They like working. They love that stuff. And I'm going to tell you, dude, when I, when I, um, we would, uh, launch the heels off off that boat.

And we couldn't launch them all at once. So we had, we had, we would move them up on the elevator to the flight deck. We would launch them, you know, fold the blades out, launch them. Then we would fly around. and wait for the next sortie to come up. And it gave me goosebumps because you're flying around that, I don't know what ships, vessels, I guess, a company, the Guadalcanal. But whatever it was, the badass battle group.

I was a, holy shit, dude. I mean, there were hundreds of, there were jets flying over, helo's flying around boats, and it was night so you could see the phosphorus coming off the props. I was like, oh, my God, dude. I don't, I feel sorry for the other guys. I mean, look at this. And it was the most awesome display of American military power I'd ever seen.

You know, when you put all that together, and it was, it was just, and I was very impressed with the, um, um, the way that ship operates. It's a machine. Yep. The guys are a machine. It's like, I mean, they're, you know, doing whatever, whatever is they do. I don't really understand.

Did you ever even do a replenishment under, underway replenishment, where they're getting supplies from another ship? That's, when you see that stuff, there's like a big giant supply ship that, pulls alongside in a sea state. There's freaking lines getting passed back and forth. It's total chaos. And it's freaking dangerous as hell. And they do that, you know, whatever.

Every three weeks, they're doing this massive free supplies. It's impressive. It was really impressive. I mean, not that I'd want to live that lifestyle, but man, dude. Yeah. I mean, you know, I literally gave me, still gives me goosebumps. I was on a ship and I was, we were getting ready. It was like 2 o'clock in the morning.

There's a freaking massive storm going through. It's raining. and there's big waves coming through the bottom of the ship, and we're launching our boats off the back of the ship. And there's a boatswain's mate. This black dude, he's a bosun's mate, and he's up there making things happen. And we're getting ready to launch waves coming in.

And he looks at me and he goes, damn, I'm glad I don't have your job. And I look back and I'm sad, well, dude, I'm bad I don't have yours. So we're even. And we fist-bunked and rolled out. But that's a thing, you know, like that's what he's into. Like, that's a badass job for him. And that wasn't a job for me. me, but, you know, put me out in the water and I'm going to go get it. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I would

take your job, but, but, yeah, you know, and there's all kinds of, like, it's almost a class system on the boat. It's like, you got little dudes that were in different colors and different rules. I remember I was at E7, so I made E7 and seven years in the Army. Damn. Yeah. And, but that's not uncommon in special operations, yeah. But E7 and seven, E8 and 12. Nice. Yeah. And, and, um, but I was, you know, it seems like, that the mess hall is always open in the Navy. I mean, it's like never shuts down. There's like 10 males a day or something.

But so we're on the Guadalcanal, and I'm standing in this long line, getting ready to go through the mess line, and see this sign that says, Chief's mess, E-7s and above. I'm like, well, fuck, I'm an E-7. I was 26. You know, and...

That's a young-looking chief, man. And I was young-looking anyway. I mean, I didn't even have whiskers, you know. And I look like a kid. You know, I was 165 pounds, 5-8, baby-faced kid, and no rank, you know. And I thought, well, I'm seven. I walked in there and there was a bunch of these old dudes that were like 150 years old sitting in there and they were like, and it wasn't big. It wasn't much bigger than this room.

And but the food was a lot better. Hell yeah. And I was like, and then you looked at me, I sat down and guys, you know, giving me the stink eye. And he walks over and goes, hey, this is these sevens in the both. and I said well I'm an E7 and I pull my ID card and he goes

no way and he goes come over here look at this dude he goes here at E7 I said yeah and I said he goes

and I said not only that all my buddies are E7s too and he goes and finally they had to make a rule no more army guys in the Chief's mess but you blew it for everyone

you should have kept your mouths yeah just freaking gone in there got in there got that good but yeah it was cool I remember walking up a stairway

one time there's a marine and standing at the top it was like the boss stairway or something I was like, you know, I have a clue. But I was all over. I was exploring.

You know, I was doing what I did in Brackapville, Texas. I was all over the place. So what was your, what missions did you do in the first Gulf War there? So, um, actually worked a lot with Red Team on this one. We didn't do the mission, but it was called, uh, uh, Pacific Wind. So if you remember when the Iraqis rolled into Kuwait City, they surround, they didn't take physically take the embassy, but they surround. rounded the embassy.

So they were, they posted up on the walls around the embassy. And so, um, um, before we were going to do anything,

it was kind of like the current muse situation. We don't want to do something and have them kill the guys in the embassy. And I want to say there was 27 staff remaining in the embassy. I might be wrong about that. I think it's close though because I remember we,

we, we put 32 people on a black hawk and train them. 32. And we put them in standing up and we had them all sit down at the same time. And I was like, there's no way you get 32 dozen on a blackout. We did. So we were trying to figure out. That's freaking amazing.

Yeah, we were trying to figure out, um, hey, if we lose a helo, how are we going to split them up? We lose two helos. How are we going to split them up? What if we only have one helo, can we do it? And we're like, and the pilot's like, you can carry the weight. The cube is the problem, right? You're not going to, you're not going to overload it. You're going to cube it.

And so we're like, well, how can we get them all in there? So we took a bunch of role players, put them in the heel of standing up, and then had them all sit down and basically sitting on each other's laps, but without the august tanks. So we pulled the ox tanks out. But I think it was 32 dudes. We put them out there. A lot of people.

But our mission was to go in to lead the – before the first shots of the war we're going to be. We're going to get the embassy back. And so we were going to go. going, and that's the first time I ever saw a precision guided weapons. Because I remember they were talking about, we're going to bomb all these dudes. And we're thinking, okay, how's that? You know, that's pretty close, right?

And, you know, we're comfortable with it, and they started explaining the capabilities. And I was like, okay, we'll see if it works. But we were doing it in training. We were running, you know, live fire training with ordinance and everything. And we would have to, it would throw the debris so high in the air. have to pause the helos because the falling debris would knock the Hilo out. But, and we worked with your counterparts in the Navy. Plan was to go in by Hilo and then fly out by Hilo,

but then they were going to come in to secure the beach and as an alternate X-Ville, we were going to get on boats and go out. And they integrated with the mission on the ground as well. So it was really cool. And that's about the time we started working more closely, with the Navy counterparts. Because up to that time, you know, if you look back

at the original gangsters of Tier 1 units, you had Marchenko, and then you had Charlie Beckwith. And they evolved differently. I can't remember which one came first, but about the same time, they started developing their capability.

And it took guys like that to get that going, especially in the Army, because, you know, like I told you earlier, the big army is not necessarily friends with special operations. You know, they see us as, you know, renegades. And it took those kind of personalities

to push that, through, you know. And they didn't always work well together. And consequently, the organization didn't work well together. Guys were the same kind of guys, you know, just guys. But that's the first time I started working very closely with a Navy counterparts in Tier 1 unit in the Navy. Met some really good guys there, Art Tolkien, Fitz Fitz, all those guys. And became yarded in with the Red Team.

That's a, never forget it. They fed me changled chicken. We did it underway. And I got back for the hot wash and I said, hey, you want anything to eat? And I said, yeah. And they had some chicken there. And I ate like, I must eat like a bucket of Kentucky fried chicken. And nobody else was eating.

Right. I was going to say, was it better coming up or going out or coming out? You know where I'm going. But they brought in this big buffalo hat in a trash can and a big beer bomb. And they called me up and yarded me in. And it went down and it came up with chicken, man. And I wondered why they pulled a trash can. I had no clue what was going on.

They pulled a trash can up. And I was like, it took me about three seconds to realize what that trash can was for. It's like when you're about to get dusted by the mafia and you walk into the living room and there's plastic out on the floor, you're like, damn, I screwed up. Yeah. But we focused primarily on that one.

That was my section's mission without going into too much detail. So that was our mission. It was the primary mission. And then the other guys in the unit at the time were hunting scuds, right? We never, because our mission was the focal point, we never got in a scud hunting business. So we sat there on that one. At some point, the Iraqis pulled away from it and it went away. We never did anything with it.

But we sat there on standby to do it. But another great workup, training workup, where I learned a lot, but really significantly for me is that's the very first time we started working closely with a red team and and and then shortly after that came with something called the george cycle I don't know if you ever heard that it's called the joint operational readiness training cycle these were like big giant exercises um yes but it was a somebody whoever came up with it super smart okay right because it was um we started working more closely with our naval counterparts always worked with task force 160th and so

the Navy working and Rangers started because Downing was I can't remember if he was the J-Saw commander at the time but he started integrating the Rangers more because we used to kind of work in a silo and when I was in a Tier 1 unit in Army we didn't really work with other guys if we needed more guys we called another squadron and so but we didn't reach outside of our own little little silo to for numbers but we would go do an exercise or do like like like the deal in Kuwait and one time you'd be with one team next time it'd be a different team all good you know but different and so you kind of got to learn and get to know each other over and over again by the time you go through a couple years goes

by it may be different guys so um they said we're going to pair we're going to make this official we're going to pair up uh red team see bravo company Rangers, B company task force 160th. So every time you go somewhere, that's your team. Got it. Right. So I got to know the guys really well. I'd spend time up in, you know, up in Virginia. They'd come down in North Carolina, knew all the pilots. And I was talking to Bruno Fallon about this the other day. Oh, yeah, it was great. Because we, I, truthfully, I worked with other squadrons in the unit, knew them because I'd gone through selection with them and we worked closely. but as far as like physically working with them, I worked with guys from the Navy more than I worked with the guys in the other squadrons

because every time we would deploy on a training hop, they would come with us. Every time we went to combat, they would come with us. And it was just really cool. It was great for the community. They needed it. Yeah. Need to have those relationships. Yeah, and they become very important.

It's a lot easier to go to war with somebody that you know and trust than it is with a stranger. But it was a cool thing. And so then you get done with, you get done with Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and what's next on the plate? When do you guys start? When does Somalia come up on the radar? 93. So Desert Storm was 91? Yes.

1990, 91. And I should know that day about it. 90. No, no, no. You're right. It's 90. And then 90 was the buildup and then in March of 91. Yeah.

You got to forgive my memory. It all kind of runs together. but I made team leader. I did. Right after, actually in the first Gulf War, I was over with England. I was doing an exchange with Brits. So I worked with Tutu for about six months.

Another cool bunch of dudes. Loved them. Yeah, cool. Funny. Not only do they work hard, they don't have to play hard, right? And so, and it was just a cool bunch of dudes. So I actually was over there with them when I got called back. I was like, you can't come home.

We've got something going on. My wife's a Brit. And so I'm over in Iraq and we're getting ready to do a bunch of hits. And we're hitting some targets and the SAS is hitting some targets. Other people are hitting targets. But we're all kind of talking together. So I'm sitting there at this with the, standing with the Brit, like the, whatever, troop commander. And we're looking at the battle map and we're like going, yeah, I'll go here and, you know, looking at the point and at the targets.

And I go, hey, man, I'm actually married to a Brit. and the dude without missing a beat, he just keeps looking at the map and he goes, sorry to hear that, mate. And then we just kept breathing. It was pretty good. No, they're awesome dudes, man. And very good.

And I would argue that knowing what I know, I wasn't one of the original gangsters of the SMU, but Charlie Beckwith and Bucky Burris had both gone over and gone through the selection for Tutu. And I want to say, spent three years over there each, and they came back with an epiphany. They were like, and they had both been green berets in Vietnam. And they knew, though, they could see that the earth was moving. And they were like, we're not in a jungle anymore. And these guys, we can learn something

from these guys. And they organized the Army side, almost identical in the selection process and in the structure of the unit and everything else to the two, too. And they were, they were, They were very, very instrumental in getting the Army SMU on the right track early on. And so did you do like a full pet billet two years over there or something like that? No, I did a short look. So they had the long look, which was a two-year billet and a short look, which was six months. And I did a six-month short look and was on the end of that when the golf thing kicked off. And then they would send guys over with us and do the short look.

And I work with B Squadron primarily, which was the guys who were – So when I left to go back at the start of the Gulf Desert Desert Storm, the guys I was working with the Brovado 2, Zero. Got it. Right. So I knew the guys that ran out of their hide site and ran off into the desert. And I think only one of them to survive isn't Colin Armstrong. But super dudes. I still talked to them today.

You know, you make those friendships that last a lifetime. But I learned a lot from them. and I think that, again, I've been out for a while, but I think both on the Navy, our Navy side and on the Army side, they work a lot closer with them now. I think you guys did a lot of work with them. The Brits are pros, man. They're pros.

They've been done actually for thousands of years, man. They've been sneaking up on dudes for a long time, and they're really good at it. So when did you start hearing about Somalia? So I got back from Gulf War and I made team leader. So I'd been at about five years, a little, maybe four and a half, five years. Young dude is a T.

And there was a couple things going on at the time that were big, big things. So yeah, the other two squadrons, A&B, had been around longer. There was a big mission that everybody was working on, and they were the ones that were kind of in the queue to get it. And C squadron was kind of left hanging. And this kind of weird, mission came up in Somalia that was more like a like a peacekeeping mission and it

started out it was going to be a team of guys and it but it was we looked at it as kind of almost like a you know they're just the one that said us keep us busy and and then it started growing and then the other one went away so they they so now we're the we're the only missions going down and it's Somalia and but now they're not going to pull it from us because we've been doing a workup on it. And again, we were on the jorts, so we're working with Red team, Bravo Company from the Rangers, and then big company task force 160th. And then we had Rick Kaiser, Howard Wazden, Homer Near Pass, and that was one more guy. I can't remember the name, but

John Day? Might be, yeah, it might be. But he was, they were down there with us, and we were doing the workup, and it just grew, it grew to a squadron size of thing. And then, of course, Everybody knows the story on how it played out. But we went over, got there in, like, I was like June, June of 93. Again, my memory fails me. Maybe in July, it may have been, you know, May, I don't know. But summer of the 93, we went over, and we, of course, the mission was killer capture.

One guy, Mohammed Adid, and then disrupt his infrastructure, if he could. And then as soon as we got there, a day we got there, we got hit with a mortar. And no casualties, but then we started going out and doing missions. And the word on the street was that he was gone and he left the country. We didn't know for sure, but nobody had seen him for a while. So we're like, he's probably gone. So we focused on his team. So like Osmondado, Omar Salad, and those guys, started rolling up his staff.

And we did a lot of missions, but most of them didn't amount anything. But there were seven significant ones, including October 3rd, which was rolling up the whole staff. How did you feel, so you guys, you know, you start doing these hits out there. Did you feel like you guys had a pretty, like pretty, I don't want to say cookie cutter, but I want to say cookie cutter. Like when I was in Baghdad, like we got through a point where it was just, we could just roll out. Temp 15 minutes, boom. Template. Yeah.

You guys got in that mode? We did, and we had to, as probably you had to as well. So we would get these, it wasn't like traditionally you get to look at a target, and you can take as long as you want to to work up on it, right? Some of these guys may only show up for five minutes, and you may get, hey, there they are. And so you couldn't go into the talk and put everybody in there and go through a planning cycle. You had to have that plan in a library, right, to pick from them. You had to go, it's a motorcade.

it's a it's a building you know it's a series of buildings so you know single building single structure multi-structure motorcade um stuff like that we had those things kind of a couple of courses of action for each one of those standard operating procedure yeah template plan cookie cutter as you said my uh my commanding officer is like halfway through my first deployment to iraq he's like hey you know I want to brief how much time do you guys need to be able to to launch on a mission. Like, how much time do you need? And I go, 15 minutes. And he's like, no, really? And I go, no, really, 15 minutes. Like, if you give me 15 minutes, guys will have in the gear and we'll be in the, and the only thing I need is on the way, when we get on

the road, if you pass me the target location and the frequency of the battle space commander that they're on, we're good. And we did that multiple occasions, like 15 minutes, let's roll. So sounds like you guys were in that mode. Yeah, same thing. And literally, we used to get the, we get a, we had an air horn that would go off. And the air horn would go off. The team leaders would run to the talk. The assistant team leader in the team would equip the birds, right? And so they'd run out there with the fast ropes and they'd load the birds and the

rotors were turning and they were already on the aircraft. So I would be in the talk. And for example, when we hit Osmondado, he was a vehicle. And we rolled in and they said, we were watching it on the camera. we saw a blue fiat driving down Army Forces Boulevard and we're like, okay, and we knew, okay, this is the way this is going to go down because we have the plan already.

And I ran out to the aircraft and, you know, rotors turning, guys sitting on there and I had a illuminated board with a grease marker. I drew a car, car, car, I drew a helo, helo, helo, helo, and I went, and they went, just like this, not a word passed between us. Yeah.

And within, you know, 15 minutes, we were airborne. And, of course, we got it done. And it works for you and against you. You really cannot operate in that environment without that kind of thing. You know, so people have often said, well, did you think doing the same thing over and over and over again was going to hurt you? Well, yeah, what the option is just to not do it. You know, let it go, you know, because you can't respond fast enough. So you have to have, you have to have some.

sort of way to launch, you know, on something that happens that quick. But that's the way we did it over there. And it worked for us until it didn't, you know. So going on October 3rd, it's the same thing again, right? Like you basically get Intel and it's go time. Yeah. So October 3rd, you know, we were at that point, we were like, man, we've rolled everybody up. We've gone out on a lot of dry holes.

You know, sometimes you get good information, sometimes you wouldn't. And they said, and it wasn't like a fast response. They said, hey, we've got something going on. And it was Sunday afternoon. We got something, Sunday morning. We got something going on. One team leaders come into the talk for a minute, came in. And we were literally in black running shorts, you know, sunning out there on the beach

and over the issue. And they said, come on in. So we went in and, you know, I remember sitting there and they go, this is there's a meeting and it's a bunch of his guys and um it's supposed to be here but we're not sure about it yet we got one source that's saying it's going to happen and but we don't have anything to back it up confirm it so let's keep an eye on it you know and um we were like asking it yeah yeah let's go son let's go up the sun yeah yeah yeah go get some go get an MRI man and um but uh we started to watch it develop through the day you know and then they had a backup source

And they didn't know each other. So they were both telling the same story, independent of each other. And then we started watching stuff on the ground, started seeing guys show up. All right, oh, wait a minute. This looks like it might be legit. And then one of the sources, they told him, they said, hey, look, we want you to pull up.

They put a literally in the movie, they put an X on top of his car. And they said, we want you to pull up next to the, building where you're telling us that this is going to go down and lift your hood right and um they were had a west cam ball on him and they also were filming him with the p3 o'rion so they were watching him through surveillance aircraft and we're watching it real time and he pulls up short about a block short and like that's not the building because we know the other guy saying it doesn't batch right and so they call him up and they said hey bud are you sure that's the right place and he goes no it's not he goes

but they've got armed guards out and i can't go any further it's a block up on the right and so we're like okay now now it's confirmed and it went from being this ain't going to happen to horns blowing and we launched and um um flew in and um first thing i noticed was that um when we launched we saw they had they used to light tires on fire to signal everybody we saw that pretty early on October 3rd as soon as we lay and they were watching the airfield and they also we think they had some some embeds and some of the UN troops who occupied the same airfield that we did so we think they had their guys in you know in some of these smaller country teams that were that were you know ratting us out basically and um but we flew in and he went And we were really easy. I mean... Just normal hit. Yeah, normal hit.

We did... That was probably the first time the gunbirds ever went hot on insertion now. So we were let out by two little bird gunships. And I would, you know, sitting on the skids on outside the aircraft, I would always watch the gunships in the front. And if they flew past and I was like, okay, it's not... They didn't see anything to shoot, you know? So it's not... hot. At least it wasn't when they went by it. But this time they did their pop-up and came down

and cut list with the with the many guns. And I was like, okay, we're hot. And they were, you know, shooting started before we even got on the ground. So, but once we got on the target building, you know, like, and I'm sure you've seen it. I mean, if you get eyeballed with them, they don't want them to do with a fight, you know, you know, they, If they think they can do it, get away with it, they're good, but, you know, they don't want, they don't want none of it when it's, when it's looking on the face. But, um, um, we didn't have any, any, um, gun fights in the building. They laid their stuff down and gave up.

But, um, I had the, um, lower level on the, um, I guess, North, east side of the building. And, um, look like from imagery that we could go in there. and then link up with the other teams and go up the stairs, but there was no passage way through. So went in the back. There were several guys there. We cuffed them, left them,

and then moved around the building until the south side of building went in. And then by that time, the other teams had already gone up this cleared the first level on their side and then gone up to the second level and captured the dude. There was a meeting, I think it was 15 guys or something like that. I can't remember the number,

but they were all sitting down on the rug with tea, you know, having their meeting. And it was everybody we thought it was going to be. And, but it was quick. It was literally. When you got up there, they were already cuffed? Yeah, they were already cuffing them. Yeah. Right.

They were already working it. And then we were standing there kind of, you know, with nothing to do. And so I said, let's move to the roof and pull security, waiting for the, you know, waiting for the aircraft to come get us. And they already called Lori, which was a, you know. Xville. And so... Now, the Ranger had already fallen out of the... Yes, yeah, Ranger's...

That's a little bit of a... Well, it's a major issue for him, but it's an issue to the operation. Yeah, for sure it is. And you're tracking that at this point? Yeah, we were. And so, and I forgot to mention that, we went in, did our clearing on the north, east side of that building, and then we came out, they were already working at Kazzbek. And he had fallen like 90 feet off a fast rope, really, really a bad fall, young kid.

But now we're packaging him for medevac. And so our medics are working on the issue. And I find out, Jocko, I find out more about this thing every day. Because there was so much stuff going on around us. I was like, I was talking to Scott Miller a couple weeks ago. And he told me one of his problems from Colin Exfell was that when the medic, our medic, went over to help the Ranger medics with the Kazavak, nobody, nobody counted him, so they didn't know he was. So when they're doing headcount, you're going, where is he? Where is he?

So there was a loss of accountability, not blaming anybody, but that's the shit that happens. Right? And so he can't really truly call for Exville until he has his guys, and we're missing a guy. And I never, I never knew that. You know, that's something that was at his level. But I mean, I knew the medic was there. If anybody had asked me, hey, where's Bart Bullock? because they were working on a casually. But they're trying to do head counts and they're getting a man short. You know, where's this bugger?

You know? But anyway, while they were, you know, cuffing these guys up, getting ready to move them, I started, I took myself to go to the roof. So we went up to the roof, and as I got to the roof, a buddy of my name, Tony Copper, super dude, another just super operator.

He was saying, hey, we're getting, keep your head down, we're getting, the fire's, increasing. So we got small arms fire coming in, so keep your head down. And a couple of RPGs have gone over to build it and stuff like that. But still nothing to, you know, it's not like D-Day. You know, it was just kind of a, you know,

sporadic, you know, I mean, you know, just looking at. So you're not, you're not really feeling a huge escalation yet? We're feeling it. And there's this, it's kind of like, my analogy, I've never played quarterback in football. I never, I played football, but I never saw the ball, you know, but my analogy would be a guy standing in the pocket. You know, if you've been in standing there a while, you're kind of like, okay, I don't see anything yet, but...

I need to get rid of this ball. But something needs to happen pretty quick because I've been here a while. It's like a clock that starts ticking, and that's the best analogy I can get it. No, that makes sense. But I started to get that feeling. It's like, oh, man, we've got to get out of here. We've been here a lot longer than all the other things, you know, that we've done.

And I know we've got a casualty. And as I'm talking to Tony, we see the heel will get hit. And going back to what I said before, I try to shoot a vehicle with AT4 or a law going 15 miles an hour at 20 meters and I miss half the time. That has to be just a miracle shot.

I mean, I can't, because I know I couldn't do it. I was like, holy shit, you know. And we both looked each other and we watched it. and we watched it and it literally looked like it was going in slow motion and it just, of course it spanned faster and faster and faster than it. Then we saw it go down behind the buildings maybe a little

less than a mile away and still hard for me to judge a distance on it but all I saw was debris, a debris field and dirt and I was like, well, we got a bird down and of course that changes everything. Now it's another mission. You've done one mission which is the

target building but now you've got a search and rescue mission and recovery. And so and we had a problem. We had prisoners and we had rangers that had pulled up to transport prisoners that were sitting there in vehicles

because the plan was a lot of more vehicles and get them out. And now these vehicles have been exposed for a long time because we got a casualty. Right? And so things are...

It's never just one thing. It's starting to compound. Yeah, it's never one thing. It's always, you know, a couple things that line up. And so, So Miller calls us down and he said, hey, here's what we're going to do.

I need one team to go with the prisoners with the Rangers on the motor cave. And that was Matt Ryerson's team, C-Tee might have to get at the time. Super guy. And rescue guys, you need to move to the crash site and handle that problem, get the survivors, take casualties if we got them and get them ready to movement. And, you know, when I got down off the building, things look a lot different on the ground than they do from four stories of them looking down.

It's kind of like we talked about, you know, if you're looking at a football game from above, it's really easy to see the field. But once we got on the ground, even though I knew the general place where the Gelo had gone down, we were like, okay, we're headed in the right direction generally,

but things weren't, it's not like in America where streets, you know, I have street signs and stuff. You know, you're like, we're going to move east, and then we're going to get to move a little bit north, but then, you know, where is it? It's an alleyway and a, you know, a dead-in alleyway. And now it's busy because now all these guys had come in to surround the building

and shoot at the building, the bad guys. Now you're pushing out through them. So you're actually kind of, they had a loose, what I call a loose perimeter around that building that was out in several blocks. So now you're not only fighting to the aircraft, you're fighting out of the perimeter that the enemy is starting to accidentally. assemble, right? They didn't do it on purpose, but they were just

coming in from all directions. Just like mob mentality. And so we started getting a lot of fire on the ground, you know, usually at the intersections. So you hit an intersection and left and right come at you. And it's you and you got a bunch of rangers with you too.

Yeah, so it's a couple of assault teams and in one of the ranger blocking positions that had been, we positioned blocking positions around the target building, roughly four corners. and about maybe a half a block out. Right. So they weren't right on the building, but they were maybe a half a block out

on the four corners. And as we started moving down that road, we just moved into a blocking position. They were already there. So they were blocking. And we said, come with us. So they just picked up and came with us, right? So now, you know, we had,

would have been three teams, three tier one teams, and then a range of block and position. that was around 12 dudes, you know. And one of the other block of position on the, on the sister block of position on the other corner had seen the aircraft. They were on the same street ground. And they moved directly to it.

So now they're paralleling each other. Right. So I've got a block of position with me and three teams. And I wasn't in charge. I was a brand new team leader. So you had Scottie Miller, who was a captain at the time. Awesome dude. You know, and then you had our troop sergeant major, been forever at the time, and I can't remember the other one.

But Scotty was the ground force commander, right? And so we were moving with him. And we were a point, so F-team. I was F-team leader. We were point at the time. And we were listening on the radio so quickly. One more block up, more block up, turn left. But the vehicles were on the same freak.

So he's given directions to two units. and we're both hearing them, right? Hindsight, 2020. You know, don't do that again. Did you guys, were you guys each wearing a radio? Like, each individual wearing a radio? Each individual had a radio that was on the assault freak. That was on the assault freak.

And then the vehicles were on the assault freak as well? I was a TL and I had two radios. So I had a radio that was on the assault freak and then I had a command freak radio. Got it. And I think the vehicles were on the command freak. They were not on the assault freak. Right.

They were on their own freak, but I mean, they were on, they had their own internal comps, but they also were on the assault freak. So the directions that were coming down to us, but were on the command freak. So I'm listening to the command freak. It's like, go turn left, turn left. No, no, not you. Right. So, you know, so it was a cluster, right, on comms.

And I've been told that since I was a kid in Special Forces. First thing to kill you is comms. You know, you better have that wire. It's better than, more important than shooting. But it had worked for so many times before we didn't see a reason not to do that. You know, but so. Yeah, it's a, it's, uh, Com's always, you know, like you said, it's like the most important thing that'll,

no one wants to talk about it, but it's, it's where major problems can ensue. But it's interesting for me to hear this. I was always like the, the most strict person about talking on the, radio like if you if you were on the assault force you weren't talking on the radio unless you were like gonna die like no one if you were down the hallway and I had something to tell you I'd either yell at you or I'd walk down there and grab you and be like hey this is what's going on but I would never get on the radio and say I you know hey hey can you can push push two guys down like you weren't allowed to do that in my troop the only people that were talking on the

radios would be people that needed to talk on the radio like a vehicle that needs to move because he's far away from another vehicle. But in a situation like that, it's going to get clustered really quickly. I tell you, man, I'm lucky I wasn't a O because Miller, I had two radios. It was all my little brain could handle. Miller had like four.

And he was talking to the, on the gun freak, he was talking on the assault freak. He was on everything. And I was like, hey, man, he must be like a genius, man. Because I literally one more radio would have. I guess my little head wide open. But, and it was, as you can imagine, it was like, I mean, you're, and you know how it is. It's like, and back then we didn't have great comms.

I mean, great. We had throat mics. Yeah, God. We had throat mics, dude. And you didn't have the noise cancelling headsets? We didn't. Yeah, man. It's a different game.

In fact, we had bone phones, I think. Bone phones, I think. And I didn't even have ear plugs in. I remember my ears are ringing for a month at that. but um but um but uh we didn't have the we had we had uh skateboard helmets pro tex yeah and um um funny uh funny backstory to it is and again i love i love the navy guys and i was by this time i'm buddies with these dudes but um we figured out real quick that um we needed ballistic helmets and we never had that we had skateboard helmets um and i'm still

kind of torn on whether but back then they were the they were the k-pots they were not like the modern day Kevler helmets. They didn't have integrated comms and nod mounts and all that shit on it. They were like, you know, German SS helmets.

Yeah, yeah. But our buddies up at Red, red team had some helmets that were a little better. They were like, they were like one generation up from that kid. Yeah, a little bit better.

I forget what they were called, but yeah. A little bit better. And so they heard about what happened and they sent there. helmets down, right, from, from six. And there was a note on top of them. And, hey, guys, sorry here, but what happened. And please, please, please, to accept this gift from six, but maybe next time you'll ask for the whole operator to go with it.

So, even in that, you know, you had the, you had the, the function. I loved it. But, but, yeah, we, we moved and we find, and again, we're shooting at this point, we've taken a couple of minor casualties and you got the guy that fell off the helo and um then we turned i went past the um the they said i went past the street we're supposed to turn on maybe 10 meters did you have a battle map with you we did big ass big ass big ass one big ass one we don't i think today they're doing this off of tablets yeah yeah yeah but we had a big one but um and we had it you know the old chocolate chip desert cameys with the with the map that we've laminated put in our pocket that you know um but it was not accurate.

I mean, it was generally accurate, but people just build houses in the middle road and stuff. You know that, so it was, it was good at orienting you, but when you got down into the minutiae of the city, it was kind of like, you know, that shack's not on the map. You weren't going to make terrain feature calls. No, no, it generally gets you there. But I got the call to turn a little bit late,

because we'd already, you know, we're shooting and fighting, shooting and fighting, pushed forward. And then I was like, okay, you went too far. Right. Now, I was a point, point team. So F team was a point. But instead of just totally reorganizing everybody

and getting back in the lineup, we just backed it up. So now the guys that were on a trail were in point, right? And as soon as we made that turn north, they got hammered. And we had six, one KIA, right there was Earl Fillmore and then probably six or seven other guys

severely wounded in just a couple of minutes of gunfight. And we couldn't see the heel but we knew it was a couple blocks up. And we had split the column one on the right side of the road, one on the left

side of the road. And we were cross-covering as we moved up. And we stopped after we made that turn north and we kind of rearranged the formation where now I'm in the I'm in the trail we stopped because we were like

okay is it this street or the next street and we're waiting for the call on the radio and because we can't physically see it you know and again you're in the street and now it's a gunfight and I remember Earl looking around and he's sitting there on a corner you know and he's waiting for somebody to tell him something he turns around he goes

what are we doing you know and uh and that's and he dropped right there but um and then um i've got um one guy next to me that was shot through the arm he was shooting like this and around came in just above the wrist came out the wrist hit him in the bicep and came out the tricep and um and he just looked at me and he yelled and he rolled over his big goes god he was that it fucking hurt. You know, and I remember thinking, I was like,

yeah, I bet it did, you know, and then as we were picking him up, you know, I had him like, kind of lifting him up. We're going to walk him in a building

and my, my buddy was with us. We were all kind of together behind a pile of rubble. And he got hit in the back, and he dropped. And, man,

he, you know, of course, letting everybody know he'd be hit because it was hurt. But then I was laying on top of him and I was trying to find the wound. And, you know, going through your mind, you must stuff God, whatever I'm

going to do. And I couldn't find it. And then I felt something hot on the back of my hand. And the round had gone all the way through the Kevlar. And the tip of it was sticking out. And so all he felt was blood trauma, but it was hot and it burned a big, you know, blood strong on his back. But his whole, it was hitting him right in the kidney. And, but it didn't go in him. So, but it messed him up. His whole whole back turned black. His groin turned black all the way down both legs, black. So he had some internal bleeding.

But yeah, we took a lot of hits right there in that corner. And then Rangers took some hits there on the corner in the same corner. Because I remember we were kind of like an L, and we had fire coming from this way, and we had a little wall. And maybe it was at the most 10 meters from us. and they would stick their guns up over the wall and shoot, you know, and we were throwing hand grenades over the wall and hitting it with 203.

And the Rangers that Blockham's position that we'd gone through was now behind us. And they came up and they sat down that same spot. And that's where Jim Lechner was. Right. And Jim came up with Captain Steele and he knelt down at that same spot. And I looked out the door and I said, guys, I said, not there. come in and in that short verbal exchange they got hit you know and that's where jim got got hit in the leg and one of the worst leg wounds i've seen lucky he has his leg yeah it's crazy yeah

and um and um and we got him off the street and then um we we we held a casualty uh collection point there and um we're pretty busy and across the street guys have been hit too um and um um had a young young guy that was uh leaving out over there you know And so we're running IVs back and forth across the street. But then we sat there for a bit, and then the SARBerry to come in on the crash site, that's Dan Jalada's aircraft. Really cool dude, if you ever talked to Dan, he's awesome a day. But they all roped in, and within a short period of time, they were all wounded, you know.

And our squadron Sergeant Major was on that bird. It was Tommy Corbyn. He was wounded there. None of them were killed. But they were all wounded. And so there was nobody on the crash site working the problem. You had a bunch of wounded guys doing their best to fight guys off. But nobody there that could solve it.

And so Miller calls them and said, hey, I need you to move up to my position, move up to the aircraft. And I said, I can't see it. Where is it? And he goes, come to me. Come to me. And I'll show you where it's at. And so I'm going to cross the street to Miller with my team. And then he said, there's the tail right there of the aircraft.

And I was like, okay. So we went over, worked the aircraft, and we got there. And, you know, they had the SARBURT had a quickie saw, some manual tools that they were using stuff in. But I'm telling you, if you ever try to get in a Black Hawk with a quickie saw, it's tough. And we went through several blades and couldn't even budget. And when I first one I got there, I was like, you know,

I don't see anybody in an aircraft. And they'd already gotten one of the pilots out. and looking through the rubble, you know, and it was the hot spot on the battlefield. There was, you know, they were shooting into the aircraft. And it had laid up against a wall, and they were throwing hand grenades over the wall into the aircraft, but they weren't pulling the shipping bells off of them.

So they were pulling the pens. But when they pulled them out of the shipping, it must have been brand new, because they still had the shipping bells on them. So there were a bunch of them laying on the ground that would pins out, but no, no, no, You know, they didn't go off because they shouldn't build it off. Thank God, you know.

But sometimes better to be lucky than good, right? So, but... So did you leave the casualty collection point? Were those guys still there and you pushed up to the helots of by yourself? Well, with the rest of your team? With F team, yeah. F team and a Bravo team. So a guy named John Boswell, a good friend of mine.

But we pulled up to the... But we left the casualties there. There were some young rangers there that were pulling security. for the casualty collection point. It was like a block or two? A block south. Okay.

About a block south. And so when we were moving up from Miller's site to a crash site, we were going to move across the street, occupy the corner building, and then bound, building to building to the crash site. And I remember looking across the street and we were going to, we didn't have anybody in the building. So I was like, we got any friendlies in that building. And so we just assumed it was occupied by enemy, by bad guys. And so I got my two or three gunners up, a couple, two or three gunners up from the teams. And we said, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to, we're going

to do a countdown, and we're going to hit all the windows with the two or three rounds, and then we're going to enter. All right. And so we're going to, and so we're going to. again, prep it with 203, and then as you're shooting, we're running across street, we're kicking a door and going. And we got everybody up, we're like, 5, 4, 3, 2, and I saw a flash of light, and my boss says, I saw a gunlight.

And I go, I saw it, is that a gun? He goes, I think that was a gunlight. And I went, okay, we called and said, do you have anybody in the building on this corner? Negative. We have nobody. We have nobody who's okay. Five, four, three, two, gunlight. I'm like, It looked like somebody was clearing You know, and I was like, okay, wait a minute Let's make another call

And while we were making that radio call The door opened up and a green camel that came out I was like shit dude You know, and it was literally like two seconds off A blue on blue And it was some of the guys from the SAR team Some of the wounded guys were ambulatory But they were clearing their way back

Because on the other side of that building was the crash site and that's where the SART team had hunkered down. And they were like, well, we got to clear this because we don't know what's in it. So they cleared the way back and it just happened to be a really good kid that I went to ranger school with this and he was John Belman. He was like an old dude when I went to ranger school and he was like a brand new guy to high school. And he looks across the street and he says, who?

I said, John. He goes, what are you doing? He goes, yeah, we got to, this is the way through. So we went, actually, we followed him back through the crash site. And, but literally, I think back on that, we talked about blue and blue earlier. Second. You know? Yep.

Yep. You know, and I was, again, before we hit record, you know, I was talking through some blue and blue snores. Clearly, I had one where I had an Iraqi guy get killed and one of my guys get wounded. And then, but there was a couple other ones. There was one that I didn't tell you about, but it's in the book, Extreme Ownership, but, you know, the Army, Chris Kyle is on his, he's a sniper. He's on his weapon.

looking and he goes hey man I see so guys in the scope weapon like in and out of the shadows in this building and he talks the platoon commander laif and goes laif like hey is there any army dudes in there because like i see a guy with a scope weapon laif calls hey we see a guy with a scope weapon do you have anyone in this building whatever the building number was the guys are like nope we don't have anyone there and the army guys who we had all lost people from snipers they were like take him take the shot take him out like really encouraging laif to get chris to take the shot. Chris didn't feel he's like, I can't, I can't PID, I can't PID. And Laif finally goes, hey, we're not taking the shot. Can you send someone to clear that building? And the army guys

are okay. Like they were pissed. And I'm not doing the story justice, but they were pissed. I mean, and again, they were pissed because, dude, we're asking them to go hit a building where we think there's enemy. That's not a friendly thing to do, right? They're like, but of course, there are our brothers. And they're like, all right, we're hitting it. You know, stand by. And a minute goes by and Leif sees the guys exit that building to go and hit a different building because there was confusion about what number of building it was.

So, like, again, you know, a millisecond of decision making. Yep, and, you know, it's luck. Yeah, right? You know, and I'm thankful, if we wouldn't have that blue on blue in the beginning, because that first blue on blue that happened with us was in a couple weeks

of maybe three weeks into the deployment, if we wouldn't have had that, we would have had a much worse one. later. Yeah. Because everyone became so paranoid about it that, I mean, you would just be so, like, paranoid. So is there anything worse you can do?

Oh, I know the feeling. Yeah. And both ways, right? So we talked about this earlier. It's like, when I got ready to move, when people say I needed to move from here to there, I was like, man, I'm not real worried about the bad guys. I mean, I can handle that, but the Rangers don't miss. Man, I mean, or an assault team.

if they light you up with a, you know, from an assault team or a ranger squad, you know, you're done. Was it dark? So when you saw that light, was that, were you seeing the light in the late daytime? No, it was pitch black. So it was already pitch black. So it was already dark at this time. Yeah, we had gone through several hours.

So you're super lucky that you could see it because if it was in the daytime, you wouldn't see that light. If it had been in daytime, we wouldn't have. Of course, you might have been able to see them themselves, which could have helped. Yeah, but I'm going to tell you, it was black. So, so we had spent. I'll lose track of the timeline, but around, I think we launched around three in the afternoon. How many mags did you have with you?

210 rounds. And we barred through every one of them. And they were flying over and kicking rucksucks out with preloaded magazines. But we went through a lot more than that. But we were again configured for a 30 minute hit. And everything we'd done at that point in five, ten minutes, we were kicking ass. You know, and we were not equipped. to sustain.

You know, it was like we're going to go in and out. Did you have the extra magazines and stuff already loaded, already in staged in case something happened? Yes, we already loaded them up, put them into bundles. And we always did, we always had that because of you guys. Because of you guys, we always had like in the Humvees, we had extra mags already loaded in the. Ammo and bandoliers ain't going to help you. I mean, it's like, I got it, you know. But yeah, they were already preloaded and stuff like that.

So, and we had some, and we ran out of IVs. You know, we started running, and everybody carried one, and we started running out of IV, so they were dropping med supplies. And I remember listening on the radio, they were talking about that we had one casually in a Ranger junk kid. And if he had been, I mean, I hate to say this, you know, but if he had been, if we'd been able to get him out, he would have lived, but it went up for hours and hours and hours. And we were running IVs over, running him, and finally he was like, yeah, he'd gone.

you know, heartbreaking, you know, but it was, yeah, so it was dark pitch black. Now, so you end up pulling up in one of these buildings for the night, right? At the crash site. So when we moved from our initial point where we got hit, we moved across to Scotty Miller

and then we went to the crash site from there. F-team did. We posted a team So there were a couple teams that moved up The F team was one of them And I could get them mixed up Because it's been a long time The Bravo team I think went

We didn't have anybody on the north side of the prune or for on the crash site We had a SAR team on there And we had moved up from the south So Miller and a couple of guys Were on the west side of the crash When I say west side you're talking Half a block

you know, maybe less. And then we didn't, we had the position that we had just vacated, was occupied by, you had the casualties, but you had a Ranger, Ranger Block in position there too that had some guys who were capable of fighting, and they had ammo. So they kind of had the southern side of it. But nobody was really to the east of the crash site

or to the north of it. So when we pushed over there, when we left Miller's position, we pushed a team on the north side, which was a positive team, and that little courtyard where all the grenades were coming over, he cleared that out and occupied there, so we didn't have to worry about that anymore. And then the F team, my team, moved through the crash site

to the east of it and position ourselves to the east of the east of the east of the crash site to block that on that end. And then so I put, and I had a couple of guys who were not assigned. to the assault force, but they were operators. They were, and I can't remember what they were doing. One of them was on the Sarbird, and one of them had been a, like they were like a backup team. It was kind of like guys who were on affiliate with a team,

but we pushed them up with F-Team to the east of the crash site. And then I went back to the crash site with my ATL and say, hey, we're going to try to get the pilot on. First thing I know, so I couldn't see a pilot. pilot. I was like, there's nothing there. It's just a wreckage, a pile of wreckage. And they'd pulled one of the pilots out, and then I talked to

one of the guys on the Sart team, because no, he's in there. He's down underneath the wreckage. So when a bird crashed, it kind of crashed at a weird angle, and all the engine and stuff collapsed into the crew compartment. So I looked down, and I can see a glove, you know. So we started

trying to take it apart with quickies saws and everything else and went on for hours and we were down to like multi-tools trying to just take stuff apart and meanwhile you know you got

you got in a gunfight and so we got a couple more guys wounded while that was going on and then it got close to the point where where I'm starting to worry like man I can't do it you know I'm like I can't I can't

I don't know what to do to get them out. And that's a, that's a terrible feeling, because you got to, you know, but you're like, it's like, man, I don't know what else I can do, you know, it was just a, I'd never felt that before where I was like, man, I, if I had a crane, I couldn't get him out, you know, and, um, and then I, um, heard a main gun from a tank. It was like, boom, I was it, man, what was that, you know? And, um, heard it again. and then I got a call that hey leave Ann Arsdale

so Colonel Van Arsdale at the time really good dude he had been in C Squadron before and then he moved over to J-Socke and he was with the J-3 shop and he heard everything that was going on

he was over in the talk listened to this on the radio and said, okay, we're going in, going in. So on his own accord, he got up, left his post, went down to the Malaysians, who, again, this is a UN compound.

So we had the Malaysians in the Pachies. And he goes, give me your APCs. Right. And they had like a, their version of an APC, which looks kind of like a lav, right, like a Marine Corps laugh. I can't remember who made it, but there was a little wheel, armor personnel care with a gun on top of it.

Don't ask me what kind. It was like a 30 millimeter or something like that. But so he got them and he walked over to the Packies and said, give me your tanks, right, with the drivers. And so he basically cobbled together this reaction force of UN guys in 10th Mountain. There was a 10th Mountain unit there that was the designated QRF, quick reaction for us. And we never met them. And that's one of the things we did wrong. We were like, I will never use them. But they're there if we need them. We should have gone over and

introduced ourselves and gone through some sort of at least rock trail or something, right? But we never did because we were like, that was so many layers deep. We were like, I would probably never do that. And going back on it now would be the first thing I would do. But he got those guys with, so they were in their Humveys, which by the way, we armored up with sandbags back in. We just piled up-armored humvees. And he had some Malaysian fighting vehicles, you know, for lack of better terms. And then a couple

of pack of tanks. And I remember thinking when he was, most tanks were going off. I was like, well, I hope he knows what he's doing, you know, because, uh, uh, uh, blue on blue with the tank. Wouldn't, wouldn't hurt. But anyway, he came rolling in there. And, um... Did you, now this whole time, the, did you know that Super 6-4 had gone down as well? No. You didn't even. know this happened.

No, I got one radio call early in the day, you know, before we got to the first crash site. So before we got to 6-1, I got a radio call from Granny Sugar. And he said, and it just, he was on the assault net, and it, or the command net, sorry, and I got this weird call. It was like, hey, I was Fox 1 at 10. What's your location? I said, we're en route to the crash site.

And he goes, how long? And at the time, you're thinking, I'm going to be. either in a minute. I said, five mics, and he said, hurry. And that's the last I heard of him. But I didn't know. So when I got to the crash site, I'm thinking he's there at the first crash site. Yeah. And I remember

thinking when I got there, I wonder where he's at. But, you know, you think he's out on a perimeter or something. And never gave him a second thought. But no idea that it went down. And you know, we were so, and everything was invested into the first one.

You know, but, um, um, so the APCs make it to you? Make it there. Well, yeah, they make it up there on, um, um, we had some hubbm these that came in and there made it to the crash site, physically to the crash site and a couple of ABCs that were about maybe 100 meters away in a tank. So, um, but, um, that doesn't make you feel better because they wiped out a bunch of pack of tanked tanks before we got there, right? So, so, um, but it's good to, you know, now at least.

you know, we got some going, you know. And so we pulled the vehicles around and we used the vehicles. We used fast ropes and these heavy-duty toe straps to basically yank the vehicle apart until we could get access. And it went pretty quick. And I'm glad it did because the sun started to come up. And we didn't have our MVGs. We had a couple pairs that we had scavenged off the aircraft. But we went in, you know, in the afternoon thinking we're going to be back and we should have carried them with.

That's another lesson we took from you guys. We never went anywhere. Never go anywhere without them. Never go anywhere without those things. I mean, we might not wear them, but we'd have them in a pouch. If you think about it, it just doesn't make sense not to. Because what if you go in a building, you're in a basement, it's dark. Right?

I mean, you never know when it can get dark. And you may not be planning to stay there until it gets dark, but you might be there. And I would never do. One of the biggest mistakes I ever made. And I made a lot of them, but that's one of the biggest ones. But we had MBGs enough to put out with the guys on like the saw and the two or three gunner. They had, you know, MBGs.

And so the guys out on these little, you know, blocking positions minus. At least they could see, you know, but I was thinking, man, when this thing gets daylight, now they can see. Right. I mean, because they'd literally walk down the street into it. into a yeah yeah

I mean and but I was thinking this is about to get crazy and at some point that we got a call it was like hey look you guys are going to have to this is before Van Arsdale showed up

you guys are going to have to get everybody you got once you get the pilot out you get everybody you got and we don't have the resources to come get you you're going to have to walk to the Paki Stadium I don't want to say it's a mile but in your mind it's a hundred miles

because now we had 70% casualties. And so you're thinking, okay, I got in here, hard enough to move here, a couple of blocks, healthy. Now I've got to carry people out of here three times as far. And I remember getting that call, and that's, again, one of those things were you go, you kind of gulp. You know, and normally things are so busy,

you don't have time to think about stuff like that. But when you get that call, I was like, oh, man, you know, and I was thinking, man, please figure this out. You know, I was like, because I just, I had this sink and feeling. and if we did that, that, you know, it was going to be terrible. Were you thinking about like, hey, no, we're going to hold up in a building and we're going to strong point a building and you leave some tanks here

and we're going to stay here until you assemble a force to get us out of here? Yeah, you know, I just... Staying in the city just seemed like the oven even worse. There was so much going through your head at the time. I just remember getting a call thing. Damn. You know, and then you just get the sense of urgency. Like, God damn, you know, get...

I'm going to take care of my one meter of ground and I've got to get this guy out. And it's like, it's almost like to become hyper-focused. And I don't know whether that is a defense mechanism. I thought about that a lot. I wonder if it's like, I didn't like that to hear that. So, don't, I'm going to just kill dudes. You know, I mean, kind of like, I'm just going to work on this. And I'm going to just deny that I just heard that, you know.

You know, and it's a weird thing. And I spent a lot of time thinking about it. But it's almost like my childhood. ADD kicked in it. It was like, yeah, man, I'm just, yeah, I can't worry about what's happening tomorrow, what's happening in a minute or what I just heard. I just have to, I'm just going to shoot. You know, it's a, it's a, it's a weird, maybe it's a flaw. I don't know, but I spend a lot of time thinking about it and I don't hide my flaws from anybody. It might be a feature. It might be a feature or a flaw. It might be a feature like, hey, there's one thing you got to get done. Yeah.

I'm going to, I can't worry about that. I got to do this right now, and I'll worry about that when I get to it. But I felt a lot like I did. When I was playing with an airplane in the corner, I was in first grade. You know, it was kind of like, I'm just going to deal with this right now. I mean, I'm not worried about the 12-year penitentiary sentence

that I got coming at me. But it was weird, and I don't know if everybody goes through that, but I did. I was like, I can't believe I just heard what I heard. You know? Because in an instant, I thought, man, you know, my West Texas math started kicking. I'm like, dude, we just took a half.

half the guys are wounded, and we've got to move daylight through that carrying guys, carrying KIA and WIA. And I went, okay, I'd just do it with this. It was a weird, weird thing that happened to me, you know. And I think about that a lot. I'm like, man, what was going through your head, you know? Because I had no response to it, I guess. It was just a, but it was a weird dynamic.

Something happened in my brain, it clicks. My little, you know, my little cowboy brain just went, okay, dude, just, you know, do what you can do here. And just forget you heard that kind of thing. And I can't explain it, but odd. But then, you know, the vehicles started showing up. And, of course, the Van Arsdale hadn't made that call. You know, I don't know what would have happened. We would have tried to walk out, I guess.

But we pulled that vehicle apart with the vehicles. I'm out, do the Harold Hilo apart with the vehicles, and then got the pilot out. And then we had so many casualties, we couldn't put people on the APCs or the vehicles. We just loaded KIA and WIA on there. And we, in the main body of Tenth Mountain had posted up maybe, I don't know, maybe a quarter mile south of us. And they couldn't get the whole bunch through. They just got through a few. And then we went down there and linked up with them and then moved to the,

Paki Stadium. And part of the way by foot, but I remember being in the back of a homer, you know, that we got on down at the link up site. So we ran to the link up site. And I jumped in the back of a homer with the rest of the guys, and they started going. And then we ran, we got to a point where they had a roadblock up. So now you're piled in the back of this vehicle at an intersection, trying to get a roadblock cleared.

And I'm thinking, man, dude, I'd rather be out walking, you know, because you just, any minute, you know, you've got that field coming. But then we got to the Paki Stadium, and then it was like, you know, up to that point, you're looking at the one meter of ground you're on, and the problem you're solving. But when I got to that Paki Stadium, it was just surreal. It was like, as soon as I walked in, they said, they offered me tea and rice, tea and food. And I was like, and I looked around, and there were vehicles shot to pieces. There were casualties laying out, KIA, laid out on the ground, not just us,

but the Tenth Mountain guys. and I was looking around and man you know what just happened you know it was like it really was surreal and a son was coming up and um they came over and they said Scott Miller came over because hey get your shit on we got to go we got to go back out I went what's up and he said we got a bird down I was like what are you talking about he goes yeah we got another aircraft down I went no way and he goes yep I said when did he go down he goes I'm not sure but he goes get your shit on let's go and so um we um we flew from the Pagy Stadium back to the hangar because that's where our gear was.

And we started trying to reconciled it as best we could, you know, put some teams together. And then Tenth Mountain had gone out. One of the other guys, Absolute Savage, his name is John Masonus. Really cool guy. And he had gone out with Tenth Mountain because he was actually one of the guys on the aircraft that was flying around dropping resupplies. So we were getting our, and he had been on a sniper team. So he wasn't part of the assault force. So he was on the heel, kicking resupply bundles to us.

And then at some point he got with 10th Mountain and led a group of guys to the 6'4. And when he got there, there was a bunch of casings, some blood trails, and no survivors. And Durant was already captured. but no traces of the other guys because they had already been drugged them through the street and everything else. But we estimate that that battle probably lasted about half an hour. And this is second end information. I wasn't privy to it until the next day.

But we think it was probably 30 minutes total that they fought it out. There's one surviving member of that team. And he'd probably be a good guy to talk to to get that perspective. and his name is Brad Holling. Just left the unit as a civilian, he was a civilian OTC instructor there. But he could tell you the story on it. But I just get it, you know, secondhand.

But by all accounts, it was a, you know, when they got put into a meat grinder and lasted maybe half an hour. So you're reconciledating gear and get ready to go back? Getting ready to go back out. And we still didn't really know. what we're looking at.

I mean, what went down, you know. And, um, but we got reports back from, uh, from the guys who had been there. And I believe it was just Mace, if I'm not mistaken. Again, I'm still trying to piece it together, you know, 30 something years later. But I think it was just John Mesa on us that, uh, callbacks. There's nothing there. It's a burr, it's down. And it's, but there's no bodies.

There's no survivors that I can find. And, um, um, and then we started, you know, we got, okay, now we've got, okay, now we've got guys missing. thing, we don't know they're dead. You know, we don't know, you know, how many were killed, how many are maybe prisoners. And so we started doing profile flights. So we started sending guys out in Helos flying, listening. I wasn't listening, but we had guys that were capable of picking up on their transmissions,

trying to vector in on it. And they had, we were trying to find their brick 112s. I don't know if they still use those when you're young. Yeah, yeah. We used them. But we were trying to vector in on them. And we actually, we did vector on one of them. And basically we heard a bunch of chatter on it.

That was a Somali chatter. So we knew that was like, well, that ain't good. You know, that ain't good. And so kind of lose track of what happened for that. But at the end of the day, they negotiated their way out of it. So we were going to, and of course, I'm going to tell you right now, if they had turned us loose in that city in any capacity, the mind was different.

And I go back and forth on whether they should have or shouldn't have, but it's probably good for us that they didn't, you know, because it would have been a different ballgame, you know. It was personal, as you know. You know, guys in special operations in any unit, but especially guys in spec ops, you spend a lot of time with each other. You know, it's not like guys come in for a year or two and leave. You know they're, you know them, you know their kids,

you know, their wives, you know, their mom, their dad. And so it was personal. So it may have been a good idea that we didn't go back out in it. But basically they came in. I can't remember the guy they sent in. He was a State Department guy. And he went to him and said, look, right now you're dealing with me. And you need to return the remains of anybody that was killed,

and you need to release any survivors. Tomorrow you're going to be dealing with a different group of guys. and I'm not responsible for what they do. And I released Mike Durant. How much longer did you stay on the ground there? We actually, and again, I'm trying to remember, but a couple weeks, maybe a month. But on October 6th, we were, and I should know this,

I mean, but he gets what I'm going to get old. I can't remember if they released Mike Durant before or after October 6. But October 6, we're standing around, and the J-Soc guys had come over from the headquarters. So we had General Downing, who was the J-Soc commander at the time. We had Jesse Lay, who was a CSM of J-Soc, I believe, and I could be wrong. And I'm sure there's some guy out there that or a sharpshoot shut up, but that's the way I remember. But we were standing around doing a hot wash. and so it's the first time we really started

being able to get the big picture together like okay what happened with the vehicles and what happened with crash site was 6-1 and 6-4 and where were you and what was 10th Mountain to it and it was like we were trying to figure out what just happened and we were all standing around outside the front of the hangar and we were talking and it became a heated discussion

a little bit of finger pointing going on and General Harold, or it was Colonel Harold at the time, he was the C-squater and commander. And he said, hey, guys, let's cool off. Take a break, come back in a few in 30 minutes or whatever, and we'll pick up where we left off, but cool off. And a couple of guys had been, it was kind of a contentious, and it was kind of like unit-on-unit-on-unit contentious. So it was like, well, you guys did this or you guys did that, which is not healthy, right? And so General Harold was doing his best to defuse it, and he said, okay, you stay, I'm going to talk to you for a minute, and I want to talk to you a minute. And I remember turning around to walk back to the hangar, and I took maybe 10 steps, and a mortar landed right there where we were having the hot wash.

And killed Matt Rarson, probably the, if not the best operator in NC squadron. he was one of the top operations he squatter and he was one of those dudes that was just a natural leader everybody loved him you know everybody's important in those units and you miss every one of them but when he

those are some guys that kind of the heart and soul of the organization he was one of them and it was just devastating so we lost him we had General Harold almost died he was hit and I think the frag went through

his femuror artery and he was bleeding out and then the surgeon was standing there John Marsh and his dad used to be John O. Marsh Jr., the secretary of the Army and he was the J-Soc surgeon and he was hit

nearly died. General Downing was hit General Boykin was hit who was the unit commander Sergeant Major Lay was hit and several other guys were hit and of course Matt was killed by that more so to add insult to injury you know three days three days after October 3rd you know that's what happened but um and I'm trying to remember if there's anything else but yeah that was that was that was a kick of the nuts and it just made matters worse we were like okay now you know and we felt like at the time was like now we need

to be able to go out you need to guy you guys need to turn us loose we want to we're not going to sit here and be, you know, shooting, you know, sitting ducks for anybody. We want to go back out and fight, and we couldn't understand, you know, what the deal was. And then, of course, you had the politics at the time, and they negotiated their, you know, way out of it. A couple weeks later, we went home. And I didn't like that. I was like, you know what, I feel like we got unfinished business over there. And, you know, you brought us home.

I felt like at the time it was like, because it's not politically correct for you to do it anymore. It's not something that's good for you But it was never about politics with the guys on the ground This is you know if it's worth us going in risking our lives and dying over Then you need a lot of us do our thing And it just you know that was kind of the But that's a story that plays out in every conflict and every generation right You know you have politicians doing what they do and then you have us doing what we do

And sometimes they don't always line up How was it? when you get back home? You know, the biggest, the thing I remember about going back home was that, you know, you go back home to these families. And it's a sense of like, man,

you know, you don't even want to, is you love them? Because, again, you're talking about extended families, you know, and you see these kids and your wives and you know, wait a minute, I lost something pretty special when I lost a mate, but this is going to change a trajectory.

or your family, not just for this generation, but for generations to come. And, you know, I was married a second time, had been married maybe about a year. And when my wife's name is Bonnie, when she came on board, you know, it was a bunch of young guys and their wives, young families. And it was fun. You know, you'd hang out team parties, you know, and you were like this big extended family. And it devastates everybody, but it really devastated the family and my wife. I remember towards the end of my career when I got ready to make a decision to get out or stay in. She was like,

you know, Norm, if you haven't been paying attention, she goes, you remember when we used to hang out with Barb and Trish and stuff and Carmen and we'd go hang out and do team parties? And she goes, you know, when I go back there now, she was, I'm the only one that has a living husband and the rest of them are widows. And she goes, I don't want to do this anymore with you, you know. So if you go forward with your life, good luck. But I know, she goes, I know, you know, I feel like she had this sense of impending them and that it came, I think it started in Somalia, you know, and she was, I stayed in

another 10 years. But she was never the same after that. You know, it was more serious to her. And when you're gone away for a long trip, you may do nothing for months, but they don't know that. You know, they don't know what's happening. So seeing the families when I came back and how it affected them still troubles me the most, I think, of anything. Because, you know, we all eventually, we choose what we do. I wouldn't have done anything else, and I know those guys wouldn't either.

I mean, they loved what they did. They were very proud to be special operators in the Army and, of course, in the Navy. And we had some great seals there with us, too. But if any one of them had been left off the mission, I guarantee you they would have been raising hell back home. But the families don't get to do that. You know, and they just kind of sit back there and wait and see what happens. And that was brutal.

And still to this day. you know, have a little sense of survivors' guilt. Yes, that is one thing. So through the 90s for me, it was like you'd think about doing one mission, basically

like one big mission. And by the time I was in Iraq, my second deployment where I, you know, I lost my first guy and Mark Lee, it's like, we're going back out, you know, in a couple days. And like, that's just what's going

happen and you know the army was taking so many army and the Marine Corps taking so many casualties it was freaking rough and horrible and yet it's like you you're you're going to get your gear back on you're going to go back out that's what everyone's going to do over and over again the same exact streets where you just had you who you just lost a guy yep you're going yeah you're going and the fact that it's it's just not going to stop and then like on the home front like my wife was going to my guy's funerals and going to visit my guys in the hospital that were really badly wounded and that was a whole new you know the whole new a whole new scenario yeah and and all those families that were going to the guys funerals in their minds they might as well be going to their

husband brother son funeral that's what that's what it seems like um what when you guys got back I mean, did you guys, obviously, you must have some, like, memorial, incredible memorial services. And then it's like, okay, now you're there back on the game. Yeah, no, we had a memorial service in Somalia, you know, where we had, and it was interesting that we lost, there were 19 guys killed in that day. But 18 of them came out of T. T.F. Ranger, so, and it's funny, it was six, six guys from, from, um, um, My unit, six guys from the Rangers and six guys from Task Force 160. So they were all, you know, six, six and six. And then, of course, you know, 70% wounded.

I mean, it was hard to find a guy that it wasn't. But we got back. We had a memorial service, but you know how it is. You know, at that time, I can't remember what we worked up for. I believe it was Pablo Escobar. you know so we get back we we we um reorganize we we try to fill our ranks the best we could and we start working on those next those next problem sets and um you know you wonder you got to be a little off to you know be able to live that it can't be normal and um because you just go okay

that happened and now I got this hotboarder coming up for this next next job you know and uh but that's I think what makes guys like you, you and the guys in the Army different, you know, as you're able to do that. And it doesn't work well in all careers, but it works perfect in that one, right? You know, but, yeah, you just get ready for the next one. And that's something that people, soldiers have done forever, right? you just sharpen your sword and move on. What kind of changes did you see in training?

So the silver lining to Somalia was that, you know, in the army they used to say we're always fighting the last war. So when they went into Korea, they fought like they had in World War II. When they went into World War II, they fought kind of like they remembered fighting in World War I. but there's been enough time between those conflicts to where nobody had ever really done it they just knew what was written down somebody else wrote in a book and so not only did the procedures, the tactics, techniques, procedures, and equipment not apply anymore. They had no context because they, you know, they just read what somebody else wrote. What Somalia did and it was unforeseen was that first thing that we noticed when we got back

And I remember talking to General Boykin, I said, you know, I looked back over the history of the unit. And we crashed a helo in Grenada, and we had to go in on the ground and get it out. We crashed the helo in Panama. We had to go in and get it on the ground and get it out. We crushed helios in Somalia, had to go to the ground and get it out. In a desert storm, we crashed the helo. Had to go by ground on vehicle, get it out. And I said, and every time I go out and I do training with a SWAT team,

in Houston or Dallas or Pittsburgh or New Orleans, they have an APC, they have an armored vehicle. And we always borrow a light-skinned vehicle from somebody like 10th Mountain and drive through town with Protex and think because we're badass is that nobody's going to shoot us. I said, but the other guys don't know who we are, you know.

And they don't care. They're going to shoot at us, and we take casualties because we don't. So why don't, don't we have armored vehicles? And there was a big fight in the unit, you know, about should we have armored vehicles or not? And that's not really cool.

That's not a, you know, that's not commando stuff. And Kevlar helmets are, you know, are dorky-looking, you know, kind of stuff. I mean, really, believe it. I mean, it may sound ridiculously petty, but those are the conversations that were going on. And the big problem with the vehicles

where we're like, hey, look, it's more than just bringing in vehicles. So you have to bring in all the supplies and logistics and the garage, the mechanics and stuff to go with it. So it's a big money item. But if you look at an armored vehicle and knowing what I know about how you fight in the city with AT weapons, so any tank weapons, you have to be the next level of training

to hit a moving vehicle with an AT weapon, like an RPG. There may be a lot of them out there, but I know because of my experience, like in Panama, yeah, if I'm driving fast and they're the wrong angle, I can defeat them by tactics and speed. And they may get lucky and hit one of these vehicles, but they're not going to be able to consistently engage me with RPGs all the time and hit me if I'm moving an armor vehicle. And 90% of the guys on the battlefield don't have an RPG. They have an AK-47.

So if I look at it from a math point, I can decrease my casualties maybe by 90% or decrease the number people who can kill me by 90% just by changing the vehicle. And I can mitigate the others by using tactics. So it only makes sense. And I said, if we're going to be fighting in cities, you know, let's not think we're going to drive through cities and, you know, light-skinned vehicles anymore. So they put together this team of guys. And again, there was a lot of resistance in the unit at the time.

You know, we don't really want these. We don't need these. And the other thing was we don't. always had to rely on other people's driving, driving them, guys you hadn't worked with before. Yeah. Right. And so we, me and a guy named Jody Nacey and a couple other guys,

first place we went was Camp Lejeune. We went down. And Army had Bradley's, right? And you had M113s. Those are tracked. We didn't have any wheel, armored vehicles at the time that I know of, right? Marine Corps did, the lab. So we went down to Camp Lejeune and we walked,

we went out and worked with, I can't remember what unit it was, but we went in and looked at their labs, watched them do some training. And I was like, man, they do a lot of good stuff with these things. One, you can swim it. Not that we would ever do that, but you can, right? It's got a two-foot vertical step. You can shoot mortars out of the back of it, you know.

And you can reduce by 90% the number of people can kill you on a battlefield, roughly, right? You know, because most people have an AK-47. and the guys having RPGs don't know how to use them. So we looked at those, and at the time, I can't remember if they were renewing the contract on them or something, but we ended up going up to Cadillac Gage, which I think was in Detroit.

And we looked at this new bunch of stuff that was coming down, and we looked at stuff all over the world, but we ended up buying, what was it? It was a... We had a Pinsgower. We had a Pinsgower. It was a light-skinned vehicle. But I want to say it was a pander.

Pander. Oh, Pander. Yeah, it's Pander. So we bought to Pander. And of course, you know, T-R-1 guys used different money. But, and we started using them. And there were a lot of guys in a high as dumb, you know.

But I think at the end of it, and I was gone by the time they really started coming into their own. But guys were calling them, oh, yeah, guys are, everybody's calling you up barring them now. But I don't remember, I don't forget. Shinseki, General Shinseki was chairman, Joint Chiefs, I think at a time. Yeah, he came in for

a capabilities exercise. And he was an armored dude. And he was an armored dude. He was either really excited or really pissed. Which one was it? Yeah, he was pissed at first. But he got excited about it. But we come rolling in and panters, he goes, hey, he goes, where did you get those? And I wasn't the guy that was explaining it. I think it was a, I think

was a general hero at the time, but he was pissed that we went outside the Army procurement system to get them. And then it became, tell me why are you doing that and not using the Bradley or you're not using what we have? And then when we went through the, and I didn't do it. So obviously the guys above my level did it. They explained to him why we made that choice. He was like, I like this.

and he went out to Fort Lewis and he started the striker program. Oh, got it. Right. So going back to your question about what are some of the things that happened after Somalia, had that not happened, you know, we lost 19 guys.

And that sounds a lot, and it is a lot. One is too many, if it's a friend. But we were better prepared for the global war on terror when it kicked off in the early 2000s because we'd already been working with Pander and had realized what you could see in that type of environment. And the profile, the enemy was similar. You know, so, and they evolved as well,

but we like to think we evolved faster. So we started integrating, like, one, the services started working closer together. Right. So you started seeing, I mean, we were working close anyway, but guys started becoming more familiar with each other because we realized, hey man, this is a heavy lift. And you can't work in a silo

because you're going to be working with other people and you're going to need them. Right. And so we started working very closely with Navy Special Warfare, working with the Air Force guys. And then our equipment evolved, you know. And so I like to think that because of Somalia,

when we started the global war on terror, we weren't fighting the last war. Yeah. We were better prepared for the war they were in. Yeah. Yeah, like I was saying, I mean, I think that you what you guys did, and we got, we got debriefs. And of course, like you said, it's still 30 years later or however many years later, people are still figuring out what happened.

But like, we had seals that were there, kind of debrief us on what happened and what to watch out for and what to, you know, be careful of. And, you know, it's like we were paying attention, you know, we were listening. We were trying to take whatever lessons we could from that. And even like, it's interesting, like, we were using MP5s, you know, in early 90s. And I mean, I love the MP5. And it's, you know, I was, when people ask me like, what should they get for a home defense weapon?

I'm like MP5 all day. Like your, your eight-year-old kid can freaking drive nails with that thing. Love it, man. Cool. I mean, accurate. But in the street, it's like, no chance. If you're going to fight in a permissive environment, it's a cool, if you get the right ammo stuff, it's a cool piece of gear.

But if you got to fight from house to house, no. You got to fight your way in and out. Yeah, man. You don't want it. But I was one of the same on the stuff. the guys it was like I don't want to when we had to turn them in I was like I want to keep my I don't want to turn it in because I love shooting it so much but um that makes everyone a freaking the best shot yeah shoots it so it does yeah but that's like the type of thing where we looked at

and go oh yeah well what happened over there what you know if you guys would have been in the streets with mp fives it would have been a disaster yeah bad business so we we definitely tried to pay attention what you guys did and the other big thing was like force on force training where, you know, in the early 90s, man, me and my platoon were freaking the best guys in the world against paper targets hanging on a wall. You know, and all of a sudden when we said, okay, we got some munition,

and eventually we got a high-speed laser tag system that's a lot better than Miles Gear, but that stuff really lets you, it's like Jiu-Jitsu, right? And Jiu-Jitsu, one of the best things about J-Jitsu is you and I can train, and we can try and kill each other. And if you want to, you just tap and, okay, We start again. You know, you can't do that with live fire.

You can't go force on force with live fire. But, and live fire takes away the two things that the enemy is going to do that you have to watch out for. Move and shoot back. Like, it's so easy to be an enemy that doesn't move and doesn't shoot back. So when we were able to start doing that. And again, I think a lot of that came from, hey, we need to open up our minds because the things that we do in the killhouse against paper targets. Yeah. For instance, stacking 12 guys in the hallway to, while we're going to.

were waiting to move down the hallway. It's like, yeah, that's not a good idea. And so that definitely changed our mentality and started getting us moving in the right direction. And how about from a, from like a strategic perspective? I, again, my first appointment to Iraq, we went out and hit a target. And it was like, you know, it was like, you know, I got the target package from Intel. Here's a neighborhood and there's a building and there's an X on it.

And they're like, yeah, bad guy, this building. I'm like, cool. We go out. We hit the building. and we get in there. And of course, it's like some random family. And we start asking, well, you know, who, do you know this guy is? And they're like, oh, yeah, that guy's two doors down.

And we're like, oh, okay, sorry. We walk out. But, you know, here I am thinking, you know, this is terrible. We just breached this freaking normal Iraqi family. We gave them money in the whole nine yards. But still, it's not, that's not good business. So I get back and I go, I go, hey, who drew this red X here? and the first guy was like well it was like that when I got through it well who gave it to you

and I'd go up the chain of command and finally it was like just some random person that was like yeah we got information that it was one of the buildings in this neighborhood drew a circle around the neighborhood and picked the building in the middle and put a red X on it and that's the building we hit and even if it did just dug down a little bit we could have gotten more clarification but that changed my attitude as far as like what we're going to do and why we're going to do it Yeah. And did you get, and now, you know, you're looking back at what happened to Mogadishu, you know, a month later, six months later, a year later.

And I even saw this with my guys like in Ramadi, you know, we first get to Ramadi, like you were saying, you couldn't leave, you couldn't get a guy. I couldn't pay a guy cash money to stay back from going on operation. Like they were going no matter what. You fast forward three months, we're taking casualties. It's like, you know, when I, we, we. say, hey, here's what we're doing tonight. Some guys like, wait, why are we doing that?

Like, they start asking those questions. Right, they wake up. Yeah, they start waking up. And it's like, hold on, why are we doing this? What's the situation? What are we trying to make happen? What's the purpose of this? Which is what you want, right?

Of course, that's what you want. Did you look in back, did you feel like you and the people at your team started going, hold on a second. Let's rethink this. Oh, yeah. Yeah, especially when it comes to Helos, right? And it's really, you know, I remember growing up with the guys in fifth group, the old timeers from NOM.

And I remember him telling me, man, hey, look, you know, you want to offset your heels, you want to set off out here, don't ever come and go from the same LZ, little stuff like that, you know, that you forget. And then I look, I look back on Mogadishu, and I go, okay, I heard that before, right,

in my distant memory, but I didn't mean anything to me at the time. Right. and so, you know, who in their right mind thinks that over and over, you might get by the way a couple times, but who thinks it in the right mind that over and over and over again, I can land a helo written off at the front door of a target building full of bad guys and not get that thing shot down. Right.

And we had five helo shot down that day, not just two. So we had one, Super 6-4, then we had the Sarbird. Dan Geelong was flying. It got hit and it flew back and crashed landing at the airfield. we had the bird that Randy and Gordy were on when they went in to get Duran out that bird was hit, crashed at another facility in Somalia and Brad was the only surviving member of that sniper team

and Brad hauling and he lost his leg on that and there were a little more but there were five five that were shot and then many, many more that had the windshield shot out of them. I remember when we went up to, we were getting near the crash site, they had Carl Meyer, who was flying a little bird for Task Force 160th, set his bird down in the middle of the street right near the crash site,

and got the windshield shot out of it. He was shooting, he was sitting there on the ground when the rotor's turning while one of the guys went to pick up Dan Bush who had been shot and killed. and he had an MP5 shooting out of the side of it Rotors turning a windshield shot out of a helo but yeah you know there's times you can get by with that

there's times you can't but what it does is it provokes you to think a lot harder when you go okay man I'm going to put a helo in here and what are all the things that can go wrong and where do I not want to put that thing when you used to when you grow up doing it and training a lot of time we're going to land on the roof you know

whatever really cool in training, you know, and sometimes applicable, but risky, right? And you forget the risk involved in it. And, but in everything we did, you know, we would, I would always look at it after they go, man, what can possibly go wrong here, you know? Because I've, at the point, I used to think, nothing's going to go wrong. And after that, I was like, everything is going to go wrong. Right. And so I lost my optimism after that, where I was like, I'd look at everything. after that very seriously. I go, man,

and probably the way I should have been looking at it before, I just had no context. And we had done things before, but we'd been so successful and lucky. One of the things we'd done before builds a sense of confidence in you. There's probably a false sense of confidence. Yeah.

Yeah, no, I definitely saw that with even like, like, with I'd see C.O platoons that would, you go on and do a hit, and it goes well because the enemy didn't shoot at you. And so you start going, well, we can do a little bit faster. We can, guys got really a great, with like surrounding the whole target and I'm like what if somebody starts shooting from inside that target building now you're on all this is not going to work out the way

and for me it was the old Vietnam guys that were like there's only two ways to assault the target either you go online or you do an L at the most right he goes don't put yourself down range yeah don't put yourself down range don't put yourself down but those lessons man they just they just yeah they just get they get faded out by training because training if you make training too easy If you make training too easy and you win every time, it gets you bad habits and you start doing the wrong things. Yeah. And, you know, there's some things that don't change, you know, men don't change. You know, I mean, we're all the same as we probably were a couple thousand years ago.

But gear changes, weapons change, stuff like that. And so you've got to be able to stay relevant. And that's hard to do if you don't have work. And, you know, we used to say that you ever heard of the Five Monkey Experiment? Five Monkeys? Five monkey experiments. Let's hear it. And I don't know whether this is real

or whether it's a made-up story. It probably made up. But they were doing a study and they took five monkeys and they put them in a room. And they had a ladder in there and every day they'd put a banana on top of the ladder.

And a monkey would go up and go for the banana and they'd come in and they'd hose all the monkeys down with the fire hose. And then they would do that every day. right and then they take one of the monkeys out

once the monkeys stopped going for the figured out that hey that's not that's not the right thing I do you know they take one of them out and put a new guy in right

well what's the new guy I do when he gets there first thing right he goes for the for the banana and they hose everybody down right and then

they move one monkey out once he figures it out they move another new guy in right And then it gets to the point where the monkeys jump on the monkey. They're like, hey, don't do that, you know, because we're about to all get a skull drug for this. And at some point, there are none of the original monkeys in there.

Right. And everybody's jumping on the new guy when he goes for the banana. And he's like, why are you jumping on me? And he goes, that's just the way we do things around here. Yeah. Right. So nobody had any context. but they're just remember that hey look

and they stopped hosing them down a long time ago they just learn hey look jump on the new guy when he comes in with a new idea right and why that's just why we do it yeah yeah and I probably butchered that but look it up

makes sense yeah but at some point you just there are none of the original guys left and you're doing things and you don't know why you're doing them you're just doing them because that's what you do yeah yeah I had that I had that happen. I was on the West Coast field teams

and I went out to the East Coast and the way we would do a peel, you'd like, well, what you would do is on appeal left, when you would turn, you'd turn outboard and you would check your flank and then you would turn backwards and check behind you.

And what you're really supposed to be doing is shooting. Like, you'd shoot to your flank and you'd shoot behind you. The Vietnam guys told me, they were like, hey, when you're doing a peel, as before you peel, you turn to the flank, you dump rounds,

and then you turn behind, you dump rounds, and then you tap your, guy out and you leave. But the way it looks on the range is you know you're like basically spinning around in a circle. It looks stupid. Yeah. And I got out to East coast and they're like hey we don't do that out here. And I was like, what don't you do? And he goes like we don't do that spin, that safety spin. And I go what safety spin? They're like you know when you're when it's your turn to go we're watching you and you're like spinning to the out and spinning around so

you don't sweep anybody but you just need to high port your weapon and you can go. And I said, oh no, no, no. This is why that happens. I'm the one monkey, right? One monkey left. I was like, hey, this is why. Because when you're in a firefight, you want to turn to the flank, dump rounds in case somebody's trying to flank you, and then turn behind you,

dump rounds in case someone's trying to, you know, come up your ass, and then you can tap the guy out. And it was like one of those connections where it just got lost in the translation. No one knew why they were doing it. And they eventually said, why are we doing this anymore?

And there you go. Five monkeys. Yeah. It's just the way we do things. But yeah, look it up. You've probably better explained on the internet than I can explain it. But yeah, you know, I look back,

too. I mean, when I first got to group, we used to laugh. You know, young guys, you know, had this one old guy, and he was like, you know what? You know, you're carrying 300 pounds of lightweight gear, what we used to say, right? Because everything's lightweight, but you're going to carry it. So when you add it up, it's 300 fucking pounds of gear. And so we had this old guy that was an old,

Krusty Sergeant Medger. He goes, oh, yeah. And when I was in Nam, I got shot, and I used to carry a silver dollar that my dad gave me in. Both of the silver dollar. And so I carried a silver dollar. where I go now. And one guy was a Bible. We used to, the young guy just go, yeah, man, I got a silver dollar, I got a Bible,

I got my wallet. I mean, by the time I get to carry all this stuff that stops bullets, I got 500 pounds of crap, you know? But so, you know, you evolve and not everything's applicable. And that's

why it's so important that you try to train realistically. Because sometimes you don't have work. And I think we're going to go through a phase, hopefully God willing, we're going to go through a phase. where some of these young guys have the ability to get back in shape and train and have some peacetime training,

but they've got to be relevant, right? And they can't lose sight of the lessons they've learned, you know, because 20 years of war, man, a long time. And 20 years of combat, and I differentiate between the two. So I look at what goes on in war

and I see Russia and Ukraine. What we were doing, What I did, I can't speak for what you guys did, but I can say that I got pretty good at combat operations. I don't know if I would be good at war. But I was blessed to be around guys that, you know, I got to participate in a lot of combat operations. I got to learn from some of the best soldiers of their generation

and the generation before. I don't know if I'm ready for warfare. I watch what's going on over there where these guys are in their trenches and, man, that's a different game. It is a different game. So then post Somalia, what's the next thing that comes up for you guys? Is it the Piffwick stuff? Yeah.

So the Balkans were kicking off, and I think everybody was doing it. I think the Navy was doing their part of it. We were doing it. A couple other organizations were doing it. But we started rotating in and out of the Balkans. And I think Strebernezzan must have happened in, what, 94 or something like that? I mean, if you ever heard of the massacre of the Spreberians, as a nasty, nasty incident, which really kind of accelerated our involvement in going after personnel

indicted for war crimes, Spiffwicks. And that went on for several years, but, I mean, there were some, some, a few things that happened, but pretty much unremarkable, really. A lot of good workup training time, application kept enough going on to keep you relevant. And then that kind of, that kind of, you know, that kind of, you. and went on until the end of the late 90s, you know. And then that time I had moved, I can't remember my dates, but sometime around, I guess, 95, 96, I went to S&T,

so selection and training. And I was an instructor over, cadre over selection and training for a couple years. And then rotated back in as a troop sergeant major, NC squadron at the end. And then you say at the end, and then you're making your decision that you're going to retire. Yeah, so I did a couple years in S&T, loved it. I didn't want to go.

I went kicking a scream at S&T. I lived in the same locker for 10 years. And I was like, I leave in a team room. And I don't care less. Whatever it is you got for me, I don't want to do it. If as long as I can stay on a team, I'm good. And that was just the way I thought. I had no ambition to be the sergeant of the Army or anything.

I just wanted to kick doors. That's what I love to do. And I was never a sniper. I was very limited in my capacity. Mark one motto, door, get here. Let's go. And, you know, when they wanted something done like, hey, we've got to do a special mission, takes a special guy, we're going to send a one day. I didn't get picked.

But when they said, we want to send a mob through the door, I did that pretty well. I enjoyed doing it. But we worked some stuff in South America with the cartels and stuff like that. but limited. And again, I was blonde-headed, green-eyed, you know,

fair-skinned guys. You're going low-vis down there. Yeah, I didn't go into Medelline, all that stuff. But, but, but,

um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um,

I looked back on it now. One of the, one of the, one of the, I really needed that, you know, um, one,

I got to work very closely with, uh, guys, uh, from the other squadrons. Um, I got to, um,

you know, when you're, when you're, When you're doing something, a lot of times you're not thinking about it, you're just doing it. But when you're teaching it, somebody asks you a question, you've got to be able to answer it. And the question can come in a lot of different ways. So you really can't just say, well, that's because that's the way we do things around here, right? You can't do the five monkeys.

You have to be able to, so it forces you to really think, well, why do we do that? You know? You know, and so it really sets you up for success. And generally speaking, if you go to selection and training in the unit, Usually what that is, that tells you you've been selected to go over and be a troop sergeant major. But before you do that, they send you over there. We want you to go be able to understand you're going to teach the basic firearm stuff. You're going to teach close quarters battle.

You're going to work all the tactics, techniques, procedures that are associated with being in a Sabre Squadron. You're going to teach it. So when you come back and you're going to, you know, even in the same building, people, evolve differently. So one squadron, for a couple years, they may be, the times on their charges may be different. The way they make them may be different. The way they clear corners may be a little different.

And if you let it go long enough, it's drastically different, dramatically different, right? And two different units. So when you go over to S&T, you get to hang out. And so you standardize your, it's like a central point for consolidation of tactics, techniques, procedures. And by the way, I can't believe I didn't bring this up earlier, but you were training

jiu-jitsu this whole time, right? I was, yeah. How'd that kick off with you? Yeah, so it was a life-changing thing for me, really. So, you know, we talked about how I grew up, and I saw a lot of, early on, saw a lot of very, very serious conflicts and bars and stuff, because I grew up in. My dad was owned bars, made whiskey, saw guys getting. knifed and shot in Causes when I was, you know, eight, nine, ten years old.

Dad was in an out of jail, so I saw it growing up, but I was never a believer in formal martial arts. I remember in high school I saw this dude square off with a day and go into a traditional karate stance and just get his ass whipped. And, you know, back in the day, you know, I'm a little bit older than you, but everybody got in this kung fu thing. They had a movie on TV. It was called Kung Fu. and and um but they were all going out and going to class and learning all this weird stuff but they were always losing the fights and um so i didn't have a lot of confidence in a lot of and we said almost joke about it oh yeah one of those guys right guy stood off and and i go oh okay here we go you know but um so i didn't have a lot of respect for it i just didn't because i

I felt like, you know, it wasn't applicable to the street. And so when I was in the unit, guys, the hand-to-hand program was not formalized. It was guys doing one thing over here, one thing over in another squadron, another thing in another squadron. And they were training in silos, right? So they trained with the guys that thought like they did. And but we didn't have a formal program. And I've been training a little bit since I've gone around, but we were bringing in subject matter experts. And one guy, one squadron, would bring a dude in with a hood over his head and he would, you know, teach you how to fight by feel.

Another guy would come in and teach you basically how to do a college football stiff arm, you know, and that's how you do CQB. He'd gone in one hand, stiff arm on the other. And some guy would come in and teach something else. and it was really just kind of all over the place. And we had some tough dudes, you know. But I was of the school that, hey, look, go work out, run, ball your fist up, hit the bag, and swing him harder and faster than the next guy, and move your nose.

You know, that's kind of the way I grew up. And it worked for me up to that point. And so when I got into S&T, you know, we, We were bringing as subject matter experts in. And we were bringing these guys in and paying them a lot of money, you know. And I was tasked with the hand-to-hand program in S&T's selection and training. And so we brought guys in, but none of them could really do what they said they could do when you put them in a scenario that they didn't control.

So this is how you get out of a headlock and with their paid, assistant. I say, well, I got Joe Vague over here. He benches 400 pounds. The biggest meanest Puerto Rico never walk off the island. And he's going to put a headlock on you. Let's see if you get out of that. And none of them could do it. And then you'd have guys go, oh, well, I'm not a fighter. I'm a trainer. Oh, I heard it all. And so I had a buddy of mine. His name was Ben Flores and he came to. You've got to check these dudes out. And now at this time, I'd already gotten disgusted with everything else I'd seen. And I thought, okay, another one of these, right? And he slides this tape across, it was like a beta tape or something like that.

It was called Gracie's in Action. Gracie in action. Yeah. Two dudes with Speedos and I was like, what is this man? I was like, I've seen you gave me the wrong tape, huh? Yeah, I was like, I've seen this stuff before but I don't watch the stuff for two minutes. So, but, um, so he goes, dude, he goes, they're a real deal. And I said, um, I said, I don't know, man. He goes, give him a chance. So we brought him in. And it was Hoyce and Horan. And Hoyt, I don't know how old Hoyce was,

but he didn't look like he was much over 20 when we brought him in. So it would have been in the early 90s. And they flew out to Fort Bragg. It was the winter. And there was Southern California boys. They showed up at the front gate. I think there was snow on the ground. And they were out there shivering with snot run out of their nose.

And I was like, oh, my goodness. And Hoyst does not look like an imposing guy. He's a, you know, he's a pretty good. boy. And I was like, man, and he looked young and I was like, oh, these days are about to get it. Was this pre-UFC? Yes. Just before the first UFC. So nobody knew who they were. And I think they had the Gracie Academy in Torrance, so Carson and Crenshaw, I think, that's where it was. And but just a year or two before that, they had been training out of the garage. This was the Gracie Challenge. Yeah, they still. They still had that going on. And I saw,

I got to watch that. And very, very cool. But their main instructor, other than Horian and Hoyce, out at Carson, at the Torrance Academy, I can't remember his name, but he was one of the guys that started, he was a heroin act that started training him with Horian in his garage. And so they were still early generation of their trainers there.

And some of the guys that are world-renowned black belts now that came out of that cohort of instructors that Corioreen had then are now, were blue belts then, you know, blue and white belts. And so, anyway, they show up at Bragg and they go up, and I'm going to give them the same treatment that I get everybody else, you know. You know, but they didn't come in with the hoods and all that bullshit. They came in and they were teaching, like, escape from the headlock. I watched that, and I go, okay.

I said, well, see if you can get out of his headlock. So they, okay, put them in there, boom, into work. And they'd show us these different scenarios. And at some point, Horian said, I feel that you're skeptical. And I said, I'm a little bit. And I said, because I've seen a lot of bullshit come through here. And he said, I'll tell you what. He goes, line everybody up.

And he goes, I said, what are the parameters? What are the rules? He goes, there are no parameters. There are no rules. Whatever you do to me, I'm going to do to you. So if you don't want it done to you, then don't do it to me. Right. So we came up with roughly the, what became kind of similar to the first UFC rules. No, no eye gouging, no bite, no fish hooking, no maiming, you know. But other than that, it was kind of a free-for-all. And it didn't take long. 30 minutes, I think he tapped everybody in the squadron. And I was like, holy shit. This is, you know, this is real with caveats. So I knew what I've seen on the story. street and none of that stuff you better be better prepared to that if you're going to go down

of Brackerville, Texas, the Kaiser because they're not going to play that game. They're going to, they're going to grab an object real quick. But it's a good place to start, right? Right. Let's start with that. And you've got to start somewhere. So you can't just say, hey, go in there and grab something and start poking and swinging. You know, you have to be able to have a system. And that was a good place to build it on. Right. The other thing that I'm noticed Jocko was that when I first got to special forces, guys were in fights all the time. You know, you'd be up at the NCO Club guys getting a fight. You guys would come in from the weekend in fights.

I remember teammates when I was on the Saddam team. We were out in Vysalia, California doing, I think it was Gallant Eagle. And we had a Saddam scenario out there. We jumped in. But two of my buddies, we were out in a tent and they were like, hey, we got a ride into town in Vassalia, let's go. And I was like, I don't, I'm tired, man. You guys go ahead. Two o'clock in the morning, they came walking back in,

and the medic was sewing one of his ear back on because he got, you know, something happened to him in a bar fight. But as I progressed through my career, that became less and lessenedless frequent. And we used to send a questionnaire out in selection and training. We'd say, when was the last fight you were in and describe it? And most of the guys at a certain point, after a certain

once that generation kind of started filtering out it was like, I've never been in a fight. And you think about it, the military got really hard on people. So you didn't have the, they weeded the guys out that were the,

you know, I would have never made it by modern standards. They wouldn't let me in the army, you know. And they certainly would have, about the time I jumped on a formation on Ardennes Road and Fort Prague,

they would say, hey, you're done, you know. But, so these guys were super athletes. They were smart guys. They were very capable guys, but they'd never been in a bar fight before. And I was thinking, man, it's going to be terrible. The first time you're in a fight, it's going to be a life and death fight.

You might want to do a couple little easier ones before that one, right? You know, before you do it in Back Alley and Mogadishu, you might want to go down to Rick's Lounge on Fort Bragg and give it a try. And there's a little bit of difference in it, but there's some similarities, right? You're having to function under the same body chemistry. So you've got all this adrenaline pumping to your brains, you're, you know, having to perform under a lot of a lot of unique accelerated body chemistry. And it's very similar to what you might see in combat, right?

And the more you do it, the more comfortable we feel in the environment, right? But I would hate to throw my son out there in combat, having no, he's never been punching a nose. You know, because the next thing you see is going to be a lot worse than that. So it's a way to put a guy in a position where he's operating in a controlled environment, but he still can get hurt. You know, I mean, he's getting punched in the nose or he's getting caught, he's getting choked. And so, and once you get that going, you can build on that, you know. But if you've never done that before, you know, you don't want the first one to be a life-and-death fight.

The other thing is, is what point do you want to, do you want to, do you want to, do you want to, just say, okay, I got the best bombers in the world. I got the best boatships in the world. I got the best fighter fights in the world. I got the best guns in the world. I got the best helmets in the world. But at some point it comes down to the guy. Right?

So start with him, right? Because if you don't have that, then you're just hanging gear on something. Right? It doesn't take long to hang gear on something. We used to say it takes five minutes to look like an operator, but it takes a lifetime to be one. Right. And so, but at what point do you want to relinquish?

I'm on a battlefield. I don't have anything but me. I run into a Russian soldier. Oh, you got me because I never trained in hand-to-hand. Right. Now that scenario is unlikely, but at what point are you willing to give that up? Right? Should start at every, if you want to be a true pro at what we do.

I think you should say, I'm going to win every time. I don't care what it is. it's going to be with a pistol, I'm going to win it, with a knife, I'm going to win it, with a rifle, I'm on win it. And if I'm out there butt-ass naked, light coat of oil and a pair of flip-flops, I'm going. I had some discussions around this when I was in, and it was like, you know, I was saying, hey, look, you know, need to train wrestling, boxing, jihitsu and Muay. Like, that's what we need to be doing. And some of the pushback was like, well, it takes a long time to get good at those things.

Takes a long time to get good a lot of things. And I was like, hey man, number one, if you think you're going to become a good fighter in five days, like you're an idiot. And number two, you're in the teams for 20 years. So how good can you be in 20 years, you know? It takes a long time to do a lot of shit. Exactly. Right. So it doesn't mean that I don't do it.

Yeah. But at what point are you willing to go, okay, I surrender. Yeah, I surrender. Right. I don't have my guns. I don't have my buddies. I don't have my vehicles. I don't have my helos.

I, fuck it, you got me. You know, never, right? Not me and not you. How much did you keep training? Oh, yeah. We trained, I felt in love with it, right? And even though I still, you got to be careful with it, right? You have to have context.

And I would never go into Kaiser's and rely on that. First thing, because I know, I'm like, man, before I do anything, I'm going to look for a pistol, I'm going to look for something. Yeah, absolutely. And, but if I don't have that, at least I've got something, right? but I trained a lot I trained all the way through

until I was in my 40s and my oldest son went on to become a black belt under Rob Khan and Robbie was one of the original blue belts out of Torrance Academy and I got my first blue belt you know naked ass blue belt

from Haleo yeah right and but we trained a lot and all my sons, my son's trained and my buddy's training. I believe in it, right? And with caveats, right? And, you know, people always go, oh, it doesn't work against multiple assailants. And I saw them say that to Horan one time and said, oh, so you and me getting a fight, I can beat you.

But if there were two of me, you could do better. All right? He said, so nothing works against multiple assailants, right? It's all context and perspective. But loved it. And learned a lot. Learned a lot from not, and learned a lot about life through jiu-jitsu.

I'm not a philosophical, you know, Mr. Miala-Kat guy. It's not. But I remember I was talking to Horacey one time, and I said, what do you think that the success is in jiu-jitsu? What is fast-tracked success? He goes, well, he goes, it's the same as it isn't everywhere else in life. He goes, You got to learn to love the things that are good for you, not the things that feel good to you.

Right? And that includes food, people, what you train, and you go, so, you know, you may like this particular way of doing things. He goes, but you really need to be working on this because this is what you like to do, but this is what you need to do. And he goes, and those are easy things to see, but they're hard to implement. And he goes, because I can put, I can take a bunch of kids in here. I can tell them, here's an apple, really good for you.

Here's a candy bar, not good for you. And I'll leave the room. I'll come back. What do you think is going to be going? And that's life, right? And that's about as deep as I'm going to get on that crap. But yeah, it was really something cool. I still love it.

Still very close friends with Horan Ann Hoyce. And it was really good for my kids. you know. Did they start at a young age? They did. I started them all really young, but I was very careful not to push it on them. I expose it. Exposed them to them to.

No, I was, I totally messed that up. I was a total psycho and just, like, forced my kids to train Jiu-Jitsu. They were literally training in Jiu-Jitsu seven days a week when they were little. And they all, well, I didn't allow, morally, my son to, like, stop because he was a boy. And I'm like, yeah, no, this is just for life. But my daughter's stopped for, they all stopped for a little while. Now they're back on, too. Yeah.

come back to the touchdown, but I learned that from football, right? So I used to watch these guys go when my kids were in like a peeway football, Pop-Worn football. I saw it when I was a kid playing football in school. You know, you had the daddy ball thing going on. And I think it's such a fine line of walk. You know, you want to give them the opportunity and you want to push them because they don't know how far they can go, but how far you do it. And so I got to the point where I was, I was like, look, I got coaches to do that. And at the end of the day, when they get in the car and leave football practice, have a bad day in practice, you know, whatever.

I don't need to be getting on them. I would see dads in the jiu-jitsu gym. Their sons will get caught. And it's almost like they caught the dad, you know. He's over there chewing the kid's ass in the parking lot. And I'm going, man, he feels bad enough as it is. Why don't you just say, well, we get some ice cream or something, you know? But I wanted to show it to him early on.

and what I really tried to do was if I would go train, I started them out with like, sit over there in the corner and you watch me train. And they got to where they felt comfortable in the environment and with the people. And a lot of people, I've seen guys walk into martial arts gyms and they don't stay long because they get intimidated by the environment. You shouldn't, right?

Yeah. But some people do. So especially with kids, though, you want to get them used to. It's almost like playtime. Yeah, make it fun. Make it fun, man. That's the main thing. Make it fun.

Make it enjoyable. Make them, you know, you should be running down the driveway. When you're, Daddy, where are you going? I'm going to, I'm going to train with Jiu-Jitsu. I want to go with you. Right. That's the goal. Right?

That's the goal. And, and, but yeah, they all, you know, it started early. But like you said, they, they, a couple years, they would go without training. But as adults, they all came back to it. Yeah. You know, they all came back to it. But there were times when they were like, I want to go train.

And I think that's normal. Yeah. But yeah, really cool. And it became later, it was the genesis of the Army combatants program. And it started there in Fort Bragg and the unit. But I remember nobody had ever heard of them or they came down. And what they could do, I never had a man be able to dominate me like that, man. I was like, and I didn't like it.

I was like, man, people handle that two different ways. Some people go, I never want to, I'm going to make sure I'm never near that thing again and some people go whatever just happened to me i'm going to make sure it doesn't happen again because i'm going to learn whatever these whatever magic these people know i didn't like it man i didn't like a guy being able to do anything he wanted to do to me yeah and i was like i'm not gonna let that happen yeah really scary and it's almost at the time now it's streets are a lot more dangerous now because everybody knows it but at the time no one you're ready it was like taking candy from a baby man i mean it was like uh it was like magic dust yeah there's this so i was on my first deployment

this is like 1992 1993 and I'm a new guy and this master chief this old master chief he had to be like 40 years old or something I mean just like ancient I'm looking at this old man and he comes in and it's Steve Bailey's his name he's a freaking legend and he goes anyone here want to learn how to fight and I'm like well I don't know what this old man's going to teach me but I raised my hand sure he goes yeah meet at this place and there was like a judo club well he had been training with the graces in the in the garage in torrents in like the late 80s and early 90s and so few of us rolled up there and he's like yeah I'm gonna teach you guys how to fight and he just

he just lined us up and tapped us out over and over and over again and and he was like a white he was like a high level white at the time but no one knew anything no one knew guard no new mount no no no no yeah it was like a smallpox on the blanket yeah it really it was uh it was uh it was uh it was uh it was uh it was uh it was uh yeah you know right after that when i first came out i was like man, dude, this is like really magic. And really, I wanted to cry because I was like, oh, my whole life, man, I've been, this could have been so much easier, right?

You know, I was like, I went through a lot of, a lot of bloody noses. I could have made it a lot easier on myself. But, so we had a couple, a core guys that were like the subject matter experts from each one of those squadrons. And we would come out to Torrance a couple times, several times a year, as many times as I could, you know.

And we were trained here at the academy. And you mentioned, Carrie mentioned, the Gracie Challenge. They were heard of that, you know. I mean, it was something that you guys might have known about here on the West Coast, but, you know, back in, you know, the hub of the Eastern Seaboard, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, I don't know if you'd have heard of it. And so I, I came in, and the very first day I was there, they had,

they're, one of their lead black, black, brown belts, because they don't, they only had a couple black belts, and most of them had Gracie on their last name, right? And, um, but one of their brown belts was a guy named Lowell Anderson, and Lowell was about, maybe five, six, maybe, standing on his tiptoes. And he was probably a buck 40, right? Wyrillardy dude from Montana. And they had these guys come in to take the Gracie Challenge, a couple of local boys, right?

And they were, both of them were over six foot tall, both of them probably 250 maybe, and shredded, you know. And the rule of the time was if you fight a think, and again, somebody's going to check me on us, but I don't give a shit. But I think the rule was he'd come in and you fight one of their junior belts that they select, whether it's a blue belt, a brown belt, a purple belt, whatever. If you could beat that guy, all right, for free, then you get to go against Hoy's, and if you beat Hoyce, I think you get 100 grand or something like that.

Something like that. Anyway, I saw these guys walk in, and of course, all of the guys, all the guys in all the belts. line up on each side of the training room. And then you walk in the door and you walk the gauntlet. And at the other end of the gauntlet is the guy you're going to go against. And it was Lowell Anderson. And Lowell's tiny. And he's two of them.

So first guy, he walks down. And you can always see just the environment. The tail goes between her legs a little bit. But he walks down there and he looks at Lowell and he's like, looks back at his buddy. He's kind of, yeah, okay, here we go. and came on. It didn't take long, but a little ragged all that dude all of the mat.

And I was like, before that I was thinking, man, I can't believe he's going to put that little dude in there with him. And he ragged all the hell out of him, man. And I was like, oh, my goodness, man, look at this. And then the other guy was like, no, I don't want to go. But the buddy has just got his ass whip, tournament goes, no, no, you're going. Because if I'm going to do it, you're going to do it. And he beat him too.

And so, you know, you. you look at the graces and you look at hoist and again he's he's an athlete but he's not the 350 pound dude and with the muscles and he's he's a he's a just a normal kind of a normal looking dude and you see him do it and you go hell if he can do that then I can do it right and um it was just um eye opening you know and I got to watch several of those things play out in that gym and I never saw anybody walk out of there with money I don't think anyone ever did walk out of there. I don't think they ever saw them walk out with money.

That's epic. That's an epic little tale of the beautiful jiu-jitsu. Yeah, and it grew. It grew into what it is today. Yeah, yeah. It's everywhere. I don't know how much it is in the, what'd you call it, the gem of the eastern seaboard? Hub of the eastern seaboard, yeah.

But in San Diego and Southern California, like, you're just jih Tzu on every corner. Florida, too. Yeah, Florida, too. My son, who's in the 82nd, he trains at Greg Thompson to Gem there. Greg was one of the guys that went out there with us on the instructor training program. So he has Team Rock. That's awesome. But, yeah, it's cool stuff.

So now you're getting towards the end of your career, getting towards 20 years, and you've got to make the call. Yeah, so I had known two lives. I'd known the life in Brackettville, Texas, and in the life in the Army. and I never nothing else nothing in between and I was very comfortable at that point in that environment in the unit it was you know 500 acre chain link fence

safe space for me right and um my wife was a pharmacist and I think we talked earlier how it was very being in the unit as a spouse was very difficult not just for her but for all of them and um got to the point where we're getting ready to you know I'm getting ready to commit to a

what would probably be the rest of my life after that. You know, because if you stay much beyond 20, you might as well stay for 30. You know, and because, one, your opportunities on the outside are diminished, right? You're not going to get out and start a new career every year that you spend in the unit or any military branch, whether you're a special officer or not. Every year you spend after 20 is an opportunity cost. right so you're losing opportunities on the outside so you have to weigh it so I um you know like I said

I'm 87 and 7 I'm 88 and 13 years I was alternate select for sort of major year after year after year finally got to the point where I was I was getting ready to make it and I was I just assumed I was going to be there forever you know and uh came home and told my wife and man she started crying and she's like you know I um I don't know if I can do this with you it scares me to death I've you've lost all your friends. You know, this is not the same place it used to be for me. And I said, I don't know how to do anything else. I got through high school, but the extent of my math in high school was consumer math,

where they taught you how to read a parking meter and write a check, you know. And I didn't do all that great at that, you know. And again, I, every day I went to school as a kid. literally was like, it was like, I felt like an inmate. I hated it. I mean, I could not describe to you how much. It still makes me bristle, right? I won one academic award in school, and it was a paddle, right?

They hit me literally over 500 times with a paddle. It was a baseball event that they shaved the sides off of, and they wrote The Builder Men on one side of it and the Board of Education on another side of it. And when they gave out all the awards for best looking and smartest and all and stuff. They gave one, that the coach, actually,

is coach Trevino, got up in front of the school and said, I got one more word. He goes, Normaub and front and center, and I was like, oh,

and I was sitting in the back of the class probably talking to some girl and in the back of the auditorium and I walked up at their front and he goes, here it is. This is yours. He goes, I wouldn't feel right

hitting anybody else with this paddle. Damn. And I still got it in my office. Right? And that's, for context. That was my school experience. That was your academic prowess. That was my school experience.

I was like every day there was something. And anything they could do to a kid back then, you know, it's not the same way as a day. But, I mean, I have a mouthwashed out with soap. I was hit with a paddle. I was put in a corner. I mean, I made the stand on my head. I mean, you can name it.

I did it. So I had helped my wife study through pharmacy school. So with three by five cards back then, you know, well, name and drugs. chemical structure, stuff like that. And she said, well, why don't you, why don't you go to pharmacy school? And I started laughing.

I was like, no way. You know, and I said, I don't even know how to work an algebra problem, unless it's involved blowing up a bridge, you know. But, I started thinking about it. I thought, well, you know, we'll be, we'll see. And so I didn't, I never really thought it was going to go very far

because I thought, you know, I'm not going to get picked. I'm not going to get accepted. So I did the prerex at night school in the Fort Bragg campus, you know, did the chems and all the science part of it as your prerex. And then I took the PCAT, which was an entrance exam. You had to take the pharmacy school for a pharmacy school back then. Then I got, I made it. I made a cut.

And took that and retired. And again, you know, my priority started a ship. We had young kids at the time. I had a two-year-old and a four-year-old, I think. And I got to where when I used to be really, really excited about going on a trip, I got to where I was missing my family more and more. And I think I just hit that age, you know. I don't know where my testosterone started dropping off or what, but something happened.

And I fell in love something else, and it was my family. And I wanted to do everything I could do, even if I wasn't going to like it, you know, I didn't wake up in the morning and go, oh, man, I'm a baby pharmacist. It wasn't something that excited me, but if it allowed me to spend time around my family and have what I call a real life, I guess, you know, it was, I would do it, you know. And, but again, I was never thinking it was going to, you know, develop,

but it did, you know. And I went to school at Campbell University. I went for exactly one month. Started in August. I was on terminal leave in August of 2001. September 11th. 2001, I got recalled back to active duty. And with no idea of what was going down, you know,

I didn't know whether we were going to war the next day or what was happening. And like Navy Special Warfare and everybody else, you know, sometimes you train jointly with civilian agencies. When I was an S&T instructor, the Federal Air Marshal program used to come down and do some of their range work at Fort Bragg, and they would use our aircraft and stuff like that for training. And so when I went back in, off the terminal leave, they said, hey, we're going to send you up to work with air marshals. Right. And so I went up there, started training with them, and then helping them build their – they had at the time, like less than 30 men.

Yeah, it was tiny. And they were not credentialed law enforcement officers. They were regulatory guys for the FAA. and they did not have arrest authority, so they could detain you until somebody else came to arrest you. And they rarely spent time on the aircraft. And then General Grange was an old Army Special Operations guy, like a second generation, third generation spec ops guy,

was friends with a guy named Tom Quinn, who ultimately became, and at the time when it kicked off on 9-11, Mike Kavanaugh, General Kavanaugh, was the head of the air marshals. He was retired to Army General, a J-Soc commander, I think. So he really used a lot of guys from the Navy, from the Seals, and from Army Speck Ops, to fly these missions for a couple of weeks until they could start getting things together.

And then we took over kind of training. And eventually, instead of going back to the Army, Tom Quinn said, hey, what were you doing when this thing kicked off? I was in pharmacy school. He goes, what does a pharmacist make? And I told him, and he goes, what if I told you I paid the same time? Come over here and be a trainer. So not a credential there, Marshall, but I was a trainer.

I was a national training coordinator for their special mission unit. And so I just said, well, that makes sense. And he goes in, and I could live anywhere I want to live. So within reason. So they had 26 offices, I think. and my wife wanted to be close to home, so I had a choice. She lives halfway between,

her family goes halfway between Atlanta and Orlando, and I know I wasn't going to live in Atlanta. So we moved to Orlando. And I had no intention to going back to pharmacy school because I had no reason to now. I had everything I wanted a lot easier. So give the laziest guy the hardest job, and he'll find the easiest way of doing it.

But that's where I ended up. and I spent about seven years there and I got a call from General Grange who was one of the guys who was involved with the relationship between the air marshals and the army and he was working on another project overseas. It was called the King of Della Special Operations Training Center. And it's a long-ass story, so I'm not going to bore you with it.

But anyway, I ended up going over there, leaving the air marshals, going over there, working on the commercial side as the, the deputy director for that facility. Spent four years in Jordan. Cool experience. Yeah. And it was still going today.

One of the things I noticed over there as the deputy director was we had our cadria guys. And most of them were guys that I knew that I had hired from the unit. Some of them were from Rangers, but most of them were guys I had worked with before. and after a period of time I had some of the guys from a Jordanian side came and said we got problems with some of your staff and I said what is it? And they said we got a lot of drug problems going on

and said not only are they using there are some of the biggest providers of it they're bringing it in the country and we're not going to put up with it anymore I also noticed that in addition to my staff of being over there, we were rotating all the

the usual suspects in the civilian contracting world all the big companies were coming through there and they would spend a couple of weeks there at that facility do their workup before they went into Iraq

and it was across a lot of them were special operations guys from across all services not just Army, Navy Air Force but special operators. Some of them were really accomplished guys and they'd

at that point, some of them already seen a lot of stuff. And so they had problems with drugs. And on the camp, you know, it was, and you name it, man, they were using it. All the way from abuse of prescription drugs to elicit drugs, like heroin. Stuff was going down. And so it became a big, big issue. And make a long story short, one of the guys that was the chairman of the board of the guys I was working with was a guy named Admiral Larson, Chuck Larson. And so I reported it to him and he straightened out and then I had a discussion with him.

He was like, you know, man, would you like to go back over? And I was like, no, I'm not interested in going back over. I'm done with that. And after discussion with him, I made a determination to go back to pharmacy school. This time, though, I had a little bit different idea about what I was going to do. Before, I was just going to go back to some small town in Texas or Georgia, open up some mom-and-pop pharmacy and, you know, live happily ever after. This time I went back and I was like, I'm going to figure this out.

You know, I don't know what's going on with this stuff, but I'm going to figure it out. And I'd already kind of done all the legwork with the prerex and stuff. So it seemed like a natural path to getting involved in it. So I went to pharmacy school, this time in Palm Beach, and Linnock University in West Palm Beach, Florida. Got through there, you had to have a 3.0 GPA to be eligible for residency. I had a 3.00. I might have had a 2.999999, but it was whatever.

They rounded it up. Yeah, right. They probably rounded the thing up. But barely made it by skin of my teeth to apply for residency program. And so I applied for a residency. I actually went to Orlando for my general residency. Then I did another residency, a PGI2 in neuropsych medication, so mental health. And with a focus on pain management, PTSD, and substance use.

And why of those three is because when I was a first year resident, when I used to rotate from those different clinics, you know, resident rotates from clinic to clinic to clinic, maybe a month at a time. And I would see the same dudes. I would say, hey, I saw you in the PTSD clinic. And then the next month I'd be in the substance use clinic. Because I'm, you were in the, and so I start to see these guys who had all three of them. They're making the rounds.

Yeah, so they would be what they call comorbid conditions. So guys that would have PTSD would have substance use issues and pain. Right. And they were related. So we started a clinic on my second. residency in a mental health thing down in West Palm Beach, which by the way was ground zero for heroin in the time in Florida. It was, you know, Florida was famous for OxyContin Express, all the things that were going

on down there with opioids. And so we were right there at Ground Zero. And we started a clinic that basically if you fell into all three of those clinics, you went instead of going to one of those silos, you went to the one where we looked at all of them. So it was an interdisciplinary team. So you had a psychiatrist, you had a physician, you had a psychologist, you had social workers, you had pharmacists, nurses, all of them working together as a team to treat this particular cohort and really cool. And then I spent, by the way, I started pharmacy school the second time when I was 52. And I remember telling my wife,

I said, I think I'm going to be the oldest kid in the class. And, um, I got there. I was older than the dean by about 10 years. Never mind the kids in the class. Yeah. So I finished pharmacy school at 56. I finished residencies by 58. So I was 58 years old when I finished residency.

So from the age of, and I'll count my residency time as employment with the VA because I don't want to make it sound like I was a new guy, but I did two years of residency. And then so that would be 2016, left the VA this year. So whatever that math adds up to be, not long, but long enough. And what I learned along the way, well, I learned a whole lot, but is I don't think I'm any closer to figuring out than I was when I got there, you know, because it's so nuanced.

And I went down that rabbit hole, and I got to the point where it was bothering me so much. I was thinking, you know, I'm going to fix this for veterans, and especially a substance abuse side, because it's all related, you know, pain, leads to opioids, which leads to abuse of prescription opioids, which leads to I can't afford those anymore or I can't get those anymore, but I can get heroin, right? Which leads to all the things that, you know, if you don't die of an overdose, you die of suicide or your relatives.

I mean, and I buried a lot of friends. I lost 18 guys on October 3rd that were friends of mine, and I've lost a lot of guys since then, that guys that you would never think that you would lose to suicides and overdosed. And so I really went in there thinking, man, I owe it to my guys to go in here and try to at least help. You know, whatever's on the other side of this life, you know, who knows? But I don't want to get there and have somebody go, you know, you could have done something you didn't, you know. And so I did what I thought I could do.

But then as I got further and further into it, I realized, man, you know, I mean, this is, more than, more than one man can do. And I also spent all that time burning all those, what few brain cells I got, you know, burning that man I'd oil, and I learned everything there was

to know about drugs, and I had one experience that kind of, it was another epiphany to me. Last year I went out to Colorado, the place called the Winter River Ranch. And they had the survivors of the Abigate out there, young kids. Man, I mean, younger than my kids.

I mean, and I had seen guys and gals just liked them in my, not the same guys, but guys like them for years and years and years and years in clinic in the VA and had seen how they responded to treatment or didn't respond to it. And then we set out there by a campfire until 2 o'clock in the morning with a bunch of young, young warriors and had a whiskey and a cigar. And I watched what happened around that campfire when they were with each other. Because a lot of them was the first time they'd seen each other since the incident, you know. And I don't think that's the answer, but I do know that what I saw there was pretty special. And sometimes it's better than, you know, it's better to talk to a friend or somebody that you have something in common with than it is to sit down and talk to a clinician, no matter how smart he is. If you don't trust him and you don't know him. And so, you know, I at some point was like, you know what, I don't believe I'm making a difference in it.

But got out and went into the whiskey and cigar business. But yeah, it was worth doing. But again, it'll make you be a little bit more careful about things you commit to in the future because I spent a lot of time, you know, doing stuff that doesn't come natural to me. So how did that, what was the genesis of whiskey and cigars then? How do we get there? So, you know, you know my family background in whiskey, but. That's right.

Besides the deep heritage you have of making whiskey and bathtubs. But, yeah, yeah, but I, 25 years after Mogadishu, we were coming up on the anniversary. And I was sitting down in Orlando, Florida at the time, smoked a lot of cigars, drank a lot of whiskey, and probably a lot more of both than I shut up. But I wanted to do something for the reunion. So a friend of mine from Cuba had his own cigar company, and I said, hey, can you make 300 cigars for the guys that bragged for this reunion?

And he goes, yeah, I love to. So we, you know, after a half a bottle, maybe more than a little half a bottle of whiskey, two o'clock in the morning on a wet cocktail napkin. We drew up a logo, and the guy I was with at the time was named Tim Young and put an H for my name, a Y for his name, and then a dagger because it's kind of the standard for special operations, you know, it's like a symbol like a special op. So we just did it, you know, and then we printed up labels and, you know, cheap labels, glued them on with a glue stick and took them up in a cardboard box, you know, for the event,

you know, and the whole thing of it was, it was just, going to be a one-time deal. We're going to smoke cigars and drink some whiskey and tell war stores, you know. So, but it took off from there. Guys wanted more of them, and then they started using them for auction items. And it just grew. And the whiskey kind of followed very closely behind it within about six months, doing something similar with it. And before you know, we're in a business, you know. And I think what happened really when it kind of turned into a business was we initially, when we made the boxes for the cigars, we put the names of the guys who had fallen. on it. And a lawyer said, you better be careful with that. Because it's a good, it's a good intention,

you know, but somebody may take offense to it and they may, a cousin of a cousin of a cousin of a girlfriend or something may, you know, take legal action against you. And then you start to realize they look, you know, also, you know, what happens if it's, you know, somebody's drinking this stuff and they get, you know, so it's just like you need to incorporate because that's the way you're going to do it. And I'm not a business guy, you know, but I was lucky enough to have some guys around me that were pretty smart with it. So they set it up and then it just grew from there. And one of the things I remember when I was a young guy in Army, we used to get all this commemorative whiskey and stuff and it never was any good. It was always like some cheap stuff, some got poured in a bottle.

And I didn't want that. I was like, I want this to be really good stuff. So I know it was probably the best whiskey in the world because we paid for it. We sourced it. We made it. We make it. And when you go in to get whiskey, they can say, we got the economy origin. We got the mid-grade and we got the high-grade. And, you know, arbitrary numbers. One's $1,000 a barrel, one's $2,000 a barrel, and this one's $5,000 a barrel, and we paid for the good stuff. So I knew it was good. And it just took off from there.

And what year was that? It would have been 2018. And then what kind of like did you recognize like oh crap we got a business on our hands At what point did you go oh damn this is bigger than I thought it was going to be Not really at first but I tell you what we did do that logo that we basically were half drunk when we drove it up at 2 o'clock in the morning One of the guys my buddy was out in Vegas and he had a I'm not going to tell you the guy's name but the guy came to him said I own about $10,000 with a barrel of whiskey 10,000 barrels of whiskey and he goes,

I love your Lego, I'll give you two million bucks for it for the label for the logo. And he said, I said, would you tell him? He got to tell him pound sand.

I was like, take the money, man. I was like, that's more money I'd ever imagine that, you know, but he goes, no man,

you don't want to do that. He goes, because that's branding, you know, and he was, he was, you know, smarter guy than me,

but I would have taken it. I would have, yeah, yeah, I'll take him. But, but, But we kept it and kept moving with it.

That's awesome. But that's when I realized, hey man, maybe there's something to this, you know. And then how, like how available is it right now? No whiskey. Yeah. You can get it online. We're in, I think, 34 states. And I think we have a special with your podcast.

I can't remember what Courtney told me to say, but the bottom line is you can get it. So you can buy it on, it's available in California. You can get it online. and cigars are the same way. Okay, well, through social media, I don't know what the, they asked me like, hey, can we give some kind of special with the pie? I was like, yeah, do whatever you want. Like, we're here to support. Yeah, so whatever that is, we'll make it.

Yeah, there's a promotional code that they get, but that's not why I'm here. You know, I'm here because I appreciate what you do. And I'm a fan. But if somebody wants to buy some whiskey and they want to use a discount code, they can do it. But that's not my priority for being here. might be Courtney, so she might chew my ass when I get back to that. Yeah, I definitely don't want you to get in trouble. Yeah, but no, not that I've ever been in trouble.

But yeah, that's how we started with it. And we've had a lot of fun. We had a buddy of mine from the, you know, we have fun with it. So we start with a story on everything we do. And then we build a product around it. Like I had a buddy of mine that called me from six. And he said, I send him some cigars. He goes, I love it, but I can't deal with the Army stuff.

And so we made one called Neptune Spear and sent it over to him, you know. And we do one for 50 cow, you know, because a buddy of mine, his kid came in with this idea, a young guy. He goes, why don't you make it one? It looks like a bullet. And then, but it's fun, you know. And we spend a lot of time, it's fun, but we're serious about it because we want the products to be really good, you know. because we are commemorating certain events, you don't want to cut any corners on that.

Because especially ones that guys died on. But yeah, fun stuff. So that's what you're up to now. Anything else? What's next? Yeah, you know, moved up to Orlando, Florida. My wife's got a farm up there. And so the kids grew up.

And once the kids grew up, I got tired of the traffic in the neighbors. So we moved out in the country. and I put up triple strain concertina around about five extra land. And living my dream there. But, yeah. And all three of your boys served in the military? They all did. I got an oldest, my oldest son, Brock, was in the first and 75th Rangers.

He was back in the Rangers during the surge. So 2004, 2005, 2006, time frame. Got out. Did he do any time in Ramadi? We had Rangers right down the street from us. He might have. He might have. I know that he got to work with some old colleagues.

when they were old men and they knew him when he was a baby. And, but, yeah, he got out and got his black belt under Rob Con. And then now he's a contractor. And then his younger brother is in the Marines. He's a captain in the Marine Corps. And then his younger brother is a West Point captain in any second. But you ought to see that house, man, when it's football season. And the last conversation I heard between the two,

they're actively serving was they won my boy from West Point first of all, Navy beat the shit out of West Point football for like 50 years straight or something like that. And I think guys started the Army and retired from the Army and never won football game.

But so my boy from Navy was really giving it to the Army guy. And he turned around to him, he said, hey, Mason, he said, what do they call a cadet that graduates from West Point, number one in his class? And he said, I don't know, he goes, second lieutenant. And he said, what do they call the guy that graduates last?

And Mason said, second lieutenant? And he goes, yeah, second lieutenant. He goes, what do they call a guy who graduates from Naval Academy? First in his class? And Mason, he said, Inzen. And he said, what do they call a guy who graduates last? And he goes, Inzen. He goes, no, second lieutenant in the Marine Corps.

So they go ahead of quite a bit. But fun stuff. And then your daughter, she's, what, started law school you were saying? Yeah, she just graduated from the University of Alabama. She went in for her West Point interview. So they asked her, so where do you rank West Point on your list of colleges you want to go to? She goes, like 15th or something like that. And they went, oh, 30 seconds later, a guy walks out and goes, see you later.

And then she went to University of Alabama. and, you know, held a lot of money. But she went there and she's recently graduated and she wants to go to law school next year. She's going to take a year off and then go to law school. Awesome, man. Awesome. Does that get us up to speed?

I'm good. Right on. Carrie, you got any questions? No, sir. Freaking outstanding. Sorry taking us so much of your time, pal. No, no, not at all. But I didn't think we were, I thought we were like an hour and a half in this thing.

Yeah, no. The time goes quick. people want to find you it's hooten h-o-o-t-e-en-y-n-y-n-y-n-y-n-h-h-com that's where people can check out what you're doing and you're on Instagram

at hoot and young TwitterX at heuton young M-T-R what's that m-T-R mean you know what that means I don't know no no young M-T-R

I don't know what it means but it's Hoot and Young M-T-R that's on on Twitter X and then Facebook Hoot & Young and you got a YouTube channel pretty cool pretty cool YouTube channel

You get on there, tell some stories and whatnot. So pretty awesome. That's where people can find you. Any final thoughts? No, just thanks for having me, privileged to be, honored to be here. And I heard a lot about you from some friends of mine that I served with throughout my career. Guys that, if they say it, it's true. And so I'm privileged to be here with you guys, and I appreciate it.

Well, thanks for coming out, man. It's an honor to be able to sit here and talk to you, get your lessons learned. So thanks for coming out and doing that. But most of all, thanks for your service. Thanks for your sacrifice. And thanks for setting an example for a whole generation of war fighters. We won't forget what you did. And we won't forget the brothers that you lost.

Thanks for coming out, man. Likewise. I appreciate it. Appreciate what you've done. Thank both for your service. And it's an honor to be here with you. And with that, Norm. Houton has left the building.

Yeah, not much to say after that one. It's safe. I mean, just awesome, awesome to have him. Just so down to earth. And quite frankly, I apologize to everyone here, but we had about two hours of conversations that we didn't record. So we just talked about so much stuff,

so much stuff in the Special Operations community and the military in general. So, so awesome to hear that firsthand perspective from him. and how it all ties in. So, yeah, amazing. Thanks to Norm for coming out. And you might have heard him talking about training jiu-jitsu.

I know we all like to train jihitsu. And I recommend that you go train jiu-jitsu. I also recommend that when you're training jih-tzu, you're going to need a little bit of extra strength, a little bit extra power, a little bit extra fuel. You've got a protocol, right? You've got like a full... Yeah, yeah.

I have a, so go on my way to the gym, I have a go. And so I crack it right as I leave for the gym. And then by the time I'm at the gym, the go is gone. And then I have a hydrate with me in the bag that I will drink while I'm training because I sweat a lot. And then when I get home, mulk. So it's a great protocol. Hey, check out joccofuel.com. If you need the good protocol.

Good clean fuel for your system. Check it out. Joccofuel.com. Also, origin at USA.com. You know, there's been a lot of hoopla about genes currently in the world. People are very excited about various genes. Some of the genes that you might, some of the genes that are named with American names, they're not made in America.

Did you know that? Yeah. Yeah. So there's certain genes that are getting, lot of buzz right now that are made in China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, or Mexico. And they have America. Yeah, and they have America on them. So let me just tell you that.

Those aren't American genes at all. Those are not American jeans. Those are junk. So don't buy into that. Buy into America. Buy into freedom. Buy into Origin USA. OriginUSA.com.

Go get yourself some jeans. Get a jean jacket. You can get the full. It's not American, but it's a Canadian. Toxedo. Get your Canadian Toxino. I posted up

with a Canadian tuxedo for my wife or not for my wife but I was like posted up with it and it didn't even like phaser. She was just like

hmm. I said Canadian tuxedo she's like oh what are you talking about? I was like I'm wearing an entire denim outfit. Is that not a thing for the Brits?

They don't have. She just looked to me like I was just normal. But you know she grew up on a farm, you know? So I guess that's kind of just how they're rolling over there.

Oh, I guess not a farm. But she had, you know, whatever, pastures and horses. So, you know, there's jeans being worn. Although they're more like wearing a riding pants. Because she's from England. Anyways, hey, listen, American made boots, American made T-shirts. American-made.

American-made. Not in Bangladesh. Not Vietnamese-made. Not Chinese-made. American-made. That's what you need. go to origin USA.com and get some. Also jocco store.com speaking of stuff to where you got a new deaf, new discipline equals freedom t-shirt.

New discipline equals freedom t-shirt V5, I believe, version five at this point. So sick, continue and develop those. This one's badass. New shirtlocker shirts come in as well. Come in monthly. Sick designs. According to Echo Charles. According to the people.

The feedback is good. Cool, cool. Check out Dave Burke. He's got a new book. It's called Need to Lead. It's available for pre-order right now. I wrote the forward to it. So at a minimum, you can get it for that reason.

Great book. Lots of great leadership information in there. Check it out. Dave Burke, Need to Lead. And speaking of Dave Burke, he's another leadership instructor like me and Leif, JP, and the rest of the crew. Escelonfront.com. We teach leadership.

We'd talk about and teach the leadership principles that we learned on the battlefield. If you want them or us for your organization, go to Escalonfront.com. And we also have an online training platform because leadership is a skill. You heard Norm talking a lot today about things that are skills. And a lot of people don't think that leadership is a skill, but it is a skill. It's a skill that you need to learn and you need to maintain. It's not something you're just born with. So check out Extreme Ownership.com.

our online training academy, and we will teach you those skills. And that's what we've got there. And by the way, we get some charity organizations. If you want to help service members active and retired, check out Mark Lee's mom. She's got the most amazing charity organization. I know right now, currently, she's working, helping several veterans that I personally know, and it's incredible to watch the organization go to work.

If you want to donate or you want to get, involved go to america's mighty warriors dot org also check out heroes and horses dot org and then finally jimmy may's organization beyond the brotherhood dot org if you want to connect with us or if you need some uh whiskey check out hoot and young uh on the internet hoottenyng dot com instagram at hootin dot young twitter at hoot and young mtr which we don't know what that means but we're going with it and then Facebook and YouTube also Hoot and Young and for us you can check out jocco.com and then on social media I'm at Jocka Willink. Carrie is at Carrie Helton just don't spend too much time there because it'll kill you once again a huge thanks to Norm Hoot Hootun for joining us today. Honor to sit down honor to meet you

I met him several months ago but it's honor to sit down with you and just hear your lessons learned hear your perspective and hear about the sacrifices that were made. So thanks for you and your service. Also, thanks to all of our brave military personnel around the world right now. With a solemn salute to the brave soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice, October 3rd and 4th, 1993 Mogadishu, Somalia. We honor your service. We thank you for the lessons that were passed on

and we will not forget your sacrifice. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, as well as all other first responders. We know you sacrifice every day to keep us safe, and we are grateful for that as well. And everyone else out there, look, you can have a really good plan.

you can have really good tactics you can have really good equipment but things can still go sideways and that's why you need to train hard that's why you need to push yourself that's why you need to prepare for the worst case scenarios because if it can go wrong it will go wrong and don't count on anything else but that you have to prepare for the worst case scenarios and then in the moment of truth like Norm Houton you need to step up and lead

and that's all I've got for tonight until next time this is Kerry and Jocko out