Jocko Podcast - 506: Violence, War, and the Path to Redemption. With Clay Martin

Episode Date: September 17, 2025

>Join Jocko Underground< Clay Martin, former Green Beret and author, shares his journey from brutal combat in Iraq to the battles of life after war. He reveals how writing saved him, how visions of an ancestral spirit reshaped his path, and why Barbarian Spirit is a call to purpose and survival for veterans today.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 506 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Now listen, I need to step out of the moment and put a little perspective to the situation. I spent my youth first as a reconnaissance Marine and then as a special forces soldier. I ended up my military life as an assaulter and sniper for third special forces group, commanders in extremist force, which, while it no longer exists at the time, could arguably be described as the most vicious, murderous bastards on the planet.

Sure, a handful of other units could vie for that title back then, but few. And while I was not their king, I did prove I could run with the pack. I've felt bones break in my hands. I've killed other humans in a significant quantity and basically led a life of violence, few other humans can fathom.

Never had I felt anything like this, not even close. And that right there. There is an excerpt from a book called Barbarian Spirit, which is written by a guy named Clay Martin, who, as you heard, served both as a Marine Corps scout sniper, reconnaissance Marine before transferring to the Army, where he was a member of the special forces.

And his deployments were during periods of fierce fighting. He also served as an instructor teaching both special operations target interdiction, which is their fancy way of saying sniper course. and he also taught advanced urban combat before he was medically retired after retirement. He became a prolific writer. And I don't throw that phrase out easily, prolific writer. You've got to get after it if you want me to call you a prolific writer.

But he certainly has. And in that voyage, he's uncovered a path that he's used to overcome some demons. And now he's helping others by guiding them down that same path. And it's an honor to have him with us here tonight to share some of his experiences and lessons learned to Clay, thanks for joining us, man. Hey, Jago, thanks for having me, brother. Yeah, I really appreciate it.

And the honor is mutual. You know, not because you're a famous podcast, or you're a show like that, because you're an old school seal and you've done some stuff, which I respect. I've had the real old school seals. I've been on it. It's weird, too, because the seal teams

have not been around for that long. When I got to Seal Team One in 1991, I went to the 30 year. So in at like January of 1992, I went to the 30 year anniversary of SEAL Team won. It was when it was born. It was 1962. And I was the youngest. You know how in the Marine Corps?

They do the youngest and the oldest cut the cake. So we did that thing. Yeah. And it was the youngest, which was me. And the oldest, which was a guy named Double L, who is an old Vietnam UDT guy. And we did the cake cutting. But then fast forward, I don't know what it was. It was a few years ago.

I went to the 60th anniversary of SEAL Team 1. And it's just wild that the history is so short. And like guys, you have guys there that you knew that were like at SEAL Team 1 originally. And they're still kicking it around. So I can't say I'm an old school school. I'm still a new guy. In relative terms of GY guys. Yeah, check, check.

So, dude, you got a lot of stuff to talk about today. I had a really good time reading your various books. Concrete jungle. What's this one? Prairie fire. And then we've got the wrath of Wendigo. Am I saying that right? Wendigo.

You can pronounce one or two is it's a Native American word. It's going to be Wendigo or it can be Wendigo. I'm not native enough to say which one's Wendigo. I think Wendigo. I think that's what we had naturally said. So I might just stick with that one. So we'll get in all that stuff. Let's get a little bit of background on you, though,

where you came from. It's funny before we hit record, we were talking about where guys come from. Right. And how they grew up and what kind of guys you end up with. It always brings me back to, you know, I had this conversation with a buddy of mine who was a emergency room doctor in Baltimore. And this was in the time, I think they were getting 17 puncture wounds on average a day from stabbing and shootings in Baltimore because Baltimore was crazy. And he said that if a family, so you get all kinds of collateral damage, you know, you get people like that. They're not a gang member, but they're just like little Sally was sitting on the front doorstep,

and she took a freaking round to the head, you know, and she dies. And she's 12 years old. And that happens a lot. And he said that basically you have, if you have a family that has, if the family's tight, this traumatic incident can actually bring them together and make them even tighter. But if there's little fractures in that family, this traumatic incident can blow up the family and just cause total destruction. And I didn't make the connection at the time, but as I see guys now, you know, when guys join the military, it's like when you go to war, if you got some little fractures in there, well, it can, it can like make you more appreciative of life. It can make you better. But if in certain situations, you got some little fractures, some things get blown up. So let's talk about where you are, where you came from.

Sure. No, absolutely awesome. And I'm going to tell some things on your show today that I've never said before. And it's not even just because I was trying to bury them. It actually comes full circle with what I'm doing now with psilocybin and these other things for the other veterans. Some of this, a lot of this actually, I didn't remember until like two months ago. Actually, back in July, when I agreed to come on the show, a lot of these things started unlocking. I've actually done probably three sessions of plant medicines in the meantime. And it's been, extraordinarily weird. But I come from a little place in Texas, a little tiny town, little oil patch in the Pananaola, Texas, and dirt poor. We were there when the oil boom ended, so everybody's broke. Especially my family was in oil and gas, like my dad was a drill or a drilling rig for a while.

Grandfather drove trucks in the oil field. So, you know, while everybody else was coming up in the country, our economy is smashed. So, you know, poor guys living in a trailer out in the middle of nowhere. I'm a little guy anyway. I wouldn't get any size until I'm like 20. I go to high school at 4 foot 11 and 95 pounds. Damn.

Yeah. It's wild. People kind of can't believe this stuff later in life, but yeah, I'm not a big dude. Anyway, so things are pretty rough. It's a pretty, it's a rough area, too, in its own way. It's not like we're in downtown Chicago or New York, something like that. But, I mean, crazy stuff is happening. While I'm not going to apologize for what happens, it does.

give me, especially now, some perspective on why my dad was the way he was. I can remember, like, crazy stuff when I'm like, before I can go to school, being like five or six years old, you know, he's taking me to work with him on this drilling rig, which, you know, OSHA would, like, fly a black helicopter out ready, like, shut you, you know, they'd go get the president of Exxon for letting this happen. But it's, you know, in 1985, so this is what's going on. And my dad is, he's not, like, really, like, a tough guy. He's not like a criminal or anything like that, but he's the smart guy.

That's why he's the driller. that makes him like the squad leader for this drilling rig. And his crew, roughnecks back then, they're also not like upstanding citizens. You know what I mean? Like they're doing this for the money and it's a dangerous job so people die and get hurt all the time. So there's a kind of a certain guy that kind of does that. He's got like, you know, Hell's Angels and, you know, Mexican banditos on his crew. I can remember like going to jail to get like some of his roughnecks for work release and then we got to take him back before we go home.

And I have also no idea why he's taking me out to, work with him. This is, this is like insanity that at the time seems fine. Now as a 45-year-old man, I'm like, that in itself is off the chain. Anyway, so anyway, this goes on. Now you can no longer drill, they're not getting for oil in Texas anymore because it's not worth the money. Economy crashes, we're broke. We're extra broke now. He's got to do some job that he hates now, you know, driving a truck. And things are never like really good at home for being like, you know, totally honest. My dad's a little bit of a psychopath anyway. He's got some violence baked in. CPS by this point has been to our house probably four or five times already.

You know, you go to school and have bruises. Like, eventually things are going to come to a head. And it's just not a great environment. I've got two sisters, one's three years older than me, one's three years younger. They're in the middle of the shit too. So this goes on for a while. And you also, like, as a guy in that kind of kind of like environment. You learn very quickly, like how to lie to CPS, right, because CPS is not going to actually do shit. They're going to come to your house. They're going to some shit. They're not going to do anything. And you're going to catch it a lot worse when they're gone. So this is going on to about, oh man, when the Gulf War started 991?

The first Gulf War was 1991, yeah. Okay. So this is where things really fall apart. My dad says like a midlife crisis. All right. He's, he's an emotional. I don't know what the hell's wrong with it, but he's coming apart. And the goal four starts, he's saying, he thinks, like the apocalypse is upon us, right? War in the Middle East, like, you know, this is it, this is the end times. So now he wants to start going to church all of a sudden. I got to nowhere. We've never had to do any shit in our lives before.

Now we're doing this. And when we get to this church, we go back to his mom's church, which is Jehovah's Witnesses, which is a culty, crazy thing, especially in the Midwest. And the other thing about cults is they tend to attract not people that are awesome at life. All right, they do. They tend to attract. like, you know, derelakes and fuck-ups and weak people. That's how it is.

So we started going to this church, you know, fucking welcome back with open arms or a bullshit. A lot of these people have a lot of mental problems. All right. And they're trying to solve this by going to a shrink. All right. But we're in the middle of nowhere. So the nearest shrink is like Dallas, which is like a nine-hour drive. So they see like, okay, you're a mess too.

Come on, jump in the van. They're going down to see this shrink. It's like this one shrink that's seen like 15 people, you know, like in sequence. Psychology is also not great in the early 90s. We're still in, like, some development stuff. And when they start prescribing him SSRIs, of various, they're just trying stuff out. And, you know, he's going to go see him like once every month or every two months to like, hey, these meds aren't working or whatever. Anyway, he tried lithium, prozac, all the stuff.

Anyway, it started making things a lot worse. All right. He is now, like, gone from being, you know, overly violent, you know, abusive to an absolute fucking crazy person. And he's really coming unglued. And this is the, this is the core memory, actually, that ends up being what gets me to join the fucking military. Before this, you know, I'd kind of wanted to, you know, I don't know. I've watched action movies in the 80s. And I kind of wanted to be a Marine for a minute, but most of it had been, like, you know, polish my boots and fucking walking a parade.

I didn't even know what the fuck Marines and anybody else really did. If I also want to be a stockbroker or some of the beat rich, you know, some bullshit. Anyway, so I don't remember exactly how this goes. I do. CPS comes to the house I'm like 13 12 or 13 I don't know what the fuck happened But next thing I know I'm in bed

Like 3 o'clock in the morning Dad comes to wrist me out of bed Fucking those me on the couch between my two sisters He is absolutely fucking losing his shit People Think they've seen a psychotic rage before And they haven't They've seen somebody get angry

All right They've seen somebody have a little bit of Roy rage and throw a fucking dumbbell or some crazy shit but he is absolutely off the fucking rails. And what occurs to me is he's actually spin him up. He's going to kill us in himself. He's fucking freaking out bashing his own head into the fucking mantel above the fireplace. Just, you know, really, really fucking losing it.

And you're 13 years old. 13. And so you're watching him. And so is he, this escalates? Or does it come out of nowhere? This is that of nowhere. This is just like, this is shit that will happen to.

And is it yelling and screaming too? Yes, slap us around, fucking freaking out. Blaming you for stuff? Yeah, you're going to get this fucking, you know,

you're going to get you taken away from me and, you know, this is all your fault. And all this shit. And I remember actually there's a very heavy lamp next to me. And there's not some fucking heroes ending to the story either.

It's just how it is. And as I think he's going to fucking kill us. All right. I realize that I have this weapon. All right. now I've got to make a fucking judgment call as a 12 or 13 year old kid. Do I wait until it's back turned and try to fucking X him out? I'm going to lose this fight too.

I weigh 95 pounds. He weighs 250. I'm going to die if this fucking doesn't work. And I end up not having to because I don't know the situation diffuses and he goes outside and gets his truck and fucking haul his ass. But that's the moment that I realize like you're on your own. You know, if you're going to fucking survive in this world, you got to learn how to fight and fight like son of a bitch.

and so that becomes my goal. I look like who's the fucking toughest gang around? You know, fucking, I don't know. We got some Mexican mafia dudes. We got some fucking other bullshit. Like, nope, they're all actually bitches. U.S. soft guys are like the toughest, most murderers bastards that they are. I've seen all the fucking movies.

So really that's what it is. Like, I have to go learn the fucking murder magic from these fucking mythical fucking heroes because that's the only way that I'm going to be okay. And I'm going to be able to take care of my sisters and my mom. Now you've got to continue through high school. Yep. What's high school like for you? So now did you get the,

did you actually make the, because I remember when I was a little kid, I wanted to be some kind of commando. Yeah. And then at one point I realized, oh, that's a real job. You could do that. Yeah, yeah.

And they're going to give me money to do that job. Here's what I got to do. Yeah. So you realize that you're 13 years old in high school or something? Yeah, it is actually like a weird path for me than that. I didn't really know about, you know, I had seen some fucking, I didn't really understand, like, what it, it meant, though, or that they would pay you.

Actually, when I went to the Marine Corps, I thought you didn't, I thought it was, that's what volunteer meant. Like, you just give them four years or you. I thought the shit was free. That's not really a point, though. I, the most important thing that happens during this is actually come up later in the Sybilisian discussion, too. I also realized this is the first time that, like, my fucking rage has, like, come back. I realize that someone's got to be fucking killed. And so I, in that moment, like, shut down my emotions.

And they will stay shut down for, like, fucking 25 years. Because I realized that what's actually going to happen, if I really fucking come back with it, I'm going to get me and or my sister's fucking debt. So put my head down, fucking, I'm a little tiny fucker still, go to high school. Do learn some cool stuff there. I end up in a weird way in the football offseason program. I'm a cross-country guy because I'm a little skinny, and that's the only sport you can do

if you fucking suck at sports. I'm no longer big enough to even pretend to play fucking basketball. Plus, yeah, cross-country team has girls on it. Like, this is awesome. It's fucking amazing. So, you know,

start running cross-country, which is cool also because this will be a thing that very much benefits me later. In the off season, we have to wait for track and field season to pick up where I'm a mile and two-mile guy. I get in with the football guys because that's the only off season

that we have in this little school. All right. And football guys are fucking scary at this point because it's Texas, you know, got 300-pound linebackers and shit. And, you know, I'm this big. But we weirdly also, for such like a poor and shitty place, we have an absolutely fantastic strength and conditioning program. We'll end up with one that, like, many, many, many years later, I will know, and I'll go to the gym with, who the fuck is he?

Who's the famous quarterback from my New England? Tom Brady? Tom Brady? I'll end up, not with Tom Brady, but Tom Brady's backup in college. Got it. All right. He's now my strength and conditioning coach. And we ended up, this is like five years ago.

And we ended up like talking about shit. And it turns out that I had a way better strength of conditioning program in high school than he did. You know, anyway, our shit's awesome. So what I realized now also the third skinniest guy there. So I'm with the other guys that weigh under 100 pounds. And we're like the bitch into the gym. We're way down there. And nobody even pays attention to.

I will also never forget this. I have, I've never seen a weight in my life. So I have a 95 pound bench press. It's like, you know, the bar and a couple of tens and a five or some shit. But what I realize is that if you work hard at this, though, like, and it's pain, like, guess what? I can take some fucking pain. But if you work hard at this, like, you will get bigger and you'll get stronger very quickly. And as is a lot of times typical, too, I'm with the guys that had no fucking work ethic.

I'm having to, like, push them around and get the fuck out of my way. We're working today. And I very rapidly started getting, you know, somewhat bigger and fucking coming up the chain. And it's honestly, it's, like, one of the most rewarding things I've ever seen. Like, if you just put effort into this shit, like, you can progress. It's fucking amazing. Especially when you're 13, 14. Right.

Oh, yeah. Made out of HG.G. Yeah. So anything else happening in high school? Like, you're, so you're into weightlifting, you're running cross country, you're running track.

Are you staying out of trouble? Are you passing school? Oh, fuck yeah. Yeah, no, I'm doing great at this shit. Really, like, I think my dad sees the threat coming too. So, like, he won't let me go look weights in the summer. He won't let me, you know,

stay up for school and live weights. We're in this, like, kind of fucking back and battle, yeah, so I'm doing everything I can, like, to get bigger shit. Mostly, though, I'm doing whatever the fuck I can do to get out of home as fast as possible. So I ended up in high school, 16. I managed to skip a grade and do some other shit. And I do that. And I also, my sister has graduated a year before me. She's gone to an engineering school in New Mexico. Same thing. I school really well on the ACTs and SATs and shit. So I get a, like, mostly a full right scholarship to this like top 10 engineering school and there we go.

Damn. Okay. That's a pretty good focus coming from this freaking chaotic shit. Oh, yeah. Oh, you were rolling out of it was rough. Especially, you know, did you see something? Was there some example that you saw? I mean, did your older sister?

You saw like, okay, I see what she's doing. I can do that. Was it somebody at school or coach or something like that? Oh, yeah. No, actually it was. So on the cross-country team, there's other guy. I won't say his name because he might actually stupid an act of dude. I don't know.

but he's just like a senior I'm a freshman but he's like the biggest scariest motherfucker I've ever seen like he's fucking jacked and yoked and fucking fast and do as fucking hard as nails and it's not like he's gonna talk to me a lot because I'm like you know fucking 13 14 but his career paths he wants to go be a seal

and that also makes me like starting to be like what the fuck is a seal like you put you know cocking on the wall like what the fuck is it but anyway no he's badass he wants to do this I'm like well maybe this is maybe this is something I can do too. And weirdly, like, he goes, he graduates and he makes it. I don't even know if I ever saw him again, but I knew friends of friends. And he came back after Buds or whatever, and he's like, he'd done it.

It's like, holy shit, like this could be done. It's actually weird by starting thinking about this guy. I just listened to a podcast not too long ago about the seal that then became a forward legionaire and shit. He was from San Diego. Yeah, yeah. And he goes off on this whole thing about, he's from San Diego. He played football. And like, he's done all these years, never seen anybody you from San Diego, and all the wrestlers and everybody is fucking tried. Somehow our little town of 4,000 people

has made him. There's another guy that graduates a year after him that also becomes a seal. And then a year after that, you know, with me, it ends up being a reconarine in green gray. Hell yeah.

Something in the water. Something in the water. Such a tough and terrible place that you'll do anything to get out of it. I don't know. So now, are you like 17 when you go to college then? Yeah.

So I turned 17 a couple months. months after I graduated from high school, go to college at 17, it's an adjustment. We've also, this whole time, like, my dad's, like, crazy control measure stuff has been, like, it's been nuts. We joined the church. He makes us, you know, call all our friends from school and tell them, like, we're not friends anymore because we're not part of the cult. And we're the only kids in this town to go to this fucking crazy-ass church.

That's not a fun conversation to have, like, 11. Your friends are like, what, motherfucker? And, you know, it takes a couple of years and then we can kind of be friends at school again, but you can't go do anything. The drugs are also fucking them up in this crazy way of, like, now he has to keep all this. So we don't get to, like, really socialize with the other kids from church for the next town over. When we go to church, we got to come home and, you know, I don't know, fucking clean the barn or some dumb shit. So I'm also going to college with like absolutely no social skills. Certainly no girl skills.

And just a fucking mess. but now I'm basically free for the most part. Are you living at the college? Yes. Yes. Yeah, and it's in the next state over it's in New Mexico.

Oh, damn, okay. So you're free and clear. Kind of. Still where you should will happen. I've been there about a month and I wake up one Saturday morning and my parents are pounding on my door because I'm still a minor.

And like, hey, we can't fucking Inspector Berks from basically. I'm like, holy shit. So yeah, it's crazy. It's absolutely bananas. But when I get to college, have no attention of graduated from college. I'm like, this is, I'm going to use this money that I'm going to have to pay back eventually because I'm going to lose my scholarship. And I'm going to

get really strong. And I'm going to go do some version of Commando guy stuff. I don't know which one it is. I'm talking to all the recruiters. I'm going to do all the research. And that's what I'm going to do. So that is actually what I end up doing. But that's actually a weird thing that happens in there. By the end of the first semester, like, I'm obviously failing class because I barely show up. I show up to the gym. I actually got two buddies that are with me. We have. We have the really old buildup to Bud's packet that you get from the Navy recruiter. Okay. Yeah.

We're doing that. It's awesome. Right. Awesome. You know, just these two guys just want to do a workout, but, you know, they're my body, so we do all the shit. Going to judo and kickboxing class, which is awesome that we happen to have those at this college, which is amazing.

That's also awesome. If you have no idea how to fight and you came from somewhere that, like, nobody else really knows how to fight, but they'll kick your ass because, you know, they've had five minutes of boxing class or something. All of a sudden, I'm in this environment where it's like, I don't even have to give you money. Let me get this right. I don't have to give you money. All right. You will teach me how to hurt people with my hands. Awesome. And then you will teach me how to kick and hit people. They're like, yeah, all you got to do is, you know, take some pain. I'm basically like conditioning

my shins all day with a fucking stick after I learned how to do this instead of going to engineering school. It is just fucking ridiculous. Anyway, I'm failing. So I'm going to lose my scholarship, but I'm going to get kicked out of college. And I'm also realizing, like, this is just a lot of money that I'm going to have to pay back. So, like, midway through my second semester, I know, I finally call a lawyer. A lawyer? Yeah. Well, this is the fact that I need to know. I'm like, hey, I am a Texas resident. I'm 17. I've graduated from high school. What is my legal status? And he's like, well, in the state of Texas, you are an emancipated adult. So you can't buy a pack of smokes. You can't buy beer. But you're also in the eyes of the law, like no longer a minor,

and nobody can tell you what the fuck we do. So. So I'm like, awesome, sweet. I'm going to drop out of college now just to save money. I'm going to go live with my uncle in Wyoming. He's an Air Force dude. And he also has known none of this crazy shit is going on. I've been telling him over the phone. He's like, what?

Fuck. So this incident happens. Now I own shit too. So I'm going to call my parents. All right. I'm going to be like, hey, check it out, motherfucker. Like, I'm no longer a minor. I'm going to the fucking Marine Corps when I turn 18

and you can fuck off and that's what's happening. So I do that and I don't know I go for a fucking walk in the desert after that Well apparently they called my older sister who's also in my same college And we're a small college too It's not like we're going to University of Pittsburgh

She's like two buildings over in her fucking dorm room And I don't know Whatever kind of guilt trip they lay on her She tries to kill herself Jesus. Yeah. Fucking slash her wrist with a fucking glass. All right.

Fortunately, her roommate finds her fucking fixes this fucking problem. All right. But this is obviously not fucking good. So I am like, oh, fuck. You know, now I'm kind of leaving my sister hair fucking flapping to. Like, I don't know what the fuck to do. I finally end up, I call my grandmother, my mom's mom.

And I just lay all this fucking shit on her. I'm like, hey, I know we haven't talked in like, you know, fucking five years, but here's what the fuck has been going on. I was crazy shit. My sister tried to kill herself. I don't know what the fuck to do. And I think I also call my parents to that point. Like, hey, motherfucker, like, leave her out of this.

So this whole thing comes on fucking glued. My grandmother's have driven down from Oklahoma with, like, one of my uncles is muscle. My parents actually have moved to Seattle now while I'm in college from Texas. So my mom's, like, flying in from Seattle, too. And then there's this whole fucking crazy fucking family drama that happens, like, right there on the fucking campus of college. Yeah, it's crazy. It's fucking absolutely nuts. I end up leaving

I go with my uncle He kind of helps me out with I get my shit together To go to the military And then the day I turn 18 I joined the Marine Corps What about your sister? What happened to your sister?

My older sister She was fine Basically She hadn't cut herself Bedin for like Really fuck herself up It was more I'm not gonna say

It was like a cry for help suicide But thank God she didn't manage To like actually Yeah So she's fine I've kind of laid the fucking Scunian down And grandma has too

Like hey don't ever fuck with my fucking sister again. So they just kind of started leaving her alone. And that's just kind of the way it goes. They're more concerned now about me going to the fucking military. Because I'm also going to get excommunicated from the church for doing this. That's how this shit works. And I don't care.

Fuck these people. Had you been to church since you've been at? Fuck. No. No. So now it's just on them. Like you, they're trying to maintain you inside the church.

And when they lose you, they're going to kind of pay for it some way in some way yeah it was going to be embarrassing it's going to be you know it's also going to be super embarrassing it's not like you know it would actually be better for them if I like you know turned gay wasn't a fucking gay parade out here at fucking San Diego instead of going to join the fucking killing machine which is like the gravest of sins so yeah so basically they end up due leaving my sick I'm now the super problem child I've got all the fucking heat coming down but they also can't come and get me so that's freaking crazy to think like a lot of parents I mean I would

say almost all parents, if their sons join the Marine Corps, they're like, oh, hell yeah. Oh, yeah, that's like, kids off the payroll. He's got a freaking square away job. Like, he's got health insurance for the rest of his life. Like, we're good to go. But your parents are freaking. Oh, yeah. They are upset. Uh, if I, at any point during this, if I, if I talk to them, they're like, you can't do this. Like, well, fuck you. I'm doing it. Yeah. Yeah. So it is wild. And this will also be true through like, especially my first, you know, four years, three, four years of, uh, a milly-old. service where I'm doing some wild shit.

Nobody's proud of that. I got nobody to fucking tell. When you're saying you're doing wild shit, what do you mean you're doing wild shit? Okay, so I go into the... What year is it? That's 1998. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. I actually end up here at MCRDC, San Diego, in October 98. Hell yeah. Yeah. So I go to boot camp. Boot camp is actually fucking easy as fuck. Like, I am loving...

Like, I'm there about three days before I realize that, like, the drilling truckers are like, well, fuck with you at night. This is the safest I've ever felt. Like, I'm having a great time. And they'll yell at you, but as long as you, like, follow these rules and shit,

like, everybody's cool. You know? Yeah, it's fucking wild. That clean slate that you get when you join the military. Here's the things you got to do. If you do these things, you're going to be fine.

That's right. And that's it. And we got you. Yeah. And, hey, if you fuck up, here's like a little, you don't even get like your head got, this is like a little punishment,

teach you not to fuck up. Get back in here. Like, okay. This is great. This is fantastic. So you're loving it from day one. Oh, yeah, love it. And so you get done with boot camp and then what kind of, did you sign some kind of contract?

Yeah. What was your contract for? Um, uh, industry. Yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Get done with boot camp. Did you go through SOI out here? Did you go? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So, uh, I went to S.O. out here.

Uh, actually went to my, this, this is funny. This is one of like three things I ended up failing in my military career. And it's, it's, it's mostly. for a certain thing of a, I'm really strong when I go to boot camp. I'm running, doing, I've never carried a ruck though my life. And that's actually one of the harder things

I think for your body to adjust to. So my shins are fucking broke off. That's weird too because you are a runner. Yeah. There's a difference, man. There's a huge difference. Huge difference. Yeah.

And yeah, so my shins are a little fucked up. They're not too fucked up. But there's a recon screening in between boot camp and SOI if you want to go. So, you know, I go to that one. You don't do the swim and all the bullshit. But the other. The ruck run.

It's a five-mile rock run. It's part of the endock back in the, I think a 40-pounder. I mean, it breaks me off. It's ugly. It's funny. Dude, did you fail it? Oh, yeah. I failed the first one.

Yeah. Oh, sure. Yeah. It's funny. The medic who's like, I'll actually end up meeting him many, many years later again. He's over in the Army Special Mission Units now. But he is running beside me, talking to one of his friends, like having a fucking merry old time while I'm like just dying. Like, you know, like fucking.

And that's actually kind of embarrassing, too, is what happens. So go to infantry school. I'm like, I got to get a lot fucking tougher before I'm going to be with these fucking dudes. And, you know, that's cool. That's what you do. Go to infantry school, no big deal. We're part of a weird program back then

that they're trying to get guys away from where they're from. So my whole infantry class, they pick up a flight of Lejeune. And the guys that just graduated on the East Coast, they pick up a flight of Pendleton. That's some Marine Corps activity, right? Oh, yeah, some Marine Corps shit.

Like, we didn't want this to be easy on you. Here you go. That's like the Russians did that. Back in the day they would take, you would not be with, people that were from your hometown. They wanted no, like, unity with that force. They wanted unity with the Soviet Union.

Yes. So that's what the Marine Corps was doing too. Straight up, you're out of here, huh? So then where do you get stationed? Lejeune. Yeah, two eight. Okay. Yep. Second Italian, eight Marines, America's Battalion.

Hell yeah. Hell yeah. And then you do a workup, getting ready for deployment? We, uh, soon as we get there, they're actually, hey, we're going straight to Panama. Okay. in like two months. That was when they were shutting Panama down. Okay.

It's 1999 down. We're going to be one of the last guys rotated in there. And it's pretty cool because we're only going as like a company element. And all we're doing is like, you know,

garden, Air Force and Navy's fucking weapons depots and shit because they're pulling everything back that's important. So, you know, we don't have a whole

crazy bunch of responsibility. But it's fun. It's awesome. I've never seen the jungle before. Now I'm in it with like a fucking gun. Like this is, you know, this is cool shit,

fucking grease, yeah. You're going to watch those nom movies, right? Hell yeah. You think you're a numb, 100%? Yeah, 100%.

And we're on this Air Force base, too, which is obviously awesome. Like swimming like a mile a day because they have a badass pool. I mean, it's great. Oh, also you can drink in Panama. Yeah, regardless of age. So, yeah, I turn, I'm 18 when we start. I turn 19 down there. But you can just buy booze to the PX because it's not the contrary.

We're having. So it's great. And they're just, yeah. The freaking 19-year-old grunts fantasy. Hell yeah. Exactly right. But there's a couple of us. So, of course, you kind of, especially if you're always going to kind of gravitate towards the dudes that are like you.

So I ended up gravitate towards a couple of dudes that are also hardasses and like, hey, we could, you know, fucking drink a couple of beers or we could drink a couple of beers and also get really hard and fucking do and go to the, you know, recon screening and fucking greek out. And so that's kind of what we do. We work out the whole time, get all, you know, fucking yoked up. Come back. One of the guys who goes to a staple tune, goes to their end doc, comes up a staple tune. I go to the recon screening, pass that one, we ease and it gets in a recont battalion eventually. And so when you get done passing the recon screening, then do you go to the recon school in Coronado? No.

You don't go straight there. What you do, the screening is just like a, like you're good enough that we'll spend a little bit of time looking to see if you're good enough. It's like a day long. It's kind of tough, but it's not anything fucking crazy. For me, then, you actually get orders to the battalion at Lejeune. And you show up and you're in a different status than everybody else. In fact, the first thing you get is a rope that goes around your body. It's tied in this fucking certain way.

and that rope means that anybody there can fuck with you at any time they want, regardless of their rank and regardless of your rank. And that's what's going to happen. And I'm going to put you through this and see if you're good enough to go to either ARS over at Little Creek or BRC over at Coronado. And then how long do you spend there before you go to one of those schools? Well, this is where things turn a little bit weird too. So at this time, like Recon Battalion is is hurting for bodies. Like they cannot fill a fat.

There's only, they're supposed to be a battalion. We've got three platoons on the East Coast. Damn. Yeah. And that's for Recon battalion. The Force Recon guys are attached to us. And I think they've got like two or three platoons too. It's so fucking slim that like guys are basically in a cycle of, you know, Mew workup,

you six months off, you work up. So they're really trying to have to get more 0321s into the between. Italian. So this is one of those things that I'm glad it happened the way it happened because it was it was different, but it also is going to kind of fuck us as like do you have an asterisk next to your MOS. So they decide like, hey, we can't get enough fucking school slots. We're going to run a BRC right here at Lejeune in-house. All right. So they do. And the guys that ended up doing it like they don't want to do it either because now we're fucking with tradition. We're doing like we're really coloring outside the fucking line. So they are extra fucking brutal onus They want this program to fail They do not want this fucking bullshit Happen but also orders are orders So you got to fucking

You gotta do your shit Yeah they They fuck us up We actually the whole battalion has to go to Greece In the middle of this too So now we're in a foreign country doing a thing Where they fucking want to fuck with you And yeah they fucking break our asses off

The big thing at BORCRARARAAS is called Patrol Week And it's like the rough equivalent like hell week, right? It's different because it's not exactly the same thing just like, oh, you're going to get fucked up and I do these stupid missions and no food, no sleep all shit.

They give us a double one. They give us 10 days instead of five. Yeah. It's fucking crazy. And it does, to a degree, I don't even remember how many of us graduated. I want to say at a 40. It was like six or nine.

It was not many. Like, they fucked us up. There's, you know, I'm for the boys as much of the next guy, but man, when you give, when you let the boys loose like that? Oh, fuck, you. Oh, it's not.

He's not good. He's not good. It's not good. It's funny. Actually, where I end up, that's the first time I ever meet Captain As Inback, too. Okay. For a minute, he ends up in charge of, like, the fucking ripple tombs. And a dude's a fucking monster.

And, you know, he's fucking bad-assie. He'll come out and, like, fight the whole fucking rip class and loss. Yeah, he's fucking great guy. You know, I also think partially that they put him in charge of this shit for a little bit because they had to give it the air of legitimacy. Like, if you're going to do some bullshit and, like, you know, we're going to give Tridentz out in fucking Thailand this week instead of it in Colorado. Like, you really got to have your shit correct. All right.

And, you know, maybe Captain Zimbach adds enough weight to this to make it count. Whatever. Anyway, so we graduate. And they send almost all of us to one new platoon. Now we've got four platoons on the East Coast who was made a new one with some other guys. This also makes the transition to a recon battalion, like, really shitty. As that, like, the dudes that weren't there and, like, didn't see what the fuck happened. You know, they're bowing up in the hallway.

Like, hey, fuck you. You didn't have a round. up the block dance monster where the fucking thing is at Little Creek and we're like hey fuck you we did some crazy shit I'll fight you right now uh we've just done this you know three or four one of quarter how long it's as ugly as fuck and then they also flip around us from it like hey fuck it we decided the accounts we're just sending you fucking little creed and we're like oh god damn it you know this is gonna fuck like we'll do it if you have to but it's it's fucking painful but I end up not doing that they're like you know you're our 321s but this was

kind of the thing that will like kind of plague some of us. Like if somebody wants to talk shit for like the rest of our career recon, I'd be like, oh, fuck you, yours doesn't count. Yeah. Ah. Yeah. Oh, shit. So, and so now you're done.

Yep. So now you're 0321. Yeah, now I'm cool. And, and go to, you go on deployment? Do a workup on the point? So we go to school phase first. That's where you're going to get like your specialized shit that you need. You know, because we don't have it built in like like, like Bonds does.

We don't have dive school built in. and we don't have an immediate airborne pipeline, but every platoon is supposed to have a dive team and a jump team and a fucking rucksack team. So we got to get six dudes to dive qualified down at Panlaas City. We got to get six dudes, airborne qualified. And there's also some like other little bullshit. We've got to have a couple snipers.

We've got to have, you know, wherever else. So basically they get the dream sheet of who wants to do what. I actually did really well at our course. I wasn't like the fucking undergraduate, I got a little fucking, you know, most hoo-a-dud dude fucking war. They're like, Lance Cooper Martin, you are stupid, but God damn you are. You know, whatever. Stupid but Tom will take those guys too.

These guys are good to go. Right, exactly. So anyway, we get to all pick, and because I did awesome there, I pick what I want, which is Moody Scouts Knitius School. Actually, ask for Ranger School and in Moody Scott Snitner School, but they're like, there's no fucking way you can do this through things back-to-back. So you're going to go to Airborne School and Pathfinder, and then if you pass that, you go to Scott's Kniper School.

Nice. Yeah. that the so you would the how long is that marine course scout sniper school that you went through oh shit man I was I was actually trying to remember this a couple days ago I want to say it's 13 weeks back then I mean it's it's fucking ugly and long yeah that was kind of the like our our seal snipers yeah that was sort of the basis of where when they started putting that school together a lot of our early guys and they went to like all kinds of different schools put together but um they're definitely and we would send guys to that school oh yeah yeah yeah so that's a very

respected school. Yeah, very much so. Did you, like, is there, what's the nutrition rate in that school? Oh, fuck. It is, it is fucking high. This is something that I'll have to, like, try to explain to, like, my army teammates many years later, after I've done SOTIC, because I didn't get requalified over there. The difference between, you know, Green Berets and their, and their sniper school,

and I'm guessing it's probably this way for SEALs and their sniper school is in the Marine Corps, sniper school is not just like a follow-on skill where we teach how to do shit, because we have sniper platoon. also. So it's a fucking brutal reality gut check. Like, we're gonna fuck with you and make sure you're a tough guy and do all kinds of like dumb shit and just to see

if you're good enough too. Not just if you can shoot and be a sniper, but if like you're hard. Because it is a gatekeeping thing for their community. And it's not you get to skip those parts. You're like, well, you know, I got my fucking decoder. Oh yeah, come in at week four. No, you're getting fucked up too. So it's very high. I want to say it's over 50%.

There's actually pictures of classes where nobody graduated. It was like the instructor standing there was fucking right on and you did you did you like have that urge to be a sniper when you were a kid? No what made you think it was cool this is kind of been the before I've gone in like I've read like all the Carlos Hathcock books and I'm also looked at it as like the two most badass tough guy things you can be in the Marine Corps is a recon dude and a sniper so you can manage you both of those like you're good to go which would have been a lot easier if I could fucking shoot Are you a shitty shot naturally? Oh, I'm fucking terrible. I'm fucking awful.

I think I'm good because, you know, I don't know, I've spent some time with my fucking 22 at the range and, you know, shooting stuff. I walk out of boot camp with the pizza box of shame, which in the three grades of marine marksmanship, there's an expert, which is, you know, awesome. There's sharpshooter, and then there's the barely pass, which is the pizza box square.

Everybody can see it from a mile away. Like, you. Yeah. Turns out I actually fucking suck with that. the rifle. Oh, fuck. So this is also a problem because this is getting in the way of the other half of the dream, right? Yeah. So I'm like, oh, shit.

And actually to get into our Marine Scouts and Ibrook School as a Marine, you have to qualify consecutively two years or two times, expert. All right. So it's going to be a little bit of a fucking problem. So good reconarming, what I do. I fucking cheat my ass off. I go to the fucking rifle range of our fucking boys and the way that we used to do things. Like, okay, you get to, you meet each other.

Okay. You go to the pits. I can take your pencil, fucking mark me, don't set the fucking record, no crazy shit, but I need a 225 or whatever to fucking pass. And so we've managed to do this somehow in like six months.

And that last time, you know, the fucking guys come back and they're like, dude, those last five shots, I'm not sure they hit the fucking earth. So I've not exactly set myself off for fucking success, right? But I do go to sniper school. I don't even, I think I've shot a fucking rifle

with a scope on it like one time before this. All right, this is, this is not good. And I end up passing the shooting phase of Marine Scouts and Iber School by my last bullet. Damn. Yeah, like, like, fucking for real. Like, in the world of honesty, I wish somebody would go pull the fucking records. I could theoretically actually be the worst shooting Marine Scouts and sniper that's ever lived. But it turns out I'm awesome at the other stuff, though, like stocking and, you know, fucking field grabs on the other bullshit.

I shoot the, you know, shoot with the fucking blankings. you know a little stock bullshit like we've all seen in the uh you know clitor movie i shoot the nCO i see of morning scouts night over school who's a fucking legend and like the baddest dude in the world of spotting people from 10 meters and get away with it so get a little legit get a little respect from that way like you know you can't shoot for fuck but you can get close on a stab so you good enough so where are you in september 11th goes down oh fuck because we had to be getting closest to seven 11th down yeah we're getting real close to it yep so this is actually in a lot of ways

for pretty poor shit, this is like the dream come true. I'm a fucking 0-321 with a fucking hogstooth by my 21st birthday. Which is fucking awesome. So we actually go out to 29 Palms. That's our first thing we do as a platoon, you know, we do those desert bullshit. I am sitting in the PX at Lejeune getting a haircut so we can have like our first formation after this fucking 29 Palm ship when maybe the second plane hits.

The first one kind of, I don't even know if most people acknowledge it. Yeah. It's an accident. we're sitting there with the fucking barber chair when the second one happens like oh fuck so you know off we go finish our haircuts get back to battalion and you're 21 at that time

I'm 21 yep do you have any idea like are you like oh we're going to war oh fuck yeah dude we're we are we are fucking stoked like we're mad we're mad as fuck all right yeah it's just happened but also we're like we were fucking going dude this is fucking

world war three fucking Vietnam all rolled into one like we're going and so I was like I guess it was I was 30 I guess at the time so I'm 30 years old, maybe 31, but I'd been in the military for a long time. Yeah. So I was like where you were thinking like, oh, it's going to war through. Right.

Yeah. I'm like, dude, just going to, like, there's going to be a couple strike missions. There's going to be a couple of DAs. Like, yeah. We're going to drop a bunch of bombs. Yeah. Because what was the last thing? We did some, you know, like we dropped bombs in Kosovo and shit like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like big air campaign, but no boots on the ground. Yep. Which honestly I'm looking at now, like, mm, it's actually pretty going on. You know, I'm talking about this. That, what we just did in Iran? Yeah. people like, you know,

what is that? I'm like, that's actually a pretty legit way to run a war. Fucking brilliant, actually. 36 hours? Like, we all come home? Right. Bad guys are having problems now? Yeah. Okay. Well, that sounds like a good deal to me. Yeah. So that that 90s war is actually a pretty cool thing. I support the 90s war mentality.

I guess I should rephrase my position. I don't think that we're going to like, you know, be building Liberty ships and throwing a fuck. But I do think like, it's like the Johnny Commando guys. They're like, we're going to fuck everybody up. We're going to be doing this year for this 20 years, just fucking stabbing people in their sleep and all kinds of awesome shit. But that is not what's going to happen for us either right then. How long is it, do you go to Afghanistan? No, no, no, no.

So this is actually like a, it's worth the time to tell. It's a very important story, I think, especially for like your podcast and talking about leadership. You know, stuff that you cover all the time is I'm about to see like some kind of crazy shit that I will never see again. So this happens, you know, we don't go anywhere. You know, crazy shit's happening. They got, like, you know, little grunts, like, digging fight positions outside the company headquartered and putting machine guns in the shit. Hell yeah. Nobody knows what the fuck is.

There's, like, guys defending Oslo Beach and shit. We're like, what the fuck? But none of this happens. So a little bit of time goes by, and we, as Marines, kind of, like, started getting back into just, like, normal flow. There's probably, by this point, like, a little bit of shit happening in Afghanistan. You know, like, Delta's over there and some Marines. you know, some fuck shit. We're like, holy fuck, this is happening.

We're going. And what's our job going to be? What the fuck are we about to go do? And a little bit more time. So we're probably mid-October. It's been like a month. And we were confused, basically. And we ended up doing this exercise out of the beach.

It's the whole battalion, and we're doing an amph exercise. And we have, you know, fucking boats and, you know, fucking scuba tanks or shit. And now we're really, you know, like, what the fuck? You know, it's Afghanistan. Like, what are we doing? But we think maybe we've got some other shit going on. Maybe we're building up to, you know, go hit fucking North Korea or whatever. So word comes down that his name is, I can remember if a Sergeant Major Duke or Duke's, but it doesn't matter.

We got this dude that for us is kind of like the fucking bullfrog. He's like the oldest fucking guy, this fucking Rekon Marine. He's actually a weird story because he was a Greenberry and Nang. Damn. Yeah. And he might have even been like battlefield commission and then, you know, some fucking crazy shit happened. And he became a fucking Marine instead. Hey, whether it's true or not the legend lives on.

Yeah, the legend lives on. He was battlefield commission to nom. Right. But I definitely know he wasn't. Like, he came and spoke at our ball the year before this. So, like, I know who he is. And like, he's got like fucking all kinds of fucking medals and, you know, fucking silver star, you know, fucking crazy shit.

He's out now. He's retired long before I show up. But he's still kind of like our fucking guy. And he's, uh, he's, so he shows up on the beach. He's like, hey, guys, check out. He's like, my new job right now is like, I'm special advisor to the commandant about, you know, fucking reconforce recomb bullshit. I'm like, okay.

And he's like, all right, I got to talk to you guys. I got to tell you what's up. It's like, what's up now is I told the commandant that, uh, that you guys are not ready. And you get like a fucking pin drop on that beach. Like, what? He's like, yeah, you know, every else so calm is going to go do some crazy bullshit. And, uh, you know, I just don't, you know, really have the faith in you, you guys, you're fucking shit together.

And so I advised him of that. And, you know, that's what's up. We're like, this is where he makes his fucking mistake, though. He's like, hey, look, it was hard to take. All right, I don't know. We're also at this point, like, what the fuck else were we going to do? Like, I, you know, fucking Snyder's fucking little assauter fucking dudes over here. Fucking, you know, get MP, what are.

He's like, so, you know, I, hey, I know, it's probably hard kind of hard take. But he's like, I'm staying at the fucking base hotel on the room like, you know, fucking 105 or whatever bullshit. And he wants to come to talk to me about, you know, why I think this. And, you know, what my, you know, come and see me. we're like, fuck, okay. So he,

you know, fucks it off back to the, back to base. I don't even know what the hell he's, doing something

on the living that day. So we finish a little amphib shit fucking, and we, you know, we'll plant our little

fake charges on the fucking bridge whatever bullshit. Again, he grabbed a couple fucking hard ass dudes and

like, this motherfucker was running the jungle of nom at 19. He's gonna tell me like, we're ready,

like, I want to know why. So it's like midnight we go to the P. Get a case of a beer, fucking trope the zoo

fucking dude's room begging the door he answered the door and he's tidy whiteies like hey he's our major fucking dukes I'm fucking whoever this whoever

this whoever you said any time any place we're like a beer we want to know why we're not ready and he's like

you know guys it's kind of late maybe you can come back some other time and that is the moment that my faith in the Marine Corps fucking shattered

we get back in the car and go back to our barracks we're like what just happened insane yeah it's crazy. But you still got to go on deployment.

Oh yeah, I still got it. You know? I still got like fucking two years left of my contract. Like, yeah, we're doing this shit. So a bunch of us at that point, now the war in Afghanistan is accelerating. There's stuff going on. There's other guys going over. And, you know, honest to God, we all start looking at, uh, where am I going to go next?

Because it's not going to be here, you know. What are the seals doing? What are Green Beret's doing? What are the, what's the, what's the checklist of, you know, how do I fucking cross services? Mm-hmm. So yeah. So this sucks. You know what's crazy is I was in Baghdad when the guys got hung from the bridge in Fallujah.

Yeah. And I was the SEAL platoon commander at the time. And I was like, dude, we will go get him right now. And I told my task you to commander who was a freaking aggressive, great dude. He runs up to the siege of soda. Like, hey, I got guys who are loading their vehicles right now. Like, we can be there in 30 minutes. And they're like, no, stand down.

And the Marines went. Okay. And I was like talking to my assistant. Toon commander, I'm like, hey, dude, I'm going to the Marine Corps. Like, I'm done with this. This is bullshit. Like, I'm going to the Marine Corps and, like, I'm going to figure it out. And he's like, I'm in, you know?

And so, luckily, some things happened where he, he ended up going and working with the Marines for, like, a couple weeks. Yeah. And that was at the end of deployment. So I went home and he stayed and worked with the Marines for, like, a week or two. Yeah. And he came back. And I was like, dude, how's the Marine Corps?

And he goes, we don't want to be in that. Marine Corps. And I was like, I go that back because he goes, it's not it's, and look, I do love the Marine Corps a ton. But yeah, it's not, not it. I'm glad I ended up where I ended up. I think I want to

make something very clear by my position. A lot of these stories again, like I've never told especially one like this, I've never told in this kind of detail. I didn't want to demoralize like, you know, young Marines a shit when the fuck of war's going on. Like, I don't think they're fucking awesome Johnny Commando badass motherfuckers. Because they are. They are. They are. They fucking are. And this was just not.

going to be fucking helpful and there's a lot of awesome shit that the Marine Corps does and yep for me in this one little microcosm though like I've just gotten you know smacked in the fucking mouth and I'm not happy about it oh yeah I mean I got asked by Dave Portnoy Dave Portnoy he's like we're at the at the Naval Academy Navy Navy Navy Football Game yeah and he's like if you had to pick one branch to go to war and like as he's finishing the world's like Marine Corps yeah oh yeah fucking awesome man when you work with the Marine Corps like the Marine Corps they are good they're at a high level across the board and they can

can make so much stuff happen to them and freaking marines are just reliable like they will get the shit done oh yeah so god bless the marine call god bless yeah all right now now but you still like i said you got to go on a point oh you got to fucking yeah yeah so uh you know this is too we do a fucking uh oh finish up our school shit this is actually where i break my back uh so my first jump out of uh airport school you know i ended up going air more school because i got to be on the jump team uh sure two vertebrae in the in the fucking back on a jump when we're supposed to you know, you train up. We weren't even supposed to be in this fucking jump.

We're trying to get our gold wings before we get out of the Marine Corps. We had at least something. I am fucked up. Like just a static line jump? It's out of the one of the beach allsies. Okay. Some of the Army dudes don't know.

You doze is a Navy dude. When you jump over the ocean and you're headed for, like the breeze can come up. Like crazy winds can come up. And that's what happens. We jump out of this 46. Winds jumped to, you know, some ridiculous speed. And we're just,

boom. Yeah, a couple dudes to get fucked up. I get fucked up the most, though. But now we're in a, You respond like, oh fuck, like I can't, we can't go tell the mew that I just, you know, got like hurt, hurt during. So we're trying to cover this up. It's kind of what it is. But, you know, my medics, like, coming in my room, help me out.

We don't go to the hospital because, you know, we'll see. We'll wait and see. All right, take this a little bit. By the time I finally do have to go to hospital. It's six or eight weeks later, get a bone scan that, like, we can see two vertebrae broken. We can't tell you when. Like, you can still walk and you still fucking use all your fingers. So it's going to happen when you're fucking.

16 could have been fucking last week or six weeks ago. I'm like, okay. And I'm like, fuck. So we're still in the work up. And finally my, my platoon sergeant comes to me. Because they're kind of like hiding me in the back too while they're doing some reggie shit. And he's like, hey, look, man. He's a legend. He's a dude's fucking awesome. His name is Derek Simmons. He's actually got like six combat action rooms by, you know, 2001 because he's been like fucking everything you can be in from like 1983 to fucking now. He's famous for doing pull-ups against Arnold Schwarzenegger with 20s on his back when they're still at the beach and winning. Damn.

Yeah, he's a fucking monster. He's like, check it out, dude. It's like, I broke my back one time, too, and guess what? That hurt like a son of a bitch. He's like, you got two choices right now, though. You can either fucking put your runner shoes on and show me in the next two weeks that you're fucking tough enough to still be here, or you can get med-boarded and your fucking

military career is over. And I'm like, oh, fuck. I pick the running shoes. Let's fucking go. And it fucking hurts. You know, but, you know, three, four months later, we're on the mew and the mountains of Coastville with fucking wrecky rock. So, you know, we go on the mew.

now it's like 2002 we think maybe like this is going to be like this is going to do like you know strike packages now we're going to you know fucking do some Johnny Commander shit I don't know but we're still going on the Mew Hope Springs Eternal at that point

you're like well at least we have like bullets and we're in kind of we're not in America or at least somewhere that some shit could pop off but mostly nothing does you know we we fucking dick around on the Mew what ends up becoming like the longest mew of all time if I'm not mistaken it's like nine 10 months and uh yeah so eventually we're we're we all get stop

loss too like they had to extend the music so we had to stop loss us and we're like fuck were you were you were you were in the med where were you were in the med and then we kept going through the suit we went through the suit that's like fucking six seven times so we'll go down to the red sea and we'll go over jibout and then we're fucking around the persian gulf and then we'll go they just really can't decide what the fuck to do with us so you're going freaking crazy oh yeah we're fucking losing our shit we are fucking fucking losing our shit. And then we also can see

like fucking Fox News on the ship. Like they're doing the buildup for Iraq. And like everybody should fucking first Mardiv fucking here and fucking LAR. And like for Monsk, I don't remember. It was a long time. A long time. Yeah.

And we're like, you know, like fuck. And then you're also trapped in this decision cycle. Like let's say the music is home. Can I immediately re-enlist for First World Recon and fucking land in fucking Kuwait two weeks later? Like I don't know. Or is this the time to cross services? This is grunt math.

right. Bro, this is grunt mouth. Like, how do I get to war, bro? Are we really going Iraq or this bullshit? And I'm going to re-enlisting the Marine Corps and get fucked for another four years. Like, ah, son of a bitch. But we end up getting extended and we're out there.

Oh, and this is the fucking, this is the brutal part of this shit. So same gunny that was our gunny that had, you know, fucking six combat action ribbons. Like every fucking thing. He's like, when we go on the music, he's like, hey, check it out, guys. I tell you some fucking terrible shit that may happen. He's like, when we went to Desert Storm, And he's like, I went, because that's number four right here.

He's like, there was a mew that sat on the coast of Iraq and never stepped foot on land. And those motherfuckers were not happy. And that could be us. So we are in the fucking middle of the Persian Gulf doing Gator Squares when O'Av kicks off. And we're like, oh, my God. Like, it's not quite that I can go up to the flight deck with Bino's and see the fucking war taking place. But, you know, it feels. Might as well.

Yeah, might as well. We go so fucking crazy, actually, that is, like, they turn around. They're like, okay, fuck, I'm just headed home. There's, like, four or five is there, like, down in the well deck having, like, a deep plotting session. Yeah, we're going to UA. Yeah, we're taking a fucking zode off the side of the ship. Like, we can calculate the fucking gas.

We got a GPS. We know where fuck we are. And there's actually a pretty proud tradition anyway in the Marine Corps of, like, dudes going UA to go to war. Like, some of the more famous users are, like, stowed away on a plane to go to fucking Korea. You know, like, they're in Pearl Harbor Garden, some bullshit. the next thing you know that the fucking chosen.

And the tradition has always been too, like, if you manage to do it, you manage to get there. Yeah, you're kind of cleared. Yeah, they're like, okay, fuck it. We'll be able to this after the war. And then, you know, then they don't. They're like, all right, high five. That was actually awesome.

He has a badass. So, you know, we're fucking trying to figure this out. And, like, are we really going to do this? Because if we get caught in this process, too, like, we're going to get UCMG or they're going to fucking pound this and probably never go to another branch of service either. But before we can make a decision. I don't remember exactly what David but Nazaria had started happening

and Nazaria is a fucking meat right like dudes are getting fucked up down there like crazy shit's happening the advance kind of stops and I guess and they come back over the fucking one MC and they're like fuck this the fucking reserves

got called in as us yay so off we go now we're headed to the war finally and where did you guys land where did they put you first thing we end up in you know Kuwait doing some bullshit they can't really figure what the fuck to do with this because a mu is actually a very

understrength thing too you know like four tanks and like five artillery pieces and you know not enough trucks definitely not enough helicopters so mostly now we're still like fucking like because they can't decide what's fuck to do with this we change commands like six times one day like a task for serra one one meth no fucking go with these army fucks pet tarot again like what are you we end up uh military leadership yeah right especially oaf one is chaos bro they got like No one knew anything.

Yards full of trucks. They're just like repairing and like, I don't even give a fuck if you signed for him. We're like, you need a Humvee, you take a Humvee, you know. If one's fixed. So, yeah,

it mostly ends up being like total bullshit though. So we end up by Al Coutte, gardens crossroads with like us, like a company at Grants and a couple tanks. And I don't know, the fucking other infantry guys go somewhere else. They guys go somewhere else. And this is,

this is like, this is like leadership fucking real shit that happened number two. Because this one, this one took a long time to sort out. This is like the final death blow of any thought of still being in the fucking Marine Corps. So our legendary platoon sergeant has also gone home. Not because we were going to war, but because like a week or two before this kicked off. Like he had some fucking family shit.

I don't know like the mom's dying or some bullshit. So I can't be mad at him, really. We needed him, but fucking also would be his seventh tour. Like somebody else needs him to. So now instead of a gunning, we've got like an E5 who's not exactly a strong dude anyway as like our acting platoon sergeant. And there's a difference between like a gunny standing up to a captain and be like, hey, no, that ain't going to fucking happen. And, you know, a six-year sergeant standing up to a fucking captain. It can be a very, it's a very different dynamic.

So I'm definitely going to say this part of that. I fucking say his name, but we're there for a while and we're doing, you know, basically just some bullshit. We're like, we're doing like night patrols for the grunts out in the fucking, but, you know, nothing, not what the fuck we're supposed to be doing. Nobody's letting us up for a race. You were named MSPF, too. all these fucking CBC schools and shit. So finally, like we could like force a confrontation as you can in that way

with like the captain, our captain. Like, dude, what are we fucking doing? I will never forget this. All right. Now he's pissed at us.

He actually pulls his little cap of his fucking armor and throws him in the fucking dirt. And he's like, I don't agree with this war and this is stupid. And I'm not getting any of you killed for, you know, some fucking dumbass objective that doesn't matter. And we're like,

You got to be fucking shit in me. This is another thing that I've never said out loud just because so many other fucking Marine officers are awesome. You know, fucking Sean Tosh is doing his bullshit right there. Of course. You know, fucking third LAR is down at the fucking Carball. I'm doing fucking all kinds of fucking awesome shit. This is the first time that I'm like,

I'm seeing fucking cowardice out of our officer corps, what I think is cowardice. Maybe in retrospect, he's got a little bit of a moral point. But at the time, it feels like fucking cowardice. It feels like he is a fucking coward. And he's now using that to shield up. from anything that we can fucking do. Yeah, and the thing, the thing that really hurts about that is like,

oh, if we, so we're not gonna do this, but someone else's gonna go to it. Oh yeah, you're exactly right, yeah, 100%. Like you can not agree with the war, but I don't, well, there's other Marines that are gonna have to go do this shit that we're not doing right now. Exactly right.

And that's not, that shit don't work. No, that's fucking bullshit. No, that's it don't work right there. No, no, it's fucking awful. And this, this feels like a fucking huge, like personal staying on our honor too, you know, when it's all fucking said and done. And it's also one of those things even you look back on like, you know, fuck, should I have taken that another level?

Should I've gone and found? Like, I don't know who the fuck that fucking Mew Command or some bullshit. But really, you know, at the time, the calculus is probably right too. Like it's the fucking Marine Corps. They're not probably going to believe a sergeant over a captain. And that's a hell of fucking accusation to make if you can't back it up. You've got no fucking proof. But it does.

It hurts. I mean, it hurts fucking bad. Did you guys do anything good? Did you guys, you know, did you have some good experiences at least? least over there? Kind of. It was just like, like, you always felt like you were a little bit

on the outside of where it was happening. Yeah, you know, we go on some brazier and be, you know, dry holes, fuck bullshit. It basically ends up being like, basically really, like, I come back with all the bullets I left with. Like, uh, we don't even have fucking combat action agreements and we shouldn't, because we didn't fucking earn them. Uh, yeah,

it's, uh, it's incredibly shitty. And we're there the shortest amount of time of any unit anyway. Like, I mean, we spent like six, seven weeks in Iraq maybe. Turk. Yeah. We were literally

the first guys on. That actually makes it worse because we were the first guys home to Lejeune. Oh. So they got the fucking band like all the fucking Johnny War hero coming and were like

Oh, like shame. Like God damn it. Like fuck. Yeah. Did you? Was that the moment you made up your mind?

You were going to leave the Marine Corps? I'd already made it my mind but that fucking solidified it. I mean, this was so, this was so bad. This is real shit, man. Like the 30 day flight or drive home

when the fucking US has NASA. I'm like, I was going to go on fucking well that could eat by 1911 like this is so fucking humiliating like this is so fucking bad uh yeah it's it's it's a hard thing to describe like how how much something like that happening it would even be different like if like if you know i was a bitch like oh you know fuck if i can't fight well fuck me we should go sell insurance or some bullshit when somebody else is like fucking dishonored you by their bullshit like that is fucking

real hard to take uh basically that keeps me going there's like i will redeem this at at any fucking price, fucking any fucking wear. I gotta go to get a poor legion like somebody's getting fucking dealt with. Yeah, there's something about it's,

it's really hard to explain but man, there's something about a young man wanting to go to war. Yeah. And it's like wanting to breathe. Yeah. It's like I need oxygen.

Yep. And when you're seeing that shit from the outside looking at it, it's just like, guys will do anything. Like you said, like you pointed out, guys would go UA and freaking break rules

to go. fight. You know, that's what people are doing. This is something I don't think people understand about like the, like the fucking real, real warrior cast. And this would be put to me by, uh, by an SF one officer many years later. And he was right. He's like, there's two kind of guys that end up in fucking SF. There's guys that came here for the, uh, you know, the fucking hat and the tab and the fucking groupies and they want to go, you know, tell girls they're fucking cool guy for commandos and chase them pussy. And there's the guys that if I told them right now, uh, either the Hawaiian

tropic girls over there and I got a bag full of Coke or we can go on a fucking patrol and these fucking shitty swamp and it's going to rain and be cold and fucking piss. and there's like a 4% chance we're going to make contact with the enemy Those guys are the fuck up with the guys that would pick that It's not even guaranteed but there's a fucking chance Young guys the warrior guys They really don't they want to fight more than they want to fuck

Which is a lot So you're driving home and or you're sailing home On the fucking NASA Yeah And you get home and how's the transition? Is it hard to do? Oh it's fucking lightning fast So for those of us that were stop loss the Marine Corps, like, you got two weeks, you're fucking out of here.

Like, fucking get all your shit done. Turned out one of the dudes in our platoon, his brother had been a recont Marine also, but he's a recruiter in the West Virginia National Guard. Boom. Like I fucking see a, you know, a Sergeant Major recruiter at this point. And there's a National Guard Reserve Battalion up there. So, yeah, we make the fucking link up. You know, he walks us right in, and we go straight to the, uh, the SF guard unit there.

Yeah. That, that SFR guard unit is like the best cat secret for dudes. It is awesome. It's freaking legit. It's fucking amazing. It's funny because I'll end up talking with some other buddies that are like reserve seals after this. And I can see strength the way you guys do it where you have to be active duty first. And then you can be a reserve seal.

And then we got the National Guard SF is inverse. Like you can be a fucking nobody. It's freaking crazy. It's fucking nuts. The thing that makes it really weird that is you can end up with some guys that are kind of fucking questionable. You also know it's like some of the most badass awesome motherfuckers you've ever met because they know how to do shit from their real job too. Yeah. So it is it's great.

There's strength. I think it's cool. I mean they go through the program. They go through the school. Yeah. Like it's, yeah, there's no such thing

in the seal teams that you have to be an active duty seal, which probably puts you at like around eight years. Yeah. And then if you get out, you can be in the reserve seal team.

So Q course. Yeah. You're freaking ready for that shit. Oh, yeah. Dude, I've been jacking steel and running a fucking treadmill for nine months mad as fuck.

So, yeah. I got a fucking fiber pound bench press. Like, yeah, we're ready for your shit. I, you know, uh,

uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, did you have, to go to any kind of like army like welcome to the army so no no no or is it just like someone teach you how to put your uniform on and that's that we're good it's like now you're in the

army it's it's really cool like the only good thing about going to marine boot camps they counts for everybody's so they won't make you go back so no like I'm literally a sergeant uh with they give me a fucking uniform and you know go to sleigh the first time i put my army uniform on is like I don't know four or five months later I'm going to my staff sergeant board I have no fucking idea. I don't even know what the fucking stripes mean and shit. I show up to my promotion board with my little airborne flash on upside down. Like god damn it.

But it's also an S-Ebrose. I don't care. They're like fucking who are you? Like, oh, you've done this shit. Like, all right, fuck it. Yeah. Any challenges or anything going through the Q course? No. And this is kind of fucking cheating the system too in this regard.

Because guys have asked me later, like what was tougher or what was hard? It's really kind of not fair to to talk about how tough your second time, you succeeded at it. Your special operations thing is because you already know a lot of the games. You already have mental toughness. You already know a lot of the shit can be done. It does make it significantly.

Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, so it's fucking child's play. It's funny because also all this other bullshit that is happening with the recon community, they have now shattered the recombie. Like 70% of recombines left. Everybody. Like, fuck this. We're out of here.

There's like 10 recomb Marines. This was at that time. Yes. Oh, yeah. Like as soon as Iraq was over. These guys. Yeah. Anybody that got fucked,

anybody that thought like the grass is greener somewhere else is fucking gone. It is a lot. It is a huge percentage. There's like, you know, 10, 15 recon Marines in my SF selection class. Damn. Like, dudes, I haven't seen years. Like, you know, fucking saw this guy back in like, you know, 1999 at the PX or some shit.

Like, what are you fucking doing here? How about you? We're in the army now. Right, right, right. I'll end up on an OD8 later with three or four reex. Khan Marines on it. Damn. Yeah, it's crazy.

So, yeah, Q-Course is honestly, you know, again, I've done most of the shipwre. It's long, but it's no big deal. Yep. And then you get to a National Guard, you go to the National Guard SF unit.

Do you go on deployment? Oh, yeah, straight to it. Actually, me and my guys, we got to skip graduation and never got a little ceremonial dinner or whatever bullshit because our battalion was deploying. And we were like, hey, can we skip this and fucking go fight? All right. Hell yeah.

So yeah, go straight to back to Iraq, 2006 with the National Guard, SF. Where were you? I spent a little bit. bit of time we were attached to 10th group so spent a little bit of time in bagdad on a 10th group team and then i went down to de waneo that was my house so what year what months was this in 2006 it was early in january february january somewhere in somewhere there so was uh-huh so was uh-huh yeah he was uh-huh he was great yeah yeah he was uh-huh he was great because he was you know

i ended up working for him in 2006 as well and he was freaking he was great yeah he ended up like i think he ended up a three-star general or something oh yeah this was 2006 yeah i was there with you Where in the fuck you read? I was down south in Dwynea, which is right next to... It's south of Baghdad, right? South of Baghdad, and it's kind of between Alcout, I heard of the east, and Carballa to the west. Okay. What is it, Carbola?

Yeah, Carbal. So you show up there, and what are you guys doing? Oh, man. Fuck. So I'll end up getting sent to a, like a long-hair team, like a six-man split team. So I show up, they're like, hey, this is what you're doing. You've got to you attach to these 10-scroop guys for minutes. what to do. Either they're like grow your hair

out, grow a beard, dying both black, don't never put uniform again the whole time you're just fucking country. Where's your civvies at? I'm like, I didn't bring any. Like the first time we brought like, you know, Finns and UDT vests to Iraq, which we didn't need. This time I brought like all kinds of armor and shit. They're like, we don't need any of that because you're going to have to do this other, you know, fucking bullshit. Like, fuck. Okay.

So, that's what we end up doing. I train up with them for a little bit and then I go down to my team. It says, down southern Iraq. And what we're, let me be careful how I phrase this. just because this is I forget who I'm talking to we're doing open, open shit.

We're going to end up doing a lot of like running around in, you know, Adidas track suits and shit. Sure. And this is also kind of a cultural thing with Tenth Group. I mean,

every group's got their own strengths and shit, but Tins Group really doesn't like their intel guy, nerds getting mixed up and like some fucking streetfights and shit because then people know who you are. So we're going to chafe at the, at the bit for,

for Tenth Group for a while, too on this shit. But, yeah. Good deployment? Pretty decent. You know, it's not like the fucking coolest deployment in the world. I do learn how to do some awesome shit. All this Intel stuff, which, you know, you hate when your young guy.

You just want to, you know, fucking breach the door and fucking have a 60. You do need to know how to do this other shit, too. It's not as fun, but it's, like, necessary life skills and, you know, building all these target packets and doing, you know, honestly, some pretty weird shit, you know, right there and fucking taxi cabs with fucking hodgeflosh on and shit. But it's not the cool. But it's all right. While we're down there, though, like, southern Iraq is, it's not, it's not like his

bad, it's like Baghdad. It's not like fucking Romani, but it is sort of pick up in violence. Especially at that point, they're funneling dudes through, like, the Iranian fucks. I come over here to, like, you know, teach him how to lob mortars at somebody and shit. And, like, basically fight some incompetent nerds because it's us on, like, a NATO base. And they'll send them north after they trained up to fight the battles of Baghdad and shit. So she does a heating up a little bit.

And kind of in a weird way, I actually hope tol was listening to this. we're going to have it to fight like 10th group's bullshit too because uh again they they want things very regiment they're culturally 10th group is also like the berlin brigade still like they're doing cloak and dagger share against the kgb that's that's what actually gets that rocks off uh which is fine man you know it's awesome uh but we we can't get any help all right we're we're starting to catch more and more more more you know bombs on the base and shit or you know interact and uh so we kind of have to you know bad news bears it a little bit in that in that sF uh strength way So we go over to the Iraqi Army units next to us

We build us a little mic force Totally off the books Right Bill McKeill has that a you know fucking They call this the box is full of sand Hascos Yeah Bill McHillaz and Hascos So now we've got what we're actually supposed to be doing

Which is Intel nerd stuff And you know we got a little Iraqi Recky section Oh wrecky sex Well we have those but over here we got an assault section We got a mic like and just weird shit keeps happening Like we keep randomly stumbling into like guys that are important Like we got a call one time.

We're like, hey, yeah, we just happened to be out on this presence patrol and this guy, you know, like, I don't know, two of claws. Some fucking, it's not like, you know, it's our cowboy, but some guy that somebody wants came through it. And so we snagged him. So can you like come get him? They're like, yeah. That's a rant. That's very lucky that you guys were there, wasn't it? Yeah.

Serendipity. Yeah, serendipity. And we started doing some stuff like that. But it's not, it's not like a great tour. You know, we mix that. We get some fights and shit. How long are you there for? I want to say nine months.

I feel like it was pretty long, eight, nine months. It was pretty good. I want to say it went into like September. It was pretty long deployment for like an essay. Yeah, yeah, for sure. No, you, we were there, though. You were there almost the entire time when I was there.

I stayed, I left October 21st, but I got there like April, like April, April 1st or something like that. So you were there the whole time. Yeah. Oh, and you remember 2006, man, there was some,

there was some stuff starting up really pop off. It was when the Golden Mosque got blown up right before that. Yeah, I didn't know. I wasn't tracking what was going on the rest of the country. Oh, yeah. I was like in Ramadi. In my,

because my first deployment was we were, we were in Baghdad and we traveled all over the place. We hit targets everywhere. Yep. But my second deployment, I never left Baghdad. I was sorry, I never left Ramada.

Like, I think I flew one time to Balad to like a meeting. Right. Like very early deployment and then I never left again. Yeah. So I didn't know what that was going on. Yeah. Yeah.

It was just like scraps. Yeah. Okay. So you come home from that. And this is when you switched over to active duty? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

So, actually this is kind of a weird thing. This actually plays a part later too. So we're having to basically make up bullshit down there. And our mic force finally tells us that they want to go get this like really bad dude. And we wanted to get this really bad dude too. But we got to like again do some crafty boy shit to do it. Well, so because that we ended up falling like Iraqi intelligence.

And we went out in broad daylight with like us and like Tony Hodji trying to get this real bad dude that turns out new we were coming. because Iraqi intelligence is not awesome and keeping secrets. Fucking huge ass gunfight. All right, we are getting the shit kicked out of us because there are a lot of these dudes fucking there waiting for us.

And the only thing we've been able to like cobble together for help is the NATO base. It's like the Eastern, it's not even like anybody. It's not like the Dutcher there. It's like all the Eastern Europeans that like only want to hang out

and so we're supposed to have like a fucking Hein gun ship and support which is insane if you watch. Animately, Hein? Yeah. Pollux are flying. And also if you grew up in like action movies,

You're like, this is the most crazy shit that's ever happened. But unlike what a hindgun ship should do, like, it comes fucking flying and to help us. And it takes a couple of AK-47 runs and turns out and goes home. We're like, yeah, it's fucking terrible. So it doesn't happen that we fight. It's fucking crazy. But a couple of weeks later, we're trying to do a rip with fifth group. There's only three of us left down there.

Then our might force goes out to fucking do something else. We don't have any help now because we don't even have a way to support them. And they get fucking overrun and captured and all the way. ones that fucking didn't die in the fight and get executed in front of the local J-Shalmani Mosque. Yeah, that's fucking hard at take. That's fucking hard at take. There's some other shit goes along that story, but it's not important.

So you guys weren't, you had no one with him when they went out to do a hit? They were like, hey, we got, we're going to do this. We're like, motherfucker there is three of us left. Like, we can't. Like, we literally cannot leave this fucking Firebase. And as they go doing it, we actually do, and I believe in the Firebase, go try to help. And we got to, like, cobble together, like, coalition. We got some Navy EOD guys and whoever else we can find is they're calling us now

on their cell phone. It's like, hey, oh, fuck, we're getting her asses kicked. We get the rest of the little eight-di-a-wrack, but we can't get there. We don't get there in time. Like, it's trying to, like, put together a QRF, like, way too fucking late, and it just doesn't work. And that's brutal.

That's hard to take. That's, like, as you're leaving. Yeah, that's like three days we're going to point home. Yeah, that's not a good... No, it's a good way to end deployment. No, it's fucking... It's rough. It's one of, like, that kind of maybe uniquely weird ways that, like,

enlisted green berets at least kind of do feel like the same bird of command guys that, you know, American officers do. Because it's not quite the same thing, but still those are my fucking guys. You know, like, I fucking train them. And, like, I was proud of them fucking held their hand and all this bullshit. And then, you know, kind of let them get fucking executed. And that's, it doesn't feel very good either.

Yeah, that's fucking terrible. Yeah, it sucks. So now you get home? Yep. Get home. I've actually, I took some pretty good rattles on that one, too. I got knocked out by a rocket, like a couple days before that the bullshit happened. We're in this fucking crazy fight with all kinds of explosion and shit.

My head is a little, it's, we don't really know about TBI as much than either. I'm actually fucked up, but I just don't know it. But anyway, fuck it. I'm going to action. So I'm not, I'm not going to tell when I come back. Like, remember all the, I don't know if you guys had the same ones. It's the questions when you get back on deployment on the sheet. They're like, did you fire your personal weapon?

You see any dead bodies. You get hit in the head. You know, whatever, like, yes, no, yes, whatever. Whatever, like, fucking justifies my CIB, but also like, no, I don't want to see a shrink. I don't want to see a neurologist. Like, I want to go back to fucking active duty. that's what I've seen now too like third group is there

and fifth group is fifth group ends up fucking coming in and these dudes are fucking awesome I'm like fuck yeah dude I want to go to like an active I want to go to one of these two active duty groups because these fuckers are getting it fucking done and so that's it when you're in the National Guard and you've been

like deployed like that you can just basically get your battalion commander sign anything at the end like I want to go to active and you know he'll sign off on it boom you're done yep that's freaking epic yeah and so that's where you end up going to third group. Yeah, so I've got to go through, we call it the ascension progress,

ascension or a recession, some bullshit like that. Basically still the active army that will not let you back as an 18 series guy until you go back to SWIC and they got to do, you got to do like a,

this is to make sure that like you're not like a total fucking chucklehead. Because you got to remember, we got guys that like at their tab in like 1985 that God bless them, like they're showing back up to like natural guard units.

So like, I've been, you know, fucking selling cars for 30 years but I'm fucking getting on. Here we go. And that's fine for like a national guard. You can't have that dude fucking like, you know, the junior brabom on a fucking teammate third group. Like you can't. There's a different kind of mentality.

So maybe you're going to go back to SWIC, do like a PT test, do a bunch of other bullshit, a ruck test. You got to go see a shrink again to make sure you're not fucking crazy. And then they'll let you back. So it takes a little while. It takes, you know, four or five months. But yeah, I end up going to a third group. And then right into a team and it's like workup cycle.

We're getting ready to go. Yeah. No. It ends up actually being really. again, just weird quinses in terms of events. My, what's now my ex-wife, works at the Special Warfare Center for us, for Ed Bragg. And so I end up knowing a bunch of support dudes and shit

that are at third group. And as well as, you know, I know teammates from, or team guys from, like, being in the Q course. But through my wife and, like, her shit, like, I know a bunch of fucking support guys and shit, too. So I go with my orders to check in the third group, and this dude that I know is sitting in, like, the S-1 clerk, he's like, hey man, the next, like,

six 18 echoes that check. in here going to the Sigdett, which is like, it's this comms thing. Like, you're going to stay here and monitor radio traffic for you. I'm like, oh, shit. So I go home, because I've got like 30 days to actually check in. I'm like, oh, shit, all right, you got to fucking make sure there's a Q-course graduation between now and then. But, you know, a little twist of fate happens where I've just bought a new house in Fayetteville, the neighbor across the street is a captain in third group and he's the fucking SIF.

So, I don't know, I bump into him all, like, going along, like, hey, dude, I got to fucking figure something out. and he's like hey you know we're actually hurting down at the fucking uh sif for bodies and there's kind of this like weird like if we say we want you can kind of it can you know kind of override some other

bullshit at the group level so yeah so that's what I do he gets me an interview and I go down and interview with the fuck stiff guys is fucking totally cool and yeah they'll take me basically because I've got they need some rein the snipers

I'm a morning sniper already I've got an aptitude for it But they're like, okay, check it out This is like being a new guy all over And they're like, you have to pass two To be in the sniper section You're going to have to pass Sephardic and SOTIC And if you're fairly one of those

You fucking out of the unit Because that's how it works down there So yeah So back into the fucking grinder a little bit And so did you go to those two schools immediately? Almost immediately, yeah I go to I get very lucky with that too Do a little bit of a train up at Sepalic

Which is like our group level CQB course I learned how to shoot a pistol a little bit better. And for Sephardic, back then there's a shoot-in test. All right. So when you show up, like day one, there's like a pistol test. Are you sweating every shooting test? Fuck yeah.

No, actually a piece of magic happened here now that has made me an awesome shooter. It's a twist of fate thing. Jifford, hear the name, Todd Hudnett? No. Okay. He was this guy. He's a, he's a civilian. He's never been in the military and his fucking life.

But basically he started winning all these, like, precision rifle contest back around like i don't know like 2004 2005 and people like where the fuck does this guy he just like showed up and just kicked everybody's ass and uh the military notice like you know like delta's already had a contract with another shit and we so the like the minute

I walk into the siff and get my locker like we're going to this hot net guy is shit and I'm actually sweating even having to go to a sniper team because like I know I saw I going to fuck a sniper I'm like oh damn it like fuck like I wanted to go to the assault because I can at least hit shit with a hammer man I can run around fast

Like I can, you know, fucking carry heavy shit. Like, uh, I'm not good at this, though. Wait, I'm not going to tell my fucking team this because like, I'm either going to be in the SIF or the fucking SIG debt. Like, you know, I will drag fucking anchor chain around my neck for the next fucking 10 years where I'll do that. So we go to the hot net dude shit. And I'm also thinking like, man, there's a fucking civilian.

Like, what the fucks do you know about a sniper rifle? God damn. I got a fucking hogs dude, man. I'm fucking, fucking 8541 Joe. Like, they couldn't teach me either. But what the fuck of this guy know? But it turns out he's got he does have like the magic. He is like one of those like once in a generation guys that is going to like dynamically change the way every everything does with the sniper.

Not just us either. Fucking Marine sealed. He's going to advance precision rifle shooting like fucking 50 years and like three years. The big thing that changes things for me is he's like, hey man, is it kind of talks like a dumb ass cowboy from Texas. It's like most people have ever touched you shoot a precision rifle. really relaxed and fucking you gotta breathe like relax and fucking you know pretend you don't know when the trigger is gonna go off and I will actually figure out the psychological for this reason for this many years later it doesn't work for a lot of people as like like

all right poor fucking kids again we're playing the the don't flinch game you know if I can raise my hand and if you flinch I get to hit you twice but if you don't flinch how many times did you not flinch I don't know like zero right because it's a million reflex like you know if I actually are gonna fucking hit you you you're gonna check check it's the same thing with the fucking rifle I it doesn't matter how much you will yourself not to have recoil, like at some, like, tiny subconscious level, like your body is still going to make a twitch.

You can override that by doing this. So he basically shows us in, like, the first five minutes where he's course, like, if you push into ground with your toes and, like, flex your leg muscles and then lay into your fucking, rightfully, calls it loading the bipod, you be able to shoot, like, a totally different way.

And this absolutely, this is like a magic trick than in, like, five seconds has made me infinitely better. Not just made me infinitely better. like as soon as we start shooting it like that I'm kicking everybody's fucking ass like like I'm concerned they're going to get fired on like the fucking third day of this but instead I'm actually kicking these shit at all these fucking experiences snipers and I'm like god damn you marine boys can shoot and I'm like fucking ain't right that's freaking epic

I'm not going to tell them for like years later that you know I actually sucked but uh you I'm not terrible with a pistol or carbine though I'm not great but I'm not fucking terrible but yeah there's a shoot-in thing so yeah I get to go to Sephardic uh managed to pass that like a week later they just started having a shoot in for SOTIC too so there's another shooting test my team's like hey man

you can go fucking HALO school or if you can go past this fucking shooting and you know basically steal somebody's slot because they can't you can get SOTIC right now too and I'm like fucking take that one yeah so I did

it's funny something like the instructions because these things both happen at the same compound on Braggs called out range 37 when I walk so I'm parking there for like the 20th week in a row walk past one of the Sephardic instructors and he's like

hold on It's like, what do you doing with sooty? He's like, motherfucker, if you get Sephardic and SOTIC, which is like two of the most prestigious schools in SF in the same segment period, like, I don't know, I'm going to fucking key your car or something. Like, like no fucking new thing. Does not everyone go through the, the CQC school? Not that one. No. That one is a very specific course that you must go through to be in a SIF.

Got it. And it's got a high-ass attrition rate, too. It's like a, you know, probably 50, 60% attrition rate. too. And it's like, if you get that one, like, you are fucking ominous to honest, like, awesome to CQB. Check. All right.

So now you're in the team. You're in the SIF team. Yep. In the SIF company, I guess. Yeah. Yep. And when do you guys rack to go on deployment? Fuck.

They're, our Advon is already there by the time I graduate SOTIC. Yeah. Bro. Nicely done. Fucking wild. And like two or three of my teammates are in SOTIC with me because they're getting called up too. They're older hands.

They came from the assault side to the sniper side. So yeah, we're like, like, I want to say it was like a week after we graduate. We're with the main body fucking boom, boom, right back to it. And where'd you go? That time we went to Baghdad. So we got the ICTF though. Oh, yeah. So we're doing.

So this is like a total change in combat for me. This shit's going to get fucking crazy. My teammates don't even really know me either because like I haven't met most of them. Like the two guys I'm starting with it and like, who fuck is this guy? Who gave him a fucking gun? but you know if we're being like totally honest like I've been like the badass where I was before right we didn't do anything unless to fucking recant but you know fucking I'm the tough guy like I'm the aggressive dude and the guy they got to pull by the fucking leash same thing I like my 19th

trip team I end up with like one other dude there that's like fucking totally bad ass awesome dude but for the most part like I am the aggressive fucking fighting motherfucker the team charge got like grab by the fucking collar like stop it's too far these dudes are fucking animals I don't we hadn't even like really done our our changeover with whoever we were placing which I think was the first group SIF we're still on uh we're still like living like the fucking transient barracks and uh but our command's like hey fuck it let's get this fucking done is this now 07 yes oh seven this is like uh July or August of 07 yeah we still have been done to you know full fucking riptoa and like we're fucking doing missions like we're

doing crazy fucking shit and uh first night we go out with these guys nobody has like serviced uh from this kind of task force, the service to Target and Carbola in like, I don't know, like three or four mons. Our commander has to be a fucking awesome dude. It's like, oh, really? So they can fuck around Carbola. That's fucking get them.

And as they send the fucking boys down there, and it is, it is fucking insane. It's, at this point, this night is going to be, like, right up there with, like, the craziest fucking combat shit

I've ever seen. It is fucking bananas. We got two troops of ICTF running all over the fucking place. Our Exo has decided to go with us. What was it? What was the target? Was it the multiple buildings?

Was it one building? Was it one dude? Was it multiple dudes? Man, I don't even remember. I want to say it was like one dude, but it was like obvious that like he was going to have some fucking dudes with him because he was, he was, you know, important.

He wasn't like, you know, again, he wasn't like the fucking match, but he's going to be important. He's going to have some bodyguard and shit. And, yeah, I don't remember exactly what it was, but it had to have been at least two buildings. They sent like a fucking lot of us. are uh so you guys are rolling out oddly enough in 06 my original deployment yeah i was supposed

to go to bag down take over i ctf oh no shit so yeah i went on pre-deployment uh site survey pdsss what we call it in the navy went there rolled out with the ictf yeah like hit targets yeah yeah they were you know so it was it was very i was very familiar with what was going on And then we come back to America And then like a couple weeks before we went on deployment They're like yeah you're not going to work with the ICTF You're going to Ramadi we're like awesome yeah The ICTF you know for people who don't know it's the Iraqi counterterrorist force

But they were like the most highly trained Iraqi soldiers The most highly vetted Iraqi soldiers And they had American like weapons guns Guns night visions the whole nine yards So it's it's the best group of Iraqis that you can have Oh they're fucking amazing I really like in a lot of ways for like the You know for like us for like green berets like, you know, train up a foreign force,

they're probably, like, the success of the entire GWAT. Like, they are fucking badass. And I'm also very lucky because I didn't have to build it. Like, I, you know, I got, I just got to show up and run it. I came on in with these guys doing all this fucking hard work. And you can imagine making Iraqis good at, fucking, like, good at CGB. Like, it's crazy. But I get to show up right for the fucking glory moment.

Like, awesome. Anyway, so, yeah, they are badass, though. And so we go to Carbola, it is. So you guys are doing vehicle mounted, I'm sure? No, we flew in. You flew in? Yeah, we flew in that one. Damn, dude.

Yeah. I never did a helicopter mission in my life. No, what? Isn't that, Lee? No fucking way, dude, really? All vehicles. Actually, I don't think it's like, right? I think it's awesome.

I would just like, freaking all, all the time, get some. Oh, dude, you can carry so much shit, so much cool shit. I much prefer it. That's like one of those things that, like, doing a helicopter rate is awesome, like the first time you do it. And then after you're done, you're like, okay, let's just drive everywhere now. No, please.

Just weird. It's weird how, you know, like, because I also, I never went to Afghanistan. saying? I never took. That flew like all everywhere over there. Oh, a lot of guys did. All right. So you guys fly down.

Yep. Yeah. Fly down. Exo goes with us. Did you land on the X? Like land on the target? Or offset by like a little bit or? No.

So me and the snipers land in the soccer field behind. We actually land land on a soccer field right behind it. Rested dudes rope in for the assault side. Yeah, there's a shitload of hell. There's a shitload of dudes. This is also like the biggest element I've ever fought with. So I'm kind of confused actually. I'm used to like six guys.

There's like, fucking six ODA, three ODAs, and like 100, fucking is crazy. Hells, fucking absolutely awesome. And, uh, Ken Solheimer is our X-O. He actually goes with us this night because he, he's just gotten tasked to be the X-O, which he knows means he's going to, like, be in the jock and his dude. And he's like one more fucking night of glory, which is awesome because Kins's like a badass dude. He's teaching at West Point now. But, yeah, he gets shot through both fucking femurs, like, pretty early.

He's out in the fucking tree, like, just straight gunning people down. and like fucking somebody jumps out, blasts him through both legs and wants through the back like under the plate. He's fucked up. Yeah. This LZ is hot as a motherfucker. They're bringing in a fucking space. It's just dropping one of it. It's fucking chaos.

And they can't even get the helicopters back in to get us because like it's too. This is actually how you know something is really hot in the army. If, uh, if like an SF captain and an officer is like really fucked up and might fucking die because he is fucked up. and they still won't bring a helicopter and like the risk is too high. So we got to fight out of Carbola. Medics, I wish you at vehicles now.

Yeah, you're fucking right. I'm saying. No shit. No shit. No shit. Medics didn't do some awesome. One of them gets a superstar star because he runs out and fucking grabs them and fucking patches both legs up.

I mean, fucking awesome shit. They actually had to bring our own, our command of QRF him to get us another LZE like somewhere, fucking Nile 50, like you'll get on all this crazy shit. And like we get back from this. And like,

Like everybody else is like okay well fuck you gotta find a new exo like They're just like this is normal shit for them and I'm the fucking new guy like This is actually the first time my life like I realized like These guys are like playing on like a fucking other level and I'm gonna have to fucking run to keep up and I'm comfortable with that That sounds awesome But these dudes are bad as fuck and no it was great. It was fantastic So what's your opt-tempo like? So so fucking high that it's it's a

actually it's actually like hard to believe and sometimes like I look back on him I actually when I'm like this was it really this fucking crazy and even like sometimes like other SF guys that weren't that kind of task force are like in a fuck away you kind of kind of kind of kind of talk like the boys from like oh seven from like Sips or Delta it's like three four targets a night it's oftentimes like seven days a week uh sometimes it's sometimes it'll be like go chase some shit like all fucking night long and we're like out of charge it's fucking out of shotgun so just we do a thing called a block party which where you hit every house on a block at once if we like if somebody keeps slipping the fucking net like we're gonna get crazy

sometimes doing fucking daylight hits uh i mean it's it is incredibly intense it's it's a level of intensity that i mean it really is like hard to believe i look back on like how in the fuck did we do this shit like every night all it's not like there's not occasional you know breaks It was actually a brownout for like three for the whole country shut down. I mean, my teammate Al-Hibarro like played all the way through Halo 3 that night or those days. Like there's some. Is that the jihitsu guy, Al? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. He's like traveling around the world right now. Yeah, yeah. He's like, he runs a weedify. Yeah. Which is a really cool organization.

He's over like, fucking Vietnam right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's supposed to come on the podcast. He's like, I'm here for three days. I'm like, cool. I'm not. But you know, we just, like, missed each other a bunch of times. When you get Alan on, yeah, he actually going to be my teammate.

He hasn't been to like a Svortig or anything yet, but he shows up as like an attachment to the fucking SIF. And I see this big, scary looking motherfucker. You can tell a lot about a dude, like how he's going to do it in like gunfighter shoot, but he's big and yoked. He's like, yeah, you know, I'm a fucking ninja fighter too. You know, black belt and you're just like, oh, fuck, come here. We'll go talk to the team, sir. And so he ends up being attached to our team as like one of our machine gunners, which is awesome. Dude, that's a fucking great job to be like, hey, sorry, you can't go in the house, but here's your 50 cal.

Like, oh, well, oh, shit. Well, that's heartbreaking. Yeah. stay out here and fucking anyway yeah i know it's great and that you should talk to alan he's a great dude so so your op tempo what's the what's the uh are you guys taking a lot of casualties or you like lost your captain or your captain well it's our exo he's not even my captain yeah he just joined his attachment that night and you got fucking shot it for his troubles yeah we we are getting we're getting fucking shoot up because this is also this is oh seven man

the fight is is is real there's fucking iEDs everywhere there's there's crazy shit and uh that's like one of those times too when like I don't think anybody thought Iraq was, it was just it was fucking insane. I don't know anybody at the unit actually ever figured this out, but I sat down and calculated it one night. We

had like a one-third casualty rate, which is fucking crazy for a troop. We had dudes wounded like two and three times. There's just one dude his name, Ray I won't say his last name. Fucking awesome guy. He was a fencer in college. He gets three legitimate purple hearts in the course of like

four weeks. Like, like, and just keeps going because he's a fucking badass. But finally on the third one, they're like, the commander is like, you know what,

just, I know you don't want to, but I'm making you go home. Like, you're going to escort these guys that got fucking wounded yesterday at the same time to Germany,

so nobody steals their shit. But you got multiple guys have like two from, you know, across the fucking trip. Yeah, we, I mean, we were fucked up.

We were fucking bleeding. And you lose ICTF guys as well. Yeah, they're getting, they're getting hurt. They're getting fucking chewed up. up. It is so fucking bad at the end that they did. They had to fly our Saffauac committee, which is our little in-group door kicking school because you had to be Safari qualified to go

in the house, but they end up having to fly them over to backfill us because there were not enough of us to just keep going. I mean, at the end of this trip, like, we'll have like three jobs instead of one. My senior will be like, you know, lead nav, lead sniper and also, you know, in charge of like putting diesel in the Humveys, like, what? But yeah, it's, Pretty crazy. Were you, did you serve as both a sniper and as an assaulter? Yeah, that's how we- Depending on the night.

Yeah, that's how we do it for our, for our sys anyway. Usually you're supposed to be an assaulter first and then go to the snipers so you can do both jobs. And what we end up doing most of the time is we're hitting so many targets that like, yeah, we'll be the assault guys for this, for the smallest target over here. And then after we're done, we'll actually more like designate marsmen and the snipers. We'll go protect the roof while the assault guys do all the fucking SSE and shit. kind of like living the dream. Oh, dude, it is. It's actually absolutely awesome.

It's so amazing. So this is kind of something that my senior, or the Bravo that's my senior sniper has, as a, he's like, hey, we get these, Everly stock fucking bags, right? From the company over in Idaho. We stick our fucking S.R. 25s in those. We carry these fucking little guns.

Now we got both. We had to carry a little more weight. But we can assault and fucking snipe. and do both these things the same time and we are going to fucking get some shit done and we do it and it's fucking awesome. We're killing so many fucking people that like sometimes the assaulters don't believe so we start

calling them up like we call her buddy like hey man okay come here all right you're just something as fucking SR 25 like they'll get behind the scope and see how far you can see like you guys can see like 600 yards with these things or fucking you know it's still like some fucking 2007 bullshit but yeah so yeah we're having a great time it is

it is absolutely fantastic and how long is this deployment? It's a short one It's like four months. At that point, three, four months. Yeah, I think it was four months.

Sips are doing short tours at this point. Yeah, I end up, I fucking shred my shoulder on this one, too. Same thing. Like, I didn't go home because, you know,

fucking boys were, we're fucking hurting. Probably ended up doing a lot more damage to this fucking thing just because I stayed in the, in the fucking fight. So I'm fucked up when we get home. I got to go and get this fucking hospital, get this worked on.

Did you need surgery? Yeah. Sure. Yeah. So I put it back. together the first time, that pretty much takes me out of the 2008 fight. Some went wrong, so they got a fucking cut

on it again. The next year, fucking kind of worked through that. The docs ended up telling me, I can't remember if they told me then or then when I retire, but they're like, hey, man, you got a limited number of times in your life. You can let your hands over your head, so, you know, use them well. I'm like, damn, yeah.

Fuck. Yeah. Anyway. But, yeah, that was that was the fucking tour. So did you get to another deployment after that? Or were you too banged up? No. It wasn't even that I was too banged up either because like, you know, at this point, I'm going to keep going to keep going to as long as I can't.

Like I go, fuck what he was a fucking doctor said. But I can't go on the 2008 trip. And then the boys come back. We get a new new commander and he's kind of a shit stick. We're being honest. He doesn't want to really deploy. So he started trying to get us into some other bullshit like go to, I don't know, fucking Pakistan and train the Pakistani counterterrorism guys or so bullshit.

it. What the fuck else happened? Oh yeah. So I'm like fuck this. I'm going to a SMU selection. Somehow train up enough to fucking get to go to that. It didn't work out for me. Yeah, get back, get on a fucking awesome team.

Probably the most stack team I've ever been on. And we end up going, we're fucking Blackwater doing a train up to do some bullshit. And we go to a fucking bar because the chief's going away. That's our warrant officer, not a chief like yours. but our war officer is he's finally getting promoted off the fucking team he's been there forever he's an awesome guy uh so we go out you know drinking and shit one night and in that way that you know sometimes just bad shit happens we got a really fucking young dude with us he's like 25 26 x-ray but awesome guy he fought was 07 uh but he looks pretty he's you know fucking

looks like he's somebody you could kick shit out of he's uh fucking met that biker's decided they're fucking jump him and uh well there was a fucking whole split team there and we kicked the fucking shit out of these guys he's got a lot of these dudes in the hospital like it's it's not great but the thing that we fail at is we do not e and e well enough uh you know if shit happens you get picked up the fucking county line by the cops in the and the fucking white van and next thing i know we're in fucking jail uh shit's not just not going great uh security clearance is suspended yeah commands like they're in a fucking book at is they're not happy actually kind of shitty nobody ever even asked what fucking happens they're just like

fuck you guys this is what's going on uh can't even be in the civ's building we're going to have clearance so fucking hand it all over a shit and uh gets sent to the fucking schoolhouse to teach damn yeah it sucked how bad did you guys just fuck up those dudes pretty good hospitalized yeah someone went to hospital yeah there was some bad shit but what nobody ever asked is uh you know why well it was fucking 20 of them all right they're fucking six of us I threw him Joe my fucking guy You're gonna have to fight fucking savage Like you're a number like that

Especially dudes that are on cranking shit Like you're gonna have to fuck come with it And you know also for being totally Fucking honest by that point In the fucking war like if Like if some fucking fist fighting bullshit happens Like you're probably gonna start Going a little further with it than you should have

But yeah we did fuck them up pretty bad But well shit happens And like No one was like hey dude All right like Here's your rehab program Let's get you this school house for a little while, we'll get you straightened out.

We'll get your security. They're coming at us with UCMJ. We're also under like, you know, felony, fucking assault and diamond by the civilian world. These fucking assholes don't as much civil suit. They thought we were Blackwater guys. So they launched a civil suit too, so they're going to get some contract money out of us.

And then they also give us a Go-March, which is a general officer's memorandum of record, which is basically like a... It's a thing that they can do that's not technically UCMJ, but it goes in your book that says like, you know, hey, Clay is a fucking asshole and never promote him. And even when you hire, you can't fight that one.

Like that one just sticks no matter what. We're fortunate. We don't get our tabs revoked. And I was spending like a year and a half the schoolhouse teaching finally beat all the civilian charges and shit because again, these motherfuckers started it. And that's, you know, you're not going to go to jail for that. But yeah, I mean, security of course, is restored. But, you know, damage is done by then.

And when you say damage is done, on, what do you mean? Like, bro, like, I was a leader in the teams. Right. And, like, you have guys that get in fights sometimes. Yeah, yeah. And it sucks and you have to keep them out of it. But like, okay, they're going to pay their dues.

Maybe they get busted down. Maybe they get, you know, sent to the schoolhouse or whatever. And then you go, okay, cool, you're done? You understand you can't do that shit anymore? Right. That was a big mistake that you made. You know that? You're not going to do it again?

Cool. Come back over here. We're going to put you back to work. We got shit we got to do. Yeah. You didn't get none of that? No. Well, because it's,

Some other shit happens initially there, too. So a couple of guys recover from this that were not at the school with me, just that they can go back to teams. But they won't let me leave the CQB course because they had to find somebody to fucking replace me. I basically need another guy that has this CQB qualification to be able to teach this, you know, sub-CQB qualification. So it's my fucking turn to go back to a team.

But I keep getting fucked out of that because they, you know, I don't know, some fucking enlisted bullshit, but they won't find a fucking guy. the fucking one that really fucking hurt me here was teams are now coming through because when you're teaching Sepah it gets entire ODAs that show up

and like every other class or something that some ODA team starting is like hey man fucking I'll trade fucking what's as much for you like you fucking awesome at this shit you want to go like hell yeah it was good fucking go I'm supposed to go to my guy

that I do from the SIF where he was a Warren officer Mike Duskins team Mike is like a fucking legend of SF this dude is fucking awesome he's fucking like six foot he's so got to damn big that he can't go to halo school like he like a square shoot cannot support him he's like

fucking six foot seven like 320 of like fucking twisted steel one time like the fucking new york jets came out to safar dig or so bullshit to uh to like you know see a mod demo and they saw mike and we're like you play any ball and you're like fuck you guys i'm gonna kill some fucking half games anyway i'm supposed to go to fucking mike's team like the all the handshake deal gets fucking made and like the last minute like the uh the fucking i don't know some fucking asshole on Sergeant Major Mafia like pulls a rug and I don't get to go. And Mike gets killed in Afghanistan. Just like fucking month into the fucking trip.

And I'm like, fuck. And right before this, I guess right around the same time, I think it was right before. I've gone in now, I'm also fucked up. Like physically like my shit's a fucking mess. Next fucking slip disc, all the shit. I'm having to go in once in a while to get fucking pain meds. Not from like the group doctors.

but from like the Army doctors because that's where like the narcotics and fucking oxygen shit is. So I go in there one day and this was fucking 2012. This is right when Obama was kind of doing that.

You remember that purge? I don't know if it happened in the Navy. I know it happened in the Army and Marine Corps. There was like a purge of dudes on the medical side. They had, at Bragg, they had like guys like going through medical records of everybody

trying to find people to disqualify them to get to get fucking rid of them. So I'm going to get my fucking shit. They're like, holy fuck, you should have been out like a long time ago you're getting medboarded. I'm like fuck you say you like I'll fight that shit but a couple weeks later that's when Mike

gets fucking killed and they're pushing this medboard shit and I'm fine like you don't want to fuck it you know if this is it you know fucking that's it I'm fucking done how long was it from med board you're done until you are out of the army well like fucking nine months it was fast yeah it was real fast

and what are you doing in the meantime You keep teaching at the school? Yeah, I'm still teaching at the school. I can't even really put armor on anymore. So I'll teach like the marksmanship phase, but somebody else has to fucking go in the house with my shit. Yeah, do that until the fucking process finishes. And then how were you once you retired,

how'd that work out for you? Oh, fuck me, dude. Holy shit. I was a fucking disaster. All right. Among the many things that go wrong, we get medically retired, Like one, you weren't like financially setting yourself up for this.

You're like another five years. So I got like a fucking, you know, brand new F-150 with all the leather seats and fucking whatever bullshit and fucking $1,000 truck payment. I haven't like, you know, really prepared for an outside thing. So I don't know what the fuck I'm going to do either. And, yeah, I don't know how to deal with like money and like fucking business. I have actually no idea what the fuck I'm supposed to do when I grow up. All this grown-up shit. Right.

It's a lot of better than she just gave me like bullets and you know you can fucking have an omelet at the chow hall if you want like okay Like I can live with that So yeah it kind of kind of just fucking comes apart actually And you know also like if you're something that I've heard now from a lot of the just like medically retired like when you've done a job For your entire life it involves like your body and like being tough and fucking performance You see this actually from like NFL guys and shit like that too and they get like fucked up and they can't play anymore when somebody tells you that like well your shit's fucking broken and you can't do this like it's it like fucks you up on like a different level you're like that was my identity

and like what am I now and I don't know so yeah so where are you living you live in an apartment you're married at the time I married at the time I got any kids no okay thank God so you're married you're waiting you live in an apartment somewhere no I got a house okay house in Fayetteville Because it's funny, my, my ex-wife was also a fucking captain. All right. So we were making fucking good money. Like, I got like a nice house, like nice shit. I'm fucking E7 with like.

Freaking officer activities going down, bro. Yeah, exactly. Right. And plus he got all the special duty pay. They're like demo pay, all this shit. See, yes, now I'm out. And I have absolutely fucking no idea what the fuck to do with myself. ex-wife is like absolutely fucking freaking out

like you're gonna have to fucking go get a job of UPS or some shit like you can't just sit home and turn to a fucking alcoholic and uh I also freak out a little bit on that one like I'm also I've lost this idea and like fucking bitch I was writing a fucking skis the fucking helicopter to go kill people fucking two years ago now fucking I don't know I'm not going to fucking loading boxes on the plane of UPS so I start going a little bit fucking crazy like

okay what am I qualified to do be a fucking arms dealer. Like a legit one. I got buddies in the fucking business. Like, all right. Fucking, you know, whatever this is.

You know, do some little, you know, bullshit contractor stuff. But mostly what I do is fucking fall apart. Because this is also, I can see with retrospect. Being in the army and being in commando fucking Johnny is the only glue that has kept

all of my fucking terrible childhood, like in one piece. Okay. So now I am Fucking absolutely losing my shit Also I don't know if it was like this for you when you got out But for me it was it was also it was like hitting puberty again Like in this context of like you know

Emotions and fuck a shit that you can't fucking handle I never expect to live to 30 Oh fuck that was that was that was people dying and shit Like fuck a shit was crazy back in the other parts of the war All of a sudden like You know you're going to live through this like probably potentially a long time I'm like, fuck, no, fucking Survivor's guilt. Like, why fucking these guys die?

And I didn't. What the fuck am I? And also, like, the fucking, like, the real hormonal shit, like, just starts coming out of fucking the woodwork. I am, like, coming fucking apart. I'm fucking, I'm a crazy person all day long every day. So what does that mean? Like, are you drinking all day? No, I'm not drinking.

Well, are you just angry? You pissed off? Are you smashing shit? No, no. I'm drinking a bottle of booze every night, but not all day. mostly what it is, this is where it becomes like this is right. Mostly it becomes like a,

like a sexual thing. We're being totally honest. Like I, it's like I'm being 15 again, except now I got a growing man muscles and a girl man fucking paycheck. And I actually end up having this conversation my ex-wife.

I'm like, I'm going out of Florida all the time to do like arms dealer shit. I'm also shooting competitively at this time. And the company that I was doing it for, I was doing this while I was teaching CCB to, you know, keep skills up. It's based out of Florida.

And I tell my ex-wife, I'm like, hey, look, I don't know if you've, ever been Florida too because it's a weird place down there. I'm like, they're fucking grown-ass women fucking throwing themselves with me all day long because if they're over 35 they can't get a date in Florida

because that's how weird that place is. It really is. It's fucking true. Everybody's beautiful and made from Miami fucking plastic surgeons. Like the cougars down there like rolling packs. You're like, holy fuck. Like this shit's crazy. So that becomes the expression for me.

I got a fucking five, six, I'm doing all kinds of fucking. terrible shit, which, and I don't even try to hide it very well. So, of course, that marriage goes up and fucking smoke. I'm divorced. I don't give a fuck. Like, I do this all in, like, a really shitty way, too. Like, it's, it's, nothing is good.

And I'm also, like, in a weird way, like, suicidal. Like, not like, you know, I'm going to fucking spark my head up, but kind of. You have those thoughts, or I'll have those thoughts. Like, oh, fuck, man, that was it. You know, I played my quarters in the fucking machine. Like, what am I going to do? I'm going to sell craft macaroni and cheese? I don't get a fuck about any shit.

Maybe this is just where I end it. I'll see it another way that I see with a lot of guys later is that there'd be a legend of SF, like not too long before this, that OD's on heroin six months after he retires. I'll see this, not heroin, but this similar type of thing happening with me. I'll just do crazy fucking shit because I kind of want to die, but not enough to like off myself. But, you know, I'll fucking drink a fifth of Jack Daniels and go drive a goddamn car around the mountains as fast as I can, like trying to break the fucking record, knowing it's, it's intentionally doing it, like, fuck it, whatever.

So, yeah, I spend this couple years just, I mean, a fucking mess. What pulls you out of it? Finally, through like a weird twist of fate, I go teach you a contract in Okinaw, which gives me a good chunk of money in my pocket for a little bit. and I end up for a gun company going to a fucking Idaho and I met who is now my wife

there. All right. And she's fucking awesome. But she's also putting up like absolutely none of my fucking bullshit. Like fucking none of it. You know, she's fucking gangsters fuck. And like as I am interacting with her

and this fucking way, I'm like, oh, this is the fucking one. Like this is it I'm like I gotta go home clean up all this other bullshit though Because I got all kinds of fucking messes at home Like you know fucking five six girlfriends different stales All this fucking terrible shit Were you living in in Fayville still?

Yeah I'm north there in Stanford I'm like I got like a room with like a flop house With like a buddy that owns a fucking ammo company Disaster Disastered yeah when I've left my house I left with like all my guns and ammo And like you know fucking two pairs of underwear and a t-shirt You know my shit is fucked

she'll eventually like like a mattress on the floor like a tough box with a lamp on it yeah she's like what the fuck but yeah a fucking total mess uh so now I I have something now that I have to

fucking unfuck my life for as I she ain't gonna put up no bullshit either like like you're gonna have to fucking come correct you want to fucking play with me like okay uh so I do I go home and fucking clean up all my messes uh fucking ex out all these fucking you know silly bitches

throwing my shit in a fucking truck and drive to Idaho. God's country. God's country. And what did you do once you got up there? Like, what were you doing for work? Nothing. I still had a pile of money from this contract shit,

so I can kind of relax for a minute. And this is maybe also the first time I like take a fucking breather. Maybe we should plan something. It turns out of me around a little longer than I thought I was going to be around for. Maybe you started to develop in this fob of this Ford operating base a little bit.

Right. Exactly. And then, so what's next? Oh, so. So you moved to Idaho. You're up there. What are you doing? Take a little time off.

Take a little time off. Very, very quickly. She's pregnant with my son. So, yeah. And I've also stepped into, in a lot of ways, like, a cluster of fuck of a different sort. Because she has three daughters. Sure. That are teenagers.

Sure. Oh, check. I have like zero seconds as a fucking parent. So this fucking shit is that. Well, actually, she comes to North Carolina to drive back with me with my, you know, like one pickup load of shit that I own. And while we're gone, the youngest one, the fucking 15-year-old, like, runs away from home and just like doing all kinds of fucking crazy criminal shit.

So, you know, grandma was watching me until it goes fucking terrible. So we're like three days away Carrie's like you got to drive faster because this just happened and like you know we got to fucking deal with this. I'm like okay. So Carrie is also we're getting to know each other at this point and she's not ever had any like really like really like really like really like really like fucking relationship. She's been like a lot of dudes that are like fucking, you know, useless. They're fucking retards or they got they got no fucking skin in the game. They're not really like in it to fucking win it. You know, nobody's like I've ever really like fucking stepped over before.

Well, that's one thing I'm going to get at. here we go. So we get back, fucking, like basically develop this network across Boise through all like the fucking criminal underground.

I'm like hunting for these fucking fucking kid and fucking running people around all night and doing this crazy shit and get the fucking kid back and she ends up having to go to fucking Juvie

though because like some bad crime has been committed in the meantime. Yeah, Carrie's pregnant and we get married and now we're just kind of relaxed for a minute and figure out

like what the fuck do you want to do when you grow up. Well, I always tell, when you guys ask me, you're like, what do you do and you get out? What do you, what do you got to watch out for? How do you avoid going down the spiral? And I'm always like, you got to find a new mission. You got to find a new mission. You got to find new mission.

You are absolutely correct. And it's like, here you were doing all this crazy shit, dumb shit. But then you meet this girl and it's like, oh, now I've got a mission. Like, now I got a new mission. I'm going to take care of this girl. I'm going to step up, be a man and get after it. 100% true. And there you go.

Yeah. Including doing some freaking underground networking, greater Idaho, freaking recover. So then when did the writing start? Okay, so now I'm also like, I can't do like contract or shit. I'm not going to raise like my son. And plus, you know, we've got a teenage daughter. We've got to still take care of it. I've got to find something else to do that is for money.

And you'll probably have an even actually going to retiree check. But I want more money or a little bit more. So it's funny. I actually do end up stacking boxes at FedEx. I fucking load the box of the box. I'm not going to plane for a minute. But I get a job. because of my competitive shooting background stuff

with this like basically online magazine about guns called Guns America Digest and you know they'll fucking pay me to review guns and I've tried to get a real job in Boise and I've tried to you know I've worked for FedEx I've done only shit and none of the shit's fucking working

really so I'm like okay fuck it I'll do this writing thing I'll see if it made good at it and it turns out that yeah I can write really fast at least and write pretty fucking well I can sure fuck take pictures and I can fucking shoot a gun. So this works out. I do that for a while. It starts getting really fucking old too, though. I don't know about like how you are with guns,

but I'm with guns like as a fucking tool. I got to go fuck what gun it is. Like, okay, fucking carry a glock for the next hundred years. Like, oh, you can't have a Glock anymore. What we have here? Fucking some other bullshit. Like, I don't, I don't fucking care about guns. As long as I have one, like, that's my tool. Like, it's fine. So I'm not like into this gun shit either. You know, I'm fucking covering like 15 ARs a year in this fucking magazine. and like, God damn it. Like, they all have Magpull furniture in the black. Like, I don't give a fuck.

So one day I sit down and I'm like, how many words did I write last month about, you know, fucking stupid guns? It's a lot. It's like 40,000 or something. Like, how long is a novel? I don't know, 50,000. Like, light bulb.

I'm like, well, fuck it. I'm at least going to try this other thing. I'm going to try to write books and see if I can. And maybe that will be, you know, a little more creative and expressive than, writing about fucking guns. So you start hammering. Oh yeah.

What was your methodology for writing? So, this is a funny thing. A lot of the other like gun reporters and shit, like they're trying to write books. Well, this is the kind of shit that we'll talk about when we go to like a conference.

Or we go to Smith and Weston to see the new gun. When it's over, when I talk about the fucking gun, we're talking about writing to each other. Like, what kind of typewriter do you have, man? That's fucking badass, dude. What did you jocco?

You with Microsoft Word guy? You're a fucking Apache open source. Like, you know, some crazy shit. So one of them turns me on to, man, I hate to get this guy. critics he's such a fucking weirdo now but he is an awesome writer uh Stephen King's on writing which is a great book for learning how to write and it could actually really be boiled down to like fucking three things I use the least amount of words possible I don't

write a fucking fully description of a bunch of bullshit and the method is sit the fuck down at the typewriter and write yeah that's the method that's it that's how it works so I take this to fucking heart and it turns out that it works really well for me so you wrote a couple was Was it two novels you wrote out of the gate? Yeah, wrote two novels out of the gate. Fuck, I can't remember their names right. Can me a second. My brain's fucking partially switched off.

Last of the war god. Yeah, sort of caliphate. Yeah. So when you write your first novel, you learn a lot, write your first novel. I wrote the first one from a first person perspective, and I wrote it in like a very limited setting. Like, it was kind of stuck in a way like you had to be right here. And but it was over and like, fuck, that was hard because, you know,

we can't have the segue where we went to Paris or, you know, And there's only one character, so there's not a lot of dialogue. But it turned out that writing books, actually, it was really fucking easy. That first one I wrote it in 30 days. And I wrote it at night after my wife went to bed between like 10, 4 in the morning. It's funny. Like, a couple times, like, she would wake up and come down and like,

the last time I'm like, what the fuck are you doing? She's like, I can't see you're watching porn in the basement. Like, God damn it. Like, no, look at this fucking outline. This is beautiful. Look at my craft. Right. Right.

But, I mean, I can see. why she's like that's the craziest shit ever fucking hurt you can't just staple my and write novels but you can so yeah fucking hammer that went out like I said it takes like a month and self-publish it and you know had like moderate success it was good

when you say moderate success what do you mean I mean it's not like I was gonna be on the fucking new a seller list or shit but it made money yeah I guess sold enough copies that like I get a I get a check for some money from Amazon I'm like hell yeah dog I got this yeah I'm like hey this is awesome

The nice thing about books, too, is residual. That's for life. Yeah. So, and then from those novels, you get into kind of like a little bit more talking about, well, I guess the thing, I was going to say survival. And I was like, well, was it really survival? But then I looked at the name of the book is like, Urban Survival. And you get into these books, which are like a little bit more, I guess they're not there. Well, they're definitely nonfiction because they're talking about like one's guidebook for surviving a civil war.

the other one's guide to urban survival. Yep. And what was your thought behind these things? This is now 2020 when you're writing these things. 2019. 2019 and 2020. Yeah. So as you decide that you're a writer for a living, like you're trying to discover like how, what's your feck and method?

So like I said, we're the first one. Okay. Like, okay, there was shit about that. That I'm like. So next one, next one. I'm going to write a bunch of characters, a bunch of a fucking different place. it turns out that's really easy too because I base all the characters on my ex-teamates like I'll change their names but you know that way I'll get to just think about like hey what the

fuck would jaco do here it's also funny when you're a real boy and you're writing like a commando johnny novel you actually have to nerve your friends because all of them are actually like know how to do all the shit if they're 20 you fucking bull up everything you got to be like oh and then we had to go get bill that could you know actually put the fucking deck you know shut the fight yeah anyway so I write that one uh at that point too I get enough success that I get a literary agent. So, you know, I got a contract. He's trying to shop around to, like, the, uh, the fucking big boy companies.

And this is where you learn how the book business works. And the way the book business works is fucking terrible. Yeah. The, uh, publishing world is very strange. Well, you're lucky. You're lucky you're living in a, we're living in a time where you don't need those people if you don't want them. No, you don't.

You can go ahead and just publish stuff yourself. They're not getting into your money. You'll get it all. You'll get it all. Amazon's going to get their cut. Yeah, exactly. But hey, that cut is a lot less. Amazon is a way better deal.

for a, I'll end up meeting some cool people later, like, like Tucker Max, who's, you know, you're hugely, because that's a law author. And he'd be like, yeah, unless somebody offers you, like, a half a million dollar advance, like you tell the traditional public companies you go fuck themselves. Like, this is the way it's done. So, anyway, so I've got an agent now, so he's got control of the books. All right. I'm still having to do the gun bullshit because this isn't making enough money.

All right. But I end up writing a series of, like, really successful articles about urban survival. I don't even know why I got in this fucking kick of urban survival But you know I did used to teach it as you I taught advanced urban combat So I just like go down the rattlehold and they like what would I do like if like she got real fucking like fucking zombies really you know whatever You know, fucking mad max world and there's fucking biker gangs with fucking oozy's you know where And I write this series of articles And it is it like breaks out of like gun world and like it's very fucking popular

People are like holy shit and the company's like can you keep writing this fucking bullshit because like people eating the shit up And I'm like oh fuck Like this is the key, all right? We'll try nonfiction then. Like, I'll write a fuck. Also, I moved to Oregon at this point. Okay. Oregon is a weird fucking place.

When you're not in like Portland, when you're like outside of Oregon. You know, it's obviously. Is it Portland a weird place too? Probably. I've never, I've never stepped foot of the motherfucker. I don't know. But the rest where they had the freaking,

the, what was the autonic, the autonomic zone? What was it? We were no. The Chass was in Seattle. Oh, that was. Which is just as weird, yeah. But Portland might as well be the fucking jazz.

It's its whole different fucked up shit. But Oregon, the state, is weird in it, like a different way. All right. So Oregon's home or Portland's home are like Antifa and all this shit. Like, it's the spiritual home of it. But there's kind of a fucking reason. Because when you get into rural Oregon, you will see shit go the other way. Oregon is the only place I've ever seen where like dudes are like flying like swastikas from their trucks.

Like fucking like stickers too. Like they're going to work this way. And there's the Antifa guys are like, it's like, it's like kind of war in the streets in like a way that like kind of makes Crips and Bloods look like fucking nothing. I'm like, holy fuck. And these are like, I'm like, holy. I'm like, no wonder fucking Portland's so fucked up. Like, like, I've been to like Alabama, Mississippi. I've never seen any shit.

Like this is my fucking wife. Oh shit. Yeah. So I kind of look at this like this is, like there's a potential here of conflict that is like sectarian as Iraq was. Like, like, if this ever like really, these motherfuckers are going to kill each other to like the. there's no reconciling this, right? So that's what starts me on the rap and I start thinking about like, hey,

what the fuck would I do if like this kind of shit kicked off? And I don't want to be on either side. I want to fucking protect my fucking bullshit over here and let these guys kill each other. So that's where I started with the, with this book. And kind of twist of fate.

I finish it. It's all the way finished. Get my agent to like start shopping it around. Because now I've got an agent. I had to play it this way. He has control. All right. He says where it gets probable.

and somebody's got to buy it from a polishing company. And so this is like, oh shit. It's like December of like 2019. Nobody wants a fucking survival book. All the fucking public, they're like, no, that's fucking stupid. Like nobody wants your bullshit. There's no conceivable way that any of this could ever happen.

There's absolutely no market for this. Yeah. So I think there's going to be some kind of a global pandemic that shuts the entire country down? What are you talking about? Right. So I've got it and it's like 80% finished and I'm not even working anymore because I'm like I'm disappointed that it hasn't sold and I can't self-publish it either at this point because I got this fucking agent. Yeah.

So twist of fucking fate. My contract with that agent comes up like June 1st of 2020. So like the pandemic has like already been going on and that's when the riots start. That's when the summer of love kicks off right. There's the George Floyd shit and everybody's going to fucking. bananas and like the fucking hour at midnight when my contract ends with that agent I'm like on Amazon self-published like print the first one doesn't even have like a real cause got like a fucking white sheet with you know Microsoft Word writing of this bullshit and I fucking

throw it on social media and it takes all right it sells like incredibly fucking well I get yeah I'm I'm making like a good fucking amount of money which is important because my fucking house burned down in January of 2020. From what? Is there a random house fire? Was it a forest fire or something? No, random house fire. We're out of town.

We're over in fucking Oregon. We were having some problems with this house. Like I was soon to do that fucking sold to me because they like conceal some structural bullshit that fucking wasn't right. I don't know. It's a fucking small mountain town. It's just way outside of Boise town of like 400 people. Next day I know I go out of town my fucking house burns down.

And then they say that they're not going to pay people from the lawsuit. It's fucking amazing. So this is all fucking bad shit. We're living down in a fucking rental house in Boise with like, you know, whatever bullshit we had on our fucking backs. This is going to end up being a fucking pain in the ass too. There's some sketchy shit with this fucking fire. And basically I have the only thing that is even ever going to be remotely as save is I'm double insured. All right.

That's because I have fucking TBI. So I'm paying USA who's been like my guys for, you know, fucking 20 years. house insurance and my wife is paying AMIG, which has been her insurance for like 20 years. Fucking, the way it works when you're done with sure there is you don't get paid twice.

Each company is responsible for half. Amig will eventually like three years later pay out their half. Fucking USA's ratchet bastardsards, though, never pay shit. So yeah. So it's fucking June 1st, 2020. We're fucking broke. We got nothing. But I had a fucking computer

like cloud. No, I didn't even have a computer cloud backup. I'd send a copy of this to one of my buddies, like an email to like, you know, read over like, hey, is this any good? And I remember that. And I call him like, dude, please fucking tell me you clencher. You still got this motherfucking manuscript. And he's like, yep, here you go. Wham!

Finish it out. It sells incredibly fucking well. That's actually the thing that saves us because I don't know, I mean like a hundred grand office book or some shit in like fucking six months. Because it's the time too. Like fucking COVID. Yeah, COVID is fucking bananas. So while that's going on real quick,

flip it over. right the other one right prairie far which is kind of the uh the second half because it's about how to do shit like an urban environment and uh yeah there you go um you get a pretty cool section in here in concrete jungle you go like this whole martial arts thing which course i freaking cued into it's chapter six ninja fighting 101 nun chucks and throwing stars but it's great you know you kind of break down a bunch of different uh a bunch of different martial arts what's good what's bad moitai boxing of course judo

Brazilian jiu-jitsu and then you get into the bad what else you got there? Oh you got wrestling obviously and the main shoe fighting and then you go into the bad and it's yeah good stuff and you know that's one chapter

but there's a bunch of chapters and about all kinds of different things that's good shit to know yeah it is man and it's uh you know it's something that like I haven't learned until a lot later in life too we're not one and known how to fight with your hands

is important for one all right that's that's number one But the other thing is, like, we can do shit in the military where we can, like, build aggression and all with, like, guns. We have unlimited ammo and we can do fucking crazy shit. For a normal dude, though, like, the best way to build, like, some fucking, like, warrior spirit and all this other shit is, is fighting. It's great for soldiers and shit, too. But I think it's more important, actually, for civilian people. Not even that they should ever fucking fight without a weapon. But when you're comfortable with a fucking grown-ass man, they can't whip your ass whipping your ass.

All right. Or you know his when you're fucking new jujitsu and like some big or even small dude that really knows what the fuck he's doing. It's just going to hold you on the floor which is very uncomfortable. Getting through that discomfort is actually more valuable than knowing how to do an arm bar.

Being able to like survive or knowing that you can take a hit or knowing that I didn't just die because somebody pressed their sweaty fucking chest on my mouth for an hour. That's one of the biggest self-defense things I want to talk about jujitsu is like if you're a female and you've never had someone just grab

and like grind on you. Oh, fuck. Yeah. You're not even going to get, psychologically you're not going to get through that. If it's happening to you the first time in a traumatic incident. Right. Whereas like,

if you do jihitsu, someone grabs you and you're just like, oh, this is what I do every single day. Like you don't have to, there's no psychological like chaos going on in your head. You're just like, oh, this is what we're doing.

You know, no factor. Yeah. And the other thing, we were talking about this a little bit before we went, before we hit record today. But like, and I kind of picked this up reading a barbarian spirit.

but I've been talking for years like hey man there's like just things that you are supposed to be doing right as a as a person right whether you're man or a woman there's certain things you're supposed to be doing and and we already talked about this today like there's something I said oh you know young men want to go to war it's like that's not and I'm not saying every single one but I'll say what most of them most the kids I knew growing up and and that's like in your blood It's in your blood to want to do that. And so why in God's name? Like after I trained Jiu-Jitsu for six months, let's say,

I can pretty much beat anybody on the street if I get into an encounter. Why the hell would I keep doing it for 30 years? I'll tell you why. Because like there is something in my blood that makes me want to do that. There's some part of my nature that wants to fight other people. Yeah. And you can't legally go out and fight other people all the time. I'll tell you what you can go on the mat every single day and you can go hard

and you're going to get beat a bunch and you're going to beat people and it's in your blood. Yeah. And it's good to get that out of your system. It's good to let that thing, like put water on that thing and let it grow. Yeah.

And if you don't, I don't know where that go. I don't know what happens to that. I don't know what happens to that urge. Right. If you don't gratify it. Yeah. What happens to it?

I don't know, but I don't think it's good. No, I think it dies. I think you try and suppress it or something. Yeah. Or, yeah, I don't know what happens to it, but I don't think it's good.

Yeah, no, I agree. So listening to your blood a little bit, listening to your human instincts of what you want to do. And I mean, you know, a lot of times people ask me like, you know, I'm thinking about going to military, but I'm also thinking about going to college. And it's like, cool, you can go to college at any time in your life. But you're 18 years old, like,

that military thing is going to tick off pretty quick. And I've had zero people. I better, there's no people that I can think of off the top of my head that say, I was in the military, I regret that I was in the military. No. And I'm talking about guys that have lost both legs, both legs, both arms.

Like, look at Travis Mills. Like, what a beast. He doesn't break down and say, hey, you know, I really wish I wouldn't enjoy it. No, he's like, I'd do it again. Yeah. So there's something going on in your DNA. Right. That wants to do this kind of shit.

Right. So do this kind of shit. No, yeah. No, absolutely. Man, I stand by it too as like, like the value in Jiu-Jitsu or MMA or any other bullshit is still not even really the fighting part of it. Like, you should know that. That's awesome.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Realistically, you should be fight with weapons anytime you can. But you're not always going to be able to, one. All right. The other thing is it's not, as I said, it's really not about the fighting. It's about, like, for dudes they're older. They've never done this shit when they're young.

All right. You have the courage to, like, go in the fuck of jujitsu and get the absolutely shit kicked out of you by some fucking 20 year old. All right. He's going to embarrass the fuck out of you. I was going to suck. All right. It's going to suck for quite a while too.

All right. It's just be like fucking six months where you can beat up the other, you're going to hope a new guy shows up in six months. You can rough him up a little bit. But that's good for you. Humbling, man. It's humbling. It's humbling.

All right. It also gives you something to work towards. It's really like drags in your fucking, you know, you want to come up. And yeah, it's all around great. I really can't think of a lot else that's going to help like a guy that's older that is kind of live like a bitch made life.

because you do it does it takes something fucking cowboy up for that shit yeah yeah it's funny I'm a 20 year white belt

like uh because I will not go back for three or four years and I'll go back for you know fuck I've never been great at consistency but I did go to the Gracie Academy's the first time in

uh fucking Tacoma in like 1998 anyway got the shit beat at me by some little tiny I wish you knew it was some little tiny motherfucker over the black belt he was like fucking 65 kick deep

I was the judo guy so I was like roughing up some of the in this little dude Hey man, fucking let me search your shit. Fucking beat the fucking, he wasn't even breathing hard. It was funny, funny shit. Anyway, I will continue.

I'll go back sometimes in that, you know, now even it takes a little bit of fucking courage to step in again. It's like, goddamn, I'm fucking old and out of shape, and I'm still fucking 20-year-old. I'll get roughed up by some fucking bluebells. I don't go, fuck. It's good to just show that you'll show up to yourself sometimes. And I do need to catch myself on some consistency

because my boys need to start doing this shit too. So. For sure. I'm kind of at a turning point. Old of the boys right now? One of them turned nine yesterday. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and the other one's fucking seven.

100%. But I'm definitely at a point of, like, unfucking my own life right now, so we'll get to that shit. Yeah, yeah. So you get done with those books, and then there's this book, which I mentioned earlier on. It's called The Wrath of Wendigo. I was like, wait, because this is a spoiler alert type of thing, because it's a novel. Right. So, but I want to talk about it a little bit.

It's like the scene is, I guess it's dystopian. in a way, maybe. But there's an insurgency in America against, like, the evil elite elected and unelected bureaucrats and oligarchs that now run America. This is like an alternate history type thing. That shit could never happen. So it's a good thing is fiction. Yeah.

And then there's this insurgency that happens. And there's a breakaway part of the country, which is Cascadia. Cascadia, yeah. Which actually, Cascadia is a real term. It's a real term for the Pacific Northwest. Yeah, the Pacific Northwest. And there's these people up there living in Cassadia. And the novel centers around this guy, Eric Hanson, and he's like a general of the insurgency.

And he's captured. And that's the way the story unfolds is that he gets captured and he gets interrogated. And he kind of tells the history of the insurgency. And while it's a novel, it's also like. an instruction manual on how to conduct said insurgency, you know, going through. I never saw that part of it myself. So like the decentralized wolf lodges and like how to fight with sabotage and hit and run and terrain exploitation and asymmetrical warfare.

It's like goes over all those things. And also the, the Wendigo, which is actually a like a Native American mythical creature. Mythical creature. and the basic, tell me if I got this right. The concept is this guy, T-O-N-N-T-O-N-N. He's the leader. He's like the original founder of the insurgents. Yes.

And at one point, he does like the sweat lodge type scenario, and he sees the Wendygo and freaking like enslaves him kind of takes his, takes his nightmarish personality and says, we're going to use this because we have to win. I'm bending you to my will. Yes. Yes. Be the reason the forest is haunted.

It's one of those things in there. So that's, so that's what happens. And the book, again, I realized when I was thinking about what I was going to say about it, is like there's a story arc that you have to read the book. And as I was reading the book, I was like, oh, damn, what's going to happen?

Because, you know, you want to know what's going to happen. You want to see how to unfolds. So great read. an audiobook version of it too and actually I listened to the audio book I didn't read this book I listened to the audio book um a lot of times with novels I'll just listen to him I totally yeah me too um so

there's that so that comes out uh how did that land in the world man this is uh this is this is we're going to have to go down a little bit of a fucking woo-woo path if you wish because it's it's this is really what happens

uh and this is kind of where we get into some like like some fucking crazy shit for being just real with each other. So I should mention that especially because of early church shit, like the whole time I fight the war, I'm a fucking atheist. Like, fuck everybody, fuck all, you know, God didn't come help me from my child. I'm mad about shit, all right.

This is when you're growing up. This is your, your attitude towards religion. This is my attitude towards religion. Yes. Yep. Yep. I'm fighting these fucking Arabs with their, you know, I'm not a believer in any kind of fruitcake shit. I'm very much like a biological, evolved guy. Like, we got one shot at this. I guess I've been of mine fucking run around in the desert like an idiot.

But, you know, this is it. When we die, we die, we're dust, all this shit. Nothing I see over there or nothing I see, not even the birth of my children makes me believe anything else. Not even fun close. But some weird shit starts coming down the pike. I'm going to say, man, about like 2017, 2018. And it's not even in here.

It's just like, I'm watching the shit that's happening to Trump with his first presidency. and there starts to be like shit that like I can't explain because again like you don't know how much of this like crazy shit is like pizza gay and all but when you start looking and you start seeing like hey these guys really are collecting all these like weird fucking paintings and like there starts to be this like fucking recurring theme and it just kind of starts coming in like I don't know I still don't know whether the at this point like I don't know if the devil is real like I don't know if any of these fucking evil spirits or real ghost spirits and that other bullshit. But I do know that these fucking assholes believe in them. And because of that, you're like, hey, learn some fucking mythology, you know, figure out what, what do their signs and symbols mean? What does it take, you know, what's it going to take to flip our people around and, like,

you know, fuck these dudes up if it comes to it. But I'm still not like, you know, I'm a fucking mercenary for the good guys at this point. Like, you know what? I'm still not going to church, but I will fuck these guys up just because they're evil. If it comes to it, everybody fucking calm down with the fucking FBI right now. Oh, got to go good. Anyway. So I'm not like a believer, believer at this point at all. Windigo actually comes to me in a complete novel, like, all at one time.

And it's mostly like sitting outside my fucking house in the woods, up in the fucking mountains. I mean, having a little couple of dope beverages. But I don't smoke weed. I don't do any drugs. I don't do any of this other shit. But it is cycling in my head. And it just, it wants me to write it. And I don't want to.

And it's eventually some like kind of weird shit starts happening to me when I'm like, no, fuck you, I won't write this fucking book. Because the other thing about it is I know the story front to back in here already. And it sounds too fucking crazy. Like it sounds like some shit that like the Secret Service is going to give me a talking to about, right? There's some nut bar shit that goes on in there. And basically what finally triggers it to you're going to, I will do this. I'll fucking bend the old red your goddamn book. One day I say I'm not going to.

say it out loud. I'm like, I am not writing this book. And so I started building the deck for my wife. All right. And next thing I know, like I never hold a drill like this. Like, you know, normally a drill, like I have a treat or shit there. I hold it, I'm holding it like this, and I'm in the middle

of this process. All right. And my oldest son at this point is not like an affectionate child. He's kind of like with his ages where he's like he doesn't want to be touched or hog or kissed or anything. But he runs across the fucking yard to give me a hug, which is completely fucking out of character for him at this point while I'm holding this drill

like this with the bit pointed out and before I can fucking do something it stabs him in the face all right almost it gets him right here by the fucking it almost gets his eye I'm like holy fuck I fucking take him a hospital uh got very lucky it was just it didn't like go through it it hurt him but you know there's a little scar there but it didn't like uh you know I'm like holy fuck also at this point like I'm learning of like fucking mythology and shit that I think it's weird that it was almost his eyeball who's the fucking who's the one I fucking king I'm like No shit. So I'm like, I already feel some like woo woo fucking shit going on there.

I'm like, okay. The kids go to bed. Like I go out to my toolbox and I go up a flashlight with an LED bulb, but it's like a fucking sure fart too. It's not like some Chinese bullshit. And I turn that flashlight on and the fucking bolt pops, which is basically never happens to LED lights. Like you could run them for like a million hours.

I'm like, now I'm getting, I'm getting like a little bit scared actually. So I fucking pick up a different one. And I pick it up. I actually take the batteries I would put it in this one. Turn that one on, the fucking bowl pops. I'm like, fuck. I put all that shit, all that batteries, all that box away. And I go and go and fuck a third one.

And I hit the button and it pops to it. Like, okay. Like, fuck it. All right. You know what? I will write your fucking book. I'll do what you want. And so I do.

I write this book and it flows out of me. And like, it does. This is the only book I've ever written that it doesn't feel like I wrote it. It feels like I channeled it. And that's, I don't know, it's also the best book I've ever written. That guy's awesome. Who that spirit guy is fucking. That guy's legit.

But that's how this one comes about. And then we get into this, this latest book, which is called Barbarian Spirit. And I guess, let me just start with the, this is from the BarbarianSpirit. Dot com website.

The demon of suicide is running rampant in our society, increasing by up to 52% in certain age group since the year 2000. It is the second leading cause of death and veterans under 45, with 140,000 veteran suicide since 2001. You read that correctly. Double the war dead from Vietnam or over one third of World War II killed in action.

Suicide is a crafty way of decreasing our numbers and strength before the final day while demoralizing those that remain. This is not an analogy. One of the few cases of demonic exorcism in the Bible itself shows what? Demons cast out of a man allowed to possess a herd of pigs immediately forces the swine to drown themselves. All right. So, and we're going to get to the Barbarian Spirit website

and this religion and whatnot. But I want to get, just, you know, we kind of touched on some of this stuff here, but I want to kind of set the scene for you. This is reading from the book by Barbarian Spirit. You say, I was very torn on the decision to try a psychedelic. I did hours of research.

I looked for anomalies like sudden death. I basically look for any excuse I could find not to use this drug. Even after I finally said, settled on magic mushrooms and procured a stash. They sat in my basement for over a year. The fear was real. I should also point out here, after I got them, I asked my experts a gaggle of questions.

I interrogated one of them for hours secretly looking for a flaw and a reason not to. I listen to people on YouTube that are very anti-mushroom for reasons like it opens a door to the demonic or mushrooms thrive on death. They are a thing of death and they are not your friend. Eventually, I decided it was time. Not necessarily even for the spiritual reasons. I was still a bit skeptical about that. But I had some problems.

Nothing else seemed to touch. The brain therapy I got before did help with the fog. I had felt on and off for years. I did feel like I gained back 20 IQ points and my focus was better. But I still had bouts of depression. I still had trouble finding any kind of motivation and I still didn't feel right. By the summer of 2023, I was ready to try anything. Anything finally concluding that any possible risk outweighed continuing to feel less than whole

It was time to cowboy up so even though you kind of squared your shit away Somewhat now you got a you know you got your wife yep you got kids was your second son in on scene yes yeah because he's uh he's only two years younger than the big one Okay so you had two boys but you're still like yeah so some shit's not right so basically I'm like doing this on fucking sure willpower And discipline now all right I'm you know going I'm doing stuff to get us money I All right. I'm trying to, you know, be a good example for my kids and, like, workouts like a little longer to fucking, you know, fucking raise them. But I'm still a fucking mess. Like, I've got the brain fog. All right.

I've got no motivation for the drive for the gym. When I do go, like, I never get any gains. Because it turns out that when I finally go to this other bullshit, I've got testosterone on it, like, a count of like 173. Yeah. This ends up being an operative. A lot of dudes are really fucked up in the interim system from either the war or whatever. So I'm basically just like tooth and claw just barely living and not very well But you know enough time to like play I know I'm fucked up though

Like I know that like I've got to do something to you'll get some energy back Get some drive and you know all this shit and that is around the time I first started about Psychedelics as a therapy which I thought sounded like total bullshit anyway It sounds like some hippie fucking peace in love like oh yeah you just you know fucking see the fairies and you know I'm like, no man, there ain't a fucking way that works, but I finally, I get, that's exactly because I get desperate enough. Like, you know, I'll try some fucking crazy shit. The brain thing that I had before was called a transcranial magnetic stimulation.

And this is the thing they're doing for veterans now, and they basically shock your brain with magnets and shit. It did help a little bit, but it didn't help enough. Like, I'm like, you know, I don't even need to feel like I'm 25. I need to feel like I'm 35. Something, though, so I can get through this. And it ended up that I had a bunch of clients. clients from this book that basically pulled me out of retirement of like teaching

puzzle and shit. They were they were Bitcoin dudes. So they're already like kind of free thinking fucking those kind of dudes. And they were big into psychedelics because they're big in programming and a bunch of other weird jobs where you wouldn't think psychedelics are the thing. But they're always talking about the shit. And they're like, no, look, like some of them had even like donated money to some of the other veteran organizations that use these as therapeutics down in Mexico for, for guys.

They're like, it's not like they ever tried to push him on me, but if I ask them, they're like, oh, yeah, man, fucking that shit will fucking totally help your ass. Like, it'll be fucking magic. I'm like, but I'm a Nancy Reagan kid too, man. Like, dude, I have a fucking dirt t-shirt probably still from, you know, like, I grew up in this shit. And especially the stuff you hear about psychedelics is in the after-school specials in 1987, it's all bad. Like, you'll cut your fucking face off of the razor blakes. There's spiders in it and shit. Melt your brain and you'll be like a, you know, retard down by the fucking railroad tracks.

so I am scared of it and it's also true like you're probably scared of it too a little bit because if you don't know how it works my biggest thought and like my guys that were I'm interested like never reconcile this point because they don't really understand but this has come up a lot of times with other veterans

when I talk to him I'm also like a fucking mass murderer man like I can do and have done like some fucking killing and shit if I put a hallucinogenic on board and I think that we're fucking you know, back at Fallujah or some bullshit, this could get real squirly.

All right. And, like, why they're, like, ain't nobody fucking stop me either for, like, a long time. You know what I mean?

Like, am I going to wake up in the bushes with an empty plate carrier? Like, that's going to be bad, right? So it is. It's scary.

It's scary for a lot of reasons. There's also a very real fear amongst, like, you know, our kind of dudes, like, what if this fucking takes my edge off? I,

you know, I'm this fucking guy, and I can do all this fucking terrible crazy shit to protect my fucking, I'm like you know fucking fucking kill those fucking counting with a fucking axe if I have to What if this makes me like a little bitch? This is one of the funniest I have a dude. I know that's a fifth group Battalion commander that they got in the space and this was his biggest concern because he's a fucking monster

He's like that was what if it turned me into a little you know fucking fairy fuck like I wake up tomorrow and like I'm a pacifist like Yeah, I was suck dude fucking these are these are things that are like we're scared I know I've I've people would try and get me because I've never like done any drugs yeah and I've and I've got like I mean I live in Southern California right I live in ocean beach in Southern California there's a lot of drugs there's a lot of people there's like normal people like that have every job you can imagine and they smoked dope all day long and oh no and I mean I've literally had the conversation where people like do do just like take your edge off a little bit and I've been like that is the last thing I want I like this

get away from me right right so that's a real fear like yeah oh yeah hell yeah and I have the like I have the fear of uh of well like a like i feel good you know like and my life is great you know know as i'm like i don't want to i don't want to like mess up the system the thing i told echo told you before we start it's like i'm driving around the highway at 80 miles an hour there's no traffic i'm listening to some good music i'm not going to pull that car over and just disassemble the engine and put it back together like that seems like a high risk to me but uh but that's me you know and do know a lot of people that have made some serious progress yeah through these uh through these

whatever they're called uh substances journeys these services yes yeah so you make the decision that you're gonna do it yep yeah and like I said it's I I'm not believing anybody to hit you people shit either about you know fucking spiritual journey like I'm with the opinion like this is probably all bullshit uh you probably sees him of course it's lusogenic you're gonna see some crazy shit but that's your subconscious you know fucking making shit up fucking whatever and uh But if it will help, all right, if it will help with, like, the brain fog and if it will actually do the other shit, they're supposed to be an income, like, fine, I'll go on a fucking fucking movie. I don't care if it's a scary movie.

I don't care if I got, you know, Freddie Cruz there for fucking 15 hours. I don't give a fuck. All right. I want, or I'm going to try this for the health reason. All right. And it also sounds crazy for me that's like, we're going to do some drugs for our health. Like, fucking what? But this is what I'm going to do.

So, so. And also, I don't want to tell my wife that I'm doing this because I'm kind of still in a mess too, kind of like some like, like, paranoid. Not really paranoid, but kind of like a, so paranoia, I guess, is the right word. Kind of some like isolation and like, you know, I don't trust a bunch of people. Anyway, I don't want to tell her that I'm doing this because she has a, she has a negative opinion of these kinds of things from her youth. You know, fuck, Hope her dad's not watching this.

Whatever, fuck it. We're going to tell this story anyway. my wife has done a like a fair amount of these things out frying which is the word I just learned from my EC like recreationally like when she's very young all right so and people that do this shit like for fun it's a totally different thing than people that do this I will come to find out for uh for these like spiritual or health reasons or something like that so anyway waited my wife to go to bed which is almost never happens she goes first all right I'm scared fucking shitless these mushrooms so I'm doing all the shit like we're in the chair's cool like rubbing them in the inside of my arm

like four hours before make sure I get a rash. Like the day, you know, a couple hours before I take like a little bite and like swish around my mouth and fucking spit it out to see it's poison. You know, I'm going to die.

And I also, because of the hallucinogenic effect, potentially, I don't want to be like in the house with my, you know, wife and kids because, you know, I'm just doing what the fuck's going to happen.

Like, you know, I'm going to start, you know, throwing dishes across the living room. You know, I'm going to get fucking crazy. Uh,

so I'm going to lock myself in the garage, which is it like a detached garage. Like I got a little fucking nest. of lawn furniture fucking cushions and shit. And I get my stuff out. I'm like, all right, here we go. And I actually divide it in half to because I'm like, if you're looking for this for like the health thing,

you're supposed to get to like a certain point, which is like between four and five grams where you can actually reboot your brains, what they call. There's actually another word for the, they call it the, fuck, I don't remember right. Like the hero dose or something like that. It's the heroic dose, but there's a certain piece. in your brain that's like hitting the reset.

And there's a big word for it. I think it's in the books more, but it's, this is what you have to get above this certain threshold to get that to work. So I'm like, but I'm going to take half of this first, just like see how it does for me. You know, make sure that like I don't completely fucking come on glued.

So I take like my two grams or two and a half grams. And it's also a weird thing because like psilocybin mushroom, it takes a long time to kick in. It can take like an hour. You can take up to two hours, but it usually takes like an hour. So yeah. So I take my stuff and hang out for a little bit,

and then I start kind of feeling kind of good. I'm like, okay, this is all right. Lay down my little fucking nest of a nest of bullshit. And I wish you had a picture that you had. You know, just fucking lawn chairs and like a poncho liner or something. Fucking one of my sandbag kettlebells for a pillow. So it starts kicking in. And I start seeing what I think I'm going to see,

what I think I'm going to see because I never thought of this is like a spiritual journey in the slightest. All right. I just start seeing some random, you know,

crazy fucking bullshit like a fucking train with wings flying through the, you know, just dumb shit. And this goes on for a little bit and sometimes it's like mushrooms now are like talking to me

which also can be just like some totally subconscious shit you know like, of course mushrooms are talking to you. Like, oh nice fuck, course there. And it's like,

okay. You know, you like, we're boys, right? Like, are we cool? And I'm like,

yeah. Yeah, this is fun. they're like, okay. Wait, so the mushrooms are talking to you, like inside your own head? Inside your own head, yes. Got it. Yes.

Is it like words or is it just like, like you just understand it? I feel like it is words. Maybe it's just the way like I see it because a lot of, you can see different things from these things. I feel like it is words. But I am, it's not like I'm verbally hearing with the way, right? It is just all in here. Anyway, they're like, hey, you know, like are we cool?

and also like I have no idea how to do this shit either like I don't know if you're supposed to have like a fucking ritual or fucking so I've kind of made some shit like I was telling you before we were on the show like I've never been into Viking shit in my fucking life like I thought Vikings were like undisciplined fucking retards and you know if I'm going to do something militarily like I want to be like a legionaire or like a fucking samurai or somebody that actually gets their haircut and shines their boots

and that's some you know fucking drunken idiotic ship but uh so So anyway, so like, but from this, I've learned a little bit of like shit. So like I've drawn like a warding circle of rooms on this. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. Like, I feel like you got to have a ritual. You can't just eat some mushrooms.

That's fucking retarded. So I seriously shit. I take the, it's like, we're we friends. Like, we're cool. And it's like, well, if you want to really do this, like you're going to have to like take the rest. I'm like, okay, that's fine. We eat the rest of these, probably. We eat the other half.

It's like, and you have to leave your warding circle too. You're going to go like fucking lay down a bed and be comfy. I'm like, oh, shit. Like I don't know who fuck I'm talking to now But it seems like the guy that tells you to put your gun down It's probably not your friend Like maybe you want to think about that one But whatever

I feel like you I feel like I'm gonna trust this I also feel like if I didn't need to trust this Well fucking kick this guy's ass And then come back to the fucking warding circle Well that's fuck stupid So eat the rest of them All right now shit's like like coming on

Because it doesn't take another hour For that second half to kick in Like it's we're escalating So I go upstairs to my guest room and, you know, fucking hop in bed at this point. Like, I don't need clothes anymore. Like, this is just kind of how fucking mushroom make you feel. And, uh, we're streaking. Streaking.

Sorry, I didn't mean to ruin your spiritual journey with a will feral joke. It's fucking right, dude. And, uh, getting bad. And, uh, I, I have like the fucking craziest, deepest, deepest, fucking spiritual experience that I've ever fucking had. Man, actually, you know, how much you do you want to do with that fucking shit? I mean, it's kind of part of the story who's kind of not important to. It's, you know, it's in the fucking book.

Yeah, I mean, some, some highlights of it. There's like this golden city that you go into. Yeah. You end up facing these evil kind of denimonic things that you're killing with a sword. Yeah. And you actually use the word smashing. Smashing. Yes.

And then, then we get to this bear and this wolf thing. Yeah. Which I think you should probably talk about. Okay. Okay. So this is fucking super important. So yeah. So when I lay down, all right, I start feeling, like I start seeing shit.

All right. I start seeing shit like hyper fucking clear, which is actually kind of, this does not happen to every with psilocybin, even with that kind of dose. A lot of people will never get through like seeing funny colors and like the psychedelic patterns. That's what I will over time come to call the veil. All right. You can take a lot of these kinds of drugs and never get through that veil. A lot of people won't.

recreational list a lot of times won't. If you're serious, though, and you're, like, on a journey and, like, you have taken this with purpose and focus and you're trying to go somewhere, you will pass through that veil and what's on the other side of that veil. Well, it varies for everyone, but for me, it's fucking crystal clear. I'm in this fucking city. And now I'm, like, immediately getting down talking to somebody, and this really is worth. They're like, fucking, all right, hey, check it out. Here's your sword. And I'm like, oh, fuck.

Well, I didn't know I had a sword, but I guess I do. and there's all these there's supposed to be all these statues of like monsters and fucking I know what they are too because I've researched a lot of shit but like there's a moloch and ball and all this shit

and I'm just like running on fucking I see these things I want to hit them like so I fucking smash them it's not like cutting either because they're like a clay or a stone statues I'm fucking smashing with this thing and I'm getting pissed off because there's no fucking blood

like I want to kill somebody too like I'm feeling this like or these bad guys like there would be some fucking bad shit I don't want to represent I don't want a paper target on the range. Like, I want fucking bin Laden or whatever. So, uh, so this goes off a little bit. And, uh, you know, I guess that was some kind of testing bullshit. And, uh, it's like, okay.

And I, this would be another thing that's consistently weird for me with, uh, with psilocybin. It usually gives me three trips instead of one. It's like a play in three acts. So I'll go into the, what I call the spirit room, which is where we pass with the veil, we sell a crazy bullshit. I'll wake up and want to go outside and like, take a piss, drink some water. have like a 30 minute break, you know, and you're still, there's still shit happening, you're not seeing things anymore. This is more like a, this is more like a reflection time. And then when that 30 minutes is over, it'll be like, okay, time for, you know, part two.

And I'll go back in, lay down and see the second actwear. But I don't know any of this shit at the time. So I come too, and like, I'm back in my, you know, guest room with, you know, fucking pillows with doilies on a shit. You know, fucking lace curtains. Like, there's no terrible shit. And I don't even, I think I look at my, I'm carrying my phone, I look at the clock, and it's only been like, you know, an hour and a half, two hours.

I'm like, oh, fuck, man, I always heard that these mushroom things took like eight hours. Like, you know, this is fucking over. Like, vision's still like a little distorted, but like, it's no different than really, like being really fucking drunk or something. I'm like, oh, okay, fucking, all right. I guess I'll go outside. You know, I don't know, I'll see some night air and fucking take a piss or something. So I can go downstairs, still naked, fucking,

high enough that that's not a big deal. I live in town, too. You know, I've got neighbors on four sides and shit. And something is like compelling me to go out and not have clothes on. And there's also still like a little part of me this rational. It's like, man, this is fucking like, no, dude, I'm going to get like arrested for, you know, indecent exposure or some bullshit. Fucking two o'clock. My wife's not going to be happy.

That happens. Walk out of the house, walk under the shadow of my fucking tree. And another kind of like weird coincidence thing that has happened is I wanted to do this the night before. but my wife stayed up late and I was tired so I went to bed early. This night, like she never goes to bed early all. She would have about like 9 o'clock, so I got fucking all the night in the world. It's also what the fuck is? It's the fucking super blue moon that won't happen again for like fucking 25 years.

And it's fucking breaches apex. Which when it was first happening, like, you know, fucking whatever, it's the fucking full moon. I go, fuck. Now I'm going to know why. Oh, as I walk out under the shadow of the fucking tree, all right, I step into the fucking moonlight. And this is, this is. still like really difficult to like fucking put into words because it's so fucking crazy but as like my body passes in that fucking moonlight I feel like something fucking like awaken

me and it is like a fucking animal and uh I know exactly what the fuck it is and it's the fucking wolf spirit and I am like freaking out a little bit this I'm also at this point I at least have enough like Judeo Christian fucking background and be like am I possessed like am I being possessed like right at this fucking moment and kind of actually. So I am like, holy shit, and I take a couple more steps in the fucking moonlight. And I'm also freaking out because I've never been this fucking high in my life. When my eyes are closed, I can feel like my body turning into this fucking werewolf. But when I open my eyes, like, force my real eyes open, I can see that my hand just in my hands.

I don't have any fucking claws. I don't have a fucking snout and fucking teeth. But if I blink, close them a little bit, I'm back to that thing. So it's like both things are happening at once. rational mind is like oh holy fuck like this is fucking crazy as fuck I know where all the werewolf fucking legend that will come from right now and I feel this like ungodly

like fucking power coming with this and that's what I mean when I say in the book like look I've done some fucking crazy shit all right I've assaulted on fucking Adderall because like we've been up so many days they gave us some fucking go pills and that's pretty fucking intense pretty fucking crazy right

nothing has ever been like this that I've ever fucking felt my life It is just like fucking raw fury. And it feels actually fucking amazing and wonderful too. Like it feels like, you know, a fucking Chuck Lell and fucking Randy Couture in their fucking prime walk through the bad gate right now, I would fucking beat them to death.

Like I'd whip their fucking ass. All right. You know, it's that kind of like primal fucking rage. And I kind of fight it actually for a little bit because I'm like, oh, fuck, man, I don't need to be possessed by the... This is where I go, you know, fucking rip the neighbor's throats out with my teeth.

Like, this is not good. And finally, go fuck it this is what's happening and i let it fucking like take over like it is is fucking so amazing it's fucking so fucking good and uh now i'm like literally like on all fours fucking fucking feeling like some kind of fucking monster like howling at the moon fucking growling and uh this goes on for a little bit and i fucking kind of come back too but i'm it's still like half and half like me in this fucking wolf fucking shit. And I'm actually standing like,

I can tell from my rationale, I'm standing like a fucking weird, but I'm standing like a fucking werewolf and a fucking movie, which still just my natural, but it feels like I have all those other shit too. And, you know, so I'm kind of freaking out still a little bit,

but I'm also like, this is pretty fucking cool. Like, you know, I like being this guy, actually. This is awesome. And I still don't really know what the fuck has happened, but I, you know, I kind of do. So it's like, you know, the fucking mushroom talking again is like, you know, uh, okay, like, uh, time to go back inside. Like, okay, well, as long as I'm in control this motherfucker, we're not going to fucking see my kids like this motherfucker. And it's like, it's fucking fine.

Just go. So I'm like walking back through my house and like, I don't know. It again feels like just some like really weird like fucking primly like, oh, see shadows my kitchen. I'll be, you know, fucking growl out of my shit like a fucking total fruit cake. And it's, it's, it's not even something I control. It's just like a, it is like a dog. It's like fucking, you know, instinctive. Like, oh, fuck.

All right. So go back upstairs, go to bed. Lay down and fucking, like, okay, fucking sleep, fucking. And so I go tumble back into the spirit realm real fucking fast. And it's like, the voice is like, okay, you know, this is, this is fucking, this is fucking, you know, Orphanort spirit. This is the fucking, you know, the wolf spirit. that's been around forever.

And like, you want to keep this, like, you know, there's a fucking price. This is also where it's like a Judeo-Christian guy or any kind of fucking, you're like, hold up, bitch. Like, we do not sell our souls. We do not make fucking deals over here. And I tell them that. And they're like, no, no, no, no, it's fine. It's just pain.

Like, you know, you got to take enough fucking pain to a fucking prove you can bomb with this fucking thing. Oh, fucking pain. That's easy. That's a fucking simple currency to fucking take. So it's like, all right. Well, you said, you said to go for it. Here we go.

and it feels like hundreds of years past I'm just getting fucked up there's other shit tell me the same time like you gotta feel every death of every other fucking fucking wolf spirit

that's ever fucking died we're not actually immoral like we'll fucking die so I just tumble through like thousands and thousands of years getting you know fucking stabbed and shot and fucking arm frupped off I see all these other fucking

especially from Europe things that I've never seen before too like I had no idea there were Roman formations with fucking wolfheads there were, especially the early days of Republic. At one point, standard bears also wore wolfskins instead of bears or lions. The Celts had something.

I see a bunch of crazy shit that I'll like decipher later is like, oh, fuck, there were other legends around these fucking things. So this goes on. It fucking hurts. It feels like real of like these injuries. And also like your muscles are fucking like very tensing. This can be called also a psychosomatic response. This is one of the things you actually want from dudes when they have a bunch of fucking traumas with the with the drugs.

Because this is actually somehow your body releases that is doing these things. You can throw up, you can shit, you can cry, or you can do fucking weird, fucking muscle shit. And all of those things are like psychosomatic release. All those things are actually helping you heal and get rid this fucking garbage. So this goes on for a long time. I'm fucking tired as fuck.

Like it was over. Finally, I get killed for the fucking link fucking head cut off or some shit. It's like, okay, fucking, you're right? I'm panting. I'm like in bed, like sweating. Like fucked up, tired, fucking all this shit. And it's like, okay. you're done except for one thing I'm like okay

it's like the bearer's gonna challenge for his fucking right for you to be in its cult I'm like oh fuck the right for what? The right to be in its cult got it so I look over and here comes a giant fucking bear you know to be perfectly honest to I didn't know enough about nor shit

to even really know that there was a wolf cult the old headnar instead of the berserkers and the wolf being of the old head nor the bear being a berserker cult So this fucking big-ass bear is coming over I'm like oh shit I'm fucking tired I don't want to fight a goddamn bear right now

And I don't have to Because the fucking wolf's over and just fucking grab this thing And fucking rips this fucking top jaw off of its fucking body And fucking throws up the fucking floor I'm like What the fuck And the spirit

Or the voice like Okay don't worry bear's not really dead Just that you know You're gonna fuck a team wolf But you can call him a bear too If you need to I'm like Okay let's fucking make total sin man

It's great All right It's fucking perfectly fucking logical. And yeah, it was incredibly fucking weird experience. Now, what's the next day feel like? Or like, whatever, three days later or whatever, like.

Oh, shit. So this is kind of like the end of like that, you know, tripping, journeying, journeying bowls. Tripping balls down the day. Journeying balls fucking experience. I go downstairs like, I'm really awake now.

I'm coming off or out of this. And I'm like hungry. I want some fucking like steak and fucking red meat. I feel great. I feel fucking more amazing. I ever felt my fucking life. it just feels fucking wonderful.

And I'm also like, nobody has ever fucking told me about having a first trip like this. I'm a little bit fucking freaking out. I'm waiting on like a Christian enough hour of like, you know, seven a minute comes so that I can call on my guys that has experience with this.

I'd be like, yo, dude, what? Is this how it goes? This is what happens to everybody? It's not. But yeah, no, it's great. It's amazing. I feel like, I don't know, it feels like one, my brain did reboot.

I feel like a new person after this. And even like, you know, three, four days later where it's all the way over, I feel like I have, like, leveled up as a human being, and I've gotten rid of all this fucking garbage, all the shit that used to bother me. There's something in that first journey that you went on where you say you learned three words, but you don't write them in the book? Like, what's that all about? Is it like foreign words or something like that?

Yes, it is. So one of the other things that it's kind of fucking really about while I'm on this fucking first journey is it knows that I'm a skeptical type of person. Even like the shit that I said, I didn't know about, like the Roman formations and the, the Celts. Like, when this is all going to be over, I could reasonably go and be like, you know what, maybe I've learned that when I was, you know, fucking 12 years old in the fucking picture book. Maybe I learned this other fucking thing. It knows I'm going to rationalize my journey. It knows I'm going to try to find a logical solution so that I can write off the spiritual aspects of this.

So when it's leaving the fucking big owl gives me these three words. And so I go to try to, once I'm done, all right, I try to, you know, go Google them. They don't have any fucking answers. They don't mean anything. So the one, I have a buddy that's what his wife is from Norway. And I actually know what language he's words. I know they're fucking Old Norse or

Germanic or old Norse or Iceland. There's something from this fucking region. This is the same like mythology that it's shown me as this is going on. And it's kind of been telling me too. Like this is, you know, this is fucking Odin speaking kind of shit. So I call my buddy his wife's from Norway. I'm like, hey man,

I need to know what this fucking word means. I know what it means, but I want to know what it means. He's like, okay, let me ask my wife. And he's like, she's like, well, it means fucking absolutely, it's a nonsense word that means nothing. But it like kind of piqued her curiosity. So she called her mom, right, it picked her curiosity. You know either.

So they called Grandma back in fucking Norway. And grandma knew exactly what the fucking meant. Because Norway, Norwegian is a language that just changed a lot even like the last 40 to 50 years. All right. And it's not even as close to old Norsey. But the old people, their language is a little bit closer. All right. And that is exactly what it means.

It means fucking wolf shirt. And he's like, Grandma wants to know how the fuck you know it because almost nobody else on the fucking planet knows this word. And so that freaks me out, dude. Now I'm like, all right.

There's like no denying that that word came from somewhere else that was not me. All right. You've got to read a little section of the book right now. As a professional soldier, I would have found the image of a berserk or laughable, mostly because in common understanding it fits so easily in the box of, then I'll just get really mad and go into a rage,

C-red or some other amateur bullshit. A common bit of wisdom from people that think they can street fight, which will get you hurt or killed real fast as tactics go, if you face anyone with skills. There are a very complex relationship between aggression and expertise. Tiny bit of history, but important. The Western ideal of soldiers has been disciplined, cold rational automaton for a very, very long time. Even back to ancient Sparta, that was what they

wanted. Spartans put anger and fear in the same box and train their soldiers to never show either. And they were kind of right, but kind of wrong. Anger can be used to mask fear, and one doesn't know how long that facade will hold up. I believe the Spartans, therefore, just tried to excise both. Odd as it may sound, they didn't really give much of a shit about personal martial ability either. All they really wanted was a soldier that could stand in the phalanx and coldly but steadily grind forward forever. I'm not disputing prowess or that it worked or personal Spartan bravery, merely pointing out what they thought of as an ideal. Romans were mass-produced Spartans, so pretty much the same concept. And I think we can say the same for pike squares and all the phalanx style warfare after.

The same applied when guns became king. It was far more important than anything else that your soldiers stand in formation. and do the right steps. Iron discipline, which does mean the negation of emotions. All of them. This is the Western goal which armies have strived for for the last hundred years, arguably for the last thousand years. Kill who we tell you to kill, but only when we say so.

Stop as soon as we say stop. And in between times, act like an automaton on parade. So calm is perhaps the greatest example of this. They select and build for this from day one. in those types of places there will be no praise there will be no rousing speeches from leadership there will only be a target and an expected outcome you will never hear that you did a good job not no matter how difficult the task might have been you'll only hear about it if you fuck up and you won't hear that more than a few times before you are gone more than anyone else socom would be

happy happy if they had robots if they could make capable men put them on ice between jobs they would do so. Now the irony here is that its recruitment practices often draw the most naturally aggressive men to start with. It spends an awful lot of money tamping that instinct down and very rarely rewards it. It might praise that aggression on rare occasion, throw out a few medals to the boys, but by and large, it seeks to leash it. I've seen that mask slip a few times, but largely it holds. There is a term you should familiarize yourself with if you have an industrial psychology. This the science of extracting the maximum amount of value for the minimum amount of input from the worker. It has a military parallel in use for a long time now and building on what was already

known in ages prior. The problem with this approach is that it blunts your emotions on every level between the cold discipline and inputs which is hidden behind a guise of professionalism and bearing friends hand over fist. You end up with all your emotions locked in a little box, which has a very negative effect on your other normal human relationships. It makes them extremely difficult. For about two years prior to this vision, I had been doing work to unlock my emotions for the sake of my children and my relationship with my wife.

And along that path, I started to wonder if we had gotten it wrong. Would we as Special Operation Ninjas have been more effective if we had more emotional investment? Sure, we did some good work, but if we had been able to tap into fury a little bit more, would we have been even better? So when you act later in the book, I wanted to make sure I made this point,

you talk about like, you realize like that is something it would be good to tap into sometimes, but you have to balance it out, obviously. Yes, yes, yes. It actually reminded me of a story of my buddy Stoner, who was one of my platoon commanders.

And he, like, we were doing immediate action trolls out in the desert. He's a, he's, he did one deployment as a seal at this point. Now he's with me. And he's a platoon commander. and like he's not being aggressive like in this training like you got to you know you're in the desert you want some people to do some shit you got to make them do some shit right you know

hey we need two guys are like you got to you got and I'm like bro you need to like be aggressive and he's like what do you mean I'm like you got to you got to like find a little bit of that rage to make shit happen and he's like really and I go yeah and he did you know he's like okay cool Yeah, like if you got two guys in a fire team that aren't like responding, you need to go make sure they freaking respond. You need to make it happen. So that kind of reminded me of that, you know, you got, he was told for many years like, hey, no emotions, no emotions, no emotions. And I was like, no, bro, you need to let those things out sometimes. Right, right, right.

Yeah. So there's where we're at. So that's your first experience with this. Yes. Then you do. Their second one is like, would this be considered like a bad trip? Man, I'll tell you straight. From the book, you described it, I landed in a new place, one of pure horror.

It was a catacomb of broken bones, skulls, and fire as far as the eye could see. It was real bad. It was real bad. I will tell you straight up from the, from like the hippies and like the therapist and the fucking people that are like into the shit for like a, like in a, even the guys are indeed. It's just like a therapeutic for a different way. Some of them that I know that I've like, remember like, motherfucker, you have always had bad trips. Everything that happens to you is a bad trip. I don't see it that way at all.

And actually most of like the like the fucking like the badass dudes that I take on these journeys, the same way. Anything that we say to like somebody out there is a bad, for us it doesn't really feel that way though. But it'd be the same thing. If we get in a fucking gunfighting the part of the way to lunch, like we're still going to buy tacos. Yeah. If we had like some fucking. Tell some good stories about that. Yeah.

Can I borrow mag? You know, I'm empty. If somebody that's never been any kind of shit is with us, like they're going to be freaked to fuck out. All right. They're not having a good day. So, but yes. The second one probably even for me could be described as a bad. trip.

And this is something that I now especially see with retrospect is happening to me. I'm having probably a very unique experience with psilocybin because it's all building towards something. I don't know what the fuck that's going to be until way, way, way, way later. But I wouldn't even say that it's necessarily testing me. It's conditioning me that these are the kind of things that can happen. Because eventually it's going to... What was it time length between the first one and the second one?

It was like a couple months or something like that? No, not even that long. Probably a month. Okay. Because this is one thing that's true from the first one too. I have so much fucking respect for this thing after I do it. Like I'm this is this is fucking amazing. Like I will never do this again though until like I feel like the omens asked me to because I respect it.

Like I'm appreciative as well as like I know this shit is fucking powerful as fucking. If it wants to take me to a real scary place, it's where we're going. So it's about a month later and it starts calling back to me. And one of the other things that is weird about me is I will end up doing like a lot. of these things in like a relatively short period. And that's not right usually for a lot of people. A lot of people will go like six months between a journey because that's what they need.

Or that's what it tells them to do. Some people will do this like once a year. All right. It'll take years to get through all the, but hey, you know, you do kind of what it wants you to do if you're really listening. For me, it's like a month. So I'm like, hey, cool, awesome.

Let's do this again. So you're slaying demons in this one. Yeah. And demon interrogation. It's like you're... Yeah. Okay. This one is fucking completely insane.

When you're going to go in the second time, you don't know what the... Like, I'm like, because if I do this again, will it be an exact repeat of the first time? Will it be the same world but it continues... Like, I have no fucking idea. So what happens is it calls me, I eat the stuff. And I go into like a totally different place. And, you know, I'm not... It's not like I'm in chapter two and like I'm still the fucking wolf guy or any bullshit like that.

And so I'm confused. Like, where the fuck am I exactly? Totally different book. Totally different book. Got it. And that's what it starts out as. Like, I get attacked while these fucking demony things.

I had actually gone in here to ask a very specific question. Now I'm getting fucking jumped. And I'm actually a little bit scared because, like, I don't know, this is my second time. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing in here. So I'm getting my fucking ass kicked. I fucking summon a shield and a fucking spear. But I'm taking, like, damage.

Like, these things are fucking hurting me. Like, I'm fucking hitting me through this shield in that world. It's hard enough that, like, feel it in the real world. Like it feels like fucking impacts. I'm like, it'll bounce me in and out of the fucking realm. It's like getting hit by like a dude that knows how it hits you. I'm like, fuck. So I'm doing this fucking shit.

I'm like basically running from these things because I'm getting a lot. I'm getting the fucking ass kicked off of me. And something happens and the fucking wolf guy just like fucking jumps in and takes over. And it was actually an ambush. All right. I needed to know this. The thing that I wanted to know could only

come from in the spirit realm term something that's on the other side. It's not going to show up if there's like a fucking badass with all of his friends, you know, waiting with fucking guns. So basically it let me use myself and like my human aura as bait. And then when the things showed up, they had the fucking answer. It forced to fad in the fucking QRF and showed me how to handle these things. And it was like, okay, you know, it took over and grabbed this thing. Like, all right, well, here's how you interrogate things in spirit room.

Fucking fuck this dude up, you know. and showed me what I needed to know. Cool. Kind of takeaway here. You say the sacrifice of old was effective, but the new way was a method of extracting more soul over a longer time. Screens, particularly phones cost you your life,

your life force, time. They are a form of sacrificing small bits of your life to the dark gods. You even bow your head in supplication. to them as you willfully carve away grains of your soul to whatever gave us this technology multiplied by billions that is stronger magic than cutting the hearts out of a few hundred per day and those soul grains feed the dust storm that will eventually destroy us this is the grease of ragnarok armageddon and calliuga combined with other mechanisms this is how they gain

power to destroy our civilizations your phone is is a demon. It is. It's a fucking wild shit, right? It's wild shit. But think about this. This is a theory. I do believe that the technology for the most part.

And fuck man, a lot of these dudes came up with like touch screens from doing psychedelics. They learned how to do that shit on the other side of Iowa. Look at like Steve Jobs or Tim Cook or a lot of these other inventors where they got their shit from, where they got the idea from that made them, you know, the bazillion fucking dollars. A lot of it came from. these drugs. All right. So you don't necessarily know where the fuck

you're going to land when you take these things. All right. And whoever is guiding you also has an influence on that. And there's, there's shit that goes on over there that none of us will ever

like really, truly fully understand. But this is what it tells me like directly. And you've got to think about it is weird. Is it not the way that we bow our heads to our fucking phones? Disturbing. It is very fucking disturbing. It's some weird shit.

Third experience. Seems like a little bit more of a minor experience. This was like a little Q&A going on. Yeah. You join the Wolf Spirit and you figure out that if you need the Fury, you can summon it. Yep. But you still get to drive. It's like, that's where you feel in that third one.

This is kind of where it went with this. It's like, okay, Leo, fucking, I had to jump in and take over last time because, you know, you're still a fucking new guy in the Spirit Realm and, yeah, we were going to get fucked out. So, which is totally cool. It was a conversation like if you're, you know, senior assaulter jumped in and fucking helped you but you were the new you know you're not a dick you help me thanks bro so it tells me it's like okay you know i had to do this one time but you know you're in charge all right you're not being like possessed and fucking taken over by this other shit uh yeah you can call on this though when

you need it and it's fucking weird uh i don't i don't remember if i put this in the book or not but this is is real shit like uh like when i'm in like danger now in like the real world like if you know a fucking hobo hops out of the fucking thing and fucking comes out with a fucking ice pick this comes online it's it's it's fucking weird as shit but it's all this I don't know if it actually works I don't know if I can actually pick up heavier shit

or hit harder or not but it feels like it feels like this fucking shit has come on board and uh it's it's pretty fucking weird but it's cool like I like I like it like I scared of shit when there's a fucking wolf demon driving the ship like okay

but you're good yeah you're totally good yeah uh fourth experience This is like a, again, there's like a Q&A going on. Do you seek knowledge or do you seek the truth? You respond, I seek the truth.

And then there's like, you get this term animal magic. Yes. What's the animal magic all about? The animal magic is, it's telling me where we gained this power of the bear or the wolf or whoever our fucking spirit guide is. And it goes into this fucking long story about some incredible like the time ago, 100,000 years or some. shit. We as men have to go to war against the fucking wolves because they're eating our fucking kids and we're trying to domesticate animals and they're fucking our shit up or they're eating all the game in the fucking forest. And we had to go fucking fight them because it's survival

to finish at this point. And we got to, so we're going to do what we're going to fucking wipe them out. So we get the upper hand because we have, you know, figured how to use spears and fucking clubs and shit. I, and we're fucking these guys up. And we get to a point where we can decisively win. We could exterminate them. But instead, we're like, you know what, man, like, you guys are fucking hard, though. You guys are pretty cool. Respect. Respect. Yeah. Like, you guys got some shit going on that, like, we could use. Like, you smell like a motherfucker. And, you know, fucking fur's awesome in the fucking snow. So we'll make a deal. If you'll, if you'll fucking make the deal with us. Like, you'd be, you know, like our fucking dudes, you'd be like our fucking dogs and, you know,

be on fucking security and bark when you're fucking crazy shit. We'll let's sleep by the fire. We'll get some fucking raw meat. And we won't go to fucking war again. And that's, so that was, that was just our deal. What happened to us immediately after that with our shaman's and shit when we went into the fucking spirit realm, the wolves gave us fucking something back. They gave us this like animal fury that we can fucking call on.

If we can figure out of fucking tie it to us. And that also makes us fucking way better warriors. And in a sense, it makes us fucking able to do some fucking crazy shit if we need to. There's some good highlight. I had to tag some highlights. I'm not, hey, obviously I'm not reading the whole book, get the book. But some of the good stuff that I just wanted to hit some highlights. Quote, we've learned to pass our knowledge across the bridge of blood.

And again, I was kind of said, this is something that acuted into. I was like, oh, this stuff that I think is very instinctual for us. It's like, where does that come from? Oh, yeah. That's what you refer to as the bridge of blood. What we learn now is easier for our following progeny to grasp. So things that you know how to do, that seems. easy to you it's like oh where's that come from oh yeah it comes from you know your ancestors yeah

kings and leaders are also fine are also necessary at times but the warrior cast should never be fully loyal to them um um uh protect the woman and child that's just like the underlying what you call the prime directive that is the prime directive that's the only thing he ever said to me as a as the fucking hard and fast rule that's the one that is not flexible that is that is the only fucking rule that there is. And really when you think about that and you think about it long enough, that does cover everything. That covers your entire fucking society. Protect the women and child.

You don't let there be a fucking only fan's fucking server and fucking bullshit. All right, because that's not protecting women and fucking children. All right. You don't let fucking criminals run a loose in your fucking society because that's not protecting your fucking women and children. You don't cheat on your fucking wife and, you know, go fuck a bunch of 20-year-olds we brought back from a fucking raid because that is not protecting the fucking family unit. When you get down to it, that is the only thing that you need to.

to know. Another one, the will matters most. Of course, I had to throw that in there. You get this one, and again, you make this link between modern times and these spiritual journeys you take. This one says, quote, I saw a gamer's chair for what it is. It is designed like a throne as mockery, a false throne for a false king. Video games are to adventure what porn is to sex, a cheap substitute designed to keep you from pursuing real experiences. The gamer's throne lets them, Feel like he's growing in power while he weakens his body and services to the synthetic ordeal An entity watches cackling from the other side of the screen Some dark shit in it that's that one was that was a piece of this vision that actually it it that really made me like fucking stop

I was like holy shit Because like all these all these other things like something taken moderation never bad like you know Fuck 2007 playing fucking halo of my fucking boys on Xx Whatever. We're relaxing. But when it becomes like your life, and it is, especially designed like fucking $1,000 gamer shares on this fucking silly shit. This has become an acceptable lifestyle.

So you don't have to get up. You don't have to get up. It's perfectly aligned your body to stay there all fucking day. It is. It's fucking insane. And this is, this is some of the shit that is weakening and crushing our fucking society. What percentage of men can't even like go in the military right now because their bodies

won't take like day one of base training? It's a lot. It's fucking crazy. It was like 60, 70%. Yeah, and that goes, again, when I was talking about earlier, like if that's where you end up, you're suppressing what you know.

Yeah, what your blood and your DNA want you to do. You do a good breakdown of Thor, Teer and Loki in there, which was always fun for me to read. You get, now your final experience, I think, you know, your, your final, like, big experience that you talk about in the book is like, it makes you sick, it makes you purge.

Yes. And you get to a point, where like, okay, you're not learning anything else from doing it again. So it's like you were, okay, I got what I needed. Yeah. So that's what the book is about. And that book turned into now,

is the word church, is that the right, yes term? It's the legal term that we're gonna use the United States. Okay. We call it a faith-based, it's a church. Church is fine. What were you say?

Faith-based, what? Faith-based organization, but church is fine. Legally, we are incorporated as a church. I mean, that's all, that's the word that we had to use in a legal U.S. system, too. So church is good. And you are a priest. Yes. At the church. The church is the, the path of the barbarian spirit. And you can go to barbarian spirit.com. So what's the, what's the goal of this, this faith-based organization that you got? So this was all the

shit that I had to do to write the book. And that was what happened with the last one where I got sick. It was like, okay, you're done learning now. Write this book and put this out. And that was like a year ago, maybe years and some change. So I didn't really know what the fuck I was supposed to do next, especially after I wrote the book. Like I put it out there. It's not like it changed the world or anything. And I'm kind of in this limbo place of like, what am I supposed to do?

What am I supposed to be doing? I'm supposed to be telling people about this experience. All right, but there's a limit to how much I can do with that. You know, like I fucking run around the street, like read my book. Like, it's not like I'm really fucking idiot with a book. So I walked down a bunch of, paths, you know, I don't know, fucking talk about it on some podcasts. And it doesn't get like a whole lot of fucking traction though.

So I'm still also in my time, when it calls me, I'm still going on these journeys. All right. I'm learning like more shit, but nothing happens that's like fucking crazy again. I learned how to use another sacrament that we use at the church, MDMA, which is, you know, ecstasy in the party scene, but it actually has an incredible use in this other world as well. there's whole like therapy systems are built around MDMA. It does a different thing

that psilocybin does. So I keep doing this stuff for a while and finally I have another vision that's like pretty fucking crazy on the psilocybin. It's like and this is actually where it names me fucking priest like the time we're just like okay

you are the fucking priest that's going to be your role and I'm like okay well fucking neat we don't have a congregation or fucking church so what the fucking priest up but it shows me the secondary vision and it's I go in And it's like, okay, you know, I'm fucking big bad ass dude in the fucking spirit world now because I've done this bunch.

I've flipped it a bunch of spirit wits, right? I'm fucking beeping. And fucking the all father's like, all right, you see a guy over here? Like, that's the demon of suicide. Like, and he's fucking your brother's up. Like, you know, you go get him? I'm like, okay. We cut this guy's fucking head off real quick.

So I go to fucking zoot his dude up. And it turns out, fucking I get close to him and this fucking minotar jumps out, giant fucking minotar. All right. And I can't fight if he kicks my fucking ass. Like, fuck. So go all through these fucking, it's a long, fucking story of processes and fucking trying to, I keep resurrecting and trying different tactics. And finally what I got to do is fucking spawn ten more of me. So now I'm like the fucking Spartan guy in the back and like, okay, you take the fucking net and go around and do this, fucking jaco, you got this fucking spear and shield, you fucking shoot some arrows out.

And we fuck this dude up. And wake up from this, I go outside. Now it's going to explain to me what the fuck has happened. It's like you have to found a church, all right? And you have to do it in this way because this is the way that you can do it legally. legally in the United States. That Minotaur is actually not a bad guy. He's the DEA.

He is supposed to fucking protect. He was spawned by goodness to protect people from like fucking fentanyl and heroin and alcohols all the fucking crazy bullshit. But the fucking bad elements also convinced him to prevent us from having MDMA and mushrooms and LSD and ayahuasca and Ibigaine. And these things that are very useful. So basically he's protecting the demon of suicide. while the demon or suicide runs around and fucks your brothers up.

It makes them fucking kill themselves. You have to find a way to fucking beat this guy. And the way that you're going to do that is this church. Because putting yourself, if I say that I'm a therapist and I run a therapy program, well, that is illegal in the United States with these substances. However, there is a very incredibly fucking narrow window of protected religious activity where I can do this. I can use these sacraments.

And I can perform these fucking rituals for our soft brothers. All right. I can bring them into my fucking place totally fucking legally. Everything's fucking cool. Walk them into the spirit realm because I can actually go into their fucking dreams, which is one of the weird things that I can fucking do. All right. And I can help them exercise this demon of suicide, this demon of depression,

and all this fucking bullshit and make them fucking better. And that's the mission. That is the fucking mission. What is it, what is logistically, what does that look? So I know on the website you talk a little bit of what you're trying to do. You got to raise money so that you can build. And what, you got some land in the Ozarks? Is that right?

Yeah. So original plan, we bought some land in the Ozarks. Original plans to put it there is there's a bunch of weird shit that goes along with, especially like using this substance like a ritual method. Being away from electricity is a huge one. All right. I've done this both like in the fucking woods and I've done this like in my fucking house. Even being away from electrical fields at all like kind of enhances the fucking process.

The ritual stuff is important because especially like fucking soft dudes like us. Where'd you do all your like really hard shit at? Like in the fucking ocean or in the fucking woods with it. No technology. Sure. You know, with a fucking rubber duck because when you're tired ass losers, it's no big deal. We have a connection to nature that like almost nobody else in the fucking world does.

The more that we can get our guys into a natural environment, no electricity, kind of feeling also, this goes like the blood bridge too. The further we can take this back as far as fuel goes, uh, in the way. to like how it would have been a fucking thousand years ago. Tents instead of buildings. Fire instead of you know fucking electrical lights.

All this shit kind of helps, right? Because a lot of dudes, it takes a lot for them to like suspend disbelief. And what I need them to do is suspend disbelief just long enough that we can get across this fucking threshold because then they're going to be good. They're going to be able to handle all this fucking shit. So we're in the building process right now.

And it's not cheap, but it's definitely not the most expensive. in the world either. Basically, we need the capacity to, you know, build like a fucking tint your thingy that we can use for, like, the temple. A lot of times these things are better done, or you're going to be able to go deeper if you go by yourself. So it's kind of a catch-22. All right. Your first experience, at least the first few hours of it, you want to have a guide there. All right. Also, you know, legitimately they should be. I was, I was fuck scared the first time, too. Just going in there by yourself is kind of, you know, is kind of.

fucking scary. But if I can, you'll walk you in there, show you that everything's fine. Like, oh, hey, look, man, you can fuck these dudes up. Here, fucking spawn a fucking weapon. Whatever you need to do. A lot of guys then, they want to be able to go to their own private space, where they can really fucking let go.

And if they got to do some fucking crazy shit, they're trying or shit out the door or some fucking crazy shit, that's just going to help them get to where they need to be faster. I also needs to be close enough, though, that as the guy is supervising, I can still walk by and, like, look in and be like, Make sure everything is cool. You're joking on your own vomit? No, you're good.

Okay. So that's where we're at right now. We're trying to build this. We're also trying to get some money in the bank for it. One thing I know about myself, like when I was a real fucking mess, when they did the brain magnet shit for me, a charity did that. All right. And I had to take a couple of steps before I was even willing to ask the charity if I could go. And if it had been like three grand that I had to come up with that in my own pocket, I wouldn't have done it.

Not because I didn't feel like, you know, not because it's even a high price, but because like when you're that banged up, like you're not going to spend money on making yourself feel better. That's what you feel like, I'm fucking robbing my kids to help me with some fucking bullshit brain stuff. So we want it for, you know, the fucking boys to be completely fucking free. I be completely like, hey, you know, you fucking call, fucking show us that you're one of the fucking boys and you're fucked up. Like, here's a plane ticket. Bring your ass out of here and we'll fucking square you away. That's what the goal is. and you want to be able to get what 20 veterans a month?

Yeah, ideal for me is 20. I can only really handle like 10 at a time by myself. There comes a point where you just can't. You know, even 10's like it's on the upside of it. And as far as like how many times a month, like I can go on a journey twice is really about it. That it's going to be like good without, you know, start to pay a price for it. So that's the plan. That's the plan.

Does that get us up to speed? What else? Pretty much, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we may actually frago the plan to Arkansas. We're looking really hard

at moving back to Idaho because that's where grandchildren live and most of the shit. So we may end up put it up there instead. But, you know, fuck you figure it out. We're only a couple months into this,

so we had to figure out that's even, you know, logistically possible. The other thing I really like about moving it up there is if we do this in Arkansas, or the Ozarks, there has to be air conditioning.

All right. Because I need people to be comfortable when they're doing this stuff. So six months out of the year, you can have to have some fucking air. If you move it somewhere into the north where the environment's a little bit more fucking forgiving, you can do this all summer long with nothing. And in the winters, you can have fires, which actually is more, it helps you with that fucking primitive feel. So it's good.

Right on. So people want to find you. It's barbarian spirit. Gethret.com. Yep. You're on Twitter X at way of theirs. Way off the res. Way off the res.

Dude, I've been saying that thing long for a long. I was way off theirs. I was like, what does he mean by like, oh. My first company was called off the res. It referenced the old counterterrorism term off the restration. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when they nuked that account, I came back as way off the rest. Way off the res.

There you go. And Instagram, you're at Clay Martin actual. Um, echo Charles. You got any questions? Oh, yeah. If we can rewind. Are you, sure.

Are you at liberty to say how you found your stepdaughter that time? Oh, yeah. You're looking for it. Like, how do you, oh, man.

This is the thing that people, like, really, like, misconceptualize about, like, you know, fucking soft-dust and greenberry and shit, like,

that we're badass because, like, we have guns and we'll fucking come through your front door. Yeah, like, you ever watch a Rambo Last Blood? Yeah. You ever watch that?

That's what I invite. You ever watch that, talking about. Actually, that's what I envisioned. I don't know if I saw the last blood, but I've seen like the first four. Yeah, that was, wait, I think so. Was that the one that came out? Five. The one that just came out? Was it the last? The last blood,

bro. He's that got a 50 cow in a house and he's like mowing people down. Is it in the house? No, he goes and finds his like, he goes down to Mexico to find his kidnapped daughter. Okay. Or not daughter, I think it's like the niece or something. This is actually what makes us dangerous. It's not that

you know, we can fucking come through your house with a fucking pistol or fucking machine gun. It's not that we can shoot you from really only there's a fucking rifle. It's that we will... I feel like that's, that is... That's pretty dangerous.

Very much. One of the many things. Like the more dangerous shit that we can do, though, is we can show up with very limited resources and make friends with people and talk to people and fucking get people to ally with us

because we understand them and we fucking epithetically figure out what makes them fucking tick. And next thing you know, we've got like a little fucking network or a little fucking army of all kinds of motherfuckers that are helping us.

All right. So even if it's... I've lived in Boise for zero minutes when I needed to do this. And next thing you know, I got a fucking network through the fucking trailer parks and all kinds of other fucking criminal fucks that I bought for like a 12 pack or a fucking, you know, box of smokes

or some bullshit. And yeah, by the end of, you know, fucking two weeks, like, I don't know, got a whole fucking ratline and intelligence network. So where was she? I had some fucking dickheads out. She was running between multiple different places, but eventually got the, you know, fucking hit a couple dry holes in the found the right target.

Right, right. It's like back in the day, right. There you go. And then when you found Or was she like, oh, okay, I'll go home with you? Or was she, like, resistant? Like, what was the whole? No, I mean, I didn't handle the action pieces of this myself either because this is America. When I showed up and, you know, fucking observer, we call cops. Oh, right, right.

Yeah. So the cops arrested fucking shitbag. They arrested these fucking shitbag parents that were actually harboring, like, you know, fucking 10, 15 runaways. Yeah, like all kinds of crazy shit going on. Maybe not some less good shit that somebody should have fucking died of it, whatever. Wouldn't have shit went down. But yeah.

So, yeah, it was pretty fucking, it was pretty fucking bananas, though. Yeah. It's funny. Actually, of all the people that ever asked me locally, like, her family shit, like, how this happened. The only guy that asked the right questions was her nephew that's a lawyer. He's like, fuck all the action Johnny's shit. He's like, I want to know how the fuck you figured this out when you don't know anybody. Mystique magic.

Right on. So we got her. She's back. No, she's great. Yep. Right on. What else, I go, Charles? That's it.

Yeah, that's it. Good to meet you, sir. Good to meet you too, brother. Clay, any final thoughts, brother? Man, this is the big thing, I think, for the veteran community. And especially, like, the warfighters, like the fucking Grons, like the fucking EOD, the guys that got, you know, blown up and got fucking hurt and shit like that. It doesn't fucking matter if you come to do it with me as long as you do with somebody

fucking competent. Don't be afraid of these substances, these fucking sacraments, is something that will help you. They are fucking amazing. You don't have to take my fucking word for it. You can look up the science and the white papers behind it where it's like 75, 80% of people. Sillacibet especially turns suicidal thought off like a light switch. It one-shots it. You can read a fantastic book by somebody else called A Dose of Hope,

which is all about how MDMA is used on a therapeutic and how it helped him. And he went through some fucking crazy shit. And this like basically totally scored his life away. So yeah. So look at it as an option. Don't go to like a house party or ask some, you know, weirdo chucklehead that does this for fun because they don't understand. It's a completely different thing. And for that matter, even if you use these substances as a young guy to like party or something like that, it is a completely different experience when you use it either ritually or as a therapeutic.

So don't just discount it because you've done it before when you were, you know, 16 and home alone. Jack. Well, man, thanks for coming out. Appreciate it. Thanks for sharing your lessons. Obviously, thanks for your service in the Marine Corps and in the Army. And thanks for taking the fight to the enemy aggressively when you got the chance. And thanks for what you're doing today to continue to help our brothers through what they're going through, man. Appreciate it.

Thank you, brother. Thanks again for having me. This has been absolutely fantastic. And I can't wait to see where this goes. Right on, bro. Thank you. And with that, Clay Martin has left the building

clearly talking about getting your mind right getting your body right getting your spirit right we can focus on the body we know that one's pretty straightforward yes you know what are we doing working out etc you might want to check out joccofuel com you might want to get some

some strawberry milk yeah I know you do the strawberry milk but you add what a banana banana what's to do with that here's well because recently I revisited the usually I have the RTDs

it's part of it's on rotation banana chocolate that's the normal but I have a I had some strawberry so decided to revisit that strawberry you add the banana it enhances the strawberry flavor

it does I put half a banana by the way but oh yeah roll that back in revisit that one so there you go could yourself some mulk so you can be strong physically

and healthier and all that chocolatefuel.com you can also hey also HiV. You ever know how high V? Hi V. Yeah. Another place you can get it.

Walmart. Wawa. You guys know the deal. Where is Hyvie? Like middle of the country. Okay. Yeah. Hell yeah.

So there you go. Check out joccofuel.com. Also origin USA.com. You know, T-shirts. They seem like no big deal, but they kind of are a big deal. Because I'll face.

We're wearing t-shirts a lot. We are. Check out the core T. Just standard. You can get graphics on them, but you can also just get a t-shirt. Yeah. And just wear it.

Yeah. fully made an American 100%. The thing that one of the very small handful of important elements of a t-shirt is the fit. Oh, that's a huge piece. Yeah, like even people were not like over-indexing on aesthetics

and fashion or whatever. I don't think they realize how important the fit is. You know, people, they'll have their favorite t-shirt. It'll be like 30 years old sometimes. Oh, I've got some of those. Yeah, but it's your favorite. Yeah, yeah, but I'm not 30 years old. Yeah, yeah, but I'm just saying for example you know in principle and it's because of the fit no matter how old

no matter how outdated the design is no matter how much it's kind of falling apart see how those things become secondary if it fits right that's one of the strong elements of the core t-shirt i've noticed the core t-shirt from origin USA now that it didn't fit good it was made in america yes sir no 100% communist free 100% slavery free origin USA Check it out. It's true. Also, we were representing on the path, you know. We got shirts on there too, by the way.

Also, very much focused on fit. In fact, I had many people tell me these are the best fitting shirts ever. Meja, guy we both know and love, you know, smart guy sometimes. Don't use the L word around me. Some of us know him. Some of us know and love him. Anyway, smart guy. He mentioned to me he had one of the old school back to the book shirts.

He said it was my favorite shirt because of the fit. It's not like back to the book is some groundbreaking message I need to wear on my back. Let's face it, it's kind of cool, though. It's cool. It's cool, but let's face it, that's not the front running element is what I'm saying. It's the fit. Anyway, he got it thrown away on accident, unfortunate incident, but nonetheless, they'll hold another story.

Nonetheless, Jocco's door so you can get disciplinary equals freedom. Good. Stand by to get some. Get after it. These are all shirts, the way we represent on the path. That's how you can do it. Indexing hardcore on the fit. Also, on Jocko store.

I'll get to the shirt, lock, one sec. On Jocco store, new shirt, good third a dish. That's not a new shirt. We've always had a good shirt. Yes, we have. And then we had another one, a new shirt. Now we got a new new, see what I'm saying? 3.0.

Yeah, 3.0. It's only been like four years since the last one. But anyway, that's a good one. Check it out. We just released it yesterday. So people, if you're on the email list, you would have known this. So I'm saying. So if you want to know about new shirts,

sign up for the email list, super simple. What if we hate spam? Amen, no factor. Because I don't spam at all. It's all relevant stuff, 100%. Okay, I mentioned the shirt locker. Shirt Locker is a new design every month. Subscription scenario.

New design is out as of three days ago, the first of every month. New design switches over. I'll give you a, actually, I think I already told you what it was. No, I give you a hint. There's runes involved. I like that. Speaking of Roons.

Dave Burke has a new book coming out. The book is called The Need to Lead. Pre-order it now get the first edition. And speaking of Rooms, Clay Martin has a few books. Barbarian spirit, wrath of the Wendigo. And he was saying it the other way. He was saying it. Windigo.

Windigo. Like, windigo. Now. I have an answer to that question. When to go? Freaking now. Rath of the Wendigo. Concrete jungle.

and then Prairie Fire. Of course, we have Eschelon Front. We have a leadership consultancy, and we solve problems through leadership. If you want to come to one of our events, make sure you go online and check it out so we can, you can actually go because these events sell out.

We have the muster coming up in December. So it's in Orlando, I believe. Yeah, yeah. So come and check it out. Escalonfront.com. Also, extreme ownership, our online training academy. You can learn to lead

through an online academy. And you can learn skills that you need. We all need. We don't always have them. We're not born with them. You need to learn them. Check out extreme ownership.com for that. And if you want to help service members active and retired,

you want to help their families, gold star families. Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an amazing charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's Mighty Warriors.org. Also check out Heroes and Horses.org. and Jimmy May's organization Beyond the Brotherhood.org.

Check those out. If you want to connect with us for Clay, go to BarbarianSpirit.com. And then TwitterX, way off the res, not way of theirs, which is what I thought it was.

Way off the res, way off the, and then Res, RES. And then on Instagram, he's Clay Martin Actual. For us, you can check out jocco.com.

You can check out on social media. I'm at Jaka Willink. Echoes at Echo Charles. Just be careful. Don't submit and bow your head to the demons that are in your phone. We do not recommend that. It'll wreck your life.

Steal your soul. Once again, thanks to Clay Martin for joining us. Thanks for sharing your lessons learned. And most important, thanks for what you did overseas to prosecute our nation's enemies. Thanks for what you're doing right now

to try and help our veterans. Thanks to all our uniform personnel around the world right now with a solemn salute to our brothers. and the special forces. It was an honor to serve with you all. Also, thanks to our police law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers,

Border Patrol, Secret Service, as well as all other first responders. Thank you for your service, keeping us safe on the home front. And everyone else out there, here's a little something to keep in mind from Clay's book, The Barbarian Spirit.

We mentioned it for a second. The quote is, anything that wants you to put down your weapon is not your friend. Now, that doesn't only apply to actual weapons. I'm here to tell you. It applies to everything that's out there that's trying to make you weaker, trying to make you dumber, trying to make you less capable,

trying to make you less healthy. These things are your enemy. That phone, that junk food, those temptations, those are not your friends. Those are your enemies. Do not surrender to them. Ever. And that's all I've got for tonight.

Until next time, Zekko and Jocko. Out.