Julian Dorey Podcast - #244 - Navy SEAL leaves ISIS Fight to Stop Burma Genocide | Ephraim Mattos

Episode Date: October 20, 2024

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Ephraim Mattos is the East Asia Operations Manager for White Mountain Research and is the Founder and CEO of the Fireside Journal. He grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and went on to serve in the armed forces as a US Navy SEAL. EPISODE LINKS - PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey - MERCH: https://juliandorey.myshopify.com/ - AMAZON STORE: https://amzn.to/3RPu952 GUEST LINKS - IG: https://www.instagram.com/ephraimmattos/?hl=en - WEBSITE: https://strongholdrescue.org/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaZ6QnPdHprxpt7njhHMyw2CiAuGfA1NtPcT33J8dLdZ3EvoqMadK6jb0Dw_aem_UGZH-q7yd-nMVmmpBrCdCA FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey LISTEN to Julian Dorey Podcast Spotify ▶ https://open.spotify.com/show/5skaSpDzq94Kh16so3c0uz Apple ▶ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trendifier-with-julian-dorey/id1531416289 JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - Ephraim's Childhood 13:11 - Becoming a Navy SEAL 22:21 - Navy SEAL Boot Camp 34:23 - Graduating BUDs, SEAL Team 1 & Culture 41:40 - True Reality of War, Stephen Ambrose D-Day Book 52:45 - Afghanistan Deployment, Rules of Engagement 01:04:35 - Insane near-death story 01:13:11 - Most Intense Combat Firefight Mission Ever 01:25:23 - Ephraim leaves Navy SEALs 01:30:47 - The Rise of 1S*S; Tommy G 01:38:21 - Future after Navy SEALS; Ephraim deploys to Mosul, Iraq 01:49:51 - Terror Tunnels; Eddie Gallagher 01:58:33 - Mosul Chaos & IS*S Atrocities 02:07:37 - Ephraim shot by IS*S 02:17:40 - Aftermath of Ephraim's battlefield injury 02:26:23 - Andrew Bustamante & John Kiriakou; "Democracy" 02:36:01 - The Burma War 02:45:23 - China’s Relationship w/ Burma & Dark Underworld in Asia 02:57:11 - Ephraim at War w/ Burma Insurgency 03:16:47 - What Causes all War CREDITS: - Host & Producer: Julian Dorey - Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.instagram.com/allaman.docyou/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 244 - Ephraim Mattos Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

48 hours later, my second time in combat. We go out and we're just doing a presence patrol. We come across a child's backpack on the side of the road. Imagine just like a pink, like Dora the Explorer type backpack. Had a bomb in it. Our dog, the dog caught it, blew it in place. So this big explosion goes off. We blow the charge.

At this point, now the Taliban know exactly where we are. And for whatever reason, this day, they decided to come out and fight. We intercepted radio traffic that they were going to come up and they were going to ambush us because they knew the route that we were walking on. And so platoon leader and platoon chief, they were like, nah, we're going to get there before them and we're going to ambush them. We get in position before the Taliban show up. We get there, we get to this tree line, we line up, we're on the tree line, we're sitting there, we're waiting. And then all of a sudden you start seeing movement in this

tree line that's maybe 25 yards away from us, the next tree line over. And everyone's real quiet and we're sitting there and we're waiting. So my squad leader takes a 40 millimeter grenade launcher, shoots the tree. Then I start hearing screaming from my left. And I was like, oh, that's the blood curdling scream of somebody who's been. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please take a second to hit that button and leave a five-star review. It is a huge, huge help to the show. And you can also follow me on Instagram and on X by using the links in my description. Thank you. You know, Ephraim, I've had a lot of people in here who have done some pretty amazing things, especially with the military, but this is definitely the first time someone pulled up a

literal call of duty looking documentary footage of them getting shot by isis onto my screen and had me watch it before i started holy shit man yeah yeah life's uh life's been interesting that's what i'd like to say it's been uh life's been crazy yeah uh lots of uh lots of weird twisted turns and and all that stuff and um i like uh I like, uh, I like to say like I've done more than some less than others in, in that, in that realm. Um, I stole that from Annie Stumpf. Um, yeah, no, it's great. And it's so true. Um, because, uh, sometimes when you're, when you're out there and you're doing, you're doing things, uh, the camera's rolling and, uh,

you know, like, like the day that I got shot, like, I had no idea the camera was rolling. I, I was like, there's a 50, 50 chance I'm going to die today. Uh, and I didn't. And, um, you know, but, but other guys that are out there doing things that are a thousand times more heroic day in, day out. And, you know, they never, you know, no one ever sees what they've, what they've gone through and what they've done. So yeah, I'm just sort of, uh, fortunate, uh, yeah, that I've been able to, you know, I guess sort of talk about those stories and sort of represent those times. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you being humble, but you're, I, let's not bury

the lead here. You're only 32 years old. You've lived a life so far that feels like it's 65 years at least. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, you're from, from the background I know of your story, it's like you grew up in a kind of culty type religion. You somehow ended up taking discipline of your own life and saying, I want to be a Navy SEAL. You go through all that. You serve in war zones with the Navy SEALs. We're going to get into all this today, people. But then you have some near-death experiences and you end up leaving the Navy SEALs to basically go do Navy SEAL type work on your own as a humanitarian in charge of his organization in the middle of the most dangerous places, which is exactly what we just alluded to in that video that was in Mosul. So we will get to all that today, but maybe we should start at the beginning here. And for people who haven't heard your story, where did you grow up and what kind of household

did you grow up in? Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I grew up in an independent fundamental Baptist home. So I definitely would not call it, definitely wouldn't call it culty. It was definitely just sort of strict, a lot more strict on the religious side of things. But I had a wonderful childhood. I love the people I grew up with. I have nothing but respect for the people I grew up with and my teachers, my pastor, and all that stuff during those times. I have nothing bad to say. realized that the over the like it was it was uh there was there was this overly heavily overly heavy influence of um of uh how do i say like people people kind of like adding whatever they

wanted to to the bible in a way and it was like well this isn't in the bible so like now we're getting a little bit uh now we're getting a little bit um uh carried away here so my attitude when i was about the age of like 16 was i was like, hey, I kind of respectfully disagree. I don't want to break away from how I've been raised. I don't want to break away from the sort of core faith and all that stuff. But it was just that sort of lifestyle just wasn't going to be for me. How – like what kinds of things did – from like a strict religious perspective, did they make you adhere to growing up that say other kids didn't have to? So like it wasn't anything crazy.

It was just different. So like, for example, they didn't want us to go to like movie theaters. But you could watch the same movie at home. You just couldn't watch it at a movie theater. It won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients. Vodka. S soda, natural flavors. So, what should we talk about? No sugar added?

Neutral. Refreshingly simple. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. The reason movie theaters were considered kind of bad was because it was like, well, people see you out there in the world going to movies. Again, I didn't really understand the reason like movie theaters were considered kind of bad was because um it was like well you know

people see you out there in the world going to movies again i didn't really understand the logic behind it and i was like that that seems a little bit silly um you know for example like girls weren't allowed to wear pants um and things like that you had to wear skirts and and things like that um so you couldn't listen to music that had drum beats in it except for like classical music so and again, like these aren't horrible things. It was just, I was just kind of like, all right, yeah. Like I'm not going to do that when I, when I get, when I get older. Yeah. Yeah. So I just, again, my attitude was like, I respectfully disagree. It's kind of a mature thing to do. Like what age were you again?

When you said that? I was, I was 16. Yeah. Uh, 15, 16. And then during that time, that's kind of when I decided I was going to be a, uh, or I wanted to be a seal and, uh, kind of go down that route, go down that route in life. Had your parents grown up in this as well, or they adopted it when they were older and joined it? Um, um, my mom grew up that way a little bit, I think. Um, I think my dad grew up in church as well. Um, and so we wanted to be a part of church, like even, you know, now I'm married and hopefully have a family soon. And, um, you know, I want wanted to be a part of church. Like even now I'm married and hopefully have a family soon. And I want us to be involved in church and whatnot as well. But yeah, we just kind of ended up in a position that the church was like a little bit more strict than kind of

what I would prefer to do for my life. But yeah. Yeah. So what happened when you told your parents, forget the Navy SEAL thing for a second, we'll get there. But like when you just tell them like, okay, I don't want to be a part of this. Were they pushing back on that or? They were, no, they were, they weren't very authoritarian about it. They were just, they were more concerned. They, cause so the thought process was, okay, if he's not going to go to church, that means he's going to go off and do drugs and do all kinds of crazy stuff. And I was like, no, no, no, that's not my attitude. Like that's not it. So I sat down, I sat them down and kind of explained to them. So I also was going to the school that

was attached to the church. So it was like a very small school, 75 kids in the whole school. And that's kindergarten through 12th grade, right? There's five people in my grade growing up for the most part, right? And so I just said, like, I don't want to go back to this. I want to go be a SEAL. I want to kind of pursue a different course in life. And I tried to be as mature and clear about my intentions. And so they were worried about me at first, of course, because their son is sort of shifting away from everything he's known. But they saw over time, like I went and I got a job working third shift at McDonald's. So I was working 11 o'clock at night to like 6 a.m. Oh, the graveyard shift.

Yeah, graveyard shift. And then my 11th grade year of school, they wouldn't let me go to a public school because they were worried that it would have like a really bad influence on me, which maybe they were right. And so I had to homeschool myself. You had to homeschool yourself? During my 11th grade, yeah. So they got this curriculum for me, and I had to – so I would go to the library, and I'd be sitting there reading a book about like here's how to do algebra. Here's how to do like some science stuff. But I'm actually really grateful for that time because it really taught me how to teach myself. It taught me how to learn.

It was a struggle. So I'd get off work at like 6 a.m. for McDonald's, 6 AM for McDonald's. And then I would go to the other thing I wanted. I didn't, I wasn't a very good swimmer at the time. So I would go to the YMCA to try to teach myself how to swim because I wanted to become a lifeguard instead of working at McDonald's. And so I'd go to the, I'd go to the YMCA, try to teach myself how to swim, slowly started getting better at that. And then I'd go to the library and try to work on, work on the school stuff. Um, eventually I was able to try out for a lifeguard, um, course

at the YMCA passed and was able to become a lifeguard, quit the job at McDonald's. And then my senior year of high school, uh, they finally let me go to a public school cause they saw that I wasn't, they saw that I wasn't going off the deep end. They're like, okay, he's not going to go, you know, start doing drugs and doing a bunch of crazy stuff. He's, he has a goal. He's working toward it. It's a positive thing. And, um, so then at that point they were, at that point they were no longer sort of afraid of, uh, of what was going to happen. That's fucking amazing though, that you did that and homeschooled. Like I laughed out loud when you said homeschool yourself. Cause I'm picturing me when I was 16 or 17 and someone

had said, you know what, Julian, you go ahead and take yourself to school. I've been like, don't mind if I do, I'll be on the internet all day doing nothing. And I think a lot of people out there listening would say the same thing, but not only did you have the discipline to like actually try to teach yourself algebra and stuff like that, which that's a whole nother thing, teaching yourself, but like you also are taking on a graveyard shift at McDonald's. Like you're building – I've often said like the Navy SEALs and Special Forces guys, there's a little chip just built different inside of them. And it's clear like you're building that discipline chip completely just on your own evolution at that point. It's pretty amazing.

Well, I would also say too one of the things my basketball coach told me. So at the church, we had a basketball league, and he would always tell me, discretion is the better part of valor. Because I would always be very aggressive during basketball games, but I wasn't that good. He's like, I know you'll never give up on me. He's like, but I need you to stop being so stupid. Stop making ridiculous plays. Discretion is the better part of valor. So when I look back at that time, should I have taken the graveyard shift for an extra 50 cents an hour?

You know, no, probably not. I probably should have just done a normal schedule. But I – yeah. But I call it – I call that my year of darkness because – Year of darkness. Year of darkness because, yeah, I was, you know, working at McDonald's all night. And then I would wake up, you know, have a few hours of light. And then I would try to sleep during the day.

And then I would wake up after it was dark and I'd go back to work. And so, obviously then my, you know, my sleep rhythm is way out of whack and all that kind of stuff. And so it was like very depressing, very like lonely, very frustrating as I'm like trying to teach myself how to swim and all that. Because I lost my entire community because I intentionally sort of stepped out from my entire community. Had you had – I'm sorry to cut you off. Yeah. But like had you – you said you went to a really small school all these years.

So there's not many kids. Like did you have a lot of friends or was it pretty much just like whoever was in the community there? It was kind of whoever was in the community. But I mean don't get me wrong. I love the people I grew up with. I had great relationships with them and it was all good. But yeah, just kind of like where we were all sort of geographically lived. I wasn't, you know, going and hanging out with people, uh, all that often. And I was kind of off doing my own,

my own thing. And some of the other, you know, some of the other like moms in the church, they were a little concerned. Everybody's kind of like looking at me a little sideways, uh, whenever I was around. Um, cause they were just concerned that I was going to go and be a bad influence. Yeah, exactly. But I was like, no. And then I honestly never got mad at anybody for that. I was just like, they'll see. And I didn't have a chip on my shoulder. I wasn't like, they'll see.

It was just like, all right, just give it a year. They'll see I'm not doing anything crazy. I'm making positive moves. And then, yeah, it turned out to be correct in that over time. You have that Midwestern rationality gene that I think skips over us on the coast here. Okay. Where we're just zero or 100 on stuff, like attitude about everything. But you're so – it's amazing. Like at that age, you're so straightforward and calm about this and focused.

And yet in hindsight, you still look at the fact that that was a really tough year that you put yourself through. Probably necessary to prepare you for what was going to end up happening next in your life. But you had said your parents did end up letting you go to public school senior year. So that's like you're 17 years old. You've never been in a school like that. What was that like from a culture shock perspective? Honestly, it wasn't all that crazy. It honestly wasn't that bad. I went to a high school called – it wasn't all that crazy um it honestly wasn't that

bad i went to a high school called it was ronald reagan high school it was like a relatively new school in milwaukee it was an ib school so like international baccalaureate it's sort of like ap it's like a little bit college prep uh sort of high school so instead of before instead of a focus on like sports and stuff it was like really academically focused um and i didn't i didn't honestly i didn't feel all that much of a culture shock. It was fine. Most of the people that are seen pretty normal and everyone was, everything was cool. Like there wasn't like a bunch of drugs and like crazy stuff going on. Like, no, it, it, it wasn't bad at all. I was like, I joined the student council, you know, cause I'm a nerd and, uh, yeah. And I enjoyed

that and, and, and, uh, working with all those people, but yeah, that, that time growing up really did in those, in those hardships formed. So what, you know, formed who I was, um, and that helped me to eventually become a SEAL and stuff. And actually going back a little farther, um, one of the, one of the most important, uh, lessons that I got was actually when I was, uh, uh, 14 years old. And, uh And so there was a Christian football camp and it was, it was only one week long, but this football camp on day one, you try out, you do a bunch of tryouts for a team, and then you do a practice. You get drafted onto a team and you do a practice. Day two, you have a practice and then you have a game. And there's not enough guys to have like an offensive squad and a defensive squad. So you're playing both ways, full length games, full contact. And then the next day you play a full game both ways. And then the next day, so all the way through the end of the week, you're playing both ways, uh, full contact, uh, for an entire week. Right. So it's basically

the equivalent of eight games plus, plus like four four or five practices and i had never experienced anything that was so physically demanding and like crushing uh in my life and the the thing was so i was just like was bigger than the other kids that were that were my age so i was playing with jv well then the varsity guys they needed additional players for the varsity level at this camp uh for for sort of the the team that i represented the green team and so the varsity level at this camp for, for sort of the, the team that I represented, the green team. And so the varsity team came over and we're like, Hey, we want that guy. We want Matos. We want him to also play for the varsity. So 14 years old, I am playing both ways for a JV. And I was like the primary, I was the primary running back and the linebacker, middle linebacker. Those are car crash jobs.

Car crash jobs. And then after those games, I would then go finish practice with the varsity squad, and then would play both ways for varsity. As more of like a – they were just kind of having me in random positions on the line. Jesus. So it was during that time, though, in one of the JV practices. I don't remember if it was a practice or it was a game, but in one of the and one of the jv uh practices uh i don't remember it was a practice or as a game but basically like i tweaked a rib and like i probably fractured it

just a little bit yeah um and i'd never felt pain like that before i'm 14. and i have to get i have to continue playing jv and varsity and so i remember there was this moment where i had to make a decision i considered i was like i'm gonna go tell the varsity coach that i can't play with them and i remember i almost started crying because i was like i don't want to quit i don't want to be a you know i don't want to be a big baby here and then i just made the decision i was like you know what no i'm gonna suck it up and i'm gonna play i'm gonna do my best and i'm just gonna i'm gonna fight through this as much as i can with a cracked rib with a cracked rib and uh I didn't tell anybody about it.

I just was like, this is what I'm going to do. But that was the moment, playing football, that I think that – I would say that was the first step on my journey to manhood. And then later on in life, a couple years later, that sort of is what gave me sort of the moral courage and physical courage to step away from, uh, you know, the path my life was on and try to chart my own course. So football had a big, um, had a big impact on me at a young age. For sure. For sure. A lot of parallels there. When did you first learn about the Navy SEALs in general? Cause you said you told your parents when you were 16, I want to be an Navy SEAL. So you knew at that point, but like, have you, is this something as a kid you read about them or? I guess I sort of knew about them through pop culture to an extent.

At the time I was looking at, I wanted to be in the military. I was obsessed with the Rangers from Black Hawk Down. So I loved Black Hawk Down, watched that movie religiously. I loved the Band of Brothers series. You know, I probably watched that 25 times as a kid the whole thing loved it, just unbelievably good, read the book it was one of the first books that I read all the way through Stephen Ambrose, great book

unbelievably good, incredible historian so I knew that they existed but as I was looking at what I wanted to do in the military I remember there was one day I was sitting there on the internet i was kind of like comparing okay do i want to go green beret do i want to go ranger do i want to go seal which which one am i going to try out for and i just remember thinking for me i was i remember it was a kind of a silly

thought but i was like if i was a terrorist and somebody told me that the rangers were after me the green berets were after me or the seals were after me who would i be more afraid of and literally just you know just like 15 year old boy logic i was like i'd be more afraid of the seals you know so i was like i'm gonna go be a seal uh the other thing too is that was part of it and then the other aspect was i had looked at the seals but i'd always in the back of my head said no i can't do that like i felt like i could do the the rucking and all the other stuff required for special forces and ranger and all that stuff. I felt, obviously it's extremely challenging. No guarantees. I'm not saying that that's weak at all, but just the water stuff is, was very scary on the seal, on the seal. And then I was like,

man, I don't know. But then I remember thinking, I remember thinking very clearly if I backed down from the goal of, or from the, from the, from the challenge of being a seal because of the water thing, like I already have lost mentally and I'm not going to make it through rangers or sf or anything like that if i'm backing down intentionally because i'm too afraid of the water um to try out for the seals and so i was like i need to try out for the skills i need to do this and it was just something a switch flipped in my head and i knew i was like i have to try i don't think i'm going to make it um but but they're probably going to kick me out but i was like I have to try. I don't think I'm going to make it. Um, but, but they're probably going to kick me out. But I was like, I have to try this or I'm not going to

be able to live with myself. And that was sort of my, that was sort of my mindset. It's amazing. And you're going, you're going through putting yourself through lifeguard school to try to learn how to swim and all that and get good at it. I mean, I would imagine you have to get pretty good doing that. No. Yeah, it was actually, it was actually good. Um, the, the lifeguard, uh, training was actually really good. Lots of good water confidence. And I actually found that I was actually sort of a natural swimmer. And once I learned the strokes, once I learned how to do it, I actually found that I was very good at it and was very, very proficient with it. And so when it came time to go into seal training, obviously it's not a YMCA

lifeguard school when you go into seal training. But,. But I was like, okay, I can do this. I can sort of push myself. I can swim fast enough to pass the test and stuff to get into SEAL training. So how did your role into SEALs work? Did you try to become a Marine first or did you want to go right to that at like 18? Yeah, I wanted to go right into the SEAL training. I had no interest in doing any other job. I didn't want to wait two years. I didn't want to do anything. I was like, I just want to go directly being enlisted SEAL and just go straight for it. So actually I was 17.

My, both of my parents had to sign for me, um, to, uh, to enlist. So I enlisted when I was 17, graduated high school, like three months later. And then, uh, by that time I had like a ship date, uh, uh, for the date that I was going to leave to go to a bootcamp. And then by that time I had like a ship date for the date that I was going to leave to go to a bootcamp. And then a few months later after graduating high school, so I was 18 at that point. And then yeah, I went to, went to bootcamp when I was 18 and then, yeah. And then the, and then it began. What's the first day of bootcamp like for an 18 year old? You know what, honestly, it was super anticlimactic. So I have a kind of, you know, so you imagine, so you know, the stories where you stories where you see the bus pulls up and then like you see the Marine drill instructors pulling everyone off the bus and they're, you know, doing pushups and they're shaving your head and all that stuff.

That's not what happened to me. So I, because of a funny turn of events. So I am from Milwaukee. Navy boot camp is in Chicago. And so it's like an hour and a half drive and so the morning of boot camp i got uh picked up with one other guy um like a contract driver drove us down to boot camp dropped us dropped us off at the front door of boot camp and then just drove off and so me this other guy we're like do we just go in there like there's nobody there to greet us nobody has a clue that we're there so we literally

walk in to this big building and i'm just kind of standing there clueless. Nobody's there to greet us. Nobody has a clue that we're going to be there. And then I just randomly see some guy come walking down a hallway and he's like, I think it was like eating something or drinking something. He clearly didn't know that we were going to be there. And he was a drill instructor and, uh, or an RDC as I called in the Navy, but we'll just use drill instructor. And, uh, so he, so he like looks at us he had a sandwich he's like are you guys here for boot camp uh and i was like i was like uh yes and then he was like then he like took a bite of his sandwich like put it down or something and he's like well then standard attention and then he kind of started like screaming at us uh just like me and one other guy and i was like yes this is it you You know, it's starting. And then they had us like – they had us get rid of our clothes and get like a T-shirt and like sweatpants.

And then I went and sat in a classroom, just me and this one other guy. And we sat there in a classroom for like eight hours until the buses of all the other people who were showing up actually showed up. So in the background, I hear them getting yelled at. I hear all that kind of stuff. And I'm just sitting in the classroom by myself. And I was like, man, I'm missing it. Like, I want to, I want to do that. That's what I've seen in the videos. Like, that's what I want to do. Like, no, it was just sat there in the classroom. So it was super anticlimactic. And then, yeah, then, you know, bootcamp started. So bootcamp is before just for people out there following along,

making sure they have this right. That's before buds and all that. This is just the initial take. And so how long is boot camp again? I believe it's eight weeks. Okay. Yeah. So you're doing like a lot of the more – I mean it's still boot camp, but it's more basic fitness stuff, military standard fitness stuff. Do you go right into BUDS immediately after that or is there something in between? There's a couple of months in between.

So yeah, during those first eight weeks of basic training, you have to become a sailor, right? You have to become a sailor in the United States Navy. You need to know how to wear your uniform. You need to pass different tests and things like that to become an actual sailor in the United States Navy. And then after the end of that, the guys who were specifically going to SEAL training, we were then put into a two-month program called Pre-Buds. And basically, you're working, you're basically doing two-a-day workouts for two months just to prepare your body for buds. And the reason they did that was because so many guys would show up to buds

and they would get injured. They'd pull a muscle, they'd whatever. So you have this perfectly good candidate to be a SEAL, but they're, you know, for whatever reason, like there's all these injuries and it costs the Navy tons and tons of money to rehabilitate these guys. And then you got to like you medically retire them. You got to pay them for the rest of their life because they, you know, whatever, because they weren't physically prepared. So they wanted to make sure that everyone was physically prepared.

And that way it's purely just a mental game at that point when you get to buds. And then they were also able to sort of ramp up the pressure in buds because they know everyone can physically handle it, if that makes sense. So you do two months of that. Again, it's two-a-day workouts. It wasn't too bad. You just sort of get into shape, lots of running, lots of swimming, and then three lifting sessions a week. And then you ship off to buds. So you fly out to San Diego, and that's when it starts.

What was buds like for you oh man um well i think it's same for everyone it's just a it's just a you know just a kick in the crotch uh there's no there's no way to get through it except for to get through it there's no secret to it it's literally just uh you just show up do what you're told uh show up on time uh with the gear you're supposed to have and don't quit and i know that sounds like overly simplistic but that's the way the program is designed so one of the things that's very unique about uh seal training and buds in particular that people don't fully understand um it's very different than like ranger selection or like special forces green beret selection so with rangers and green berets green berets in particular um you'll have i'm just gonna just pull some random numbers here but

you'll have like out of 100 guys who show up for green beret selection you'll have maybe like 40 or 50 of them will actually sort of finish the selection course like the initial selection course but of those of those guys who've passed the course only you know 10 or 15 will actually get selected to continue on into special forces training. Right. And so if you pass, you might get, you might be able to start over again. Um, so that's, that's very different than SEAL training, SEAL training, a hundred guys show up 15, like 10 guys are standing at the end and you're in, if you're, as long as you're standing there in the end, like you're in, you're in, you're in. So it's a very, very different, um, thing, the selection. They're

not going to kick you out. Uh, really you kick You kick yourself out, which is kind of hard to believe. But then when you get there and you realize just how painful and brutal it is, you realize like, oh, this is kind of savage and it's kind of medieval. And yeah, as long as you're standing at the end, you're sort of in, unless you're like a total piece of crap. I mean it sounds wild, of course, to civilians like me every time. It never gets old hearing about this because guys came in in different classes and they all have their own perspectives on it. But like you guys are training to be the top tier, whether it's something like BUDS with Navy SEALs or some of the training that the special forces have to go through on on that side on the army side it's like you're training to be the absolute top tier warriors that the greatest military in the world has and so in a lot of ways when guys make it through something that hard as brutal as it is it's like to me it's like the ultimate as a civilian like badge of honor to look at someone like yo that dude's built different you know what i mean like like the fortitude you have to have for that but i've had several navy seals in here sean ryan mike ritland remi adeleke taylor cavanaugh i'm trying to think that i have do i have any others that have been in here let's see that's not that sounds like the crew right there if i miss someone

in my bed it's a great lineup. Yeah. Amazing lineup of guys, but I've asked most of them. I think I forgot to ask Sean Ryan this, but I've asked most of them if there was any one thing that they felt like from a personality standpoint, went into someone who makes it in buds and then makes it to be a Navy SEAL

versus someone who doesn't. My, my number one answer to that is a sense of humor. And I know that sounds crazy. So you have guys that are sort of, and I mean like truly, like a truly deep sense of humor, like on a deep psychological level, right? So you have guys that you know that are funny

and you're like, oh, that guy's funny. I'm not saying like the funny guy's gonna make it through. I'm not saying the jokester's gonna make it through. I'm saying the guy that when things are awful, like absolutely awful, like, you know, you've crapped your pants, you've peed yourself, you're chafing, you're miserable. It's 3 o'clock in the morning on like Wednesday morning of hell week. You're in excessive pain. You're freezing.

You're laying in the water. And then that guy can laugh about it and just be like, dude, this sucks. And then the guy next to you is like, yeah, dude. And then you can laugh about it. Like a truly sort of like lighthearted view of hardship. I would say that's probably the best way to sort of predict who's gonna make it through. But the thing is you can't actually see that person's true sort of soul until you're in that moment. So ahead of time, I can't predict like, oh, the funny guy's going to make it through. That's not what I mean. It's like in that dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, dark moment when other guys are like, you know,

and their, their minds kind of snap and they kind of, they kind of internalize and they get, start feeling sorry for themselves. And they start thinking like, well, maybe I want to do something different with my life. You know, it's like amazing how many careers, how many guys, uh, you know, realize what they actually wanted to be when they grew up on like Tuesday night of hell week. Right. You're like, oh, I suddenly actually, I actually want to be a doctor, you know? Um, and, but, and that's fine. That's okay. There's nothing wrong. Like those guys have made it that far. Those are really tough, good dudes. Um, but yeah, that, that, that the training just lays all that bare. I feel like you just described our mutual friend, Mike Ritland.

Okay, yeah, yeah. He's that dude. He can make a funny little joke calmly with a dead-end. Yeah, a dry sense of humor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. Yeah, exactly. What a great answer.

That is not an answer I would ever expect to hear. I think Taylor was the last guy I asked that, and he gave me a good answer too. But it was more like what you would think. He's like grit you know guys that just don't care they'll just get their dick in the dirt and keep fucking rolling like nothing bothers them yeah and i mean yeah that that kind of does it for me and in a way that sense of humor kind of is that grit it'd be built the ability to laugh at yourself the ability to sort of laugh at hardship the ability to laugh at whatever's going on it's like is anybody dead no all right Then we can laugh. It's like, okay. Yeah.

So grit, absolutely. But I think part of that grit is, comes from humor and that's a way to, it's sort of a coping mechanism in a way. But yeah, that's kind of, that's kind of my, my thought process on it. What's the most intense swimming base or diving base portion of buds? And like what, if, if you're allowed to talk about that like like what do you have to do in that um well i would say i would say there are very few things that you can be certain of in life but you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning you can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink and of course you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month.

With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. At one point, there's this sort of pass or fail thing you have to do. It's a five-mile open ocean swim. The first two miles of it are timed. Then the last three miles are just, um, to, to completion. Yeah. Um, so that's, I mean, that's definitely just a once, uh, it's sort of a one-time thing that you have to do. Um, but I would say it's different for each

guy. I mean, obviously there's the, uh, drown proofing where you tie your hands and your feet and you know, you're, you're not, they're not wrapping your hands and your feet with something like Velcro. So if you panic, it'll, you know and your feet with something like velcro so if you panic it'll you know come undone like no if you panic the the knot's only going to get tighter so you you know you're actually you're physically tied and thrown into the deep end of the pool um so that gets that gets some guys um i think the um another thing that mentally makes i saw multiple guys quit before doing the 50-meter underwater swim. They didn't even want to attempt it. Guys who had trained for months or even years to get to SEAL training, you have to swim 50 meters underwater on a single breath hold.

And you have to jump in, do a front flip, and then start swimming. You can't kick off the ball. When you get to the far end of the pool, at 25 meters, you're allowed to kick on your way back. You're allowed to kick off that far wall um but there were guys that were like yeah i'm not going to make it through that tomorrow so i'm just going to quit today uh and so they were so afraid of it because every single class that i know of guys are going unconscious during that 50 meter swim guys are getting shallow water blackout and it's terrifying right because you're basically your your brain and your body you feel like you you're committing suicide in a way. Um, when you're, when you're that deprived of

oxygen and air and stuff like that. So the key is just to stay calm. Uh, you have the ability, you have the physical ability to do it. Um, if you, if you've trained for it, um, it's actually not all that difficult. Uh, guys psych themselves out before they jump in the water. So your heart rate's high and you, your stress levels are high and therefore you're just depleting your oxygen and guys are passing out. For something that's relatively innocuous, you should be able to do it if you've trained at that point to be a SEAL. You hear about these things that they teach the Navy SEALs and within special forces specifically where it could be something like – you'll see some viral tweets talking about how a Navy SEAL is trained to fall asleep in two minutes or you'll see something. Oh, those are – yeah. Yeah.

So some of those seem fake to me. But the ones about being able to reduce panic, when I've read those, those make a lot of sense to me. Is there a – like does that type of training come later versus like in buds they're just trying to throw you through the ringer to see what you can take and hopefully make it through or during buds are you getting any training on like hey you know you're going to be doing x y and z there could be for example a sense of panic setting in here's how you deal with that here's what we expect you to be able to do and go on or once once again, does that come later? When I was going through SEAL training through buds, there was zero and I mean, zero support from the staff. Um, they were there to see who, who has it already. Um, they were not sitting there going like, Hey guys, so this,

you know, today's going to be a mentally challenging day. I want you to think through this. I want you to think about your goals. Like, why are you here? You know, before you like, no, it's none of that. It was, it was like, it was, they were aggressively trying to be as make your life as miserable as possible. Um, later on in training, they would do very, very occasionally they would have like a, uh, a command, like, like, like a, like a former, like master chief or something. Who's, who's like a really experienced guy. Usually like dev group, like seal team, six guys, like old school guys. And they would come in and they would occasionally do like a talk to the group. Once you've already made it through how week, uh, they might, they might talk to you a little bit, um, just sort of about mindset and some

stuff like that. But, um, for the most part, I mean, no, uh, so I, I've never, I, so for me, I have never seen one of those, those tweets or those videos were like, here's the three things the seals do to whatever I've, I, anytime one of comes across you know my feed i look at it and every single time i want to comment yeah that doesn't happen you know maybe it does now but i was like no that doesn't like nobody you know like oh you need to do this like box breathing technique you need to do this and this is where all the seals are trained and uh i i that's i never i never saw it some of them seem like the four minuteminute abs or whatever when you see that. But then there's others, like some of the psychological stuff.

I'd love – like next time I get one in my feed, I'll send it to you. You tell me if it's bullshit or not. But like some of them make sense in the sense that you're like, well, yeah, they get thrown into a situation like this. They better know how to handle that. Um, well, I would say, I would say a lot of the advice that's in those tweets or in those, in those, uh, posts and things, a lot of the advice is probably really solid. I just, I'm like, yeah, we never, I was never actually taught that as a seal. Um, now don't get me wrong. There might be at a particular seal team, they might bring in like, uh, you know, whatever, someone to, to kind of talk to the team about that. So I'm not saying that that stuff never gets, uh, taught or in different areas, but yeah, like with, with us, uh, like during my time,

that never, that never really happened. Yeah. What year was this when you were doing? I went through buds in 2011. So I graduated high school, 2010, uh, buds was in 2011. So you're 18 years old at this point while you're going through this. Yeah. You make it through buds. The guys that you graduated with are you close with a lot of them to this day um no but that's because uh we all got went to different teams so when you when you graduate buds you still have six more months of uh seal training and then you end up getting assigned to a seal team so your your whole group of trainees you just get you know uh shotgunned out to the four winds, uh, to wherever they need guys, uh, within the, within the teams. And so like, I, I was put into

a platoon with literally nobody that I knew. So like I was put in my first seal platoon, um, what team, uh, the team one, uh, West coast team. So I, um, yeah, I was put into a platoon. I didn't know a single guy there. Um, whereas all the other guys in my class, they were put into a, into a platoon with at least one or two other guys that they knew from training. So, yeah, so that was kind of odd. But, yeah, the guys that I served with in the platoons, that's where you really start to develop those bonds and have sort of that, yeah, sort of a family level connection with those guys. But you get there, you're basically a kid. You're not showing up with anyone else from your class. And you got all these hard and badass Navy SEALs. What's that like to walk in that room for the first time?

So it's a little intimidating for sure. And then it also kind of depends on the culture of the platoon that you're walking into. So the platoon that I first went to, very sort of like over the top, like aggressive, macho. You know, it was a platoon that was slated to go to Afghanistan. Uh, so, uh, which is great. And that's where I wanted to be. Um, but yeah, so it's like, you just have these different personalities and then some dudes, they like, just love to mess with the new guys and, but other platoons, like they, you know, they're more like, like more like mentors. And then some platoons, it's more like just beat on the new guys,

uh, kind of thing. So I was in the one that was more like beat on the new guys like hate hate on the new guys uh so you know it is what it is uh kind of luck of the draw where you end up um but yeah so that's definitely it's definitely strange walking in there because you want to prove yourself to to those guys and uh yeah it's it's it's interesting uh going in there and you in you know that half the guys in that room have killed people you know that um most of these guys have been in there and you, and you know, that half the guys in that room have killed people, you know, that, um, most of these guys have been in combat and, you know, they've proven themselves and there's, and no matter how much training you've been through, there's always that little voice in the back of your head. You're like, I don't know how I'm going to react when the, when the, when the first bullet goes past my head. Right. I don't know how I'm going to react.

Uh, I hope I do the right thing, but you want to prove that. So you kind of have this inferiority complex because you're like, I have yet to prove myself. Um, even though you've been through SEAL training, none of that matters ultimately, because now this is my family. I'm with these guys for the next two years. We're going to do 18 months of training together for a six month deployment. So that's our two year cycle. And I have to earn my space, my place within the platoon. And, um, you know, of course you're gonna mistakes. You're going to, um, you're, you're not even guaranteed to stay in that platoon. Um, if you really, really screw up, they'll kick you out just because you become a SEAL doesn't mean you get to stay a SEAL. Uh, I think there was two or three guys from my graduating SEAL class.

They were kicked out within a couple of months at their SEAL team. Yeah. For what kinds of things? Well, uh, the, the standards, um, increase when you get to your team so you make it through seal training and it's like cool man that's great you sort of like check the box cool you're part of the team now but you got to earn your spot like i said there's another 18 months of training and it's like uh the the the house runs like the you know room clearances get faster the lights go out we're doing live fire you know this is there's a real grenades and real bombs. And, uh, you know, we're jumping out of real helicopters. Like, you know, this, this whole thing is, um, uh, it's like no joke and guys die in training. So you can't, if you can't handle the training, which we train as hard as we possibly can in preparation for war. Um, actually I have a buddy from, uh, named John Caloos from Massapequa over in Long Island. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he was killed in training right after we got to our SEAL teams.

He was an East Coast guy. He was killed in a vehicle rollover. He was a machine gunner on a Humvee overturned because they were doing nighttime practice assault on a target. Vehicle hit a ditch, flipped over, and killed him. And he hadn't even deployed yet so yeah it's no joke and so if you're not up to par um they have no problem they'll cut you loose they don't care that you're technically a navy seal at that point because you're really not so the eyes of in the eyes of navy seals like you're not really a navy seal until you've completed one deployment and then at that point you're sort of – at that point you at least have a little bit of respect.

There's a great quote from the show Mad Men in season two or three. The guy – you ever see that show? I think I've watched like the first season I think maybe a while back. So you have the premise. It's about 1960s advertising agency. But one of the owners of the agency roger sterling after they land a huge account like this enormous company signed with them i forget what company they everyone walks out of the room and it's just him and don draper and sterling says something like well the day you

get account is the first day you start losing them and that always dawned on me because that is what it is right like you you get a win and then it's like how long can you even hold on to this? And so for the Navy SEALs or something this high level, it's like, all right, you're a professional. But now you're a professional every single day. And the day you're not the full professional we want you to be, you're gone. Right, right. Like no questions asked. And I understand why that's – as there's an ambulance going out back, but we're good.

I understand why that's the standard again because like going out back but we're good i i understand why that's the standard again because like we talked about 10 20 minutes ago it's like well you guys are the highest level warriors so that this is the expectation if you guys are going to be called in to do the bin laden mission or something like that you know it better not be someone who's fucking up things in training that's just how it is guys if you're still watching this video and you haven't yet hit that subscribe button please take two seconds and go hit it right now. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing too is, um, so obviously mission success is your primary focus, right? Like we represent the United States on the battlefield and the, uh, objectives of, of the United States government, the United States people. Um, that's

our job is to represent them on the battlefield. So, um, they would always say that, uh, the American, this was sort of a phrase that would kind of get thrown around sometime in the SEAL our job is to represent them on the battlefield so um they would always say that the american this was sort of a phrase that would kind of get thrown around sometime in the seal teams and it was like the american taxpayers deserve to have the best warriors representing them so you better show up and do your job uh and you better um like we we represent you know the us uh the us citizens um but so there's that level of it the other level level of it too, on a practical level, on a pragmatic level, just day to day, I'm trying to survive today. Um, so it's like, I might die in training. If you mess up, um, I have a, I have a buddy, he got shot in training by, um, a, uh, a guy who was going, I forget if he had already completed. No, he was going through SEAL training. So he was almost completed with SEAL training. Uh, one of the students shot one of the instructors on accident with a machine gun yeah so my buddy got shot um

yeah with a 762 around from a machine gun yeah through his shoulder luckily he survived and all that kind of stuff right so uh you're dealing with you know life and death situations and so it's like even before we get to the battlefield like i just want to survive and at least get get to that point you know that's where we can at least uh if i if I'm going to die, let's, let's, let's die in battle. Uh, you know, taking out some bad guys who, who want to harm, uh, who want to harm the Western world. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, you had said, when I asked you earlier about your whole, when you first got introduced in Navy SEALs and whatever you went through the story of how, you know, you're like, Ooh, oh, they look the most scary.

I'll do that. But you're still a kid at that point. You don't – you were obviously extremely mature. That needs to be said. But you still don't have a concept of life and death and you said it yourself a few minutes ago. You didn't know at this point how you might react when you get put into that war situation in Afghanistan. But was there a point – I don't know if it was before Buds.

It sounds like maybe it would have been after Buds based on what you're saying. But was there a point where you haven't deployed yet but you are now realizing, OK, I'm representing, as you said, the American taxpayers. But I'm going to go into a situation that I may not survive. Like, was there, was there a real understanding of that? Or was it more, you're so focused on your training and going through the motions of it? That's like, we'll deal with that when we get there. Well, a little bit. So when I was going through training, I had a, I had a, a situation where like my, my, my parachute didn't open. My first parachute didn't open. That was my 11th jump. So this was still during SEAL training.

So I had this near-death experience where I had to cut away my parachute and then open up my second parachute, right? And that was like this terrifying, adrenaline-inducing thing, like hands physically shaking. I'd never experienced that before. Yeah, it's like it's,

and I literally had recurring nightmares for a while after that. But my brain sort of figured it out. That's kind of an interesting story as well. So there was that level of it a little bit. But there's this thing that I think people don't fundamentally understand when it comes to combat. There is a certain level of denial that everybody who has not been in combat

has about combat. So there's this level of denial. And it's like, okay, when we get into combat, I really hope my buddy doesn't get hurt. That would suck. You're not even – a lot of – most guys are not even thinking that it's going to happen to them. Like there's this psychological level of denial until you've actually been there and you've seen it. And so you hear guys in Vietnam would talk about this.

Like the longer you spent in Vietnam, the more afraid you got. You didn't get more confident. You didn't get more like, oh, I got this. You became more afraid because you realized how random and deadly it was and all this facade that you have all the psychological barriers that you have in your head that are saying it's not going to happen to me it's not going to happen to me they're all subconscious you don't even realize it's happening um you those start to get those start to go away and so your your first time in combat okay somebody's actually shooting at me for the first time oh shoot oh my goodness okay somebody's shooting at me not just at my group somebody's physically

shooting at me i hear the bullets snapping you know feet around me going between my legs right like there's bullets landing around right around here that's my first time in combat um i was like oh somebody's physically trying to kill me um so that's that facade breaks down a little bit and then you see the guy next to you bleeding because he got hit by something. And you're like, oh, okay, this can hit you. And then over time, eventually you see people get shot and you see the dead bodies, you see all this kind of stuff. And then eventually it just, all of these sort of mental blocks and barriers that you have just get torn down, torn down, torn down, torn down, torn down. And then for me, when I finally did get shot, that was all of all of those, all of those sort of coping mechanisms and denial were gone. The moment like I got hit,

I was like, all right, like, for the rest of my life, I no longer feel like I'm not going to be the one who's going to get hit in the car accident. I no longer feel like I'm going to be the one who's going to make it safely through this roller coaster ride and it's not going to go wrong. All of that illusion of safety is like completely gone because you're like, dude, I was like inches away from death. And so it breaks down over time. But then that level of seriousness is why you have the more senior guys. They're a little bit more hard-nosed. Some guys will be more hard-nosed.

Some guys will be more focused on mentorship. And they take things a lot more serious because they're no longer in denial. When you first show up to your SEAL team, you're like, yeah, dude, I'm a SEAL. This is great. We're going to go kick some ass. It's like, yeah, dude, you also might get your legs blown off. You might become paralyzed. Your face might get burned off. You might die might you might be blinded you know um that's if you survive and that's the that's the reality of it yeah it's heavy man yeah and that that i've never heard someone describe it that way psychologically about that switch and it's like it's gone forever like you now realize this is always it and now you're you're the opposite like in your normal life as you're describing it too because you're like oh all this could happen to me like forget a war zone it's

just like oh i could be the guy in that car accident that's it's what what you say though like even as a civilian it's it's funny how you describe that because i'm always checking myself on things like that like i'll be out there i'll be like wow it's really a shame that happened to that person and then i will make myself say to myself like, yo, that could have been me walking right there. You know, because it's not your first, it's this natural small narcissism that's built into all of us. Like, oh, we won't be the one. It's just human nature. But then you get it totally flipped on its head because you go into war zones and you're like, oh no no that can happen

speaking of stephen ambrose who wrote band of brothers he wrote a book uh called d-day i don't know if you've read that one it's it's like i think it's like a thousand pages long but it just goes into detail of everything that happened like leading up to d-day and their planning and all that stuff on it um from what i understand i believe the the entire first wave of troops except for some of the rangers i believe the vast majority of the first wave of troops that hit the beaches at normandy were all first-time fresh troops who had never been in combat before and they did that intentionally because guys who've been in combat before they're going to be much more likely to hide behind you know hide behind cover they're

not going to charge the machine gun nest as as readily um because they're not in denial of the fact that you're going to get shot they've already been in combat in north africa or italy or wherever else so that's uh that's another reason why why they did that yeah that i mean we that's come up on a few podcasts recently like d-day because we had the 80th anniversary over this past year it blows my mind the sacrifice that was made there of people who literally they put down the opening of the boat. They're gone. Like you could have 40 guys thing down, two seconds later, 40 guys gone. Totally gone.

Yeah. And we as Americans, we don't fully understand that level of violence. And for good reason. That's good. good reason that's good that means that the military is doing their job um it can happen obviously 9 11 you know here close to new york um things like that can happen but it's it's it's difficult for people to fathom it's like oh that couldn't happen i you know that couldn't happen here and wars really aren't fought that way um nowadays it's usually if there's there's a mass casualty like that it's usually

going to be a helicopter was shot down or a plane crashed or something like that, at least for the American military. Does it frustrate you sometimes now when you're here in America and you see – let's call it what it is, some of the bullshit we take for granted? Does it frustrate you to the point that you almost wish the rest of us could have to see the types of things you've seen to understand how good we have it here? Well, I'd say yes and no. Yes, I'm frustrated. No, I don't necessarily want people to have to experience these things. That was harsh. So yes, it is very frustrating. I think there's a lot of people intentionally blinding themselves to reality, and there's a bunch of different reasons for that and whatnot. But I think that as a society, this is why Memorial Day is important. This is why what a society focuses on during its holidays are important.

You don't have to have another terrorist attack on US soil to remember 9-11. You don't have to have, you know, you don't have to have Americans getting shot in the streets to actually fully take the time to think about what's going on on Memorial Day, the men who died, the men and women who died. And I think it says a lot about our society that in a negative way, that we have these like little dates here,'s like okay memorial day like weekend like okay cool i can get you know mattresses for cheap that's what that's what people think when they think more like oh memorial day sale right uh or you know july 4th it's like oh cool fireworks and then grilling out and it's like no there's a deep deep story there's a deep history there and i feel like a lot of times we we step away from

that or if you look at like easter like hey does that symbol? It's like that symbolizes Christ rising from the dead to save all of humanity, right? And that's what it represents. It represents sacrifice. It represents this horrible thing. And then God's mercy and love and that stuff, right? But what does that turn into? It turns into bunnies that lay eggs, apparently, and that kind of thing so those holidays are there to remind us of these important things and so i think it's important just for americans to like okay on that holiday on the memorial day hey have a great weekend enjoy your three-day weekend but like take five minutes to like drive by the military cemetery just remember if you're

you know if you're a parent take five minutes just tell your kids like hey this is why we have off work today. It's for us to remember these people who've died to keep us all safe because there's bad guys over there. They want to come here and hurt us, and those people went and stopped them. Hell yeah, man. Yeah. I mean one thing I do every day to start my day after I get a workout in, I'll take a lot of calls in the morning, and I'll go for a walk when I'm doing it right out here on the river. And it's beautiful because like you got the whole New York skyline.

It's the best view in New York that exists anywhere. And along the route I go every day when I cut back into town to come back down here, I'm not going to lie and act like I stop every day. But every now and then I'll stop at this memorial that's like literally overlooking this skyline much of which was built after world war ii right of all the world war ii veterans who made that possible and there's just something in that where it's not long it's not like you know this deep profound thing but i'm like damn like they they did that they did that right behind there like we have that because of them and and i wish you know it's not to get preach, but I wish more people from a civilian standpoint like me would do that. I don't really ever see people – I'm sure some people do, but I don't ever really see people stop by that thing or really look at it.

It's a pretty amazing memorial too. But you're right. Like we've made a lot of things in society come back to all the materialism. And look, nice things are nice. back to all the materialism. Yeah. And look, nice things are nice. I like some nice things too. I remember that. But there's a balance in life, right?

And, you know, when you're thinking about these types of long weekends, if you will, like you described, Memorial Day, Labor Day, July 4th, you know, we have good memories, hopefully, of, you know, being around family and stuff like that. But you can kind of balance the two like i i know with july 4th for example you know at least in my life because i got big families i've always been around veterans because i have veterans in my family and people are wearing you know some american flag shorts and it's there you kind of remember but not everyone has that and so i you know for the people that don't i hope that there's some ability like you said to have that reflection if you will yeah and it doesn't have to be weird doesn't have to be awkward right uh you know you can just literally just take 10

minutes and just like hang out like so i'm not on the 80th anniversary of june 6 i actually like pulled up saving private ryan and like uh i had my parents and my wife we just sat there we just watched the first 30 minutes of it and i was like just like, hey, we're going to do this just out of respect for these guys just to remember what they did. And my mom and my wife, they weren't like super up to par on the sort of the history of what exactly happened. They knew about it, but I was just kind of was like, this is why these guys did what they did. Like this was a bunch of American boys going over to like just schwack nazis and liberate europe from evil and um you know i was like this happened 80 years ago today and then we just watched the first 30 minutes of it um you know and uh that was it the most amazing war footage ever captured in a

hollywood movie yeah it's unbelievable it's incredible what they did with that yeah it's so powerful yeah yeah so i think i'll probably make that a tradition, probably with my kids at some point, you know, if I have kids in the future. I like that for sure. But we got cut off with your story. You were finishing your training with Team 1 to go into deployment for what it sounds like was going to be Afghanistan. Yeah. So you knew the entire time you were training you were definitely going to Afghanistan. And this is now – so this is like 2011, 2012-ish?

Yeah, 2012, 2013. Okay. Yeah. Now, this is an interesting time because, you know, I'm sorry if people have heard me say this on the podcast before, but just to reset the deck. Like, you know, the Afghanistan military operation that occurred immediately after 9-11 was one of the most successful military operations in the history of the world. It was incredible. And then obviously Iraq is a whole other conversation, but we go there and it's like, you know, to borrow Obama's line, took your eye off the ball, and Afghanistan shrinks in resources and very slowly has that now what ended up being 1920-year decline that led to 2021 when the Taliban took it back over. 2011, 2012, 2013 though, the way I've heard it, it was like the signs of that precipitous decline were already showing. Would you agree with that?

Absolutely. So when we landed in Afghanistan, this is my first time in combat. So this is my first time on a deployment and you know, combat comes later, but we landed and we got an Intel brief from the people who were already there on the ground. And so these Intel people came in, they pull up a big projector and they and they show they're showing us the map of Afghanistan. And then basically, they just started there was a whole it was a map of Afghanistan, all the different sort of provinces and and regions and uh they were like we don't control here we don't control here we don't control here we don't control here here here here here we lost this last month we lost this last month and it was just and i was like oh my word we're losing this war like we we control nothing here we have we have you know we have the ability to reach out and do missions in places because we have helicopters but we control nothing uh basically nothing we control only very little bits uh very very small bits and when i went to afghanistan in 2014 we were in the process of continuing to uh we called it retrograde we

were retrograding uh we were slowly giving up bases and leaving and giving up bases giving up military bases handing well handing them back handing them over to the afghan army for that yeah but they they weren't in a position to be able to actually hold them. And so I ended up in Logar province in southeastern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. And I was at an outpost there. And our job – there was this very large air base called FOBSHANK, Forward Operations Base SHANK. And the Taliban, who have complete refuge in Pakistan, they would come across the border into Afghanistan with basically fully armed, fully rested, good to go, unlimited weapons, unlimited ammo, total impunity. They can just cross the border whenever they want to. And they would come in and they would attack Fabshank, which has big aircraft, lots of military forces, lots of Afghan forces. So I was in a very, very small outpost, middle of nowhere, right at the mouth of this valley that came out of Afghanistan where all the Taliban fighters would come through.

And so our job was – basically our job was literally go out, find the Taliban, pick a fight, kill as many of them as possible, don't let them get to Fabshank. So just kill as many Taliban as you can, find them, kill them, get them to fight, and then that was roughly what the mission was. However, you're not allowed to drop bombs on buildings. So if the Taliban runs into a building, you can't drop a bomb on it. Oh, boy. Unless like the commander makes like a – you commander makes like a very, very specific decision. And then you also are not allowed to hit targets. You're not allowed to be aggressive and hit a target until the sun comes up, until dawn.

Why is that a rule? Because the incompetent people in charge were setting the rules. It makes no sense, right? It's like, all right, we got a truce, it's sundown. Like, what? No, exactly. Exactly. We were not allowed to hit targets at night. So we could get into position at night. So we would push the rules as much as we could. So we're like, okay, cool, sunrise is at 6.01 this morning. All right, so 6.01 in one second. All right, go. And that's what we would do. But by that point, the Taliban, they're up an hour before sunrise anyway you know and they kind of know what we're doing so um yeah it was it was daytime um tree line to tree line fighting um sort of like uh sort of like band of brothers visually it was just like i just

imagine like the hedgerows in in europe that's kind of what it was so we'd get into these gun fights with taliban at 25 50 meters day broad daylight woods and mountains out in the well out in the uh fields in the valleys so it was like valleys that have a bunch of farm fields and stuff like that so there's a set of hedgerows they have uh like uh um um like little rivers and stuff like that yeah and these tree lines so yeah it was it was uh really really bizarre um what we were required to do but yeah we'd go out and we would fight the Taliban and we were very successful at it and it was good. How many guys would – like what are your patrols like? Are you splitting up in teams of 10?

Like what's the op tempo like there? So depending on the mission, if we're doing like a presence patrol, we were doing I think probably, I want to say 25 SEALs. Uh, we actually had a group of paratroopers that were assigned us, um, uh, security at, uh, at our outpost. And because we're just running daytime operations and these were good dudes, we're just like, Hey, we throw in a squad of a machine gun squad of, uh, paratroopers and they would just roll right with us too, because we were just doing daytime operations so we were basically uh infantry you know in a way and uh so we'd run out with um total maybe like 30 35 guys because we'd have some afghans with us as well and then we'd have afghans and other positions around but yeah like our like

the main element would be like yeah 30 35 people maybe i would imagine you came upon some villages and doing this and things like that you interacted with with people who weren't Taliban mm-hmm oh yeah absolutely yeah yeah what was the vibe of those people because at this point again we're like 11 12 years and Taliban's taking more and more places it seems like you know to get an Intel report like that that you just described when you get on the ground that that feels like a morale-killing moment you know yeah so the i i didn't have a lot of personal interaction with the locals because i would i was just the junior guy on the team so i didn't have like i wasn't sitting there with the interpreter having conversations with people the interpreters were with the officers and like higher higher ranking guys making decisions so i was just kind

of uh following and told you know doing what i was told um but uh the people were sort of indifferent they would see us walking around and they would just be out kind of farming their fields if they weren't farming their fields or if they all started kind of going back to their houses you knew it was about to pop off uh they would know stuff was going to pop off so um so that was a thing and then also too is like you can't even you can't even get mad at these people for not even necessarily supporting us because if they help us, they know that in like three months, we're gone. And the Taliban are going to move into town. And anybody who collaborated, yeah, you're just going to get killed.

So they were sort of indifferent. It's kind of the vibe that I got from them. They didn't want to help us because they're like, dude, if I i help you i'm going to be dead in six months and my kids you know so um not a not a great look and then so during that time um summer 2014 this is actually the same summer that isis started taking over iraq and so um during this time we we knew that at the end of the deployment we were actually just going to leave our base we didn't tell the afghans exactly which day we were going to leave. So we stopped combat operations after like, I think it was three or four months. At that time, a bunch of SEALs had gone into Iraq to deal with ISIS. And so I got pulled out of Iraq because combat operations

stopped. And I went to backfill a standby SEAL unit in a different part of the world. That standby unit had already gone into Iraq. So anyway, we had to sort of refill the standby unit. So I went there. And the guys that were in my platoon, they literally just in the middle of the night, a helicopter came in. They all ran to the helicopter. The helicopter flew away. And then that was it. The Afghans like woke up and all the Americans were gone. And that was it. Yeah. And of course, I'm sure that place fell within a few weeks yeah you were saying at that initial intel meeting the goal or stated goal was like just go find taliban and kill him did you feel like there was even an overall goal though that's not really a goal that's like a you know all right let's go find any bad guys and do the bad thing to them. Like,

or the good thing to them, I guess. Right. Like there doesn't, it seems like there wasn't a core objective. Like, hey, we can take this city and this town and this place, set up a fortress and then be able to drive out Taliban. And then, you know, you know what I mean? Like there's nothing like that, that seems to be presented to you on the board no not at all not at all so the i don't know what the exact u.s policy was toward afghanistan at that time i don't understand the policy was sort of like retrograde so we were slowly withdrawing and sort of collapsing all of our positions around the country back to sort of the core of afghanistan um yeah i don't know what the actual u.s was, but it was definitely not aggressive. It was not, let's go in there. Let's let's whack, you know, bad guys. It was, it was very much, um, we're, we're slowly handing this thing back and everybody knew, everybody knew that the Afghans weren't gonna be able to hold that wasn't so anybody, you know, especially if you want to

fast forward to the 21, 2021 debacle where the Biden administration was saying, well, we've trained the Afghans for 20 years. They should handle it. And it's like, no, dude, everybody knows that they weren't trained properly. It was a total disaster. I've heard some horror stories off camera about the training that occurred, big air quotes. Okay, I was never involved in that particular training. But yeah, it was like,

the biggest thing that I saw that was a big problem with how we train the Afghan forces, we train the Afghan forces or try to train them to fight like how we fight. But Americans, we rely heavily on our firepower. We rely heavily on ISR, drones, AC-130 gunships. They got all that. Come on. Yeah, exactly. So the Afghans, that's what they were used, that's how they they were taught to fight and so then the moment we get rid of all that they you know it's like they're like dude we don't know how to fight without all this backup so now it's just taliban with rifles and rpgs versus us with rifles and rpgs who's going to win taliban because that's all they do that's all they know how to do and they're going to crush you so we we really set the afghans up for failure um i honestly

don't even blame them for not being able to hold back the Taliban because they weren't trained to fight that kind of war. Sure. But you're doing – I think you said these patrols are occurring over like three to four months where you're going out. You're getting in firefights with Taliban. And I know you've had a few, as you mentioned, like near-death experiences or whatever. Was one of them in Afghanistan as well? Yeah, so I actually had a very, very close call in Afghanistan. It was my first time in combat ever, my first ever mission.

We were providing daytime overwatch of this checkpoint that was supposed to get built. The Afghans never showed up to actually build the checkpoint. We hear the Taliban. You lost Alessia a while ago or the afghans did i'm sorry yeah yeah um the uh so so we're there sort of doing overwatch afghans never show up to build the thing um the but the taliban they they can all see us up there on this on this on this rocky mountainside and there's zero trees um where we're at and we're just kind of holding position up there and we hear hear the Taliban snipers on the radio. We hear them talking to each other. And they're looking at our element and they're looking at my element and then the other element. And they're sort of like saying like, yeah, bring up the snipers. Like, here's a Taliban never fired at us. We just, we just sat there and kind of waited and, um, nothing really happened.

And then at the end of the day, uh, or at, uh, after a few hours, our officer made the call. He's like, all right, we're just going to leave. Um, Afghans clearly aren't showing up, you know, whatever. We're just going to leave. So as I was, I was the farthest guy on the most exposed position with a machine gun. Um, and I was, um, I don't know how to explain this, but basically I was on the,thest guy on the most exposed position with a machine gun. Um, and I was, um, I don't know how to explain this, but basically I was on the, I was on the downslope of a Rocky mountain.

I have zero cover and I mean, zero cover. I mean, zero cover. If I lay flat, my body, my legs are still sort of above my head because I'm on this downhill slope. And as soon as we stand up to leave, the first bullet comes in and the first bullet is aimed at me. It lands about six feet to my right. So here it comes in, you know, hits right there. in and the first bullet is aimed at me. It lands about six feet to my right. So here it comes in, you know, hits right there. I see the dust kick up. And then I turn over to the guys, I look at the guys next to me and I scream sniper. And then I dropped down immediately, get as small as I can. Now keep in mind, I'm looking over this valley and there's, I can literally see 10,000 trees in front of me. Uh, and you know, 57 tree

lines and a bunch of different houses. I have no idea where the sniper is. No idea. I get down to the ground, I get down behind my machine gun, uh, behind my machine gun, another round comes in three feet away. So this guy's adjusting for when his elevation was perfect. He was just adjusting for wind. He was just walking. He was walking his bullets in. And so I know the next shot is going to be right on target. So I put my machine gun on fire. I put it at a tree line that's, you know, maybe where the sniper might be. And I just, I literally, I put, you know, I put the machine gun there.

I hold down the trigger. So machine gun starts going. And then I literally take my eyes off my sights, put my head straight down and put my face basically into the rocks. So that way my helmet was facing in the direction of gunfire. Cause I was like, I'm about to get hit. And then another round comes in and goes right between my legs. And I feel the, and I know this because the rocks between my legs shattered. And so I felt the rocks like shatter and kick and kick, uh, kick my, my, my pants, right? The shattered rock. And so at this point, I then pop my head up and a bunch of bullets start coming in.

So at this point, we're three, four seconds into this. So all the SEALs, there's like 25 of us at this point, everybody's laying down gunfire into every window, every tree line that you could see. Everyone's just dumping rounds back because we don't know where the sniper is. And so at this point, inaccurate rounds started coming in. So that same sniper, he's still shooting at us, but you can tell that he's scared because the bullets are now landing to my left, landing to my right. They're landing in between me and the guy who's next to me, the guy who's next to me, a bullet lands, a bullet hits right

next to him. The rock shatters. And, uh, he, he uh got like a little bit of frag in his arms his arm is bleeding a little bit like not a not a major wound at all um and so then we we get out so he's he's actually our platoon chief um and so he he makes the call on the radio and he's like he's like matt let's get ready to move um and so he calls for covering fire and so i turn around and up on up on top of the hill you see entire SEAL platoon come over the hill, totally expose themselves to enemy fire. They're all standing up there and all just laying down this just hell of gunfire over our heads toward the Taliban. And they're firing rockets and just – and it was this really cool moment. And then – so then myself and the other two guys were with me on this exposed position.

We then ran behind the hill and the bullets stopped coming at us at that point. Yeah, because they got a whole team of two. Yeah, exactly. And so we run back behind cover, and then we have to – I think it was about a mile of exposed open rock area on the side of this mountain that we had to move across while the Taliban is just taking pot shots at us the whole time. We called in airstrikes, and we're – again, we're sort of on the edge of this mountain that we had to move across while the Taliban is just taking pot shots at us the whole time. We called in airstrikes. And again, we're sort of on the edge of a mountain, and so there's airstrikes are coming in,

and the aircraft are actually below us. So these aircraft are dropping lower than we are, coming in and doing gun runs on these tree lines where we think the Taliban's at. This is your first combat experience? This is day one, day one. I've been in, yeah, this is my first firefight ever. Did time speed up or slow down neither i i was i felt uh felt very felt very calm obviously my adrenaline was gone but i was like

okay i know exactly what to do and i uh i don't i i didn't feel panic obviously i felt fear it feels some adrenaline but my job was uh so actually that's actually funny. There was a moment where I was like, oh, I should get up and run behind this hill. Obviously I'm getting shot at, but I didn't get up and run, which is probably would have been the smarter thing to do realistic is get up and run behind this hill. But I didn't get up and run because the other two guys to my left didn't get up and run. And I was like, I would literally rather eat this third bullet that's about to come in, then run behind these guys and get to cover. If they're not running, I'm not running. I'm going to be the

last guy to go. I've got to earn my spot in this platoon. I've got to earn my spot as a seal and I need to not panic. And who knows, like, uh, if I had stood up at that point to move, you know, I could have taken a bullet basically to the crotch or to the hip i probably would have taken a bullet to the crotch um probably would have killed me or paralyzed me right um so yeah like just that like no stay down the guy next to you he's staying down he knows he's a senior dude he's been multiple combat deployments and i was like i'm not gonna let him down um so i'm gonna stay. If I die – I would literally rather die right here than that guy see me run away if he's not running. It sounds like all the thoughts you're describing are thoughts present there on the battlefield though.

Are you having any meta thoughts at the same time though? Like, whoa, like I might not make it out of here. No. At that time, it's just purely survival and I'm here to prove myself and I'm not gonna yeah I'm not gonna let my teams I'm not gonna let my teammates down and that was it that was it I feel like that definitely proved yourself to some guys right there yeah yeah yeah amazing it was a first firefight yeah first first time ever yeah exactly and you're also I mean look, the strange thing when we look at modern warfare and we look at the periods in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places around the world that we're seeing right now is that it's not like the old days where there's a battlefield, right?

And military lines up, military lines up, and may the best military win. It's like you are fighting these – this is not the right term to put on it, but it's the best thing I can think of at the moment – these piecemeal pieces of a war across entire countries in many cases where in the middle of it, there are civilians everywhere. And you don't know who's friendly and you don't know who's not. And, you know, a lot of the, you see a lot of stories online about veterans of this era who will talk about these unspeakable situations where it's like they had to decide if someone was friendly or not. And they're not wearing a military uniform. They're not a part of the Taliban or something. But, you know, it's like, it's us or them. And you're on that – as you're going into these patrols every day, knowing you're heading into villages, like you described it, sometimes people would go indoors and you know, oh, shit's about to pop off. And other times they'd be friendly. Like are you thinking about the possibility that you may have to make some really difficult decisions on people who may be innocent caught in the middle? Yeah. So fast forward 48 hours. Let me tell you the story of my second time in combat. 48 hours later.

48 hours later, my second time in combat. We are, my second mission ever, we go out and we're just doing a presence patrol. We come across a child's backpack on the side of the road. Imagine just like a pink, like Dora the Explorer type backpack. I don't know if it was actually Dora the Explorer, but it was like a little girl's backpack on the side of the road. Imagine just like a pink, like, Dora the Explorer-type backpack. I don't know if it was actually Dora the Explorer,

but it was like a little girl's backpack. Had a bomb in it. Our dog, the dog caught it, so we blew it in place. We call it bipping it. So we blew it in place. So this big explosion goes off. We blow the charge, blow the IED.

At this point, now the Taliban know exactly where we are, and for whatever reason, this day, they decided to come out and fight. We intercepted radio traffic that they were going to come up and they're going to ambush them. So normally when you're on a patrol and you're going through a town or a village, you're walking very – just sort of at a nice leisurely pace. You're just kind of – your head's on a swivel. You're constantly looking around. They were like, no, we're going to get ahead of these guys. So we started sprinting. We're sprinting as fast as we can through these villages to get to, I don't know exactly how they knew where the ambush was going to come from. I wasn't on that side of the intel things, but they knew exactly,

our squad leader somehow knew exactly where the ambush was going to come from. We get in position before the Taliban show up. We get there, we get to this tree line, we line up, we're on the tree line. I lay out extra ammunition. Our squads are all lined up. I'm on the farthest squad on the right. We're sitting there, we're waiting. And then all of a sudden you start seeing movement in this tree line. That's maybe 25 yards away from us, the next tree line over. And everyone's real quiet and we're sitting there and we're waiting. And my squad leader, his job was to initiate the ambush when, because we were the farthest ones back. So as soon as we were in position, we could initiate the ambush if the Taliban came in. So my squad leader, he, he, he sees a Taliban guy right across the, the, the field from us, 25 yards away. Uh, it takes a 40 millimeter grenade

launcher, shoots the tree, um, right next to this guy. Um, and basically blows this guy's head off this Taliban guy's head off. And then that was the signal to fire. So we all instantly opened fire and just start raking this tree line with machine gun fire. I was a machine gunner at the time on that mission. And so I have 200 rounds and I'm just just raking this tree line right at like chest level. And other guys are doing that. And we also started firing CS gas into the tree line to get the Taliban to run out. Um, and so we fire CS gas in there. Well, the Taliban, I don't know how they survived, but they immediately started returning fire. So there's bullets coming back at us. Um, I think they're just kind of firing wildly,

but there's bullets flying past us. So there's like little pieces of, uh, like, like branches and twigs and stuff like falling on me as I'm firing. Cause there's bullets, you know, coming back and, um, the Taliban in the middle, I think they all got killed. So the Taliban to the left and to the right, they tried to flank our position and tried to attack. So our guys on the left and our guys on the right are just dropping Taliban at point blank range, like 10 yards away, just boom, boom, boom, just stacking these guys' bodies. Um, and then because they're also running away from the CS gas. Um, And so then the wind shifts, so we're kind of getting hit with the CS gas too. So I'm like sitting there choking and like crying on this CS gas in the middle of this gunfight. Anyway, we call a ceasefire. The last of the Taliban guys are killed.

Then I start hearing screaming from my left. And I was like, oh, that's the blood curdling scream of somebody who's been shot. And it was one of our Afghan allies. He had been shot like four or five times, like in the crotch and like the hips area when the Taliban had done that thing. So it's like maybe 50 meters to my left. And so he's, you know, so he's wounded. So our medics start working on him. And we didn't know, I think there were still a couple of Taliban guys in that, in that far tree line. So we're still taking some pop shots, but now we have to get this guy evacuated. And so we moved back a couple of tree lines. We moved back to tree lines.

And as we're moving back to tree lines, we call in airstrikes on the tree line that the Taliban had been. So we had these eight tens come in out of nowhere and they're just, you know, it's blown up this tree line. Yeah, it was great. So we moved back, we moved back to tree lines. We set up a perimeter and then, so the Taliban stopped fighting, right? And we, so we're in this perimeter waiting for the helicopters to come, you know, maybe they'll be here in 20, 30 minutes, whatever. Not a super long flight. Our medics have stabilized

the patient. They've got them on meds. So we're just on security. So my job was to hold security to the South. And there was an exposed position. It's difficult to explain the battlefield geometry, but basically there was an exposed position to the South that you can only have one guy on kind of in the middle of a field, uh, to watch the Southern position. So, um, I volunteered to go out there, uh, because, uh, I was like, okay, I'm the new guy. My job is to get shot if someone's going to get shot today. Right. Uh, so I go out there, um, to this little area, the guys are, even the guys in the tree line are kind of like looking over at me. They're like shaking their heads, like laughing, like, it sucks to be you.

And I was like, all right, like it is what it is. So I go there, and all of a sudden we start getting radio chatter. And we hear the Taliban. Hey, we're going to attack from the south. The Americans that are on the perimeter, we hear helicopters. We're going to attack them from the south. And I think the Taliban knew that we could hear them. And that's you.

And that's me. I'm the dude on the south and i think the taliban knew that we could hear them and that's yeah and that's me i'm the dude on the south and so they literally to the the other seals they radio over and they're like yo matos you you you copy and that there's you know they're coming from the south that's you and i was like yep got it so i like literally took my weapon off uh off safe and i was just sitting there you know waiting and so i i see in front of me, maybe, uh, maybe 75 yards ahead of me, 50, 75 yards ahead, yards ahead of me. There's another, um, uh, like small tree line. And there's like a couple buildings over there, Afghan huts. And also, and sure enough, I start seeing heads. I see a couple of heads bobbing up and down in this tree line. And at that point I could have fired, but, um,

I was like, no, I need to see a weapon because I've been trained. They've been drilled. That's drilled into your head a thousand times. Do not shoot till you see a weapon. You shoot at weapons. You shoot at weapons. Like you don't just shoot at people unless, you know, you need to make a value judgment, a value call. So I'm sitting there, I see this, these heads moving toward the edge of the tree line and they're going to get in position to attack me. And, uh, I'm waiting, I'm waiting, I'm waiting. I've got the finger on the trigger. I'm looking down my scope and,'s like a 4X zoom on the scope. And then out into the clearing, running straight at me are two little girls. One's like maybe five, the other one's like maybe eight, just little girls. And they are weeping. They are screaming. They are weeping like there's tears

running down their face. And both of them are wearing the exact same kind of backpack that we had just blown up an hour earlier now i don't know for sure that these girls were suicide bombers but the taliban said they were attacking from the south these girls are wearing the same exact kind of backpack that we had just blown up the taliban knows we just could blow up these kind of backpacks and now there's these two little girls running at me and they're terrified and they're like they're they're horrified the one little girl is kind of holding the other girl's hand and they're running right at me so I start screaming at them instantly I'm like get away get away you know I don't speak any you know I don't speak their language so I was just I was just like screaming at them I was like

waving at them like get away get away and I'm not taking my finger off the trigger like I'm aimed at the one little girl's head uh the taller of the little girls I'm aimed right at her forehead uh right at her face and I'm like screaming I one little girl's head, the taller of the little girls. I'm aimed right at her forehead, right at her face. And I'm like screaming. I can just, her whole face is just right there in my eye. And I'm like, I'm like, get away, get away, get away. And I see these backpacks and they're bouncing. And these girls, they kept on running at me and I'm like screaming at them. I'm like, you know, I don't, I don't have time to like do warning shots. This all happens in a matter of like five seconds right does it feel like five seconds no it feels it feels like forever but it's like your heart you know in

that moment you hear the you know your heart's like boom boom boom boom boom like i'm about to shoot this little girl so the little girl she sort of crossed the line that i was comfortable with and i was like i was like this i was like i'm gonna have to shoot this little girl she's i don't know maybe maybe, uh, 40 yards at this way, 30, 40 yards. I don't remember. It's difficult to say, but I was like, I was like, I have to shoot her now. Um, but I was like, I'm going to wait a little bit. Um, if she blows up right now, I'm the only one that's going to get hurt. My team's not going to get hurt. If she comes another five yards closer, now my team's going to get hurt. I have to shoot her.

Um, so I made the decision in my head. She gets, she gets to shoot her um so i made the decision in my head she gets she gets up to that line i make the decision in my head okay i'm gonna kill her uh i'm gonna shoot and so i start to squeeze on the trigger i'm and i'm getting i'm waving i'm like pleading with this girl to stop she you're waving while you're yes i'm because i'm laying down i'm laying down on the ground so with a machine gun on a bipod so i'm laying on the ground watching her and i'm waving my left arm and i'm like get away get away and i'm just screaming at her eventually the girl stops she finally sees me looks straight down my scope she stops looks straight down my scope and she knows like i'm gonna shoot her like she knows she's dead um and i just started just screamed one more time like get

away get away get away um and then she grabbed the other little girl turn around and ran away i was i had literally already gone through the mental decision i'd already made the decision i'm going to kill her um but i didn't have to at the very last like i mean and it sounds overly dramatic sounds like a movie but it's like no three more steps she i would have i would have shot her and i would have had i would have had to um and actually after this mission i was talking with a higher ranking guy kind of about what had happened and he said next time you shoot he said next time don't wait it's like next time you shoot um and i was like roger that um so i even got like a mild reprimand for not shooting right um. But you had, hold on a minute.

In that moment, just I'm going off how you just described it as insane as that is. And obviously there's emotions going on there like you described, but like you were still analytical. Like you're giving me yardage markers. You're giving me, okay, I got my line at like 35, right where she's on it. So it's not like you let her get to 25 or something. She got right to your line you were about to do it and she turned around maybe i shouldn't say i'm surprised you got a reprimand but i'm like mildly like surprised that you got a reprimand for that the

the reason the reason i was reprimanded and it wasn't like a harsh reprimand it was like they realized like yeah that's a tough situation dude like you know but like they were like basically you made the wrong call next time shoot um so the reason for that was i the reason i was just sort of putting this arbitrary lines in my head as this was happening right to keep in mind this happens over the course of like six seconds five six seconds um i'm making this arbitrary line where i'm like if this girl blows up i'm gonna get hurt but my team's not gonna get hurt as soon as she going to cross the line to where my team is going to get hurt. Cause they're off to my left flank. That's when I got to go. Um, so she blows up. I'm okay with me getting hurt. I'm not okay with her getting hurt. The problem though, is if I get hurt, my team's not going to get hurt

trying to get me out. That's the, that's the real problem. So that's why they were like, dude, you can't even let yourself get hurt because now – so I was in that situation and – 48 hours, you're in an intense firefight where you're getting shot at left and right, and they have to basically have like the fucking Wild West unit come up on the top for you and your guys to get out of there. Then 48 hours after that, you're faced with the decision with your fingers pulling – you said you were pulling down on the trigger? I had pressure on the trigger. So it was a machine gun, so you got to put some significant pressure onto the trigger it's not like a nice light trigger like for a pistol so you have to actually put some real squeeze on it so i took the took the slack out as it's called and it was ready to go i just needed

like a few more pounds of pressure well i'll tell you what man like you're blessed in the in the trials of fire like that that's and that is probably i'm trying to think that might be the wildest opening to a military combat career i've heard yeah it was nuts very very well the rest of my deployment was sort of standard combat stuff um those those first two were like the crate were like sort of the craziest of that but so actually that that experience of almost shooting these little girls and again going through that that whole process um when you know people talk about the combat stress and this and the other thing that was the one thing that really uh messed with my head and i realized i was like man these little girls are caught in the middle of this war and that got me to start thinking about civilians

it got me to think about what's going on with civilians who are caught in the middle of this war like when those little girls turned around and ran away where'd they go who do they run back to you know i don't know for sure right that they were bombers um they but they ran back to somewhere where they're the taliban's going to control their life and that's so that was one of the big reasons why i ended up getting out of the military a few years later because i realized i started i just started looking at the world different i started looking at all these different civilians who don't have SEALs and Green Berets and Rangers to help them when their village is being attacked and they're being overrun and their village has been slated for genocide. They don't have someone to help them. And so that's why I started my organization, Stronghold Rescue rescue and relief um was to protect and care for

families in war zones and i didn't know exactly what that was going to look like i didn't know exactly how it was going to turn out and like where we are today um but that was the that was the catalytic moment that shifted that was the first step on that journey of looking at the world in a different way and thinking about the people caught in the middle of these horrible horrible situations yeah the crazy thing about being in this studio is is when people like you start telling a very visceral story like that especially the life and death stuff let's call it what it is you know you're telling it and i'm picturing you'd do an amazing job telling the story by the way i feel like i was there on both of those that was that was pretty incredible but i'm picturing all of it but as i'm watching you especially physically do it like when you had that part where you look down

the scope and you're like i can see her fully in my scope i know you can see her right now like like it was a second ago and that's a that's a wild thing to me because you're very lucky in that you didn't end up having to do that so that that's that's a great thing but it's still like you said it still leads to other questions like what became of her what happened but at least it wasn't you that had to make that reaper type decision like oh fuck this is it but still that's gotta fuck with your head because there's so many other soldiers who have served in those types of areas that you know and don't know who maybe had to make a different decision there. And you wonder what happened to all those kids too and what it's all for. Yeah, I have a buddy.

He unfortunately passed away. His name is Marcus Mendolia. I was in the SEAL teams with him and a different mission. I wasn't on this particular mission, but he was in another area of Afghanistan. And yeah, he was in a situation where he, yeah, rough situation. He basically had to make a split second judgment call. He made the right call. They were taking fire from a building. He saw someone in the window of that building, fired, took him out. And it turned out to just be a woman who was not an armed combatant, but she very well could have been, you know, spotting for, you know, I don't know. So you kind of run

through all those, you run through all those things. I have another buddy, I won't mention his name, but they set off a charge to, this is the same deployment. So they set off a charge to breach this compound. A piece of shrapnel goes up, somehow cuts through this tree and goes and just randomly goes through a window and kills a little baby, like a little one-year-old baby. Just slice things. And so when you, when you look at war, nobody really thinks about the people that are in the middle of it, just, just totally caught and totally defenseless. They, they have, you know, they have nothing. And again, that's, that's why with, with my organization, that's why, that's why we do what we do because we go into, we go into places where, um, they'll never be able to pay us. They'll never be able to help us. They would love it. They would love it. They would love it if they had some SEALs and some rangers to come in and help them. And they're facing genocide.

They're getting bombed. I just got a photo yesterday. One of our ambulance teams evacuated a guy who got hit with a Burma Army drone. They just dropped an 81 millimeter right in his village. And so his thigh is like completely blown out. And our team uh our team of locals there uh you know evacuated him treated him evacuated him um and stuff like

that happens all the time i get i get stuff like that three four times a week on my phone right um just that's just in burman that doesn't include all the stuff that's going on in africa that doesn't include obviously ukraine you look at uh you know hezbollah and hamas hitting israel there's there's so many there this stuff is going on all all the time and so my my life work and my life focus is really trying to help people understand these conflicts but then also um help the people that are in the middle yeah we're we're gonna get there that's coming up because like you had a clear decision like even at a young age after already doing a lot with the Navy SEALs but then decided to do this on your own.

But you had said – you already explained how you basically had to hop out of there in Afghanistan and they presumably took whatever bases those were because the Afghanis probably couldn't hold it. But you were saying at the same time this is going on – I remember this summer very well. It was summer 2014 is when ISIS was popping off. You had the Daniel Pearl thing. I think the guy's name was like Jihadi John or something who was slicing off everyone's head. And you had this new caliphate that made al-Qaeda look tame. As crazy as that sounds, you're not on that battlefield at that time. But how much information or intel, like what types of things are you guys hearing and talking about at. They're like, Hey, there's this new terrorist group in Iraq called ISIS. And they're like doing all this terrible stuff.

And we're like, well, yeah, we, we, you know, we're, this is the first that we're hearing about it, these Intel reports. And, um, so then we're, so then we were told, yeah, the other guys from SEAL team one that are sort of in the standby unit, that's, uh, there's always a unit that's on standby to respond to things that team got dispatched into into Iraq and we know all these guys. One of the, one of the guys who was dispatched into there, uh, my buddy Mikey, he's still active. So I won't mention his last name, but my buddy Mikey, he was with that platoon that went into Iraq with the first U S boots on ground to deal with, to deal with the ISIS situation. And there was another guy

who was an officer going through who I went through training with, who was also assigned to this. And so we keep getting these reports and we're kind of talking to our buddies through chat and messenger and stuff like that. But come to find out my buddy Mikey and this other officer I had gone through training with, they were the guys calling in all the airstrikes

on the ISIS, on all these ISIS convoys. So you remember like the convoys that were just, you know, whatever, 50, 60 ISIS trucks, and they'd all just get like just destroyed on the ground. That was like my roommate was the guy calling in all those airstrikes. Nice. And controlling all the aircraft. He was a JTAC, a Joint Terminal Attack Controller. Basically just means you're a combat air traffic controller.

So that's going on. And then, yeah, so we're hearing about the whole ISIS thing. And then I left Afghanistan a little early to go refill that crisis response. Right, with the other team. Okay. But then you come back to America, right, to basically go into another 18-month training type period? Yeah. So you do two years with that team, so 18 months, six-month deployment.

So at the end of our six-month deployment, our two-year cycle is over, and then all the platoons get re—at the time, this is how it worked. All the platoons then got shifted, so I got put into a new platoon. Um, you know, I, again, I know a lot of the guys there, but it's, everything just sort of gets jumbled, jumbled around and you start your 18 month cycle for your next six months appointment to wherever. Right. Are you, those thoughts you described a few minutes ago about, you know, some other callings on around the world and helping with people like this, are those thoughts creeping in already at this point where you're like, you know, meaning are you, the better way to ask it, are you at the point oh yeah where you're like you know I meaning are you the better way to ask it are you at the point when you leave the what was that called the when like the secure team the backup team uh I'm not gonna say the actual name of it but basically

the standby team yeah yeah that I just wanted to term when you leave the standby team to come back to the U.S. are you seriously contemplating at this point, leaving the seals like now? Um, the, my, my plan of what I was going to do next was not solid, but no, my sort of my attention was, was being drawn away. Um, and it was actually really solidified during the second deployment. So my second, so we did an 18 month workup, a totally new group of guys, again, bunch of, you know, uh, good friends of good friends, and it was a good time. But the second deployment, that six months, we basically were assigned to Southeast Asia, and most of our job was training and building up the capabilities of host nation units, so our allies, and we'd work with them to build up their capabilities and stuff,

which is a good mission, and it's important for America to do that. Not what I signed up to do. I didn't spend the last... I didn't go through through seal training and then just do an 18 month workup uh so i can train someone else how to do something right i want to go do the job right um again i understand the mission i understand why it needs to be there i support it but i was like yeah this i'm not going to do this for the rest of my life and there was one particular one of the places we went into was thailand we worked in thailand so we're working with the Thai SEALs. We were just training with them, doing ship takedowns. Are they any good? Yeah, they're great.

Yeah, Thai SEALs are great. Yeah, they're really good in the jungle. Man, those guys are ninjas in the jungle. They were teaching us some stuff, and it was really cool to get to work with them. But during that time, I was very aware of the war happening in Burma. And there's this genocide and all this horrible stuff happening in Burma. And there's this genocide and all this horrible stuff happening in Burma. And it was frustrating because I was in such close proximity. I've already been to combat. I've already been to war. And I'm here in Thailand with a full platoon of

SEALs, like 20 guys-ish, give or take. And we are like a four-hour helicopter ride away from villages where people are being raped and murdered and genocide is happening. And I'm like, dude, put me in coach, right? Like, just like put me in. I can't sit here and just do this. So that was actually, we spent about, I think like a month and a half, like six weeks in Thailand. And during that time, I just, I realized, oh man, like I've got to go do something. I cannot live the rest of my life being held back. Like I'm under no impression.

I'm not Rambo. I'm not going to go there and like save the people of Burma, right? Or wherever. But I can go help. I can help protect the village. And if they have no, they have nobody to help them, like I'm going to go help. My buddy, Tommy G, you ever seen his YouTube channel channel he's a documentarian on YouTube maybe I don't think so he's can we pull that up Alessi let's let's give Tommy a shot I here's

my boy but a couple of my friends Tommy G and Brandon Buckingham are for my money like telling some of the best on the ground stories in in the country right now and they both want to move internationally with things as well which is really cool but tommy's got this amazing quote where he says i can't boil the ocean but i can boil my pot yeah right yeah and he's like look you know i'm a realist about the fact i am one guy but like if i can do a piece of good right here with these people maybe that i build relationships with and you know because he's going into some horrible places sometimes where things are really really bad but he's like if i can help some of these people and you know become their friend and and and be the reason that you know some people might make it out of that type of situation like that's a win

for me and it seems like you have a very similar idea the way you just described. It's like, okay, I'm not going to go in and stop this genocide. But if there's people there that literally are getting no help right now that I can go help, I'm trained as a weapon of war to go be that person, be that kind of white knight in that type of situation, help whoever I can. Yeah. And that's very much the attitude of it. First of all, that looks really great. I'm going to have to check out his content. I can't believe I haven't seen that before. Yeah. And that's, and that's very much the attitude of it. First of all, that looks, that looks really great. I'm gonna have to check out his content. I can't believe I haven't seen that before. Yeah. He's amazing. He just did a documentary with, uh, Andy Bustamante, the CIA guy that comes on here a lot. And Danny Hall, my friend who's a silver star winner has been on the show where they went to the site of the Trump assassination. Oh, no. Danny Hall is one of the deadliest snipers in American history.

Oh, that's great. And then Andy's obviously like CIA. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot going on there, but he's doing some really, really cool stories. Oh, dude, baller. I love it. I think that's fantastic.

Yeah, my attitude, I think that's a great, I can't boil the whole ocean, but I can boil this pot. Yeah, that's how I see it. And I think that the solution to a lot of the world's problems, it's, you know, to quote Gandhi, if I may, you know, be the change you want to see in the world, right? It's like, what happens is everybody sees all these problems. Everybody sees what's going

on in the world. And then everybody just sits back and doesn't do anything, right? And you don't have to do everything. You don't have to do what I do. You don't have to go into these war zones, but you can talk about it. You can do a podcast about it. You can, uh, you can whatever, donate to an organization that's helping out, or you don't even need to do that. Like just help out in your local community. You know, like I guarantee you, your local homeless shelter needs help almost certainly. Right. Like go help there. Right. So there's, there's, um, just get off your butt and go do stuff. And you don't have to do all that much. You have to dedicate your life to it. Um, but if everybody just pitches in a little bit, um, you can have these massive impacts, right? If everybody just boils their own

pot of water, you can, you can boil the ocean or pretty, pretty damn close. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, and that's, and that's definitely our, definitely our mindset is, um, one of the, one of the struggles we have, uh, one of the struggles I have at my organization is, uh, uh, I'll call it recruiting. Uh, we have lots of people who want to come with us to these conflict zones and things. The problem is a lot of guys, their thought process is like, oh, I want to go get my gun on. I want to go fight bad guys and things like that. And they're looking for action, not necessarily to help. They're looking for action.

And that is not going to fly with what we're doing. We're not chasing the action. We end up in situations that do have action, but that's 1% of the time, the other 99% of the time it's logistics and training and fixing vehicles and trying to figure out the communication bit and travel. And you know, that's, that's the, that's the, that's the actual job. And then there's that 1% of the time where things go haywire. Um, and you gotta have guys that aren't trying to chase that because then they're not happy doing the rest of the thing. You need people who are about that life, not that moment.

That's a great way to put it. That is a great way to put it. Yeah. Yeah. You can use it. Yeah. I'm going to use it. Yeah.

Yeah. Don't tell anybody. I'm going to use it. Let me tell you what I came up with, man. No, I want to hear all about this, but you didn't, you're there, you know, whatever it is, four helicopter rides away from where Burma is, but you're just doing you're there, you know, whatever it is, four helicopter rides away from where Burma is, but you're just doing training stuff. And then that period, six months or so? Six weeks. Six weeks specifically in Thailand, but yeah, six months of deployment. We went to

multiple countries. Okay. So that deployment ends, you come back to the US, you didn't leave the SEALs though, right away, right? It's just kind of a planted seed in your head at the moment. I still have a few. So when I got back from that deployment, that was, would have been late 2016. And then my term of service is up in early 2017. So I still, I still have, I have roughly like six months, six or seven months left in the military to kind of make a decision. Um, I actually looked at staying a little bit longer, um, just for like two years. Um, I looked at several different sort of postings and sort of, we call it shore duty. So non-combat postings, um, to maybe like knock out a degree or kind of figure out what I wanted to do next, but nothing, nothing really, really stuck with me,

um, that I really, really wanted to do. And, um, so at the time, you know, ISIS was obviously a big thing, uh, at the time and people were trying to fight back against ISIS and there were American volunteers, you know, going over there to fight ISIS. And I thought, well, I people were trying to fight back against isis and there were american volunteers you know going over there to fight isis and i thought well i'm not trying to go like go fight isis but i was like there's again there's these civilians that are caught in the middle of this maybe i can go do some humanitarian work and so i was still technically i decided i wasn't going to stay in the military anymore i didn't know exactly what i was going to do, but I knew in my head, I was like, I want to start a company or an organization or whatever. So that, um, uh, so I can hire guys with my background to go and help these people who will never be able to pay us. Um, cause like, okay. So for example, the, the work that I do overseas at the level that I do it, um, if a regular, uh, like Western power,

like, or like a, uh, like a stable country, if they were to pay me to come in and do the same kind of thing, let's say they're like, hey, we want you to come in and like go after terrorists or narcos or whatever else, right? They would have to pay me like – just me personally, like you'd have to pay me $2,000 a day just to come in and do this. And so like we're providing a very high level of service. And a lot of that is just because of the risk of the level of stuff that we do. But it's like I'm not interested in that. I don't want to do that. I want to go help people who nobody – who don't have anything. They barely have enough rice to eat or they don't have any food at all.

They have nothing. Those are the people I want to go help. What are you like 25, 26? I was 24 technically. So 24, um, so I was still technically in the military. I took leave. Um, I had 60 days of leave saved up. And so my last day in the military, I technically wasn't on leave, but it was a Saturday.

So I was like, they're not going to call me on, on a Saturday. So I just risked it, flew, bought a one-way ticket to Iraq, met up with, yeah, some other American volunteers there. And so I ended up working with them for like my first like six or seven weeks in Iraq. Yeah. This is 2017. 2017. You got a one-way ticket to Iraq. One-way ticket to Iraq. One-way ticket to Iraq.

I haven't checked the Iraqi vacation logs recently, but like is that a thing? Yeah. Can I go? You could probably – even today – and at the time, you could fly into northern Iraq. You could fly into Erbil, sort of Kurdistan-controlled areas. I'm not going to do that, but – Yeah, no need. Good to know. Yeah, you can do that.

So I flew over there and – I mean there's other aid workers and stuff going over there too. So to me, it seemed, you know, it seemed like this very sort of crazy thing, but when you got on the ground there, there was like other people there too. And there were other people there that were, you know, volunteering in different ways. So I met up with another group of Americans, um, and, uh, they were doing basically humanitarian work and then like some medical support for some of the Iraqi army who were clearing Mosul.

So the Iraqi army, they didn't really have medics because you don't have time to really train up qualified medics when ISIS popped off. And so long story short, we end up embedded with a Iraqi army armoredqi army um armored unit which was clearing the areas around mosul sort of like the plains of nineveh um taking these little villages back from from isis from can i cut you off for one second i just want to make sure we have the background here so that so that people can more even appreciate what you mean when you go through your personal story

with it but like yeah the battle of Mosul in 2016 and 2017 is one of the largest military operations in modern history. And I feel like a lot of people like don't really know a lot of the details or what's going on. So you are getting there when this is well underway. This is an operation that includes the United States, Iraq, I believe other Western countries as well. I'm not going to name them because I don't remember exactly who, but like what, what was the, obviously ISIS had held Mosul. It's one of the two or three most important strategic places in Iraq. The objective obviously is to get ISIS the hell out of there. But what was the, how did it go down? Like, like who was,

was the Iraqi army in the lead or was the U telling them what to do? What was the cadence there? Awesome, yeah. So just a couple of historical facts about Mosul. So Mosul is the place where al-Baghdadi got up in this giant mosque. I forget the name of the mosque. But it had a leaning tower, like this giant leaning tower. He got up there and that's where he proclaimed the existence of the caliphate so um that was for lack of better term like that's where they signed their version of the declaration of

independence like we're we're in we're our own independent country right the terrorist declaration of independence so yeah exactly so they uh so that was right there in mosul in a place called the old city of mosul so when you look at Mosul on a map, the Tigris River cuts the city in half, and then it cuts the city from the east side and the west side. So when I got to Mosul, the east side of Mosul had been cleared from ISIS. And so basically what ISIS did was they blew all the bridges across the river, and so they congregated all of their force and all of their strength in West Mosul, which is where the stadium was where they were doing the mass beheadings and the executions and things like that. And it's also just around the corner from the mosque where they had declared the beginning of the caliphate. So when I got there –

By the way, unless he has the – I just want to make sure for people out there following what you're saying he has the map up of what you're describing so perfect you're they'd cleared everything east of yeah so let's say can you can you zoom in here maybe make uh you keep zooming in keep zooming in yeah right about there is good probably go back a little bit um yeah so you can see the the um the uh tigris River cuts it basically north to south. So the east side taken, I'm going to say roughly half of the west side, right? So all of ISIS at this point in history, or at least the forces in Mosul, ISIS forces in Mosul, they're all concentrated in sort of the last literally quarter of the city, the upper left-hand corner there, the northwestern part. So the Iraqi army unit that we were working with they um they were an armored unit and so you know uh combat 101 don't send your armor into congested cities yeah uh because you you

unless you're unless you are completely surrounded by infantry who have cleared everything else out um around there what's the cost of this though by the way because you just described that basically i'm going to round the numbers here this isn't exactly accurate but like 75 of it is now they're down into 25 of it because then they're roughly upper west corner yeah but like the 75 that's been taken isis was hiding civilians among them and everything. Obviously, it's a war zone, but is it just leveled? So on the east side, and we could actually see this when we went into West Mosul. We could see on the east side. Obviously, there's a lot of destruction and a lot of crazy stuff has happened there.

It wasn't quite leveled. That's very different than West Mosul. West Mosul would be leveled. Every building basically it was just like blown to rubble so when we went into west mosul there were cars driving around on the east side you could see people at restaurants you could see you could see lights on they're driving around living a semi-normal life it's not normal but like and then right across the river is isis and like the stronghold of isis and there is no power it's just blacked out

uh cityscape um it's like north and south korea from the sky yeah kind of exactly exactly so i guarantee if you're taking photos of it at that time the right side is all lit up lots of lights generators power uh west side yeah uh total total blackout so the iraqi army unit we were with was an armored unit and they were charged uh their their mission was to clear all these small little villages sort of on the outskirts of Mosul. It's just sort of flat, open plains. It's the plains of Nineveh. And so that was kind of our job. And so they'd go liberate a small town. Villagers – not villagers, but Iraqi civilians would come out of those areas. We'd give them food, medicine, and take care of them and sort of send them off to our refugee camps. Nothing super crazy. We had one situation where we ended up getting into sort of a gunfight with ISIS and kind of going into a tunnel with ISIS in the tunnel. This wasn't where you got shot. No, no. This was like a month and a half prior to getting shot. What happened here?

So the Iraqi army, they lined up all their tanks. There was a small village called – I believe it was called Garbala and maybe 50, 60 homes in this small village. And the Iraqi army, they lined up their tanks. They had – I want to say maybe eight up their tanks. They had, uh, I want to say maybe eight or 10 tanks. They had an American tank, they had a Russian tank, and then they had like a bunch of like Russian BMPs and a bunch of like up-armored Humvees. And they did a full blown, uh, World War II style online assault across like a mile of open flat ground to knock out ISIS in this particular little village. As they advanced across this, so I was there in the line with the Iraqis. As they advanced across the open, some of the

vehicles were hitting landmines, like anti-vehicle mines and blowing up. And the ISIS guys in the village, they're firing back with like heavy machine guns, 50 cal machine guns and things like that. And also firing mortars and rockets back at uh back at the iraqi army another day at the office another day at the office so during this fight i was assigned to stay with a an iraqi army medic um not really a medic but he just was like the dude that you know sort of took it on so he took it upon himself to do it great guy guy named uh named Fize. And so I was told, stay with him. Like your job is to support him. So, um, I'm standing with him. We're walking alongside an Iraqi army. It's, it's, it's a U S built Humvee, but it's Iraqi army driving it. Um, and we're driving across and I was, again,

I was told to stay with this guy. So he runs out into the open, uh, to go forward in this battle because a suicide car, an ISIS suicide car comes out and hits the first line of tanks and it blows up this massive explosion. It's like a 2,000-pound bomb going off. And Fize was worried that they were going to be wounded up there. So I'm in the second line. So he runs across the open. Keep in mind, it's like quarter mile, half a mile to the next line of – to the forward line of troops. And so I'm like, all right, this is, this is kind

of crappy, but I gotta, I gotta stick with this guy. So I start running with this guy. We get maybe a hundred yards away, 50 to a hundred yards away up. And the Humvee that we were standing next to the wheel that we were standing next to hit an anti-vehicle mine and the entire front of the humvee blew off yeah so had had we stayed next to that humvee i'd be dead like yeah zero percent chance of survival um and so then we turn around and we go back to the so we turn around we go back to see if there's anybody wounded back there there wasn't anybody as advance happens, I sort of end up in the front with the front Iraqi soldiers as they're going house to house clearing out ISIS. And at this point, most of the ISIS guys had kind of run away, so we're not seeing them. And we come across

a small hut, and there's like a machine gun poking out of it an Isis machine gun poking out of it and so one of the other American volunteers I was with he he throws a grenade into the building and then me and him assault the building and we're spraying bullets into it and when we get into this small building there's a there's a tunnel there's the entrance to an Isis terror tunnel that goes down underneath this village and you go right into it and so we go right into it yeah so we go in there and uh we're throwing grenades or uh the other guy he's he's throwing grenades ahead of us um to to sort of clear the way and um so we're down there and um we kind of get to the end of the tunnel so so we get we get to this large open shaft in this tunnel and we look up and there's like another entrance. There's like maybe 10 feet above us.

So like we're deep underground right now. And like maybe 10 or 15 feet above us, there's another entrance of a tunnel that goes in a different direction that we don't have access to. And so we're like, hmm, that's weird. ISIS must be up there. They must have, you know, they must have like climbed up there and pulled a ladder up with them. We must be up there. They must have, uh, you know, um, they must have like climbed up there and pulled a ladder up with them. We weren't really sure. We didn't hear ISIS though. So anyway, we clear the, we clear the rest of the tunnel. We can see where they have their lights and their Korans and where they were sleeping. You could see where they

had peed before the battle. So like, it's still like wet where they had peed, you know, five minutes earlier or an hour early. I don't even know. We get to the end of the tunnel. We don't find any ISIS. We go back through the tunnel, back through the, to go back to the entrance. And as we're walking through, we're walking through this very narrow tunnel and we look down on the ground and there's a Russian mine in the tunnel right there. And we had walked over it multiple times and just so happened to not step on it. Total freak accident. We hadn't stepped on it. So- How'd you know it was Russian? Because it was just a Russian made, Russian design.

Okay. So there's a landmine right there. God, they have shit everywhere, don't they? Yeah. And one of the guys pointed at us like, oh, that's a Russian whatever. I was like, cool, man. Yeah, let's get out of here. Let's stop talking about it. So we get out of the, we get out of the tunnel. Um, and so then the Iraqi army, they, they had taken the town at that point. And then what they did was they brought in a bulldozer cause it's an armored unit. So they have a bunch of bulldozers and stuff and they collapsed the tunnel.

They just collapsed the entrance to the tunnel. And there was like another exit that collapsed the exit and all this kind of stuff. And they fill it all in. Uh, so we leave, we come back the next day, the Iraqi army still is monitoring or still is holding this town. We come back the next day and the, and the Iraqis tell us, they're like, Hey, that tunnel you guys went into last night, right where that giant shaft is. We heard two explosions underground and ISIS guys were in there and they had killed themselves because they were buried alive.

So for whatever reason, the ISIS guys decided not to take us with them they were hoping to survive and um otherwise because they'd been up there had they just tossed their grenades out we they we would have been buried alive with them they would have just you know uh killed us and gone out with us but uh they were trying to survive so we we lived lived to fight another day and that was actually my first – I was still technically in the U.S. military when that happened. That was my last day in the U.S. military. I was holding the questions on this because you're telling the stories. I don't want to get you off it. But like you land.

Let's just call you out of the military even though you weren't. But now you're not with them. There's an Iraqi army. There's a U.S. army. You're a civilian. I guess because it's a war zone, you can just grab a gun and get in there and like are you coming across any units though and like saying hey we're humanitarians here to help but are they giving you any like pointers like oh we want you here we want you there how or is this just total no man's land

like free for all so kind of free for all kind of no man's land um there were u.s forces there um when i was there we never interacted with them i never i never saw them i never interacted with so they didn't know who you were no they know the the guy like some of the other guys who had been there longer with uh had been volunteering there they like were doing they they made sure that the americans knew where we were and what we were doing but we were like embedded with the Iraqi army. But they didn't know who you are. No, no, no.

They didn't know this is a Navy SEAL. No. But there's a funny anecdote to that as well that I'll get to in a second. But the Iraqi army, we're there at their behest, at their good graces. So we're there to serve and help them as they liberate their people. So they were the ones who gave us the weapons they're like hey this is an ak-47 off of a dead isis fighter you can carry it and here's some grenades from a dead isis fighter you can have it don't mind if i do don't mind if i do

right and if they didn't give us stuff we wouldn't care anything because we're not you know we're not trying to be crazy and run around and you know try and be rambo um fast, fast forwarding a little bit, just to comment on what you said. So after I got shot, like a day or two later, the group of volunteers I was with, they ran into the SEAL unit that was there in Mosul. And what team? It was Eddie Gallagher's platoon. And Eddie Gallagher was actually one of my, he was one of my instructors going through buds oh he was kind of a funny thing so they like showed him photos

so they showed him photos and the guys were like oh that's Matos like yeah we know him like what the hell is he doing here and so like guys were like texting me they were like dude we're in Mosul like what are you doing and I'm like pull up fam let's roll yeah it's like no I'm in a i'm uh i'm laying in a bed in in uh in urbeel with uh with a bullet hole in my leg man um and that was the only interaction i had with uh the u.s military uh during my time there

really but um yeah so we're working with this iraqi army unit so but then are we back right after the tunnels now yeah we're back after the tunnels. And so then the Iraqi army that we were with, we were not expecting this to happen. Basically, they were ordered to – so if you look at the map there of Mosul as the Iraqi army is pushing from south to north on the west side, basically, the Iraqi army couldn't move any farther forward because ISIS has all of their troops right there. So the Iraqi army could advance forward, but they're taking just massive, massive casualties. They need a second front to open. And the only unit that was available to open a second front in Mosul on the upper west side was this Iraqi army unit that we were with. And so we weren't told this was happening. We didn't realize this was happening.

But basically we wake up one day and it's happening. And we were on the outskirts of Mosul. We knew that we were kind of there. We didn't really understand what the Iraqi army objective was. But we get up one morning and we think the Iraqi – so the way the Iraqi army would fight is they would fight. They'd get up in the morning. They'd get up in the morning.

They would attack like a little bit after dawn, after tea time. They would fight until like noon and they're like, cool, we're going to call it a day. Let's have some lunch. Maybe in a couple of days we'll go again. Just a very sort of predictable, interesting cadence. And so that's kind of what we expected. So we wake up one morning and the Iraqi – we're sort of – we're a couple miles from Mosul and the Iraqi army – so we're following along with them. And they brought in multiple units, not just like one brigade of an armored unit.

They brought in like an entire division of armored units. So it's like four or five times the size. So now of like 10 tanks we're dealing with like 40 tanks and bmps and armored vehicles and they line up on the upper west hand side of uh upper left hand side there um up in the upper left hand corner let's see there's a place called musharifa yeah right there you see musharifa left a little bit to your left right there that's it right there so there's um there's an open field there yeah you can see the open field um yeah between the left and right so yeah right where your cursor is and the Iraqi army lined up all their tanks right there and then just south of the Tigris river basically yeah where the yeah where it turns and they just did a full-blown World War II-style online assault directly at the ISIS positions there in Musharrafa. And so we didn't know this was happening until it was happening.

And you're in the middle of it. tanks. ISIS, of course, they immediately opened fire and they start sending out car bombs and mortars and stuff like that. And there's landmines everywhere. So some of the tanks would hit landmines and they'd blow up, they'd blow off a track and we're treating the wounded. And as soon as we got to the edge of the city, civilians were like, yo, this is our chance, let's get the hell out of here. And so civilians by the thousands just started running out of the city across that open field to get to safety. And occasionally, ISIS would – if they were in a position, ISIS would just start shooting. Mow them down. They'd start moving. They'd mow them down, start shooting these civilians.

And so basically we started treating civilians. And so, what we thought was going to be like a three-hour mission that morning turned into three straight days of constant fighting all day, all night as the Iraqi army struggled to get a foothold and open up that western front. And so then ISIS, of course, had to start moving some of their troops up there. And then that started this 30-day slog of just house to house, room to room, start clearing the ISIS guys out. And we were there the whole time treating the wounded, treating the Iraqi soldiers. And – Are you also in the midst of the – soldiers and um are you also in the midst of the like well you are in the midst of the battle but are you i mean you're firing too right yeah so there's um uh we're not the ones we're not the first ones through the door to clear the right

we're back 50 meters when the dudes in there get shot we're we're treating them or when civilians are getting shot we're treating them so we're moving up so we're very very close but there aren't situations where you're moving from place to place where you're taking fire from- Oh, no, there are. There are. So are you shooting back? Absolutely. So there was a- So for example, one instance, there was a group of about 20 or 30 civilians. It was all women and children. And they were running to us to get to safety i think this was on like day or two or three i don't remember of that of that initial few days um but there's a large crowd

of them and i start hearing the snaps from isis snipers snap snap so they're trying to shoot these moving civilians and so my buddy skye and i he was a former marine um we we were like oh hell no so we run out there we get into a trench and we kind of hear the general direction of the gunfire. So we start firing back at ISIS in sort of the general direction to draw the fire toward us. And so instantly the snipers, they stop shooting at the civilians and they start shooting at us.

And so I'm in a trench and I watch the bullets impact, you know, three or four feet to my left. And then the next bullet comes in and hits the dirt right in front of my face, splashes my face with dirt. I drop down, roll over, pop up four or five feet away, wait for the bullets to impact there, roll back, you know, so you're kind of doing this, you're playing, yeah, you're playing whack-a-mole with these snipers. And of course, this lasts maybe like 60 seconds or so. But when this happens, the civilians that we were basically, we were just trying to draw fire away from the civilians, and it worked.

So ISIS starts shooting at us. And some of the civilians, they panic and they start running, which is kind of good because they're kind of all over the place. And then – so there's like women and kids like running right in front of my rifle as I'm firing between them. Oh, my god. So there's like three feet separation. I'm like, boom, boom. They're running. I'm like, boom, boom.

But it was very instinctual. It wasn't – like i felt very like relaxed like okay i know i know exactly you know what i'm doing here um so like i'm firing if they if they put their arm out in front of them like i'm going to shoot their hand right like i'm that like i'm firing it's like they're crossing guard from hell yeah exactly so i'm uh firing between them um because some of them ran in front of us most of them were smart enough to run behind us but But these mothers, so like you want to talk about terror, these mothers are taking their little boys and girls that are, you know, one, two, and they are physically, as they're approaching the trench that we're in, they're running as fast as they can. They're

exhausted. They can't run very fast. They are physically taking their children and throwing them ahead of them three or four feet, just a sack of potatoes just throwing them at us to get their kids behind us into this trench oh my god and so kids are just falling and uh you know falling and jumping behind us and then these women are jumping behind us in this trench and um like one lady she tried to throw her kid but she like fell off she like her balance was off or something so she ends up she's like holding her kid, but she like fell off. She was like, her balance was off or something. So she ends up, she's like holding her kid by its ankle across her back as she's like running, trying to get to us. And so this kid is like hanging upside down, just bouncing along for the ride. Um, so imagine the terror, imagine the fear of these mothers trying to save their kids. It's almost unimaginable.

Yeah. And they're throwing them and they only have three more feet to go, but they're still choosing to throw their children instead of running with them for those last three feet. Cause ISIS was, like I said, gunning down, gunning down civilians every chance that they got. Yeah. So a lot of, we were in a lot of situations like that. And what, so unless we definitely can't put the video on the screen for everyone else out there, but we'll tell you what, what, what do people Google to find that video? Yeah. So if people just go to strongholdrescue.org and then just go to our media section right there. Yeah. We'll put a link in the description of the video. Yeah. And so you can just go there and watch this video. Okay. Yeah. Can you pull it up for us and

not put it on camera? And actually, instead of doing a cut in, I'll take this moment to say to our YouTube reviewers, told you to come to this time stamp because we'll put that at the front everything discussed today is in an educational context a historical telling showing absolutely no violent images of any kind is strictly someone who was there ephraim taking us through what happened and it falls completely under the correct guidelines of full monetization on YouTube. Thank you. Have a great day. Anyway. All right. Let's pull up this video. And while you and I are watching this, can you just walk me through what's going on here and walk through our audience? What's going on? Yeah, absolutely. Um, is the, I think that's the old video there. Yeah. Do we have to, there we go. Yeah. Um, all right. So the, uh So the video starts off. So let me give a little context before the video starts.

Yeah. Who's videoing this, by the way? Yeah. So what's going on is the ISIS, the reason we didn't just pound them into dust with airstrikes is because what they would do is they would force the civilians to stay with them because they know that Western forces and the Iraqi forcesqi forces don't want don't want civilian casualties we don't want to hurt anybody right so regardless what the news tells you we are and as my story uh from earlier demonstrates like we are trained do not hurt civilians like you know yes so anyway but they they keep the civilians with them because they know that we're not just going to hit them with a 2 000 pound jdm and then they're all you know they're all dead so they keep the civilians with them as hostages and so in this particular place um the a group of about i don't know how

many civilians ran away but it was a lot may have been 500 i don't know because 200 of them were slaughtered in the street that doesn't include the wounded 200 people were killed right in front of isis headquarters as this massive group of people all got up and left at the same time. So these Iraqi civilians who are tired of being around ISIS, they want to get away. They want to get their kids to safety. So they're grabbing their kids, and they're taking a backpack, and they're running. So as they cross this, it was maybe like a six-lane highway, like main highway there in Mosul. It used to be a six-lane highway. Yeah, like main, main highway there in Mosul. Um,

which it used to be a six lane. Yeah. So it looks just, it just looks like rubble, but yeah, it used to be like a, uh, like a large street. Um, ISIS just gunned them all down. And so there's literally piles of bodies where people are getting shot, falling down, other people climbing over those bodies, getting shot, falling on top of those bodies, more people trying to climb over those bodies, getting shot. And so there's like literally a pile of bodies in one spot of like 25 people. There were women, kids, 14-year-old girls saw a little baby, maybe six months old. Its head was caved in. It hadn't been shot. Both of its parents had been shot in the back. It was obvious what had happened. So the mother had been shot. The father was carrying the baby. The father had been shot in the back, fell forward. And so then the baby's head was

cracked open on the rubble when the father fell forward. And that was maybe six or seven feet away from the corner that they needed to turn to get to safety. Do you have any moment to like during this to process that and take in what you're seeing? When you're in these situations, your mind is intentionally numb. You have to deal with it later. You can't sit there and be like, oh, how do I feel about this? No, it doesn't matter. We've got a job to do and I'll deal with it later you can't sit there and be like oh how do i feel about this right now it doesn't matter we've we've got a job to do and i'll deal with it later so you turn off that part of your brain um turn it off you just turn it off you just turn off that part of your

brain um and you still care you know that there's a part of it that still bleeds through but in those moments you can't be sitting there thinking about how do i feel about this yeah um so isis guns down like 200 people in the street and um in the pile of as we were the some of the first guys on the scene to see what had happened and when we got on scene and we were looking through the through the buildings and through some of the some of the safe angles to see what had happened um we noticed um a little girl alive in the pile of bodies and she's just sitting there like in shock and we believe she's hiding under her dead mother she's hot she puts her mother's like hijab like over her to like hide herself from the sun now keep in mind it's mosul in uh june and it's like 110, 115, 120 degrees. You're just getting, you're literally getting baked alive sitting out there. And this had happened the day before we showed up on scene.

So this little girl, she's laying out there. She's totally in shock, has no idea what's going on. Uh, she's 50, 75 meters away from ISIS headquarters, just laying in this pile of bodies. And so we all looked at each other and we're like, yeah, we got to go. We got to do something here. Yeah. Uh, we had no choice and we can't wait till night. Um, we got to go now. Otherwise this girl, cause it was like, uh, early in the morning when we found it was like, she's not going to survive the afternoon heat. She's going to die. Um, and so, uh, we contacted the, the uh we contacted the we contacted the u.s military and basically we're like hey put a drone overhead you guys need to see this so the u.s military actually put a drone overhead and

they were watching this how'd you contact them um the the other guys uh who are like sort of like leading the group of volunteers who've been there longer they uh basically just already had the numbers so people like hey like we're here just so you guys know you know so they were able to yeah just kind of keep the iPhone and be like let's go fam that's literally that's what it was yeah like here's my iPhone like hey let me text you this coordinates put a drone overhead uh that's exactly how it worked god bless Lockheed Martin baby let's go yeah so the uh so the drone shows up overhead they the U.S. military sees what's going on and so they they're like cool we can give you guys a smoke screen. That was all we can do. We can give you guys a smoke screen if you guys are going to go do a mission to get civilians out of here. So the US military made a call,

and they started firing using artillery. They started firing white phosphorus, which was detonating in the air and was building up this smoke screen in front of ISIS. And then the Iraqi army are the ones actually driving the tank that you see in the video. So that's an American M1 Abrams tank, but that's actually a jet engine on the back of these things are pretty cool. But, um, the Iraqi army is driving that. And then that was it. So we had a tank, a smoke screen, and then there was like a four or five of us who are going to go on this mission to get this little girl. And so the U.S. military starts firing this white phosphorus, giving a little bit of a smoke screen.

It was still not that great. We get behind. The Iraqi army tank drives out into the middle of the road. We get behind it, and it just drives straight behind enemy lines, right there, right up to ISIS's front door. ISIS immediately starts opening fire. Machine guns, rockets, mortars are going off, landing behind us because we're moving forward. They're trying to

walk their mortars in on us, but we're still moving forward toward them. So they're landing behind us. Um, and, um, we're literally stepping over the bodies of, of the dead as we're trying to get into position. Uh, we finally get into position and then, uh, this is where the video starts. And, um, uh, myself and my buddy Sky there on the left, and this is Dave on the right. Um, we gave covering fire and, uh, so at this point, uh, Dave gets ready. The little girls like right over there. Yeah. So I pop out from behind the tank. Ice is like 50 meters away. We're dumping rounds point blank, right into their position. Uh, like 50 meters away. We're dumping rounds point blank right into their position.

My buddy Sky there, he's dumping rounds right in their position as well. Dave runs out, grabs a little girl, comes back, gets behind the tank. Wow. I thought he was shot. So I'm like, hey, what's up? Are you all right? Because he fell down after he picked up the girl. But he was good.

Yeah, he was good. He's totally fine. And so then we start moving back toward Iraqi Army lines, and there were some war correspondents there who were filming this, and we didn't know that they were filming at the time. And that's you in front of that tank. That's me to the right there, yeah. This footage is unbelievable. And then, boom, I get shot.

So we don't have the audio on, but there's a burst of machine gun fire comes in and I got shot through the right calf. I fall down behind the tank. And you get right up. Well, because the tank, so yeah, if you see the video, the tank is about to run me over and I have no choice. At that point, I didn't know if my leg was going to stay intact or not.

Is it all adrenaline? Like, are you not feeling a lot of pain because adrenaline's going? At this exact moment, I'm not feeling pain just yet. And so then this part of the video, there's another angle from another guy who was videoing. So you can see the blood pumping out of my right leg there. And we're waving. We're telling the Iraqi army. We're like, hey, guys, send a Humvee. We need a Humvee to come across the open here and come get us. And nobody was coming. And I was like, all right, I have to run across the street to, uh, to deliver this message. Otherwise you got to hobble across the street. Yeah. So your calf, bro. Yeah. So people aren't, if you haven't checked out this video yourself, you need to check this out. Steven Spielberg could work his whole career to get footage like this and never be able to cap. This is unbelievable. So, yeah. So then I run across the street at that point and I'm screaming for Humvee as I'm running. I'm like, Humvee, Humvee. In case I get shot, ISIS, they're shooting at me. And again,

if you watch the video, you can hear the noise of the snaps going by me as ISIS guys, they could see me and they're shooting at me. Luckily, I make it across the street. I pass the word to get a Humvee. I see them get into action to move a Humvee to go get the, uh, to go get the rest of the team. And, uh, yeah, Humvee went out there, got the little girl and, uh, and the rest of the team and made it across the opening there. Cause if they had tried to move across while carrying her, they would have all got gunned down. Um, that was a, that was a, you had one shot at running across the open and not getting hit. And so, um, if they had, if they had then gone,

cause like now ISIS is looking at that spot. Um, so I was able to get through that because they weren't necessarily watching that. So. At what point do you start to, does the adrenaline leave and you start to feel pain? Cause like a calf is a horrible place to get shot. Yeah. Yeah. Painful place. Yeah. Not the, not the deal. Um. not that I have experience, but no, I, uh, actually the, some of the, like the worst pain was, um, as soon as I passed the word to that, the Humvee, I realized that they were getting the Humvee going. I was like, okay, cool. Mission complete on my end. Um, there were other medics there and they just immediately jumped on top of me, cut off part of my pant leg and started, uh, shoving, twisting iodine soaked gauze into both of the holes in my leg

um and that was insanely painful um you had it hit the bone no just no that's good so i got extremely excessively lucky it was a bullet through and through just just meat um no bone if it had hit the bone, I probably would have, probably would have died because well, no, it would have, um, I wouldn't have been able to move. I would have had to crawl out of there. Right. And I wouldn't have been able to move fast enough. I probably would have ended up getting shot. Um, and yeah, so then I said, then this is like where things get weird too. Um, talking about just all the different volunteers and stuff that are there so i end up being taken back to a um a mosque that's being used as a clinic by the iraqi army and so i'm being treated by get this iraqi army medics like actual like doctors there were some

guys like high level officers yeah who are actual doctors yeah making sure yeah no like really uh really really great guys so muslim iraqi doctors who are officers in the military and mennonite nurses in their blue and like the blue dresses and the hair buns and all that believe it or not um shout out to ronda she's awesome shout out to ronda and daryl um really cool i don't i i don't mean this is a joke i honestly don't know if they watch youtube or not um but yeah so there was like a men in night uh charity that was out there doing medical work what a combo they would not carry weapons they were like nope we're total pacifists like we're not gonna carry weapons we're not gonna touch weapons but they're

up there mortars going off and uh yeah so it's like I have this Iraqi guy named Mohammed and then Rhonda from Pennsylvania. And they're the ones – Yo, mad respect to them. Wrong place to be a pacifist, but mad respect. Yeah, nothing but respect for them. They were really wonderful. But that was just the bizarre nature of where I was. And then – so that day i ended up riding with

the mennonites back up to erbil um to safety to safety it's safe it's as safe as you know realistically can be um i went to a hospital there in erbil and i had to spend the night in a ward filled with peshmerga kurdish peshmerga fighters who'd all been wounded in the war and so i had to spend one night there with them. And so I'm in the, I'm in the only empty bed down at the end of this dark sort of room. There's maybe 40, 50 guys,

wounded soldiers in this, in this ward. And so after visiting hours, they turn off all the lights and it's time, you know, until, until the next morning, there's still doctors and stuff on staff, but's sleep time and in the dark in the pitch dark i'm laying there alone no one there speaks english i was laying there alone and the screaming from

these wounded guys in the middle of the night is something i'll never forget. These guys were screaming for their mothers, weeping in agony. Guys who had been much more severely wounded than me. Guys who had been burned. Guys who had been shot in the hip. Guys with horrible, horrible injuries. Mine was very minor compared to these guys. So I spent a night just listening to screaming in the dark. And then in the middle of the night I'm, I'm laying there and, uh, I'm at the

farthest bed all the way deep in the ward and away from the door. So middle of the night, some point, I don't know what time the door opens and a guy walks in, in a suit and he has a flashlight and a file and he starts walking person to person and flashing the flat and shining the flashlight on their face going person to person. And I don't know how some weird sixth sense, he must've like known that I was looking at him. So he stops and then he just shines the light all the way down at the end, right on my face. The light stays on my face and he just walks straight up to me. And I'm like, okay okay this isn't cool you know like is this some assassin going to take me like i don't know like what like what the hell sounds like the men

in black yeah so i'm like what is this so this guy comes up to me and he speaks broken english and he's from kurdish intelligence and he's like i need to talk to you and he's like who are you and uh so we we sit there and have a conversation long story short he was concerned that i was isis the reason for that is be here's why i'm a white westerner with a beard the only guys with beards were isis and i was like i was not with the us military they're like so he was coming to make sure that i wasn't isis and so he he and i had a he and i had a conversation i just explained everything i opened up my phone showed him the photos and after after the first like five minutes he like relaxed i was like okay did you have a gun

in your face for the first he did not but he had he had a pistol on his hip yeah uh but i was also just laying in bed at the very beginning yeah yeah yeah don't leave anything out yeah uh so that yeah so i so i basically had a had a one hour podcast with this intel agent right there told him the same story should have recorded uh yeah it would have been great and so then he was uh and he was like awesome and then at the end he was just like he was just like thank you for helping my people yeah and walked out that's and that was pretty crazy and that was it and, yeah, a couple weeks later, I flew into Chicago, and my parents picked me up at the airport. Dude, had you ever done any work with the Kurds during any deployments? I guess you kind of didn't because you were in Afghanistan.

Yeah, no, I had never been to Iraq during my time in the military. I never got to work directly with the Kurds or Peshmerga or anything like that. So actually the next morning, the Kurdish doctors, they were going to do a debridement on my leg. And basically all that means is they're going to cut away all the dead flesh from the burn because when the bullet goes through you, it burns. And then little chunks of flesh don't get blood flow to them, so they die, right? And so you have like all this rotting flesh if they don't cut it all off. So they have to cut off more stuff. Yeah, so good times.

So they bring me into the room. They start kind of getting me ready. They're going to put me under with some painkiller of some sort of anesthesia, general anesthesia that was going to kind of make me go unconscious or something. As they're doing it, they were like asking me who I was and like, what are you doing? And I gave them like a 30 second version, like, oh, I'm here and I'm doing this. And they're like, oh, you're Peshmerga, you're Peshmerga. And I was like, no, no, no, I didn't work with the Peshmerga.

I was only with the Iraqi army. And I was like, I know the difference. I was like, no, no, no. And they were like, Peshmerga means those who face death. You are Peshmerga. Thank you for coming here and helping our people. And there was four medical staff there. Each one of them reached out and like touched me and said, thank you.

Wow. And then they put me under and did the debridement. And then, yeah. So they were like, no, no, you're Peshmerga. You face death. Yeah. The Kurds are so fascinating to me. They come up on so many different podcasts because you got this group of like 35 million people. They don't have a country, but they do.

They just don't have borders, right? They have their own military. They have their own intelligence. They have their own system. It's not like the way I understand it. It's not like in Iraq they're paying taxes to Iraq. I mean I'm sure there's some ways they're doing that, but like it's not like they're a citizen of those countries. And they're also like this amazing ally of the United States and all our stuff over there.

Yet we haven't supported them in actually getting – it's so strange to me. Yeah, I think a lot of that just goes back to the history of – and I'm not an expert on this by any means. But it just goes back to the history of people who were not from the region drawing arbitrary lines. And it's like, come on now. I think some of that is – a little bit of that is intentional because they want to keep – they want to keep places destabilized. That way they don't become great powers. That's a big reason. The other reason is just total incompetence and people are just fools.

And it's just a bunch of dudes sitting in a room going like, yeah, let's draw a line here. And like I've got other things to do. So let's just draw the line there. That sounds good. End of the meeting, right? And so then now there's war for generations in these places. I think that's unfortunately how a lot of this stuff happens. Yeah. I think that's unfortunately how a lot of this stuff happens.

Yeah. I think that's a good point. There's a lot of back office quarterbacking that seems to happen in our government. There's a line I'm thinking of that a recent podcast, my buddy Danny Jones did. He's got a great show and he did this sit down with andy bustamante who's been on his show for a long time he's been on my show a bunch cia guy and john kiriaku who was a very high level cia guy who ended up long story short cia ended up sending him to prison for 20 23 months for it had to do with like the the torture stuff he was against it then they tried to pin it on him that whole thing wow but like really interesting podcast and there were so many good stories in there one of them that john was saying because again like he was one of their this is the guy who

took down abu zubaydah like he was a big time big time spy for cia he was talking about i think it was a country in africa maybe it was the congo I think it was – no, it might have been Sudan, one of them. But he was talking about a conversation he had with one of their high-level government officials and trying to get him to understand the United States position and go along with what was going to be good for them or whatever. And more importantly, keep them from some of the dealings they were going to be doing for them or whatever and more importantly keep them from some of the dealings they were going to be doing with russians at the time and the guy looked at him and said you come in here and you offer us democracy the russians offer us food and and it just hit him like oh shit yeah we just have this idea of like we're just this is a great idea it's going to be good for you like a used car salesman or whatever. And like maybe it could be, but they're not – the idea is actually simpler.

They want to eat. They want sustenance for their citizens and stuff. And so I feel like a lot of the things we do around the world, it was just a very good symbol of like we're constantly trying to spread democracy or like solve these problems that sometimes don't even exist in some ways with what word it's like, it's like square peg and round hole, if you will. And in reality, there's just basic things people want. And if we could put our heads together, I don't know. And like, think about it that way. Maybe we could deliver more and you could make small steps towards better alliances and more stabilizations if you will yeah absolutely I think there's a there's a great lack of ignorance in sort of US culture in a way and it's I think a lot of it has to do with geography so

Americans we're we have Canada the north Mexico to the south everybody loves Mexican food you know Canadians are like our cousins you know and that's it whereas if you're a European you are surrounded by a bunch of other countries Mexican food, you know, Canadians are like our cousins, you know, and that's it. Whereas if you're a European, you are surrounded by a bunch of other countries, you can you can go on an eight hour road trip and hit seven countries if you want to, you know, in certain areas, right. And so they're much more aware of different cultures, different languages, and how their actions affect other people. And I think that, yeah, as, as, uh, just as a culture, we don't, we don't really think in, in those terms. And that's something that, um, I think

we really need to, to fix. I think a lot of times people don't understand history. They don't understand, um, these different conflicts and, and things that are, that are, that are happening. And, um, yeah, I think that's why like podcasts like this are, are great. So we can dive into, dive into some of those particulars and at least make people aware of it and then they can do some research on their own. And, and yeah. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And, and yeah, if, if podcasts like this can play a small role in that, that's amazing.

You know, I, I think, I think part of it, unfortunately, like everything else has to do with experience though, too. Like to take your geography example, even one step farther, I always say pretty often it's like we've never really been invaded and it shows, right? Like 1812, War of 1812, we got invaded and yes, we had terrorist attacks in 2001 and 1941, of course. But I mean like a full scale like military coming in here and doing something. We don't really know that because we do get to be the pawn to cross the way, right? Or across the pawn from all the other land. And when you look at other countries around the world, like you said, there are a lot of them.

They all have borders with each other. There's conflicts. There's cultural conflicts. There's things that have led to war. There's recent history of war. And like they have an understanding of how quickly that can suddenly be a problem. And I worry about that here because I don't want it. You had talked about this theme early on in this podcast a little bit,

but to go back to it, I don't want it to take a fucking 9-11, which happened less than a mile from here, for people to be like, oh, we're all on the same team, right? Like it shouldn't have to take that. But we end up getting into these comfortable times where everyone then decides the stupidest shit to fight over that then you know truck month is on at chevrolet get zero percent financing for up to 72 months on a 2025 silverado 1500 custom blackout or custom

trail boss with custom trail bosses available class exclusive duramax three liter diesel engine and z71 off-road package with a 2-inch factory suspension lift. You get both on-road confidence and off-road capability. Dirt road ahead? Let's go! Truck month is awesome! Ask your Chevrolet dealer for details. You know, unfortunately, it does take something like that happening for people to realize how quickly it can all be taken away. Yeah, absolutely.

So actually one of the projects – so again, fast-forwarding a little bit in sort of my life story. So I'm currently spending a year at Harvard University. I'm getting an MPA. Harvard. Harvard, yeah. Harvard. I'm working on my British accent. Harvard.

Working on my posh – my posh. Yeah. So I'm, I just completed the summer term and I've got two more semesters that you have to do at more than full time in order to knock out this degree in a year. And so one of the projects that I'm actually working on, it's something I'm building, it's called the Overwatch. And it's, it's going to be, it is an email based sort of newsletter that summarizes all of the things that are going on in the world of armed conflicts and international affairs. So it's sort of like a morning brew or the hustle but focused on armed conflicts and what's going on around the world because, for one – so I see this all the time. People will say – I'll talk to them about the war in Burma or I'll talk to them about other places I've been to. And they'll say, I've never heard about this.

How come nobody talks about this? Well, the reality is people do talk about this. There actually are journalists covering what's going at each other or whatever, right? And so these very important stories just get buried. And basically it's a once-a-week email where we summarize like anywhere from like 10 to 15 of major events that have happened that week related to armed conflicts and government and things like that. So this is a project of mine that I'm going to focus on building up more and more over the course of this year at Harvard. And eventually we'll probably expand it and things like that. But the idea is in this newsletter, we're not just putting sort of a quick blurb of what's going on. That's sort of the basis of it, right? So

like, here's a story, here's like three sentences, just a quick overview of like what's happening, let's say in Haiti, right? But then within there, we're going to put links. So you can click on this link and it's going to say, hey, here's an overview of what's going on in Haiti. Here's the summary of like the PNH and G9 going at each other. You're like, okay, well, what is that? Well, PNH is Haitian National Police and G9 is the, is the group of gangs, right? So you can just click on that and you're like, okay, cool. Here's 200 words, explain sort of what that is. And the idea is that over time, eventually you don't have to click those links anymore. You just kind of get the,

you understand it as you read it, like, uh, or in Bur yeah the the knla and the sac are uh in a battle right now and you're like well what does that mean and how like what is like who cares like what is like where is that and what's going on right and so we explain that kind of stuff um on these additional links and so it's it's news with context it's uh it's not really news it's more like world events with context and It's, uh, it's not really news. It's, it's more like world events with context. And so we're, uh, we want people to understand history, understand like what's going on. So you're, you're learning the news as you're, as you're, as you're reading it, as opposed to just, um, you know, cause it's a lot of times I'll see an article that comes through and I'm like, I don't know what that acronym means. And I'm like, wait, what's going on in Ethiopia? And like, what is the Tigray region? And like, why? You know, and it's like, this is even,

this is the world that I live in. Like I was a SEAL, you know, and I'm getting a, you know, an MPA at Harvard. And like, I still like, there's so many things I don't know. And I want to make sure that I know these things. And so anyway, I'm building, yeah, this thing called the Overwatch. That's very cool, man.

Yeah, it's called the overwatch.co is the website. And it's free. People can just go sign up for it. Just drop your email in there and unsubscribe anytime, obviously. And so you have people who obviously are going to be writing that with you and stuff too because here's the other really difficult part for anyone who would do something like that. You also got to figure out what the best information coming from the ground is too, right? Because you're not there in all these things and we know how one thing that all sides of

war have in common is that there's always some level of like slanting it towards our side yeah for sure no matter what for sure so uh one one of the one of the ways we're going to deal with that is when uh first of all we're going to try to pull the most uh reputable sources as possible um so we sort of we scour like many many many websites and we have some technology that helps us do that um so that's one and it's actually i was actually thinking it'd be actually almost we might do this um possibly in the future we might even do a segment where we kind of show like an actual piece of propaganda and we're like hey this is burma army propaganda and like we show that like this article was written by people who are

associated with, so people can kind of see that, or like, this is a Russian propaganda and kind of like exposing what some of these things are. Um, the idea of what we're, of what we're, um, doing is it, the intention is not to sway people in one way or the other. It's just, here's the groups, here's what they're fighting about um obviously if it's uh something written by al jazeera versus israeli times it's you know uh and it's something to do with the middle east obviously there's going to be a slant there yes and uh there's nothing we can do to you know pull away from that so we try to find the best reputable sources or at least put two two links there so people can kind of you know see what's going on is the general idea.

Overwatch.co. Overwatch, theoverwatch.co. Theoverwatch, okay. Yeah. Cool. I like that. Yeah, so that's something I'm working on. Because, yeah, even my work with Stronghold, I'm out there doing- Which is your foundation.

My foundation. I guess we can kind of just dive into that at this point. Yeah, actually, maybe the storytelling of it would help people. So you get injured in Mosul, you recover in the hospital. As you said, you flew back to Chicago. You had still been active military technically when you flew over there. So it's not like you had this foundation yet. When was the actual foundation born? The actual foundation itself was born 2018. So the next year is when it was, when the paperwork was filed. So, um, middle of, uh, so June, 2017, I get back to the U S and then, uh, at the end of the year,

I was actually in Thailand doing kickboxing. I was at a kickboxing camp for, for a month, just doing, uh, kickboxing. And, uh, I was using it just to get back in shape and, and, and everything. Um, and then when I was there uh basically i was uh invited by some people in burma and they said hey like we understand your background um the war in burma it in our area is going to kick off again there at the time there was a ceasefire in the eastern part of burma okay and they were like hey can you can you come help us we need help and this is where it all started for you This is where it had started ideologically years prior. And then now I'm being asked to come in and I just so happened to be there. And I was like, yeah, absolutely. And so, um, I ended up going into, uh, I ended up going

into Burma and working with the, I work with the Karen tribe. And, um, my first trip in, I ended up spending like three weeks deep in the jungle, just kind of getting to know these guys, seeing what I could do to help them. And it was basically frontline mentorship and helping them prepare for this war that was going to come. And the ceasefire that was in place between the Karen and the Burma army was already starting to break. And there was already like fighting, but the two governments weren't acknowledging that it was happening. So one step back on the sort of war in Burma. So Burma has been at war since the end of World War II. It's the world's longest running civil war.

It's been going for 70 years. Can we pull it up on a map, Alessi, for people so that they can follow along? But please continue after. So since when the British left at the end of World War two the basically the ethnic Burmese who control the center of the country their army which actually sided with the Japanese originally during the beginning of the war they switched sides when they realized the Japanese were losing and they fought alongside the British and so then the British basically left them in charge

with all the weapons and guns oh so that's that's to be close as a this is very much an oversimplification but that's basically what happened and so now the burma army controls the country um so imagine if the u.s military came in and we're like yeah we're getting rid of the police force we're getting rid of congress we're getting rid of the president and the general uh whatever general mark milley or petraeus or whoever what could go wrong yeah he is now in charge right nothing could go what could possibly go wrong So the guy who's in charge of Burma is a guy named General Miaoli. General what? Miaoli. Miaoli, yeah. Sounded like meow, meow. Meow, meow. Pretty close. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, dude. He's, yeah, not a fan. So anyway, he is the general of the army and they

control the country to an extent and they unfortunately um they are using sort of racial uh tensions to divide people and try to divide and conquer so um on the outskirts of burma there's about a dozen there's more than this but that's let's say about a dozen major tribes that live in the border regions of burma and the burmese are traditionally from the sort of central part of the country. So the central Burma army, they are trying to conquer all the ethnic minority tribes and all that that implies.

So there's genocide, mass rape, forcing children into the army, drugs, Burma army soldiers are taking drugs. That's a whole other story. It's nuts. I've seen it. And so the entire country is basically in a civil war. So then back in a couple of years ago, there was a sort of a fake government that was set up to where the Burma army was like, all right, we're going to make moves toward democracy, but it was fake. wasn't real they still controlled this fake Congress and stuff that they set up in a constitution so

they do all this stuff just to sort of show the world like oh yeah we're making moves toward democracy and so sanctions were lifted or eased against the Burma army so they used that to build up their strength and build up their army and then they continued to attack people so in 2017 they pushed out just under a million uh rohingya muslims from the western part of the country um and that was because the rohingya muslims didn't have any weapons to defend themselves all the other ethnic tribes did have weapons to defend themselves so it's ethnic cleansing it's ethnic cleansing it's it's genocide ethnic cleansing all of that and so the the thing that's different is a couple years ago the burmese or the Burma army, they basically got rid of all the fake pretense of the government anyway.

They got rid of the fake pretense of this fake government that was in place. But that pissed everybody off. That pissed off even the people who had supported the Burma army in the past. They were like, no, no, no. We were moving toward democracy. What are you doing? So they actually bought the lie themselves and so then when the burma got rid of it they were like all right cool now we see you guys now we see you for who you really are and so now the entire country is in like full-blown civil war it's not just the ethnic minority groups

it's the people in the center of the country now want the want the military gone and so the war which has been extremely violent for decades is now reached a fever pitch and it's much much worse how's it being fought is it being fought like that village to village type style where it's just random pockets here and there just here and they're all over the place shooting each other like like what's the what does it look like on the ground so what it sort of looks like is the different ethnic minority groups who have their own territory they're trying to push the burma army out from those territories so um the burma army they fight sort of like a conventional army um so they go and they're the

ones setting up the outposts deep in an area that they're trying to control they're the ones that run the patrols so they use the same tactics that we used in Afghanistan, for example. I'm going to be very clear, not the rape and the genocide and the murder. Okay. I'm going to be very clear on that. But as far as like military tactics, the Burma army, they're the ones with body armor and helmets and outposts and machine guns and air support. So they're sort of a conventional army. That's how they're trying to control the country. But all the ethnic minority groups, they're all sort of guerrilla groups, and they're trying to get rid of the Burma army from their territory. And so since – over the last couple of years since they called it a coup, all these ethnic minority groups are all fighting at the same time. And so now the Burma army for the first time is really losing some territory and really taking it on the chin and is against the ropes and is slowly losing territory as this is

being fought. So what used to just sort of be guerrilla tactics, trying to stop Burma army convoys from coming into Massacre Village and the villagers kind of run away. Now it's like the guerrilla groups, they're all getting together in large numbers and attacking the Burma army outposts to try to overrun them and get them out of there and knocking out the convoys and that stuff. So it's like a full-blown almost – it's still a guerrilla war but it's approaching more of a conventional war in a way because the numbers are so big. Before we get to what you're doing on the ground just from like a geopolitical standpoint here trying to analyze it, do you see – I mean you're talking about a war that's

basically been going on since World War II as you said. I mean you're talking about a war that's basically been going on since World War two as you said I mean that's insane to me that's like four generations but yeah do you see an end in sight I think potentially in the next three to four years you we could see the Burma army gone I think that's possible I can read it four years. Yeah. So the Burma army, they're just consolidating their forces and just getting tighter packed, tighter packed. And nobody from the outside is really helping. I think the Chinese are helping in some areas a little bit. The US isn't helping at all. And so the Burma army, they will lose a lot of territory over the next few years and they're going to sort of consolidate their power in the cities.

And so we'll see sort of what breaks at that point if the different groups are able to overrun the Burma army. So it's going to take time, and it's thousands and thousands more people are going to die before the Burma army are gone. Now, in the meantime there, once the Burma army is gone, now there's a power vacuum. There's people who in certain parts of the country are used to getting millions of dollars from drugs and there's hydroelectric power and there's an oil pipeline that goes from there to China. Oh, that's nice. So there's lots of different complications there.

And so you could end up having some of these groups fighting each other as well. So the place is gonna be very unstable for a very long time. Well, there's a question actually. This is something we see in all kinds of different conflict zones across the world obviously but you're talking about a country on the map here if we can pull that up for one sec you got it there lessee so burma is basically smack dab almost basically snap smack dab in between india and china two enormous world powers there's a pipeline as you said going to china as an example the way it has been explained to me by people

smarter than me about this stuff north korea essentially and all the horrible shit he does there is allowed to exist because of china like they they let that happen. They could stop that at any point, but they're like, you know, there's some sort of economic ties there. Has that been the case in, in Burma as well? There are definitely some ties between the, uh, Chinese. So my, my personal two cents on the situation is the, the Chinese are willing to sort of work with whoever's actually in control of Burma. Um, they want to make sure that the oil continues to flow they want to make sure that the hydroelectric power continues to go they've got development projects that they've invested in so they don't I don't I might just two cents on it and I could be totally wrong

on this but I don't think the Chinese really care who's in charge as long as they get along with them so some of the tribes up in the far north are actually being backed by the Chinese. The Chinese are giving them technology and weapons and drones and different things like that to attack Burma army positions. Because there's also a lot of rare earth minerals and mines. Burma is... Okay, imagine a country that's mineral rich and has all these resources that's basically been untouched for 70 years, right? All the other countries after World War II, yeah, have been mined and all that kind of stuff. Burma has not. I mean, there's gold and emerald and hydroelectric power and timber and rice. Yeah, where's your Rolex, bro? Come on. Yeah, yeah. I'm in the wrong business. Exactly.

Yeah, this is my $65 Timex from Target. I know you got that money hidden in the backyard. Don't worry about it. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, so it's like the – so it's a place that there's a lot of resources there that the world needs and wants. So China is definitely backing some of the groups, but they're not backing other portions of the groups. The Burma Army also has a lot of deals with all the different countries along the border. So the Burma army, because they control the supply routes, they control the borders. They're moving drugs, they're moving whatever they want to move. Wow. Yeah. So they call it, it's basically a form of crystal meth. The big

one there is a form of crystal meth called Yaba. And that's what they call it. It's like a pill. You put it on, you put it on your tongue, and the Burma Army soldiers will actually take this crystal meth. So it's sort of like the German military did during World War II. Just like the Nazis. Just like the Nazis, yes. Isn't it amazing?

Like all the bad guys, they're like, yeah, we're going to have our soldiers do drugs. Meth! Yeah, let's, meth is the answer. Meth is the answer. Yeah, but it basically,

it makes their soldiers in combat, makes them fearless, makes them hold the line, makes them aggressive. I wonder why. They get shot and they keep going. Yeah, but it's very, very common. So anytime the local guerrilla forces take a small outpost or something, there's just a bunch of crystal meth in the form of these Yaba pills. Yeah, and like you're saying this is so deeply entrenched for so long it's like it's like the cartels with mexico different different setup

but they've been there so long they're they they and the government are one in the same right and that's essentially what you have here with the military they're the cartel themselves they have these deals with other countries who let's be honest they don't give a shit what happens to the people in there it's all just economics for sure yeah that's what a what a clusterfuck of a situation yeah now imagine the drug let's let's so let's continue on with the mexico analogy um so let's say the mexican government or the mexican let's say the mexican military controlled mexico and they were the ones making drugs right and now let's say that they were selling drugs to the united states right and right on their northern border and then all the people in mexico

rise up because and and they're they're selling drugs directly to the u.s government right let imagine that right uh and now the people of mexico rise up to try and get rid of the military which has all this money and stuff and has fighter jets from america right uh and they're trying to rise up and overthrow this military well that's that's how intertwined this stuff is like now the u.s military is like we've given you fighter jets and we have major you know billion dollar drug deals that we're doing with you on an annual basis it makes things complicated it makes things really really murky and so as the locals are starting to win, things are getting really, really complicated. The Chinese are back in like little groups here, little groups there.

I really don't know what China's like actual backroom policy is on Burma. But yeah, it's – the place is the Wild West at this point. Now, what are you guys doing there? Because that's where we began. Obviously, you guys have now been on the ground there for years because it starts with this kind of like re-engagement on your part to where you get the opportunity to get called in. But like what's happening in Burma for you? So the organization I run, like I said before, is called Stronghold Rescue and Relief. And our primary focus in Burma is to do frontline

mentorship with security forces that are trying to protect civilians from this ethnic cleansing and genocide and things like that. Showing them basically how to use what they already have and bringing in like communications, different things like that that can help them. We put in a lot of early warning systems, star links, radios, and in these different villages and things. So villagers know which way to run when these attacks come, all this, all this different stuff. So we invest a lot into that. And we spend months on the ground living and working with these people, doing everything we can to make sure that they are capable of taking care of themselves when the next attempted genocide comes. Now the war has changed a lot because now these guys are fighting

back a lot more. So now we've really rolled into doing tons of medical support. And so in East Burma, we run, we run the only actual ambulances in East Burma. And I'll let you, I think we can pull this up on screen too. We had the video of the ambulance driving across the river. If we could pull that up on our, our instagram oh yeah good call because we got to make sure there's no the other stuff is censored yeah stuff like that okay great so this is this is where so this is in burma this is an eastern uh this is an eastern burma and this is just one of our ambulances crossing uh a river a few weeks ago um and so we have these souped up uh high luxes with uh medical supplies in the back and they are these are these are the only ambulances that are evacuating people so we're talking women stepping

on landmines soldiers getting shot uh pregnant women having complications they have no way to get to like the the rudimentary clinics that are in that are in burma like very very very few there's another really great ngo that has a has a really good clinic and it's but it's deep in the jungle um and what would normally take someone four days to walk we can get them in four hours now with one of these with one of these trucks all right let's play this real fast go ahead aless yeah so for people who are listening yeah you see this monster yeah you see this high lux pickup truck driving through the through this river we got chains on the tires we got snorkels um winches on these things yeah and like you're going up that engine's almost going

completely under the water um and that's these only that's these people's only hope if we don't have that vehicle there those people do not cross that river or they have to get carried across that river and there's patients in the back of that vehicle uh in the back of the ambulance there so we're transporting hundreds of people uh at this point every year we have four we have four full-time uh ambulances plus an ambulance boat as well um that transport people. There's like this huge man-made lake from a dam that was built by the Burma army that swallowed up like 100 square miles of ethnic territory, of course. So anyway, yeah, we do these medical evacuations. But what's really cool about these ambulances is they are run by the locals. So these are refugees, people who've lost their

villages, lost their homes. And it's their own tribe that's under attack, and they're the ones running the ambulances. Keep in mind, they've never had ambulances before in their life. And so our policy when it comes to helping in these places, I call it charity with dignity. And we're going to help you. We're not going to give you a handout, we're going to give you a hand up. I keep my teams extremely small, so it's like no that's not what i need it's like these people now have a job they have a skill set the local government and like village leaders now they're learning how all this stuff works yeah and now this is hopefully forever they'll have ambulances and we put in the very very first ones in eastern Burma. Yeah, it's a hard dance, guys.

Like you got to manage there where you're doing something amazing, especially like if you get a public platform, you start talking about it righteously. So there's so many people out there who are like, oh, my God, I want to help. And I love that. I love hearing that. Me as well. But like one example, a really good friend of mine, Paul Rosalie, who's been on this podcast now three times. When he was first blowing up with the first episode we did, so many people were saying, oh, I want to – he's in the middle of the Amazon jungle basically trying to protect it from the loggers and gold miners and all that. It's incredible work he does.

I was just down there with him in May for 11 11 12 days and it was really eye-opening but you know so many people hit him up and want to help but like he has to say no to pretty much all of them because it's similar to what you were talking about earlier like you know they think they're about that life but they're really about that moment and they're not even equipped to handle that moment that's no disrespect to the people that want to help, but he's sitting here going, honestly, the best way most people can help is you keep donating so that we can buy up the acreage, which that's exactly what they do. He owns 80,000 acres now down there and has all of his park rangers patrolling it who are native Peruvians who were born in the jungle and know absolutely every fucking thing you could know about that. Right. Exactly. And he's like, I don't need cowboys down here. Yep. All due respect. It sounds like you're in a very similar position with the type of people

that you're vetting. And I also kind of want to know, it sounds like you have both military and civilians going in there, like under your oh like people who who work for us yeah uh so obviously nobody's active duty military right but all of our yeah all of our frontline guys who actually go in to do like frontline mentorship and frontline um we're training frontline medics and we're there with them showing them how to save people's lives in those situations all of those guys are ex-military. Right. And they're all either from special operations or special units of one kind or another. And again, it's a very small team.

I don't send in tons and tons of people. The guys we have on the team, they're just absolutely stellar and extremely committed. They're about that life, as you say. And so we don't bring, civilians to sort of like do the work very much. We'll have a couple of admin people come in from time to time to help us with the organizing of the ambulances and things like that.

Uh, my wife actually, she's from the Karen tribe. Uh, so that's, that's another, that's another crazy story. Oh, you met her there. I met her in the jungle, but she, yeah, I'll tell that in a second. Let's tell that story when you get there. Yeah, so we'll have people come in to help with that a little bit. We brought in, like we were in Africa, we brought in a doctor to help us during that time in Africa. But for the most part, yeah, it's all ex-military guys.

Because my vision for starting this was I was like, hey, there's all these guys who are in the military and they have all this training and they're very frustrated because they want to help. There's no opportunity for them to help. And so I've created, you know, a small thing or it's, it's a big thing, but it's, uh, I only have a few openings for, for, for jobs. Cause I keep it like, again, I have to keep things very small, but, um, yeah, that's sort of the, that's sort of the, the, the main goal. So, yeah. So my wife, um, crazy story, how I met her. So I got off this like two or three week uh mission deep in the jungle in burma there the burma army was moving through this area and was like attacking these villages and such so we were we were helping repel that and helping making sure that everyone was

uh as safe as possible and um dealing with the dealing with the threat um we, we'll say. And, um, so I get off of this mission and, um, uh, the clinic that I was mentioning before, where we take our, where we take our patients in the ambulances. Um, I love going to the clinic because it's, you know, it's run by another Western NGO and they, uh, you know, they have, they actually have like warm blankets and they have dry blankets. Uh, and I was like, I want to get back there so I can like sleep under a hut instead of just in my tent and have a blanket. That would just be really, really nice because I've been sleeping in a hole for the last three weeks. So we travel through the jungle. It's raining.

We travel across this lake. It's raining on us the whole time. And the guys at the team were like, hey, can we just stop at this village? And like, we'll get to this place tomorrow. We'll get to the clinic tomorrow. Like, no, we're getting there today. I was like, no, we're going there. I was like, we're already on the, we'll get to this place tomorrow. We'll get to the clinic tomorrow. Like, no, we're getting there today. I was like, no, we're going there. I was like, I was like, we're already on the, like, I'm already wet. Like, let's just keep pushing through. Let's get there.

So we get, we get there late at night. It's like this, I don't know, like 13 hour travel day through the jungle. We, we get there the next morning. Uh, we wake up and, um, one of my, one of my friends who works with the NGO, she, she was coming over to say hi to us. And then she, there was this, uh, little, little Asian lady, uh, with their, who's, who's Karen. And I was like, oh, she's cute. And, uh, and then, uh, she started talking to the little, the little Korean lady started talking and I knew within like five seconds of her talking, I was like, if everything checks out, I'm going to marry this girl. So she spoke, so she spoke with a perfect American like accent. And so come to find out, she's from the Karen tribe. She went to Thailand as a war refugee when she was a visa. And so they went to Canada.

And so she grew up in Canada. And so she had just come back to Burma to basically find a way to help. And so she was at that clinic because she was gonna be teaching some English and some science to some of the medical students who were being trained there. And so, yeah, that's where we met in the middle of the jungle.

Middle of the Burma jungle. Yeah, yeah. And then, yeah, and that was it. And the middle of the jungle. Middle of the Burma jungle. Yeah, yeah. And then, yeah, and that was it. And then we got married. So there was that cool story. Good for you. Yeah, the cool thing is her dad actually works in this – is from the same villages and the same area that I've been working in for years at that point. And they're from the same – they're from the same villages that I would go through and have tons of mutual friends from the – they have tons of mutual friends.

So when I was like, oh, yeah, I'm marrying – so when I told the tribal leaders, like, I'm marrying this girl, they're like, oh, that's the granddaughter of this guy and the son of this guy. Like, yeah, that's my best friend. And like, oh, yeah, this is – he was like our tribal leader back in the day. And like, So pretty cool. That's really awesome. And like obviously in the middle of that happening though, you're in the middle of this war that's going on. I'm looking at a video like this. I'm seeing the work you do.

I'm hearing about it from you as well. And I'm wondering, I got to think you guys are in the crosshairs of the military who probably doesn't like you. Like how much of a threat – like have you guys had some serious close calls? Have you lost some people? I don't know if we can show this video, but it's up there on Instagram. It's on our Instagram. So I'll just tell the story. So the ethnic, so, so, so the current people that we're working with, they were working, they were doing a joint operation with, um, one of

the other, like the tribal groups, and they were trying to take back this big town or medium-sized town from the Burma army. And, um, so during this battle, we were there, um, so it was like urban combat and we were there maybe, you know, 150, 200 yards behind like the very, very front. And we had a casualty collection point set up and we had some medics there. And, um, there were three, uh, three white guys there, um, myself and two other guys. And as the fighting happens, civilians, of course, they start to leave the city. Um, and so as they're leaving the city, um, somebody who was a sympathizer with the Burma Army, they – as soon as they got out of there, they found a cell phone tower or whatever. They called the Burma Army and said, hey, in this particular building, there's three white dudes.

Oh, boy. So we don't know that this is happening, of course. Now, the Burma Army, they have fighter jets and bombers and drones and all that stuff. So at the time, uh, and that particular day of the battle, I actually started getting pretty sick. Um, I had like a fever. So I was in this building. Um, I laid down, there were two other guys that were with me. They were also laid down. We were just kind of like just relaxing between, you know, patients and things like that. And, um, we didn't realize this was happening, but basically the Burma army, they cut all the cell phone towers.

They sent three fighter jets on a totally different flight path. So these fighter jets would come in and they would bomb where they knew the forces were in the town. But we could always hear them coming, right? Because they were going to come in and they're going to bomb certain locations within the town. But they did an entirely different flight path to where we could not hear them coming. They came in low and fast from an entirely different direction after cutting the cell phone towers. So the first thing that we knew that we were being targeted was the roof blew off the building that I was in. So we're laying there on the ground, the windows and the roof and half the walls above us just blow up just just gone so what the burma army does is they'll they'll bring in fighter jets um and

they'll you know actually i'm not gonna i'm not gonna talk about that particular tactic that they use um just because yeah i'm just not gonna talk about that yeah so anyway so they they came in the bomb hit blew off the rooftop and um the the idea is to sort of wound everybody inside. And then they bring in the other bombs to kill anybody who's coming in to get the wounded and anybody who's stuck. That's when they kill them. So the first bomb goes off. We luckily were all laying down at the time. And so the roof blows off.

The walls blow out. The windows blow out. I look over at the guy next to me, Adam, and we just like, we're like, oh, all right, time to get out of here. So I literally grabbed my cell phone. Cause I was the only thing I was holding. I was in, I was wearing flip-flops at that exact moment too. And we run out of the building. We jump into a trench and this is on video. So this is on our Instagram. If people want to go check it out, the, um, and, uh uh the next fighter jet comes in and we hear it and i actually i just turned my phone on just kind of put it up above my head and then just got down on the trench the next fighter jet comes in you hear the you

hear the engine screaming and it comes in boom hits the building blows it up right where we had been right where we had just been sleeping or sitting 60 seconds earlier and so we're in the trench and then the third jet comes in, boom, hits the building again. They had every intention of just killing us. Yeah. And so then we start, so actually at this point,

I'm sorry, I was not wearing my flip-flops. I was barefoot. I ran out of the building barefoot. Even better. So we ran, so we had to run out of this area because these airstrikes are coming in and now we know the aircraft are going to come back

and they're going to start strafing with machine guns. So we run out of the area, the aircraft start coming in and start strafing where we had just been with machine guns. So I'm running barefoot through like broken glass and like, uh, rubble of this village in the middle of the jungle. Um, and we get out of there, these airstrikes come in and all that stuff. And, um, all of our gear was completely blown up. Um, everything was blown up. So, um, luckily one of the guys went back into the rubble after the airstrikes had stopped and they found my bag had a bunch of holes in it, but my passport was good to go. My wallet was good. So I was like, okay, very cool. So I had that, but everything else was blown up, had no shoes. Um, and, um,

yeah, so that was very, very, very close call close call these are the this is my point though these are the kinds of threats that you do this great work under though you know and while that wars you just said you're hopeful it could end in three or four years i mean that's a lot of time and a lot of desperate war measures that could be taken between now and then i i i hope you guys stayed as careful as you can over there it's amazing work it's just like oh people at home i mean i'm sure you can understand like the stakes that you're putting yourself in the middle of at all times it's it's truly incredibly courageous man yeah and then and then that goes back to that whole you got to be about the life not about the moment and um you

know so for me uh right now i'm uh like i said, I'm knocking out this master's at Harvard. And part of the reason I said yes to it when I got it was I was like, I need a breather. Because I could feel my own sort of sanity slipping away a little bit. I was like, man, it's just so much going on. I need a breather. And so the thing is, even during Christmas break, I'm going to be back over there helping and working and stuff. And then as soon as – I'll get back to Cambridge a couple days before classes start again. And that's my intention.

And then also I won't go to the graduation either. I'll just go. Go straight there. Yeah, as soon as exams are done next day, back over there. Yeah, because we have to be over there before the rain starts at the end of May. So, yeah, so that's sort of what I'm doing. And that's where your focus is right now in Burma specifically. Yeah, primarily Burma.

We've got a team going into Malawi next month to work with anti-poaching park rangers. Yeah, so there's civilians in these communities that are caught in the – that are in the middle of these – Where was that? What's that? Where was that? Malawi in Africa. Yeah, so we do small missions, small temporary missions to other places as well. And the larger we get, we'll be able to put in more permanent stuff. We've done stuff in Haiti. Um, I was, uh, we were in Israel right after the October 7th attacks up in Northern Israel, um, helping, um, the Israeli, uh, people with, uh, medical support and stuff like that. And just bringing in a ton of medical supplies. And so we're, you know, in these abandoned, uh, you know, abandoned neighborhoods because all the, all the Israeli civilians had to leave.

And then the IDF they're set, they're sitting there firing artillery back into Lebanon as, as Hezbollah's firing rockets and, you know, hitting the, hitting the area around us and Hezbollah fighters are jumping the wall. So we were pretty close to that. I was in, uh, Kiev as the Russians were, uh, advancing on Kiev. Uh, we were helping. You were there. I was there. Yeah. Yeah. So we went in after the, after the invasion started and I went into Kiev to help, uh, basically prepare the medical, uh, uh, situation there. And then basically there was civilians who, who had never, you know, they'd never been in war ever.

And these, some of these, one guy was talking to us and he was, he was like, sort of like crying as he was telling us about it. He's like, he's like, I don't want to fight in a war. He's like, I'm a computer. I was like, I'm a graphic designer, you know? And we're like, Hey hey man like we got you and we just you know we're kind of like helping uh helping uh prepare them for for what was coming thank god the russians stopped and turned around uh so that's good i was very happy about that but yeah where you mean like where you were so we were so we were in kiev the russians were advancing on the outskirts of kiev

they were in like northern kiev so i never personally dealt directly with the Russians. I never was like under direct fire from them. You're saying at the beginning they moved tactically. Irpin in particular, which is where all the mass rapes and the mass genocide and slaughter of civilians happened. It was those Russian troops that were in Bucha and Irpin. So it's sort of like a suburb of Northern Kiev. I was in Central Kiev waiting for the Russians to get to that point. So we were helping prepare for the Russians getting to that point. So that's when I say, luckily, theian military stopped them and then the russians turned around and went back north to belarus and so we didn't have to be involved in anything which i was very grateful for have you been back there at all uh back to ukraine

yeah uh no we had we had a presence there for i think the first uh four to six months i think about six the first six months or so, we go in right when there's like the catastrophe, right when things are chaotic. And then if that location has a ton of other support coming to help them, we just, we kind of, our main focus is on Burma. Yeah. Yeah. I had a guy, Mark Turner in here during episode 162, he was explaining the Ukraine side of it because he has a foundation called the Overwatch Foundation. He's a Scottish-American recon marine. Oh, that's great.

It's the Overwatch Foundation. The Overwatch. That's great. But he was there like day one of Ukraine and throughout the course of this war and I think until very recently. I'm not so sure he's been going back in the last six months. But he was training battalions of citizens that you know now had to fight and he's just like dude they're they're fighting the the war is so stagnant in in from like an urban warfare context that you just have

all these fucking people dying but they're fighting over like 20 yards for two weeks they're not fighting over like oh we're gonna take this town or whatever and it's just so sad to see like you know you could call it a stalemate war the problem is like all these people are still dying in the middle it's not just like they're standing there you know looking at each other it's it's really to me the more i hear out of there the more it's like the worst side of just like war for war. You know, I, I, I hate to see that, but I guess like if you're coming in there at the beginning, it's, it's been a while, but I probably should get someone in here to talk about wherever the hell that is now. Cause it's just, it's, it's a crazy, crazy situation. Yeah.

Where the exact thing is so I I my personal prediction pretty much within the first like month or two months that I was there after the Russians pulled back from from the northern key I was like okay I kind of predicted I was like this is gonna turn into it into a big stalemate the Ukrainian forces do not have the strength to push the Russians out but the Russians also do not have the strength to take all of Ukraine. And so, um, it's like what happens when an immovable or what happens when an, uh, unstoppable force meets an immovable object, right? It's just, it's chaos. And yeah, so you're dealing with, um, trench warfare and some of the videos. I don't know if you've seen some of the videos and stuff coming out of the fighting. It's unbelievable. Um, and the Ukrainian

people are just incredibly heroic and like just fighting back. It's like the people themselves are just – are unbelievably determined to defend their territory. them and all of this stuff yeah and it's their land you know like like i i have tremendous reverence for that and most of all i'd like to just see cooler heads prevail and see some sort i don't know what you call it like some sort of deal or whatever to just like stop this stuff it's it's it's why i mean we're more we're more than two and a half years into this now yeah like how much longer are you gonna do this yeah i uh you know i always say people talk about war and it's these wars constantly happen i always say you don't go to war to end all war you go to war to purchase a limited amount of freedom for a limited amount of people for a limited amount of time and then you got to do it again because the simple reality is that evil persists. The motto of our organization is the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good

men to do nothing. One of the reasons why I love that quote is because it speaks to the nature of evil nature. The nature of evil is that it's always expanding. It's always pushing. Every time you push back and you push it back a little bit, you didn't get to the root of it. It's going to come back. The weeds are going to grow again. You got to do the weed whacking over and over and over again. And that is the difficult pill to swallow. Everybody wants world peace. Everybody wants these things. It's not going to happen. That's like saying you want a farm that has no weeds. It's not possible. And so the reality is you need to, we as a society need to secure what we have and immediately stomp down when there's the smallest amount of um actual evil i'm not talking about dissent or you know

and so there's a fine line i'm not talking about totalitarianism obviously i'm just saying you see you see a jihadi group pop up take take them out immediately right away. Don't negotiate with them, don't deal with them. Like just get rid of them, stomp the weeds out right away. You see, you know, Russian aggression somewhere, stomp it out right away, deterrence. And we as a society, like we have to have this mindset shift because people, they're like, oh, I'm so tired of the war. I'm so tired of the war.

Like we gotta find something. And it's like, yeah, everybody's tired of the war and nobody's so tired of the war. Like, we got to find something. And it's like, yeah, everybody's tired of the war. And nobody's more tired of the war than the soldiers who are on the front line fighting it. They're like, dude, yeah, but how do you make peace with somebody who wants to come in and kill all of you? You know, like, how do you meet someone halfway who wants to exterminate you? Oh, it's hard. You know, it's impossible. It's impossible.

So you have to fight. And so then people say, well, you know, look at the cycle of violence, you know, look at this and that, you know, and it's like, no, dude, this is, you're fighting for survival. And there's, you know, some wars are just purely fighting for survival and it's, and it's frustrating and it's annoying. And it's not, of course that's, that's putting it very lightly. Um, but yeah, it's like you have the Russian army in the Ukraine situation. It's like trying to take over another country. It's like, dude, no. Like no.

Yeah, you can't do that. And it's like you can't do that. And the only way to stop them is to fight them and kill them. You can't negotiate. Now, don't get me wrong. We're in a position now in the Ukraine ukraine russia conflict where you go all right russians can't win ukrainians can't win necessarily um and so now this is what you were to get to your point cooler heads need to prevail there needs to be some sort of a deal struck so we

can end the war because at this point russians aren't going to take ukraine ukrainians aren't going to push all the russians out how do we you know how do we let's let's let's figure this out now instead of six months from now because whatever the deal looks like six months from now it is that's exactly how things are gonna look right now you know what i mean like the battlefield is not going to shift that much um it's just not and i think it's great you know ukrainian troops they just went into russia which i think is pretty cool they're hitting back um you know that's they go in they let's just say hypothetically you have the Ukrainians they go into Russia they take some territory they hold it um now you're in a position where you can say cool we'll withdraw our thousand

troops when you withdraw your thousand troops from there how about that okay cool a little bit of leverage exactly so I don't know if that's the strategy but um you know i just can't get out of my head with these situations and we'll stay with the russia ukraine example because we're on it but like you have all these people fighting each other in the streets you have the ukrainians defending their land and you have the russian soldiers many of whom are 18 year olds who have just been signed up for service and told to get the fuck in there yeah you know coming in and the bottom line is when you look at war and it's cynical but it's also kind of true so much of these wars are fought between a bunch of people who are told to be where they are by a few people in suits in a room who determine that this is our policy and of course guess what if someone in that room is like hitler

or something guess what fuck you like you. You're getting murked today. But it still makes you wonder like how much of this is just the egos can't check their ego at the door, so to speak. And I know that – like Vladimir Putin, his whole life is ego. There's no checking his ego at the door. So, you know, how do you tell a guy to do something that he's going to think is tantamount to castrating himself? It's hard. Yeah. I think that whether you're dealing with international relations, interpersonal relations, I think that ego is probably the single biggest, most toxic that that is sort of the fundamental human flaw and if you want to take us on like sort of like a deep sort of philosophical um angle on this um so if you look

at the like the original story in the bible like the garden of eden right so you look at this this ancient story um who knows if it's literal who knows if it's not right like it's um but the point is uh satan or the snake whatever um he tells adam and he says uh he says eat this fruit and you will be as gods knowing good and evil right and so what he's doing is he's saying you if you want to be god what he was appealing to their ego he was saying you're going to be god you're going to know good and evil you're going to be able to make the decisions reality is no longer going to be objective it's whatever you decide you're going to be God. You're going to know good and evil. You're going to be able to make the decisions. Reality is no longer going to be objective. It's whatever you decide, you're going to know good and evil. And when you look at what... They were basically saying,

I want to be a God too. And when you look at many of the problems in society, it's individuals trying to play God. It's on a grand scale, it's Hitler, it's Putin saying, I am God, I will take this country if I want to take this country. On a personal level, individuals, it's saying, I'm going to completely reject scientific reality or just the reality of what's in front of me. And I'm going to just make up my own rules. And whether that's gang members saying, I'm'm not gonna, you know, be a part of society. I'm, I am God.

I make, I decide what's right and wrong. And then people start to convince themselves of the evil things that they do. They are completely convinced that they are, um, the good guys. I was talking with a, um, he's a, he's a pastor now, but he used to be a gang member. And I was talking to him. I was like, what is the, what, what is the draw of these gang members wanting to sort of be the bad guy? Like, what's the draw of that? He's like, no, no, no, you're asking the wrong question.

He's like, none of the gang members think that they're the bad guy. They all think that they're the good guy. And then you hear the whatever, rap music or the culture, and it's, you know, no, man, I'm trying to get this bread to feed my family. And it's like, no, dude, you're selling drugs because you want a nice car, but they convince themselves of these things. Putin, like, no, I want to, I want to whatever, you know, rebuild the glory of the, of the Russian empire and reunite what is, what is rightfully ours. No, dude, you just, you just want to be a tyrant.

You want to play God. And so I think that that's a important lesson for us all to look at in life. The things that frustrate us when we get frustrated with other people. It's like we got to look at your own life and go like, okay, where am I trying to be God? Because that, I think, is like the original human sin in a way. And it just causes the original human flaw. And that's what causes all this evil. From that, I think that's an incredible point and a great place to close it.

You've told some unbelievable stories today. We've been talking for almost three and a half hours. So this has been amazing, man, and I love the work you're doing. We're going to have the links to your foundation down in the description below so people can check it out and they can donate there as well to help fund what you're doing. Can I just say one quick word about that? Please, yes. donate there as well to help fund what you're doing yeah can i just say one quick word about that yeah so with with stronghold rescue um we we kind of a bit of a unique model what we do is if people want to support us we say uh that's great why don't you just give like 50 cents a day or dollar a day right so we raise 99 of our money from people who sign up uh basically for a monthly

uh subscription it's just a monthly donation uh to to us to us. It's a small amount and it really, really adds up and it really, really helps us. So, and if you do that, we have a t-shirt, like a really good like athletic fit t-shirt we'll send you. If you sign up to do that, then yeah, strongholdrescue.org if people want to check it out. All right, well, keep doing what you're doing. And I love the work and I'd love to hear more about it

in the future on the show if you're down. Beautiful, yeah, let's do it again. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode.

Before you leave, please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. It's a huge help. And also, if you're over on Instagram, be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory Podcast or also on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. Both links are in the description below. Finally, if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes, use the Julian Dory podcast playlist link in the description below. Thank you.