Julian Dorey Podcast - [VIDEO] - Ex-Delta Force Mercenary "GRIM REAPER" - Dale Comstock | 188

Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up, guys? If you're on Spotify right now, please follow the show so that you don't miss any future episodes and leave a five-star review. Thank you. We drove into an area that's about seven kilometers that the Taliban owned. It was their territory. You can't make a left or right turn. You got to go north or south down this road. And we had to stop. We heard the Taliban on the radio. They had set up ambushes on both ends of our small convoy. And they were getting ready to hit us. And then I realized, oh, shit, the only way we're getting out of this is we've got to run the gauntlet now. And I remember when we turned around that night, my Afghan interpreter was with me. Dude, as soon as I started driving, I said, shoot anything where a bad guy can hide behind it. I said, don't relent until we get out of this thing.

Starting point is 00:00:35 So as I'm sitting there, I'm watching the vehicles go one by one. The firefight starts. I've got time to watch the show and think about it before it's time for me to start driving my vehicle, right? And all of a sudden, I thought, you know what? I've been in a lot of ambushes, but I've never actually had to deliberately drive into an ambush to get out of it. But I have no choice this time. And then I started thinking, man, what if I don't make it out of this one? You know, I am driving the one with the antennas.

Starting point is 00:00:55 And so I thought about my family. And I took the moment. I said, okay, I want to visualize every one of my children's face, everybody's face, my wife, my kids, one by one. See their face, last time maybe, their face, their face, their face, their face, their face. And then what I want to do is get that all out of my mind. So I'm no longer distracted by that. Right. And knowing that would be maybe the last time I ever think about it or see him.

Starting point is 00:01:24 So, Dale, do you refer to yourself as a mercenary these days yes no yes no okay well so let me kind of clarify that a little bit um funny to bring that up so bbc came to my home in florida last may and they want to film a documentary about me right they got this fetish about mercenaries and it stems from something I did back in 2015, 2016. I made international news. I was part of a strike team that was contracted by a foreign government to go after terror targets. And so we made the news because of that and some of the fallout from it. But so they've been kind of interested in me for the last several years. And then with the invasion of Ukraine by the Russians and the Wagner Group, right, the Russian mercenary company, that kind of piqued their interest more.

Starting point is 00:02:19 They want to know more about mercenaries. And so we had a few conversations. I wasn't looking to do anything, but they kept calling me and asking me questions. Long story short, they thought it would be a great idea if they could do a documentary about me and my life and this world of mercenaries. So the word mercenary, sometimes it is synonymous with the word prostitution. It's one of the oldest professions in the world, but they have a place. And so I don't think of myself as a mercenary. And in fact, I remember when we did the interview, they came to Florida.

Starting point is 00:02:59 They watched me train and do all kinds of stuff with soldiers and others. And then when we actually did the interview, the journalist, they brought a journalist. That was a surprise attack. I wasn't expecting the journalist to show up. The producer showed interview, the journalist, they brought a journalist. That was a surprise attack. I wasn't expecting the journalist to show up. The producer showed up, the camera crew. Oh, it's from the BBC. And then like, oh, by the way, we brought so-and-so. She's a journalist, and I recognize her because she's been trying to hit me up on LinkedIn for a long time.

Starting point is 00:03:22 And I just kind of felt a little animosity. I could feel there was a little tension there, right? And wasn't anyway she was looking for the aha moment and so when we started the first interview she uh she started using words like assassin and bombs and i had to hit the brakes right there goes last stop whoa wait what you know so you know i said first of all i'm not an assassin um you can call me a mercenary that's's legit. I literally, I hire myself out as a professional soldier to do things that other people can't do. They don't have the skill sets to do. And I'll caveat that with, I don't murder people. I don't do anything illegal. Okay. When I go after people, they're bad people. It's the difference between murdering and killing.

Starting point is 00:04:02 Yeah. For sure. Yeah, exactly, right? You know, murder is because I don't, I'd kill anybody for money, but I don't do that, right? So, you know, if I'm going to go after somebody, I got to be able to sleep at night too. Don't look at this guy too excited. Don't make me come across that table. No. So anyways, I told her, listen, I said, I'm not a mercenary. I said, I'm a professional soldier. I said, I'm not a mercenary. I said, I'm a professional soldier.

Starting point is 00:04:32 I said, I will make bombs. I make explosive charges. Okay. Everything that I do is I always have, I'm always thinking about collateral damage, minimizing that and making sure that whatever I do is targeted, is direct. And again, it's, you know, I'm going after just the target and i don't hurt anybody else in the process so um am i a mercenary you could say technically yes um i don't care a lot of people think oh my god he's a mercenary it's like call me a hooker so what you know i mean two oldest professionals in the world we need them both right so they've kind of helped create it's truck month at gmc tackle the open road with added confidence in a 2025 sierra 1500 pro graphite at zero percent financing for up to 72 months with an available 5.3 liter v8 engine 20 inch high gloss black painted aluminum wheels off-road suspension with available

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Starting point is 00:06:14 Man, okay. Whew. Better sit back, hold on to your hats, buckle up, put out your cigarettes, it's going to take a minute. Yeah, all day. Yeah, so what happened was my mom and dad met. My dad was in the army for 20 years. And I grew up most of my childhood in Germany. My mother's German. And I lived in the military. I grew up in the military culture for 20 years in Germany,

Starting point is 00:06:37 the military bases during the Cold War. Literally, that's all I knew right up until I graduated high school. And when I graduated high school, my dad also retired, and he got a job up in Menlo Park, San Francisco Bay Area. Oh, yeah. And with an electronics company, right, because he was in the signal corps in the military. And so we moved up there, and suddenly I am outside of the military culture. I'm now in this other world that I don't recognize. I'm going to school with kids that are not like the kids I'm used to. I'm going to this other world that I don't recognize. I'm going to school with kids that are not like the kids I'm used to. I'm going to, you know, be blunt about it.

Starting point is 00:07:09 At least when I was growing up in the military, you know, kids were different. You know, we grew up like little islands, like in Germany, for example, little islands of Americans, you know, and all we had was each other, you know, and we had, you know, we had that discipline, that regimentation from our fathers in the military life and the culture. And you got used to that, you know. And then suddenly, I'm in this cast in this world where the kids are a little different. You know, they're not they don't have that military, that regimentation, if you will. And I'm you know, I know people go, you know, whatever. They're going to have something negative to say about that. But there's a lot, there's a lot of good

Starting point is 00:07:46 that comes out of that. You know, the military is really one of the last bastions of society where, and don't listen to all the news and the crap out there. Racism is not alive and well at all in the military. In fact, it's very integrated. You really hardly ever come across any incidents of racism, man. We're all brothers and sisters, man. It's just the politicians want to exploit that, and it's their way of breaking down this last institution where morality and ethics and patriotism still flourish on a daily basis. But anyways, I got used to that lifestyle and I wanted to go back. That's all I could think about is I want to go back to the military life, you know, and I wanted to be a soldier like my dad. And so when I was 17, a year before I graduated high

Starting point is 00:08:38 school, I snuck off and went down to the recruiter's office. Now, my dad had plans for me to go to college. And reason why, my dad graduated high school in 11th grade. He didn't graduate. He finished high school in 11th grade. My mom in the ninth grade. Nobody on either side of the family had college degrees. And we were poor white people at the end of the day. And so my dad wanted me to be the first one to go to college. That was his plan, his dream. My son, he's a college degree. American dream. Right? And I had bad news. I didn't want to tell him, but I was like, I don't want to go to college that was his plan you know his dream my son he's american dream right and i had bad news i didn't want to tell him but i was like i don't want to go to college i'm not a good student you know i was barely making d's and c's and f's in high school you know and uh i just was

Starting point is 00:09:14 not inclined for that you know for school um not yet anyways so i went to recruiters he found out about it it's too late i re-enlisted um and the reason I reenlisted, I was looking at the TV guide in my house one day. And one of the advertisements in the center of the guide was an advertisement for the U.S. Army Rangers. And it had this guy coming out of the jungles with patrol cap, camouflage, Car 15, rappel rope. And I said, man, that's me right there. I got to do that. And so down to the recruiter's office, signed up, told my dad. And then I realized I broke his heart, disappointed him. And now I felt really bad. I'm like, damn, I can't unring that bell. So

Starting point is 00:09:55 I said, look, dad, I said, I want to be a soldier like you. This is what I know. This is what I grew up into. It's the only thing that feels comfortable to me. And I said, but I promise. I said, I promise you, I will get my college degree. I'll do that too, right? And so a year later, I went in. I ended up, I didn't end up in the Ranger Battalion because they pulled a quick one on me at the last minute. Oh, by the way, there's no Ranger slots, but man, there's 82nd Airborne Division slots. And you can always go to Ranger school. You just tell the sergeant, Major, you want to go to Ranger school? He'll send you. What a big lie, right? It doesn't work like that, but i didn't know that's how they get you yeah they got me right so i ended up in an infantry company in the 82nd airborne

Starting point is 00:10:30 division right and then finally in a lurk platoon long range reconnaissance platoon and uh for my first four years so now i'm sitting here and i'm married um you know i've got a wife and i've got how young were you married so I married my wife at 21, my first wife of many. She was actually older than me. Yeah, we were talking before the podcast. You represent like every nationality around the world at the end of the day. Yeah, absolutely, man. So yeah, this one happened to be actually was French Creole, black, right? And so we had a daughter together. My daughter was pretty young at the time. And I hit a crossroad. I was like, do I stay in the military or do I get out? Because I

Starting point is 00:11:05 felt like, you know, I'm really good at digging foxholes and filling them back up and sitting under a tree for three days, cleaning my rifle, you know? And I just didn't feel challenged. What years are we in right now? So this was 1981, 82, 83. And so at this point, I'm like, okay, do I stay in or do I get out? And here's, so I call my mom and my mom and my dad live in Sacramento, California. I go, hey, mom, listen, I'm thinking about getting out of the Army. Would you mind putting up with me and my wife and my daughter for about three or four months so I can get on my feet?

Starting point is 00:11:37 And my mom, in her harsh German accent, was like, no, not no, but F no, right? I said, damn, mom, thanks. I thought you loved me, but my mom's like that. My mom loves me, but she's got limits, right? I said, damn, mom, thanks. I thought you loved me, but my mom's like that. My mom loves me, but she's got limits, right? And that was a limit for her for sure. So I'm like, well, I don't have a choice. So I got a letter at the same time from Delta Force, S-F-O-D-D. And by the way, they send these letters out to everybody that's eligible to apply. Okay, let me carry out that. There's guys to apply. Okay, let me caveat that. You know, there's guys around, yeah, Delta Force One, I mean, they sent me a letter.

Starting point is 00:12:08 No, that's not how it works. They don't want you. They send everybody a letter because they canvas all the military records, all. And they look for guys that meet the minimum qualifications, which are pretty stringent. And if you meet the minimum qualifications, then they send you a letter and go, hey, you met the minimum qualifications. Would you like to apply to try out to go to assessment and selection, right? So it's a very lengthy process. And what's the pass rate to get in there? All right. Look, all right. So think about it like this. They canvassed the Marine Corps, Air Force, Army, everybody, right? Everybody.

Starting point is 00:12:45 It's eligible. Out of those, everybody they've canvassed, they only select 100 guys twice a year to try out, right? To even try out. To try out. My class, when I went through, my class, for whatever weird reason, had 110 guys. I'm not sure why we had 10 extra guys, but we had 10 extra guys.

Starting point is 00:13:04 Of the 110 that started, six of us completed the course. Of the six that completed the course, three of us got selected. I was the youngest Delta operator ever at the time at the age of 23 to get selected. The other two guys were 33. So think about that for a minute.

Starting point is 00:13:18 We've had some classes where one guy has made it or no guys have made it. Okay, that's how difficult it is. When people talk about SEALs and BUDs and blah, blah, blah blah let me tell you what the difference is between you know and you said it right i'm not gonna say it but you know some of them are my friends i don't want to beat me up either but uh but here's the difference right with delta force selection and let's say buds for example um and you see it all the time right seals they're all on the beach running around you know and they're carrying boats and rolling around in the sand, getting wet,

Starting point is 00:13:46 you know, and singing and yelling and hollering and crying, pissing and moaning, doing flutter kicks in the waves. But they're doing it as what? As a group, right? And so when you're in a group, what can you do in a group? You can draw power, motivation, you know, inspiration from the other guys. When your crank is dragging in the dirt, you're like, I've had enough, and you see Joe Snuffy over here that's worse than you, but he's hanging in there.

Starting point is 00:14:06 You kind of get inspired to keep going on, right? You don't want to quit before he does. Right. But when you go through Delta Force selection, it's an individual effort. You're not with any group. You're all by yourself. Every day, all day long, everything you do is by yourself. Moreover, you do not know the standards of performance, right?

Starting point is 00:14:23 They don't tell you what they are. They give you the task. What do you mean they don't tell you what they are. They give you the task. What do you mean they don't tell you what they are? You don't know what they are. For example, what they'll do is, here's the task. They don't tell you when it ends. What's an example task? Okay, for land navigation, for example.

Starting point is 00:14:35 Okay? So think of this. You're in the mountains of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, wherever, right? Sorry to hear that. They're going to tell you, okay, today you're going to start at this point. And your next point, here's a grid coordinates for that. You have to navigate to that. And then when you get to that next point, give you more grid coordinates. You go to the next point, the next point, next point, next point.

Starting point is 00:14:54 And now you're walking through mountains, rucksack on your back. It's raining. It's snowing. It's freezing. You're tired because you're walking up and down mountains. You're full of mud and piss and vinegar. And you don't know when it's going to end. And we asked, sir, how much time do I have?

Starting point is 00:15:09 The automatic response, and I know this because I was a cadre a couple times, was do the best you can. But sir, how much time do I have? Do the best you can. And with a straight face, right? There's no encouragement. There's no discouragement. It's like you're talking to freaking robots. That's so bizarre. I've never heard anything like that from the military. Yeah. And there's no other place in the military that

Starting point is 00:15:30 does that, right? It's just this organization. And so what does that do to you? So every day you're going, doing the best you can, right? Which means going balls to the walls every day, all day long, up and down these mountains. You don't know when it's going to end. Do you know how long? You don't. No, no, no. But do you know after the fact, like if your length of time that you did it is the same as others or does that vary too? You don't know. You don't know anything. They don't tell you anything, right? So, and the reason you don't know anything is because here's what happens. So you're out there by yourself for a couple of weeks, all alone, every day, under

Starting point is 00:16:02 pressure, under stress. You don't know what the standard performance is but you know it must you must be making the grade because you're still here they haven't canned you yet um and so what happens is you physically start breaking down okay because you're pushing yourself as hard as you can because you want to make it and then when your body starts to break down the mind starts breaking down right so and guess what they're not breaking you down you're breaking yourself down they're going here, here's the standard. Just do it. And you just do it and you break yourself down and you can't blame them. You got to blame yourselves. Like, well, they just told me to do it.

Starting point is 00:16:30 How hard I do it, it's up to me, right? And so what happens is your mind starts to go and that's what they're looking for. They're looking for the guy that has no body left. You know, physically he's done. Can he still motivate himself to perform anyways by himself? No inspiration, no motivation. He's not looking at Joe Snuffy over here and getting motivation from

Starting point is 00:16:51 that guy. He's all alone. He's in the woods by himself every day at night in the rain. And whether he succeeds or not is all on him. And this really has a psychological effect. Oh, yeah. A huge psychological effect.'re isolated um and you're looking for some type of encouragement from you know the instructors and they're just stone-faced do the best you can how long are the days you can go all day all night and go all day all night yeah and like yeah it's like what was the longest session you had 36 hours something like that well let me put it this way i did at least 40 miles in one stretch.

Starting point is 00:17:27 I can't tell you the numbers, the time. With gear. With all my stuff. Oh, yeah. But I can't give you the times because I would be giving away too much information. But I've done 40 miles more than once, straight, nonstop, like nonstop through mountainous terrain, weather, everything else.

Starting point is 00:17:45 So it is by far the hardest selection in the world because you're all alone. And this is where you really separate the wheat from the chaff. This is when you really get to see what a man's made out of. Oh, yeah. You know, I remember when it was one particular day, closer towards the end of the course, and it was raining every day. It was freezing. It was the year of the course, and it was raining every day. It was freezing. It was the year of the 100-year floods.

Starting point is 00:18:09 The Cheat River in Virginia went over the banks like 12 feet. Everything was underwater. And I'm crossing a farm field, and it's very foggy and rainy, and I just get literally stuck in the mud. I'm up to my knees in mud, and I got no gas left. I'm just worn out. It's late in the course. I'm up to my knees in mud, and I got no gas left. I'm just worn out. It's late in the course. I've expended everything I had.

Starting point is 00:18:28 And I know that somewhere in that direction in the fog, there's a mountain, and I got to go to the top of that mountain. And I pull out my map sheet, which was like a soggy toilet paper, and I was just falling apart and stuff. I'm trying to hold it up and orient something. Back in the days, we had maps. Yeah. I forgot about that. We had maps, too, but we also had, you know, yeah, right? We had maps, but on this particular day, they told us to draw our own map, right?

Starting point is 00:18:50 And so I had it in my pocket, got soaking wet and turned into toilet tissue. And I remember standing there, couldn't move my legs. And I was so demoralized, so beat down, so physically exhausted. I just stood there and I thought, man, I started crying. I mean, I literally started tearing up and I was like, you know, I quit, man. I had enough, and I'm just, this is just too much. And I'm a stud. And I finally, I hit that breaking point and I stood there for a few minutes and then I started to reason with myself and go, well, Comstock, you know what? Nobody's coming to get you. Nobody's coming out here and picking you up out of the mud and carry you out, right? So no

Starting point is 00:19:28 helicopters flying. Nobody knows where you are. You know, you're here by yourself. And there's no instructor anywhere near you. Nowhere near you. They just sent you off completely. Yeah. In fact, I've had to go out and fly out on some of the, when I was an instructor, I actually flew out with search and rescue helicopters looking for guys. And I'd have to go down on a jungle penetrator and pick them up off the ground and carry them out of the helicopter. But anyways, I finally started talking to myself. I go, what are you going to do? You can't stay here. If you want out, you got to go get out of the farm field, go top that mountain.

Starting point is 00:20:00 And when you get up there, we call Victor Whiskey, voluntary withdrawal, right? Sorry, I like the Victor Whiskey, voluntary withdrawal. And I thought, okay, that's the plan. I get there, we call Victor Whiskey, Voluntary Withdrawal, right? Sorry, I'd like to Victor Whiskey, Voluntary Withdrawal. And I thought, okay, that's the plan. I get to the top of Victor Whiskey. So now I go up this mountain, I get to the top, make it, there's a rendezvous point there. There's the instructor sitting in the truck. What do you mean rendezvous point in this context? Well, because I have to go to different rendezvous points to pick up my new Greek course for my next leg, next leg. Right. And so, so I get up there and, and I'm thinking about, okay, I want a Victor whiskey. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, Compsoc, stop. I said, you're on the top of the mountain.

Starting point is 00:20:33 You can roll back down the mountain if you have to, because it's the only way you're going to go. Right. So I managed to not Victor whiskey, voluntary withdrawal. And I went and got my next grade coordinates and I went down the mountain and I continued on. And, uh, got my next grade coordinates and I went down the mountain and I continued on. And here I am, right? So I got to tell you, it was one of the most challenging, mentally one of the most challenging and physically one of the most challenging things I've ever done in my life. 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. The numbers, you know,

Starting point is 00:21:06 obviously the numbers bear that out. It's probably the hardest course in the world. And as you said, they pick 100 people twice a year, and of those 100, a few make it. Yeah. So when you go in, you're going into a team of guys who have been – in this way, it's similar to the SEALs who have been past all different years in there, and then you just join up. Yeah, yeah. You're the FNG, right? Freaking new guy. You can say fucking on here, by the way. Okay, yeah. I don't want to offend nobody out there.

Starting point is 00:21:35 No, don't worry about it. We're good. But yeah, but at the end of the day, and that's not even over then. So it's still not over. So now you get through the physical part. Then there's the next part, which is the board and the psychological evaluation. Now, you've already been evaluated several times by psychologists. Now they evaluate you again at the end of the course. They want to see if you're still wired tight. And they ask you a lot of really weird questions. Sometimes they don't have a right answer, but you don't know that.

Starting point is 00:22:01 And so they just want to see how you're going to answer it. And then you end up sitting in front the uh they call it commander's board it's all the squad and sergeant's major uh well wait wait wait back up for a second what kind of questions joe talked about this he had a similar thing for ground branch which we'll get to that too but this is obviously for delta what kind of questions would they ask well they can ask you you know imagine you're 23 years old. You've done really nothing. You haven't done a lot in the military other than being an infantry guy.

Starting point is 00:22:31 And they're going to come up and create hypothetical situations. What would you do in this situation, right? And they want to see you think through it, right? Now, you don't know if there's the right answer or there's not. But they're looking at you going, is this guy logically working through the problem or is he just winging it? Like, I'm going to kill them all like God sorted out. You know, no, that's not the right answer, right? You're out of here.

Starting point is 00:22:53 You know, and so they're kind of looking at your maturity and things like that. Because at the end of the day, what they want is a guy, regardless of age, which the minimum age was 22. I was the youngest at 23 at the time and at the rank of – actually, I was an E6 staff sergeant. But you're expected to be able to go out by yourself, represent the unit and the United States government, okay, and speak to anybody at any level about tactical operations, strategic operations, like if you were a general or anybody else. They want to know that if they send you out there, you're not going to embarrass the unit or you're going to screw things up. And so they're looking for a level of maturity as well. So we had a saying, we're not looking for the best man, we're looking for the right man. And look, there's a lot of dudes out there, studs, that could run through that selection course. Very few, but they could, right? They get to

Starting point is 00:23:40 the other end, but they're dumber than a rock. And it's like, yeah, you're pretty strong, but we don't need strong guys. We need smart guys that are strong. And so, in fact, when we did the shooting part, we always said we don't need shooters. We need thinkers who are shooters. You have to be able to think first, and shooting is a secondary piece of it. And then from there, you go in front of the commander's board. They ask you a bunch of questions. Assuming you make all that, they like you, and you go in front of the commander's board, ask a bunch of questions,

Starting point is 00:24:09 assuming you make all that, you know, they like you, you know, and you answer all the questions the way they wanted it, you get selected. Then you got to go through the operator training course, which is about another seven months. Um, and that's another pass fail situation, pass fail situation, lots of pressure there. A lot of guys wash out, um, when they go through that portion, particularly the, uh, the close quarter battle piece of it, where you're actually going into rooms, right, with teammates, and you're shooting robots and targets, and you've got chickens flying around and balloons busting and loud music and strobe lights and a lot of madness going on in the house of horrors. And they want to make sure that some guys just can't handle the stress,

Starting point is 00:24:45 and they're very dangerous to themselves and to their teammates. And if that's noted, you know, at some point you'll be excused from the training. It's like, you know, we can't use you psychologically. You're not prepared for this type of training, right? You're just not adapted in any kind of way for it, you know? Sorry, you're a good guy, but you don't have what it takes to do this kind of work. So they put you through the ringer. A lot of guys fail that.

Starting point is 00:25:07 It is very difficult. It's very nerve-wracking because you don't want to be that guy that shoots, well, a hostage target. That's a no-no, all right? God forbid you shoot a hostage target by accident, and God forbid you shoot your own teammate, right? That would be really bad too, right?

Starting point is 00:25:24 But everything we did was live fire, live ammunition, live explosives. We literally shot around each other very, very close within inches of each other. And we had to be able to do that. I mean, you were expected to do that. You're a surgical shooter, some of the best combat marksmanship in the world. We had to. Think about this. If I had to go into an aircraft, a tubular target, and we got terrorists inside of an aircraft

Starting point is 00:25:48 with 200 living hostages, and we bust in there, and they're screaming, and they're jumping around, you got a bunch of bobbing heads, and I got to take a 10% shot with a.45 at 15 meters, and I got to hit the dude in the head. I better hit the dude in the head

Starting point is 00:26:01 and not hit the passengers in the head or my other teammates on the other side of the sky, right? So we had to be able to hit the target and know what's beyond the target and know that if we get a through-and-through shot, I don't kill somebody else. So you had to – this is where the thinking part comes in, thinkers who are shooters, right? Control the situation, not let the situation control you. How good of a shooter were you before you did all this? I sucked. I could shoot a rifle, but I never shot a handgun.

Starting point is 00:26:27 Handguns were, you know, we had to be very good with handguns. And the theory was if you can shoot a handgun very accurately, then you can shoot any weapon, you know, long guns, carbines, submachine guns. What makes a handgun so difficult to shoot? Well, because one, you don't mount it into your shoulder, right? And two, you're extending it outward. So, you know, you get a lot of weaving and bobbing, right? You're trying to hold this gun up. Two, you've got to manipulate the trigger while it's doing all that out there. You've got to press the trigger

Starting point is 00:26:53 and you've got to keep the sights aligned, right? So front sight and rear sight alignment. There's a lot of things, fundamentals that are applied in a handgun that makes it very difficult. But if you can apply all those fundamentals in a handgun, then you can much easily apply those in a mounted weapon in the shoulder. So we had to be really good at that.

Starting point is 00:27:11 So I'll share another. Can't keep that mic close, by the way. Yeah, and another, I'll share another part to that story. So I show up at OTC, operator training course, day one, and we're all sitting around, you know, at the desk, waiting for the instructors to come in with the FNGs. And we got our little badges and the guy comes in. We call him- I hit you with the badge too. Yeah. Well, let me tell you about the badge. So this guy comes in, his name is Mad Max. Imagine

Starting point is 00:27:34 a guy that's like five foot six, big red bushy mustache, gnarly, just, you know, he was like Yosemite Sam without the cowboy hat, right? He walks in, Vietnam vet. And the first thing he starts off with was, I want everybody to take a look at the badge hanging around your neck. I'm like, okay, look at the badge. He goes, you know what that badge means? Nobody wanted to answer. He goes, I'll tell you what the badge means. It means you come through the front gate without the security guards harassing your ass.

Starting point is 00:28:00 That's all it means. It doesn't mean you're a Delta operator or nothing else. I'm like, okay, now we sorted that out. Okay, got it. I'm not in yet. Got it. And then, and so then the training started. And so, like I said, the training is very firearms intensive for the first couple of months. And the first two weeks was all dry fire training. In fact, we were in a bay, indoor bay. And every day from around 0830 to around 1800 every day we were standing with all our combat equipment on four feet away from the doll a wall there's a one inch square pacey on the wall

Starting point is 00:28:32 and we would go through on command all the fundamentals of marksmanship training combat marksmanship from the four-stroke draw to reload drills of declaring drills and offhand shooting right turning movements over And we never shot a bullet yet. We did this day in and day out every day. You know, when you do something every day, all day long, you go home and have dreams about it. You can't get it out of your head, right? That's what it was like every day. I'm doing firearms training in my bed at night with my wife, you know, like Jesus Christ, you know? And about five days went by. And so every day after training around 1800, 1900, we would go into the classroom and we would do a brief back.

Starting point is 00:29:10 And the instructors would go, okay, guys, this is what we did today. You know, we need to work on that. We need to work on this. Tomorrow we're going to do that, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, and feedback and so forth. And everybody's bobbing their head. Yep, that makes sense. And then something happened around day five.

Starting point is 00:29:23 And what happened was mad max goes comp stock stand up wow that's never happened before he's never asked anybody stand up so i'm like roger that stand up and he just starts to dress me down right there in front of everybody he goes comp suck you're the most effed up shooter in this classroom most effed up student he goes if you don't get your shit in one bag you'll be doing the duffel bag drag out the front gate do you understand me sorry like whoa did not see that coming right and uh very disconcerting and everybody else was like trying to move away from me because they didn't want to catch whatever i had right it was like you know like jesus christ you know that was what i didn't even realize i was that bad i thought i was keeping up with the class so anyways i went home

Starting point is 00:30:04 that night and i remember thinking what am i going to do, and I remember thinking, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? What am I going to do? And so I remembered something I had done when I was 15 playing baseball. And I'm going to have to kind of segue off on this story a little bit. What happened was, well, when I went home that night, my wife goes, hey, honey, you know, she's cooking dinner. You want to eat dinner?

Starting point is 00:30:23 And I go, no. I said, I got to go to bed. I got training to do. She didn't quite understand, but she knew whatever I meant was serious. And so she didn't bother me, didn't question me. I went to bed, and I laid in bed all night long, and I visualized everything I had learned so far. The grip. I mean, like I'm actually doing it. I saw the front side picture, front side alignment, trigger press, follow through, breathing, stance, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I could feel the weapons in my hands. To this day, I can still feel those 245s that I had, the primary and secondary. They became a part of my body, part of my, you know, I mean, really.

Starting point is 00:30:53 I shot so many rounds with those guns over the years. It's insane. And so I visualized all night long actually doing this properly, the way I'd been trained. Now, next day i go to training and training all day nothing happens nobody's yelling at me nobody's encouraging me nobody's giving an attaboy nothing told silence day two goes by same thing day three goes by nothing's happened now i'm getting nervous i'm like you know at least if they're yelling at me they still think i have potential but they're not even yelling at me, right? They don't even care.

Starting point is 00:31:28 And I'm like, you know, I'm thinking, man, we're getting down to, you know, we're getting down to the final hours, I think, you know, and I'm like, oh, my God. And then we go into the classroom in the day three, and it happens again. Comp stock, stand up. Hosh, man, I swear to God, I had a 1,000-pound barbell on my shoulder. I'm like, oh, and I got up, right, and I stood up, and I was looking down at the floor and i could hear the you know fat lady singing in the back you know the swan song

Starting point is 00:31:49 and and uh i could see all the guys looking at me at the corner of their eyes kind of moving away you know because they know i'm getting ready to get fragged right here in front of everybody and uh and i'm already thinking it's all over right and um and then he goes mad max goes everybody take a look at this man. Take a good look at this man. And now I'm thinking, yeah, last time you ever go see him. Yeah. I'm thinking, you know, yeah, exactly. I'm thinking, yeah, rub some salt in the wound too. Why embarrass me in front of my peer group? You know, I'm a, I'm a non-commissioned officer. We're all non-commissioned officer. How about you just take me around the corner and go,

Starting point is 00:32:22 Hey, comp stock, you suck. Grab your shit and get the hell out of here. You couldn't even do that. And I'm thinking, this is bad, you know. And I was getting kind of angry too. And when he said, take a look at this man, I'm like, yeah, take a look at the loser. Take a look at the loser, you know. And then the next thing that came out of his mouth was, he goes, this man is the most fundamentally sound student in the class. I predict he'll be top gun. I'm like, whoa.

Starting point is 00:32:42 Whoa. And I'm looking around. There's a 180. Yeah, complete, right? I'm like, whoa. There's a 180. Yeah, complete, right? I'm like, whoa, really? And congratulations, Comstock. Good job. Keep it up.

Starting point is 00:32:49 Well, after we completed that part of the training with the 45s, we had what's called a man-on-man competition, Top Gun. And basically they set up, it's double elimination. You have two ranges set up identically, and you have to basically shoot for time, and you have to knock down a series of targets, right, pepper poppers, plates, bowling pins. And then in the middle between these two ranges, there's one target. It's called a dueling tree.

Starting point is 00:33:13 It's a vertical post, and it has two 2-inch or 3-inch flags on each side, right, so a total of four. Once you knock all your targets down, you've got to go to the flag. You have to knock your two flags and make them swing around to your opponent's side, okay? If he gets all four flags he loses and so i'm going up against what no doubt in my mind was the best shooter in the class the whole time right i just like wow you know and it's down to me and him i'm like wow it's amazing i went from like zero and i'm number two right and so we shoot it out and uh the rule was every plate had to fall over before you engage the dueling tree. So I'm ahead of the guy.

Starting point is 00:33:46 Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I'm hitting all the plates, knocking everything over. And then I hit my last pepper popper. I hit center mass. I'm up on the dueling tree and out of peripheral vision, I can see it's just kind of teetering. I'm like, oh, crap. And I remember the rules. I go back to get it.

Starting point is 00:33:59 As soon as I go back to get it, it falls over. So it wasn't balanced properly, right? So I come back. By the time I come back to the tree, my opponent's on the tree. He's one shot ahead of me now. You know, ding, ding, ding, ding. You know, and he beat me by one shot like that. And I was like, man, so close.

Starting point is 00:34:15 But number two, I mean, that's – Well, at the end of the day, technically I beat him, right? It's just the pepper popper was not balanced properly when he set it back up. Had it fallen like it should have, I would have won, right? Did you ever find the guy who put that up? No, and I actually didn't care. I didn't even make a big deal. It was obvious who won the fight, and I was just happy to be there. I didn't care if I was the last guy.

Starting point is 00:34:33 I'm like, congratulations, dude. Good shot. You're a top gun. I was just like, whew, I'm still in the course. But that's a little bit of an inside story about the unit and just how difficult it is. A lot of guys fail the OTC. They don't get to come back.

Starting point is 00:34:48 A lot of guys get shot during the training. In training, they get shot. And sometimes they get recycled, and sometimes they don't come back. It's a very dangerous training event. And it lasts for six to seven months. It includes all kinds of stuff military free fall um it's it's it's very physical very hard and uh and very psychological how do they make i want to talk about like where you went first and and what you were doing but how do they make

Starting point is 00:35:18 the decision in the military for missions to go to say say, Delta Force versus Navy SEALs and stuff like that? Like, obviously, we know with the Navy, if it's water-based, of course, they're going to do that. But, you know, we see a lot of land missions too. I mean, the Osama bin Laden mission was all on land and they used Navy SEALs there. How does that go down and what's the coordination like? Yeah, so let me start by saying this. Delta Force is the premier counterterrorism rule. Hands down.

Starting point is 00:35:46 SEAL Team 6 came after the unit, okay? In fact, a lot of the SOPs and stuff they got, got from us. SOPs? Standard Operating Procedures, right? Things like that. T-O-N-E, Training Operations, Equipment, Table, stuff like that. I'm going to get Remy and a guy in a room with this guy. Yeah, I'm sorry.

Starting point is 00:36:01 He's so good. I forgot you guys don't understand acronyms. Anyways. That guy just mentions the Navy SEAL i think oh yeah yeah we'll have hand-to-hand combat in here be freaking awesome yeah i'll probably screw up his hair gel though but you know he don't he don't have hair just like you oh yeah he's got it done because he because all the hair jelly was using that's why you don't have hair mine Mine's just hereditary. Anyway, you were saying standard operating procedures came from you guys. So anyways, long story short, how is a decision made?

Starting point is 00:36:33 Who goes? There's a lot of variables and factors. SEALs were literally out of their element on the ground. They do water ops. And just because there's not enough we didn't have enough special operations capabilities they found themselves doing a lot of the land stuff as well i'm not saying they can't do it they can um but you mentioned osama bin laden okay now i wasn't there for that part but from what i understand you know i was there but not with that part of the unit.

Starting point is 00:37:05 What happens is in Afghanistan, for example, you've got so many assets committed every night to running operations all across the country. Every unit, you know, they're running off. Oh, yeah. You know, you could be running 20, 30 operations a night. And there's only a limited amount of helicopters and assets available to support those operations. And so, you know, when it came down to, you know, him, it's like the first people they call was the unit, Delta, okay? And then Delta goes, okay, you know, look at our matrix, you know,

Starting point is 00:37:32 what's the probability the guy's there? And if it doesn't cross a threshold, for example, more than 50%, they're like, you know what, give it to our little sisters, the SEALs, let them handle that one. Let them do some fun stuff tonight, right? While, you know, we do something else. And, well, that was a mistake that night, night you know because it just so happened as he was there and you know they got the they got the glory for it um and you know look one team one fight i'm not

Starting point is 00:37:53 begrudging that kind of stuff but you know there's like you're begrudging a little bit no maybe a little bit maybe you know but uh you know a lot of seals are my friends too imagine if the last thing osama bin Laden saw was that handlebar. You're dead, motherfucker. That would kill me. That kills automatically. It's got like 30 kills by itself, you know? I mean, for sure.

Starting point is 00:38:15 Are you a guy like, do you have the cigar hanging out your mouth while you're shooting people? No, I actually have a lollipop, believe it or not. Really? You're a lollipop guy. Yeah, I like sucking on lollipops, man. I'm not a cigar guy, but... I wouldn't have taken you for that. Yeah, I got pictures of me downrange. People have taken pictures of me.

Starting point is 00:38:27 I just need like the Tropic Thunder image of you with like the fucking AK in your hand just with the cigar chomping out like, America! But no, there's a metrics for it. You know, it just depends, you know, what the mission is and also, you know, what assets are available and what are available and what the units that they want to use. Are they already committed to something else?

Starting point is 00:38:51 So it's task organization. It's done at another level, and it's not who's better. It's who's available and who can do the job type thing. How many people are in your standard Delta Force group? That I can't tell you. Oh. Yeah. Can't tell me.

Starting point is 00:39:11 That's classified. Can you give me a ballpark? It's not many. You just threw the math, right? I just told you earlier today, you know. Not a lot of people. Three guys made it through. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:39:19 And so, you know, the numbers are very small. But, you know, the guys that are selected, they're selected because they have, they bring something to the table in that, you know, they have above average IQs, PT tests, physical fitness scores, no judicial punishment. There's all these things they factor in, right? And they're looking for the right guys. I mentioned earlier, not necessarily the best guy, because that's all relative. What they factor in right and they're looking for the right guy as i mentioned earlier not necessarily the best guy because that's all relative what's the best guy right everybody thinks oh he's the biggest the fastest he must be the best no i've seen a big lot of big fast guys fall flat on their face real fast um it's not about that and who is the right

Starting point is 00:39:58 guy actually it's kind of a well-kept secret between uh the psychologists and the command section and only certain people in the command section know what the standard is. Nobody else knows what the standard is. I remember one day standing around in a squadron bay at the end of the day with some of the other operators. You know, we're drinking our beer or Coke or milk or whatever the guys were drinking. And we're like, you know, what do you guys think? Why do you think we're here? You know, and we're always playing the guessing game.

Starting point is 00:40:22 Why are we here? Anybody take a guess, you know? And one guy came up with a pretty good answer. I thought, you know, he probably hit always playing the guessing game. Why are we here? Anybody take a guess, you know? And one guy came up with a pretty good answer. I thought, you know, he probably hit the nail on the head. And he goes, yeah, we're all here because we're all controlled psychopathic killers. And I thought about it. I was like, yeah, it makes a lot of sense, you know, because nobody has in the U. Controlled psychopathic killers.

Starting point is 00:40:40 Well, if you think about it right so it takes a little bit of psychopathy to go out and and be able to kill you know and take out people and not really have a lot of remorse for it you know as long as you're killing bad guys you know you shouldn't lose any sleep over it it's when you when good people get hurt that's when you lose your sleep yes and so i thought about it's like you know no no man here standing with me or in that unit has an aversion to go into combat. In fact, we all look forward to it. We actually look forward to it. That sounds even more bizarre, right?

Starting point is 00:41:11 It's like, wow, you guys really want to go do this? Like, yeah. It's like playing on a professional football team. And what do you want to do? You want to play what? At the end of the year, you want to play the Super Bowl, right? Who wants to just play to play and everybody gets a trophy? No, we want to win in the Super Bowl, right? And that's kind of how it was in the unit. It's like, you know,

Starting point is 00:41:31 this is why we're here. We want to be the best. We want to do the things we've learned how to do. And it's not just because we're, you know, again, control psychopathic killers. It's not that. It's because at the end of the day, we're driven by patriotism, integrity, and honor, and all those things that a lot of soldiers hold near and dear to their heart. We believe in certain things. Maybe a lot of civilians don't, but as soldiers, we do. And that's what compels us and allows us to go out there and face, you know, and face the enemy, knowing that we may never come back. You know, I had one of the spooks I had in here was this guy, Jim Lawler. It's interesting to talk with you because your expertise was in the field undercover with nuclear arms deals and things like that. And it's like the whole reason we went to Iraq

Starting point is 00:42:19 was because they had WMD and that turned out to not be true. That's exactly right. People ask me about that sometime. And it is true that Saddam Hussein had been working on nuclear weapons before then. He had used chemical weapons against the Kurds. The Kurds are an ethnic group there in Iraq. Killed thousands of them. In fact, one of his cousins was known as Chemical Ali. And Chemical Ali used... He was like an old school CIA guy.

Starting point is 00:42:49 He was, well, he says he's not in it anymore, but are you ever really out? But he was in from 1980 to 2005. And one of the things he talks about a lot is the psychological profiles that they look for in this case within CIA case officers. And he is very open about the fact that one of the profiles they like – it doesn't mean every case officer is like this – but they love guys who are dangerously on the line of being a sociopath. They're not a sociopath, but they get hirings wrong too, so every once in a while they do hire a sociopath. But Jim talks about that. He has a self-awareness of it with himself he goes i'm like right there but i'm not but it allows me to be able to do my job because i have to make hard decisions where people die right you know bad shit happens and is is the bad shit for the good you know that's the decision to make so in

Starting point is 00:43:39 your seat like as a case officer his main job is not to go out and fucking plow motherfuckers down who are bad right your job is and it could be any second any day you main job is not to go out and fucking plow motherfuckers down who are bad, right? Your job is, and it could be any second, any day. You got to be willing to go in there. The boss says, hey, these guys are bad. Not even here's why. They're just bad. They got to go.

Starting point is 00:43:54 You got to be able to go do that without sitting on the trigger like, oh, maybe. Wait, is this guy really bad? You know what I mean? Like there's that, let's go. Well, there's another component to that, right? So, and this is one of the reasons we know we we're selected because it's it's constantly ingrained into our heads um at the end of the day there's nobody can tell you when to shoot or when not to shoot this is why looking for the thinker who's a shooter you've got to make a judgment call

Starting point is 00:44:20 is this is this worth the shot and you know now here's my example okay so modelo prison uh right on modelo prison this is actually on discovery channel i think on history channel um they declassified it so that was a rescue of kurt muse out of modelo prison 1999 in panama and we're involved i was a breacher on it i'm the guy that actually blew the doors in on the on the annex on top of the prison went down to get them out so um as we were coming in if you can just imagine um we had a hit time of midnight on the december 20th and about seven hours out we got information intelligence that uh we had been compromised and again um you know what they say loose lips sink ships so a couple guys you know

Starting point is 00:45:06 that live there you know called home to mommy and daddy said mommy daddy something bad's going to happen tonight but i'll never see you again i love you like you know and then some other guy went down and he's told all his panamanian friends and family around the canal hey you guys don't want to be around here tonight something's going to happen right so okay that just alerted the enemy that something's going to happen tonight, right? And so we knew we were compromised because our snipers were already deployed. They're in the woodland, the jungles, and they're watching. And they're like, oh, all of a sudden, Modelo Prison is being reinforced with Panamanian Defense Forces, Dignitary Battalion, Militia. They're literally setting up.50 caliber machine guns on all the corners.

Starting point is 00:45:42 They're reinforcing the commandant's headquarters across the street, Noriega's military headquarters. There's a lot of activity. And that activity started to draw in civilians because they wanted to come down. They were really coming in with lawn chairs and stuff, waiting for the Mardi Gras parade or something, the Rose Bowl parade. And they're sitting on the sidewalks drinking and playing music. And suddenly you've got thousands of people around the target, right?

Starting point is 00:46:09 And the target's being hardened. And we've got to go in there and get them, right? Because the reason we had to go is because, oh, yeah, the 82nd Airborne Division and Ranger Battalion are in flight already on the way, right? So there's a big aerial signature in the sky. Timing. Right? And they're on the way.

Starting point is 00:46:24 We can't turn them around because now the mission will be compromised, and it's a big aerial signature in the sky timing right and they're on the way we can't turn them around because now the mission will be compromised and it's a change it's a game changer so we've got to go and what ended up happening was all we could do is slide the hit time h hour to 20 minutes to the right zero zero two zero hours and we went in and i remember i was on a little bird it's a little uh mh6 you you've probably seen the pictures of the small helicopter like flying egg it's got the little pods on the outside two guys yeah we'll put a picture of it in the corner of the screen yeah so you'll pull it up and uh and so i'm on uh i'm on the first bird there's four of us going to come in and we're going to

Starting point is 00:46:59 land on the roof and then i'm going to get off with my breaching charges my job was run over to an annex which is about 10 by 10 square. I had a door on the top, a steel door. According to CIA sources, it was a solid steel door. So I built the explosive charges to breach that door. And so I run up to the door. Well, let me back up. So as we're landing, okay, because the weight of the operators

Starting point is 00:47:23 and equipment were taken in, which wasn't a lot, by the way, the initial helicopters, the original MH6s, the engines were the same engines they use for irrigation machines, like in farmer fields, right? It's a motor that sprays. And that's what's holding us up in the air. I'm like, holy shit, they put propellers on it and we're flying. I didn't know that, right? And I got a briefing from the pilots on that. And so we were actually maxed out with four operators, all our body armor, weapons, and stuff like that.

Starting point is 00:47:51 We got to chop weight so this thing stays aloft. And we were literally stripping avionics out of the helicopter. Okay, you don't need that. You don't need this. Get that out, get that out, get that out. In fact, two of the helicopters of the four were like, hey, you know what? We don't need two pilots. You're out of here.

Starting point is 00:48:04 We had two helicopters with one pilot and two with two pilots. All of the operators, we literally didn't even bring any water in. We just tried to trim as much weight as we could so we could land these helicopters. And it still wasn't, we still weren't able to just land them. We had to actually sink the helicopters in very slowly onto the roof. So as we're approaching and we're literally sinking the helicopter on the fourth story of this prison, I remember, you know, at this point, all hell has broken loose. There's gunfire everywhere. I mean, people are dying. It's like complete chaos. And I noticed as we're coming down, I saw a group of about four women and running out in the street, a couple of them holding babies.

Starting point is 00:48:46 And in the middle of the four women was a man. And he was part of what they call the Dignitary Battalion. He was a militiaman, right? And so I can remember him very vividly. He was wearing blue jeans, a white guayabera, brown type of hiking boots. He had an AK-47, I still remember he was probably about 5'8", 190 pounds. And you know, how can I remember all the details? Because when something's very emotional, you tend to remember it much longer, all the details, right? And so this is a pretty emotional period right now. People are dying and shit's happening.

Starting point is 00:49:22 And so as they're running out in the center of the street, I think probably a distance from my barrel to his noggin was about maybe 30 yards and uh he had his ak-47 up and he was using the women and kids as he's backing up as a shield and he was he hadn't leveled the weapon at me yet or in my helicopter because he's still kind of moving and as they were crossing the street, there was a cemetery. And the cemetery had like a four-foot wall, but the entranceway was like an arch that you could walk through. And they were all kind of moving to that together in a cluster. And I already had them in my sights.

Starting point is 00:49:56 I had an 8.2 thousand. I had the dot on his forehead. I could have took the shot, but, you know, I didn't take the shot. And the reason I didn't take the shot, because I was able to, you know, with all the excitement, I was still able to discern, listen, if you take that shot, that round will go through his melon and it will probably hit the woman and child behind him, okay? And so, you know, and I said, he's not an immediate threat,

Starting point is 00:50:18 although the weapon's up, it's not shouldered, it's not leveled, he's not taking aim yet, he's still moving. I said, I still have time. You're able to make that whole calculation. Yeah. Wow. that's what you're trained to do right that's why you're selected so and how far away were you again maybe 30 yards max uh that's kind of and you were able to tell yeah and i'm at a you know a deflate position shooting down at him as a helicopter sinking i hadn't shot yet right i mean not him And so. But that's how it's going to let you basically, it's like a drive-by. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:50:46 You know, and plunging fire going straight down. So, but something told me, man, just wait. He's not going to shoot yet. But when they go through that arch, somehow I knew, I don't know how I knew, but somehow I knew that the women, the babies would all button hook to the left and he would button hook to the right. And he would come over that wall. And damned if he didn't. That's exactly what happened. He came over the wall.

Starting point is 00:51:09 Now he brought the weapon up and leveled it and, you know, I was waiting for him. So, you know, I sent him, you know, I sent him a hello and a goodbye. And so, you know, and then the helicopter landed. I'll show you what hell looks like, boy. But, you know, but where I was going with all that was you have to be able to make those critical decisions under pressure, under stress. And you've got to make good decisions, right, because you have to live with them, right?

Starting point is 00:51:32 If I took that shot and let's say the helicopter buckled and I hit, you know, any number of those women or kids, you know, I've got to live with that, you know. And you have to ask yourself, was that shot, was it worth taking that shot at that moment of time? And sometimes the answer is yes, because if I don't take that shot and he shoots and shoots my helicopter down, guess what? You might have four or five fathers on this aircraft whose kids need them. Right. And boom, you know, so, you know, it's, you got to weigh all that out. That's a tough decision to make, you know, and there's no right answer for it other than, you know, the man on the ground, you know, you, you know, you got to make that. And this is why we go through this very intense training to make sure that we can make those, you know, those high pressure decisions, especially when, you know, the fight or flight reflex is setting in and you got tunnel vision, the loss of depth perception, tachycardia, and all these things are kicking in, you know, you've got to be able to work through all that and still make a good shot under pressure and still keep a circle of awareness about you and know what's going on. I still have to be aware that, hey, I'm laying on the roof and there might be a dude down there getting ready to shoot me in

Starting point is 00:52:36 the face when I get off the helicopter, right? So there's a lot of the process at one time. And this is why, again, I'm going to go back to what I said earlier. They picked the right man, not the best man. And this is why it's one of the most difficult selection courses in the world. It ain't all about being physical. It's very physical.

Starting point is 00:52:52 But the whole idea is to break you down physically. No matter how physical you are, they're going to break you down. They want to see how this functions under pressure. Oh, yeah. So.

Starting point is 00:53:00 And what was, so we have this pulled up right here. This was Operation Acid Gambit. Who was this guy, Carl Muse? Kurt so kurt muse kurt yeah yeah so kurt muse was a businessman okay that's what he'll tell you um living in panama but you know it's not hard to figure out what was really going on so he's a businessman he started a rotary club you know amateur radios blah blah, blah, blah. But they were doing, you know, signal intelligence. They were basically spoofing Noriega's communications.

Starting point is 00:53:33 And then finally what happened was Noriega's military intelligence started to triangulate where he was emitting, you know, because they kept moving the transmitter, right? And they finally caught up with him at some point, and they arrested him for espionage. And he ended up in Modelo Prison. So he was literally locked up on the second floor. He had security there the entire time. How big is the prison? It's a pretty good size. It was four stories.

Starting point is 00:54:01 Actually, there's a picture on the internet also of the prison itself. It's four stories. Actually, there's a picture on the Internet also of the prison itself. It's four stories. And, of course, like all prisons, it was overcrowded. They had more people than they could fit in there, but they fit them all in there anyways. How big is the staff approximately? Well, at the time, they had 64 guards on duty, and they reinforced with about another 60 Panamanian Defense Force soldiers because they knew we were coming. So we had 120 shooters on the ground level waiting for us. Is it public how many people you had on this mission?

Starting point is 00:54:31 I think it is because they did a documentary on it. So it was 23, 25. 25 of you guys against 125 of them. Just there on the ground. There on the ground with the fortress. Yeah. So there's another story. another so i add to the story right because it's actually a really kind of cool story so we land um i run up i put the breach in

Starting point is 00:54:52 charge on the doors we finally breached the doors i breached the doors we go in we we go down to second level the interrogator was given instructions that if anything happens outside the prison gun fire etc he was immediately go in and kill Kurt Mews, Dyson. Wait, wait, wait. Yeah, he was going to execute him immediately. Oh, the Panamanians. Yeah, they were to execute him, right? And so-

Starting point is 00:55:12 Hold on a second. If this guy's like an expatriate trying to overthrow a government, why are we trying to rescue this dude? Well, there was no proof that that's what he was doing. He was a businessman, right? Sounds like he had some friends. Well, he may have, right? And so, you know, only he knows the truth.

Starting point is 00:55:29 But all we know is he's an American and he's being locked up. And there was other incidents, right? So everybody's going, oh, there we go, you know, you know, starting wars. Well, actually at that point, up to this point, they'd already killed several Americans for no reason at all. They shot a second lieutenant on the street um and several people yeah in panama right noriego

Starting point is 00:55:49 had lost his mind at this point so they're actually now targeting americans everywhere and so this is one of the reasons we decided we need to go in there and we knew kurt muse was in prison we're like let's get this guy out he's an asset as well so that particular mission was the spearhead for the entire operation. We led with that operation. We had to get him out first before everybody else came in, the paratroopers, the rangers, and so forth and so on. So we initiated the assault, so to speak, the invasion, if you want to call it that. The invasion.

Starting point is 00:56:19 Yeah. You know, it is. We invaded the country, right? Sounds like a Sylvester Stallone movie. Well, think about it. They call it Just Cause, right? So it was a Just Cause. Anyways, I'm not here to question all that.

Starting point is 00:56:32 All I know at the end of the day is I know what they did. I know what PDF was doing. They tortured a lot of people. They hurt a lot of people. They killed a lot of people, even their own. You know, it was not a good regime at all. Hey guys, it's come to my attention that many of you are unaware that we have multiple other channels on YouTube and have for a while in at least two cases. So the first channel is at Julian Dory clips, which we've been posting on for over a year. It has mid form clips

Starting point is 00:56:59 and short form clips going out every single day. And it is huge to help us in the algorithm when those clips do well. So please go over there and subscribe. The link is in the description. The second page is at Julian Dory Daily, which is a brand-new page with different editors posting exclusive content that is also mid-form and short-form clips. That link is in the description.

Starting point is 00:57:19 And finally, we have a page called Best of JDP, which we put on ice for a while, but we just hired another editor to bring back. It is a shorts-only page. He will be making shorts exclusively for that channel. Once again, the link is in the description. You can check out all three down there in the description, and I hope to see you guys subscribe. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:57:36 So, you know, now we're in the building. We make it to the second floor, and here's an interesting story. So the interrogator lost his nerve, and you know he was quaking in his boots not sure what's going on but he knew something was going on there's a lot of gunfire going on right now a lot of explosions and as one of our teams breached the uh the room where the interrogator was sitting he got up and he ran into a shower stall and and he had a handgun, and he literally positioned himself in the shower stall with a weapon mounted up with a handgun, fake trained on the door, waiting for the first Delta operator to come through it.

Starting point is 00:58:13 The first Delta operator who came through it, who's no longer with us, was a guy named James. James saw him run in there. James followed him in there. James shot him four times in the chest. The guy never got his round off. Dropped him right there with a Kar-15. Speedy surprise, violence of action, right there was uh three tenants of combat and so you know so muse was alive we breached the jail cell door got him out put him on a

Starting point is 00:58:34 helicopter he's shitting himself yeah and uh well he should have run and after what and then what happened really was bad because it took you guys so long yeah no he was happy he was a happy camper that he was getting out of there because he was looking at probably going to get executed or never get out of prison for a very long time, if at all. So at this point – Imagine being in a Panamanian prison. Yeah. I could think of worse prison being too, by the way. Oh, I'm sure. But that's not a good one.

Starting point is 00:59:01 That's not high on my list. No, it's not. Any of the third world countries, for sure. I live in Indonesia. I know, yeah, no. So, yeah. Yeah, my dogs probably live better than some of these people doing some of these jails, man.

Starting point is 00:59:16 But anyways, we got to – so my team is now on the third level. I'm laying on a balcony, and I'm engaging across the courtyard. There's, you know, there's Panamanian forces on the other side shooting back at us. We're shooting back at them and guard towers, a barbershop, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's pitch black and it's so much noise and flashes of light. You know, there's a blackout now. It's just total chaos. And as I'm laying there, we're lined up waiting to go to the roof and the helicopter would come back and pick us up. All right. The the little birds you could hear them buzzing and they had to land two

Starting point is 00:59:48 by two so what i didn't know was they you know kurt was the first guy out that team brought him out first how many guys are on the ground in the prison with you um well we had guys on support maybe total of about 12 okay inside there right? And so they get him out. They pack him up, put a helmet on, body armor, pack him in the middle of a helicopter. They fly off. As they fly off the roof, they get shot down, and they crash into an alley, right? So we don't know that yet. We didn't know that happened.

Starting point is 01:00:19 I'm laying downstairs on the second floor. I'm shooting away, and I'm waiting for somebody to tap me and go, okay, let's go. Time to move. And nothing's happening. And I'm shooting away, and I'm waiting for somebody to tap me and go, okay, let's go. Time to move. And nothing's happening. And I can hear helicopters coming and going. I'm like, okay. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4.

Starting point is 01:00:35 New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Should we be leaving here soon? And so I remember reaching back with my hand to find my teammate, and I don't feel nothing. And then I reach back with my leg, and I start sweeping the floor, trying to feel somebody's foot or something.

Starting point is 01:00:56 And I realize they're already gone. They forgot I was laying on the floor. They couldn't see me because it's so dark and all the gunfire. They literally left me inside the prison. And they're on the roof getting on the helicopters. And I'm laying there and I can hear the Panamanians coming up the stairs. I can hear all the glass break. I can hear them talking in Spanish, you know, and they're coming up to fight, you know. And I'm laying there and go, holy shit, they left me in the prison. So I get up and I run like a scalded dog up the stairs,

Starting point is 01:01:21 run out on the roof. And thank God there's a helicopter still sitting there. And I run over to my seat, but somebody else was sitting in it. And we're like, it's my seat, you know, and I'm starting to panic. Get the fuck off the helicopter. And I don't know where the confusion set in. And finally he realized he was on the wrong helicopter. He got up and ran back to his helicopter, and I got my seat back, and we flew off. We were supposed to be the last helicopter out of 15 helicopters. No and we flew off. We were supposed to be the last helicopter out of 15 helicopters.

Starting point is 01:01:46 No, I'm sorry. We were supposed to be the first helicopter. No, I'm sorry, the last helicopter out of 15 to land at Howard Air Force Base. We were the only helicopter to come back. And we're landing, and I go, where's everybody at? And we had what's called J-MAL. It's basically a joint medical unit. They were already set up, all the doctors, everything.

Starting point is 01:02:04 They're all standing on the tarmac, hands crossed, waiting for us to come in, ready for casualties. And we're the only helicopter that lands. And my team leader looks at me and goes, you guys stay here, hold on. You know, he runs over there talking, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he comes back. He goes, okay, put a fresh magazine in.

Starting point is 01:02:18 We're going to go back in. Precious cargo just got shot down. And I'm like, oh, shit. Now I got scared. I wasn't scared before that, but now I'm scared because I know where we just came from. You know, we had stirred the hornet's nest.

Starting point is 01:02:29 You know what a 50 caliber tracer looks like when it's coming at you? Nope. A flaming basketball. Yeah. And like, they're coming at us underneath our freaking helicopter. I'm lifting my legs.

Starting point is 01:02:37 You go, holy shit, you know? And guess what? Do you have the handlebar back then? No. I couldn't really grow much. I was still pretty young back then. You know, I had a little blonde thingy. Everybody thought I was Chuck Norris. You didn't have this? I had the Chuck Nor handlebar back then? No. I couldn't really grow much. I was still pretty young back then. I had a little blonde thingy. Everybody thought it was Chuck Norris.

Starting point is 01:02:47 You didn't have this? I had the Chuck Norris look back then. Everybody thought it was Chuck Norris. Yeah, but this is so good. Yeah, I know. This is good. We'll pretend like I had it. I want to pretend.

Starting point is 01:02:55 Let's keep going. But yeah, so anyways, like, oh my God. So we start spinning up, get ready to go back, and then we start seeing other helicopters come back. And then we got the word that one of our ground units had recovered the crashed helicopter. They had taken casualties, and the only guy that actually didn't get hurt was Kurt Muse. If you read the story, and by the way, it's in my book. I'm not trying to put a plug in it, but American Badass.

Starting point is 01:03:20 Link in description. Yeah, and these documentaries. So what happened was when the helicopter crashed, it was sitting on its side. Hinges were still running. Rotors were running. A couple guys on one side had been shot. One of the other guys, James, the guy that killed the interrogator,

Starting point is 01:03:35 came off the pod, and we're all tied in. He was swung underneath the skid. The skid took his toes off one of his feet. Then my team leader, he was unknocked and conscious. Kurt Mews gets out. He thinks everybody's dead. It's just him now. So he grabs my team, assistant team leader's pistol,

Starting point is 01:03:52 and he's going to fight for himself. And as he does that, he starts to stand up into the rotor blade. And my assistant team leader sees it, jumps up and grabs him, but pulls him down. As he does that, he takes the rotor strike to the head in the process, literally shaves the helmet off of his head, knocks him down. As he does that, he takes the rotor strike to the head in the process. Literally shaves the helmet off of his head, knocks him out.

Starting point is 01:04:07 And, you know, so now everybody's unconscious, right? And then luckily, you know, the quick reaction force that was on standby,

Starting point is 01:04:15 they rolled in with APC and they picked everybody up and hauled them off. APC? Armored Personnel Care, sorry, for you, non-military type.

Starting point is 01:04:22 No, I'll stop you when you do it. Don't worry about it. Yeah. They call them M113s at the time. like square box looking tanky things um but um the irony of it is uh tom my assistant team leader on the team that was his third helicopter a second helicopter crash in a month he on the rehearsal well he actually had three so the first one was a hard landing he got banged up pretty bad on that one for the rehearsals for the attack, for the rescue.

Starting point is 01:04:49 Then the second one, he gets shot down. He's on medication for that thing, for the head injury. When we go back five months later, we're in the Panamanian, in the Darien jungle, which, by the way, is all over the news with, you know, illegals coming across here. We were actually in the Darien jungle jungle and we're getting ready to go fly and do another mission and our helicopter crashes again a black hawk who the fuck is driving this helicopter they're different helicopters but his task force went 60 actually we're alive because of the pilots they're that good um the this particular helicopter had a catastrophic failure

Starting point is 01:05:19 the number one engine and uh we had you know we had an auxiliary tank with another 400 gallons worth of jet fuel inside the helicopter you know we had 15 packs personnel equipment four crew we were pretty heavy and uh as we were flying away the number one engine went out we lost lift hit a tree snapped the rotor blades off and we turned into a giant lawn dart and uh we're flying through the jungle with no lift crashed and that was the one that paralyzed tom for the rest of his life he's still uh he's still paralyzed to this day um and yeah it was a bad thing actually it was a couple of guys that were paralyzed i ended up with a broken back spent five months in a body cast um you know but uh but i'm okay my back still functions and i'm still standing up so i'm grateful for that but uh yeah, so the life and times of Delta operator,

Starting point is 01:06:06 and that's just one of thousands of stories, you know, Blackhawk down, you know, I mean, there's that. In fact, Blackhawk down was really about one team of several teams. So, you know, he couldn't pack it all in one movie, but. Wait, you were in that? I went there. Yeah. So that's, that's another story too.

Starting point is 01:06:23 Gary Gordon was my. Well, please do tell yeah i won't yeah gary gordon was one of the um medal of honor winners he was actually on my team in the operator training course so i knew gary really well and uh you know the story with him obviously he went fast roped in knowing he's not going to come back out him and randy shoe guard and uh to save michael durant the pilot, from when the helicopter got shot down. And the coolest part about the story is these guys kept asking for permission three times. We'd like to go in.

Starting point is 01:06:54 We would like to insert. And the commander's like, you know what you're asking, right? He goes, yeah, we know what we're asking. We want to go in and insert because the crew might still be alive. So they fast roped in two guys, man, two snipers. And they were getting it on, man, with a lot of Somalis, a lot of them, and close-range combat. And finally got down to Randy was the first one, I believe,

Starting point is 01:07:15 to get killed after Pallone engagement. And then it got to the point where Gary, he ran. They pulled Michael Durant, the pilot, out. He was still alive. And they put him like in a little hooch. had a broken back he was in bad shape and gary ran in over the car 15 he goes there's five bullets left in his weapon sir good luck and he ran back out to pull his pistol that's all he had left him and uh and he went down pretty hard after that you know so that's kind of that's just one of the stories um both

Starting point is 01:07:45 randy and uh gary got the uh congressional medals of honor for that you know and so it takes it takes cojones it takes discipline it takes purpose man to do something like knowing because those guys had families they had children you know and to have to go down and know that you're going to risk it all to save a man, you know, man, there is those, there's no greater love than that, you know, and there's just no greater love than that. And I hate when I hear people, you know, bad mouth in the military and we're a bunch of mindless machines to do with the government. So that's a bunch of BS. Okay. I don't hear a ton of people doing that. Yeah. Well, yeah, I have. And I read a lot, quite a bit. And so at the end of the day, hats off. And I'm not saying hats off to me, but to those that have

Starting point is 01:08:32 really given it all, man. Like those guys. And I've lost a lot of friends. And man, the saddest story, one of the saddest stories was I had a friend who's a seal yeah he's a seal and he and i worked together uh with the government right we'll call we'll call that and um great guy him and his wife couldn't have kids you know for a long time he wanted a child so bad and uh oh is this post-career on yeah this yeah this one i was you know a government contractor, you know, for the AlphaBit company. So one day they were trying to adopt a child. One day they were able to adopt a child, a little, I believe it was a black baby. I can't remember, from the mom, a little girl. And he was so happy, man.

Starting point is 01:09:21 He was just elated. I was really happy for him because I really saw, man, how bad they wanted these kids for over the years. And soon, about a year later, man, he got killed in Iraq. He had an IED and he was in a, what is basically

Starting point is 01:09:37 an MRAP. It's an armored car. They're heavy. They're big. And this thing got launched in the air like 60 feet, you know, and killed everybody inside the vehicle. And uh the vehicle and i'm like man he's had a year ago he adopted this little baby they went and waiting forever and boom just like that he's gone you know and there's a lot of stories like that you know and and uh yeah you know again these are these are these are good men doing you know and i don't want to say god's work, but they're doing the right thing, man. They're in the process of trying to help other people.

Starting point is 01:10:12 You know, when people talk about, you know, Iraq and, you know, Afghanistan and some of the places I've been to, you know, good people, man, have been oppressed badly, especially by Saddam Hussein. I've seen what he's done. I've been to the palaces, the sex palaces. These guys were – I've listened. I've interviewed witnesses. I remember one particular farmer. His property bordered Uday's property, the son of Saddam Hussein, right? And his cows wandered over to their property

Starting point is 01:10:45 there's no fence line everybody's cows were over there he went to get them back and they're like hey get off the property oh those are my cows no there are cows now

Starting point is 01:10:51 right and he's no those are my cows oh yeah those are your cows watch this and they literally rounded up his wife

Starting point is 01:10:56 and his kids executed all of them in front of him go whose cows are they now right and so and they let him live

Starting point is 01:11:02 by the way and that was his story and that was quite common to hear stuff like that you know um go into a building and you see scuff marks on the walls right from shoes where they were literally hanging kids and and the dolls from the rafters hanging them and they were kicking with their feet and they're off the walls and their scuff marks were being left on the walls okay um when you see stuff like that when you hear stories about how sodom these sex palaces he had they were really big palaces swimming pools all kinds of crap they would literally he would literally send his guys out his henchmen and they

Starting point is 01:11:34 would literally drive down the road and find the best looking girls they could find any kid they were married or not and that's a good hot one there they round them up and guess what you're gonna be partying at sodom jose's palace tonight whether you want to or not. And they literally had sex dungeons, chains, handcuffs, cocaine, and they're banging these girls, and they did whatever they wanted to these people. If you look right here just past where this picture on the wall is of the skyline, so a little up, maybe about 10, 15 blocks, I believe – we'll have to double-check this. I think it was across from Michael Bloomberg's townhouse or whatever it is in Manhattan on the Upper East Side. Saddam Hussein had a place there that was a torture dungeon for his guys, his intel guys, to go find dissidents or whatever in America. They'd take them there into the basement and they'd just fucking.

Starting point is 01:12:21 See? I mean, it's animal shit. The world is full of evil. And here's what pisses me off, particularly about Americans, is a lot of people haven't even left those boundaries of their state, let alone the borders of the country. And then when they do leave,

Starting point is 01:12:36 I've left the country before. They went to Cancun. So what? That's not leaving the country. I've lived, traveled to, and worked in over 101 countries. I've been all around the planet you know. I've lived in over 100, lived, traveled to, and worked in over 101 countries, okay? I've been all around the planet, man. I've been everywhere.

Starting point is 01:12:50 And I've had the opportunity to see how other people live, how they're treated, what they think of us. It is very different from what people read in the media in America. Oh, yeah. In a lot of ways, a lot of people hate us. For example, I live in Bali, as we talked about before the show. I live in Bali. I have a home also in the Philippines, and I have a home in Panama City Beach, Florida, which is where I'm currently at. I just came in a couple of days ago. But when we talk about freedom and police abuse, let me tell you something. My wife,

Starting point is 01:13:22 again, I mentioned before the show, my wife is Indonesian. My wife is Muslim. Yeah. And we were in Hong Kong, literally walking down the street and the police literally just walked up to her, pulled her into the alley and made her piss in a cup and get, do a urinalysis. Why? Just because they looked at her and it's, Hey, you might, maybe you're on drugs. And it literally, they go through her purse, make her piss in a cup and do your analysis. Okay.

Starting point is 01:13:44 Think about that for a minute. This is other countries oh yeah okay i can go on and on with these stories it's this is not an exception um there it gets worse than that you know and we don't have a lot of time to get into the details we got all day real quick though i just gotta stop go to the bathroom okay we'll be right back we're back now before we we just stopped it that's that's why i didn't know that happened to you. Twice. Wow. Yeah. It's so normal.

Starting point is 01:14:07 Crazy. But anyway, you were saying before we stopped with this that some of the things around the world, like we don't understand how lucky we are to have it the way we have it here. And I got to tell you, man, like I always try to check myself with that because it's easy to complain, and I do, about so many things going on in the country right now just with people just not being able to talk to each other. It gets very, very exhausting, and we all create the biggest problems we can on social media. But the basic things we're able to do every day from waking up in the morning and having the right to go to the gym or just do what the fuck you want to do, have a job, be able to pay your bills, it's not that easy in so many countries around the world. And there's random shit that can happen where the government can have total control over every facet of your life. Social media, what you post on social media could easily land you in jail or get you deported, especially in Indonesia. You say the wrong thing in there, boom, you're out of there. And they'll find you.

Starting point is 01:15:01 They'll hunt you down and look for you. They're very active about it. Unlike us, it's like, come on over, bring us it's like come on over bring all your bring in just come on over you don't do what you want try try doing that crap in another country um i don't care what it is whether it's the philippines indonesia you know any country they're they're not going to tolerate you overstaying your visa or sneaking into their country you know they're not going to tolerate they're going to find you and there's going to be harsh penalties. You're going to get kicked out.

Starting point is 01:15:26 We're the only country that does this crap, and to our detriment at the end of the day. It's to our own detriment. The rest of the world doesn't think like we do, and are we better off? I would argue that no, we're not. America's not free. We're not free, and we're manipulative. Why do you say that? Well, at the end of the day free we're not free you know and and we're manipulative say that

Starting point is 01:15:46 well at the end of the day you're not free because look you even now particularly right you if you say something that goes against uh you know for example we'll talk about covid you know you don't believe covid covid's conspiracy okay maybe maybe it is covid but it's not what it is they make it out to be and you start you, you get censored, right? We saw that happen with Facebook and all these different social media sites, got called out on it and agreed. Yeah, the government kind of told us to shut us up, shut everybody up. So who's really in charge here? Do we really have free speech? Can you really say what you want to say? Can you really do, do you really have that freedom? No. The IRS has got you by your nuts, right? Now're all, now they're really going to get our nuts

Starting point is 01:16:27 because once they have us on digital currency and that's all we have, you have lost all power, all freedom. Think about it. Have you ever noticed, I don't know when you, on the ticket for Spirit Airlines, when you bought the ticket, but like when I buy my ticket, for example, United Airlines, now what I'm noticing under the price is also my carbon footprint. That's kind of weird. They've got a carbon footprint on it for the ticket I'm going to buy. That was never there before. And why is it there now?

Starting point is 01:16:54 I'll tell you why it's there now. It's conditioning. What they're doing is conditioning to the fact that you have a carbon footprint. And eventually, once you get used to it, then they're going to charge you for it, right? And so what's going to happen is, look, the government might charge the airline and go, hey, you got to pay for carbon tax, but they're going to pass that cost on to you, right? You're going to pay for that carbon tax. And so, but anyways, all of a sudden, it's another way to tax you at the end of the day. So where does it stop? Does it stop at the gas pump? Or now you pump five gallons of gas and go, huh, there's a carbon tax under there too. Because my car, I bought five

Starting point is 01:17:28 gallons of gas, that's going to turn into this much carbon, right? So you see how this is working. And I don't even know how I got down on this road here. But at the end of the day, we're not in control of our lives. Everybody's got a piece of your ass. The government has a piece of your ass. The legal system has a piece of your ass. Law enforcement, your employers, you've portioned out your power to quite a few people. You have very little power of your own. Very people are really sovereign. And those that are are very wealthy. And even those don't really have full control of their lives, even in Indonesia, which is one of the reasons I live there, just to escape all the madness from this country. But even there, I'm not really free because I still fall under the, you know, the rule of the local government, you know, and of the national government.

Starting point is 01:18:09 You know, they still have a hand on me. But I actually have a little bit more freedom there than I do here. It's kind of like, again, I told a partner here before we did the show. I said, you know, Bali is like, you know, Indonesia is one of those last places on earth where, you know, life is still pretty good. And I always joke with my friends, my American friends and my expats, you know, we always giggle and laugh around the table and like, hey, man, shh, don't tell your friends, they'll come over and wreck it for us, you know, we're living a pretty good life, you know? And I mentioned that to two girls earlier, it's that kind of stuff that

Starting point is 01:18:42 there's no tolerance for it. And there's a, they have a very dim view, the rest of the world, of what we do. They're scratching their head going, how can you justify changing children's sex? But they're not old enough to join the military, not old enough to drink beer and drive a car. But there's just so much weirdness. The rest of the world has questions and uh you know and i get i'm on that side of the world where i get to see and hear this stuff and and i don't even try to answer it i'm just like you know what i don't know how to answer it i just just leave me out of this argument man i'm just here to live my life enjoy what i'm doing here and my wife and my family and and that's it you know live in paradise

Starting point is 01:19:22 so to speak right it does feel like sometimes the whole thing is like a long reality tv show though because we we fight over you know some things that are very legit that maybe are a problem in society moving forward with how we go about certain issues but we also then fight over things that are such minute little examples in our culture and make them the main thing and make them the focus of the rest of the world. And it feels like sometimes it's just some giant distraction to get everyone fucking pissing around the card table together.

Starting point is 01:19:58 Yeah, you're right. I think so too. I think a lot of it's just a distractor, you know? You know, we were talking in the car earlier about, you know, this year is kind of the year of the apocalypse you know when you think about it i don't think there's gonna be a 2024 election it's not gonna be a good one if there is what i don't think there's gonna be a 2024 election what the fuck you're talking about yeah i don't think there will be i don't think there will be with the way things are going you don't think we're gonna have an election in this country i think what we're gonna have is war is what i

Starting point is 01:20:23 think we're gonna you think we're gonna have war in this country i think what we're going to have is war is what i think we're going to have you think we're going to have war in this country i think so you want to take a bet on that right now i'm not gonna take a bet but that's my you know all right so you're not gonna take a bet because i'll bet fucking 10 g's right now that's not happening 100 yeah no i think i think there will be one here's why they're gonna get rid of trump they're gonna do something one two and i think we're at the we're at the breaking point when it comes to his base right so those that support him right no no but who's they doing this well obviously it's the opposition right the left the party on the left the democrats for example um the the powers to be so forth that are actually pulling all the the uh pulling all the strings right now i don't think there's going to be an election i think we're also going to be in a war with Russia by the end of the summer, not because the Russians are bad.

Starting point is 01:21:07 And I know that sounds really bad, but a lot of people don't think about how did Russia get into this position in Ukraine to start with? Did they just say, oh, we're just going to invade it and take over the country? So go back into the 70s, right? NATO. When NATO first started out, what is it? 13 countries, we said, hey, we're not gonna expand beyond that. We're never gonna be knocking on your door, Russia. Don't worry. Here we are 30 countries later, we're on their door,

Starting point is 01:21:33 and we're doing the same thing that Russia did when John... Cuban Missile Crisis. The Cuban Missile Crisis, right? It's like, get your missiles off that island, get them off our doorstep, and we're going to war. And they did. So we did the same thing, but we didn't back off. And so I don't believe that the Russians' goal is to take all Ukraine back.

Starting point is 01:21:52 It's certain provinces or portions of that country. And here's the other irony, right? So you have the Azov brigades, right? What are they? They're Nazi brigades, literally wearing swastikas, okay? So we're yelling about fascism and Nazism, yet we're supporting a Nazi fascist regime. Yeah, well, it is a small – it's a small percentage of them. It doesn't matter, right?

Starting point is 01:22:12 I mean, we have neo-Nazis here in America. Right. And we're attacking them left and right, right? And we're calling everybody a fascist and neo-Nazi. Right. We also aren't being invaded right now. I got to defend them on that because – and I'm not defending the days all battalions disgusting you know i salute whatever happens to them in war i'm not gonna feel bad but i'm just saying like and i got a lot of problems with that war and the

Starting point is 01:22:35 fact that there's no real effort for peace we're funding it over and over and over again we're funding death yeah here i'm with you on all that. I think that, you know, some of the – unfortunately, what comes of it is everything becomes politicized because we have involved ourselves politically in it. Well, yeah. At the end of the day, what do we get out of it? Nothing, right? We spend a lot of money supporting this country for some very dubious reasons. Oh, they're going to get something out of it. Who's going to rebuild that place?

Starting point is 01:23:04 Absolutely, man. They're making bank. All that money we've given them so far, you know, hey, man, there's people in this country that could use that money. Agreed. The guys in Hawaii, 700 bucks, everything got burned out here, 700 bucks. But we're sending millions and millions of our tax money to a country for a war that doesn't involve us.

Starting point is 01:23:24 Why are we even involved in this thing? I'll tell you what really sat wrong with me is when you saw Zelensky a few weeks ago in America, he's literally meeting and taking photo ops with all the leaders of all the defense companies. Exactly. It's like Raytheon, Lockheed, everywhere. It's not even the meme rights itself. And I'm not even blaming him in that situation.

Starting point is 01:23:49 I'm looking at us going, when people sit here and scream about the military industrial complex. There it is. There it is, man. Like, it doesn't get more blatant than that. And, you know, they're making content with them, like with the nice camera shot. Like, hey, like a fucking Allstate commercialstate commercial like they're all sitting there shaking hands kissing babies but they're really just funding more death in a war that is is i mean i i've had mark turner in here who's been over there since like day one on and off training ukrainian battalions and stuff

Starting point is 01:24:19 he asked us to do a site survey can you kind of go over all the locations, this location and all the locations we have and see where our guys are and give us your assessment. So we started doing that and they were putting snipers up in a clock tower. It's like you've been watching Saving Private Ryan too much, you know. It's not a good place to put a sniper. Contrary to popular belief, you don't put snipers in clock towers, right? Why is that? Because they're easy to pick off up there yeah you're stuck up there yeah right you're stuck up there one tank rolling through takes care of everything i mean you've seen that in saving private ryan right i mean i don't know why everybody thinks that's the thing that guy actually he was a cool character in that

Starting point is 01:24:56 movie but he got blown away by a tank because he's up in a bell tower or whatever he's like it's an unwinnable war for everyone right these fucking two armies sit there and fight over – they fight for two weeks over 20 yards. Yeah. It's just not – it's just death. Yeah. And it's – yeah, it's a racket, you know, at the end of the day. You know, war is a racket, so to speak. And it is.

Starting point is 01:25:15 And unfortunately, I hate to, you know, be the one to say that, but I've given – But you profit off that racket, though, too, doing what you do, no? Unfortunately, I do, you know. Well, fortunately for me, I do. But it is what it is, know people need my help and look at the end of the day i do what i think is the right thing to do i will not go and fight ukraine you know i've been asked if i'd be willing to go that's like why i ain't got nothing to do with us and not only that i don't agree with that war okay so there's a part of me a moral side of me that picks and chooses

Starting point is 01:25:43 the fights i want to get involved in uh if you said to me hey uh you know do you want to go to wherever yemen and kill isis or al-qaeda sign me up fuck you you're gonna pay me money i'm gonna do it you know because i've seen what they're capable of doing right and so i don't have a problem with that um somebody's got to do it and if you can't do it and you need me to do it, okay, if you're paying me, I'll go do it, you know? And, you know, God is my money. No, actually, you know what? At the end of the day, if I'm going to take a risk, I won't be paid for it because I got family too that I need to feed, right? So, but I'm going over there to help people hopefully and get rid of the evil that would destroy everybody else. Same thing with Afghanistan and Iraq. I've seen the evil that these people are willing to do. And most people sit behind their computer at their TV at

Starting point is 01:26:31 home and they've just never been there. But once you've been there and you've seen it, it's like, man, you know? Well, I want to go back to that too, because you've been talking about Iraq a little bit. And I don't want to, I want to back down from my opinions that when I'm sitting across from guys like you, who who I respect who were there. And I always do say this about that war as someone sitting in an armchair who didn't fight in it. The guys who go there, the guys who do the job, you guys are following orders. You're doing what you're supposed to do. I got all the respect in the world for that.

Starting point is 01:26:59 And I think the military gets put in a bad position because they got to answer for decisions that happen in Washington, D.C. that they don't get to make, no matter how high up they are in many cases. But you look at that war, obviously Saddam, bad guy, like not good guy. His sons were horrible. His reign was tyrannical. He was sociopathic. At the same time, though, I do always struggle with the idea of two things. Number one, is it our job to be the world police at all times in all places?

Starting point is 01:27:32 And number two, did we not end up leaving it worse than we found it? Because I would argue that as bad as he was and as awful of a person as he was and the things he would do that you laid out. Yeah. Tragically, some of the examples of how bad it would get. It was at least more controlled than it is now, where it's just this power vacuum of almost tribes of terrorism that is ripe for the taking. Well, exactly. And I totally agree, right? We should not be policing the rest of the world.

Starting point is 01:28:07 And two, classic example, Kabul, 20 years. And what do we do? We hand $80 billion worth of equipment over to the Taliban. And for all for what? For not. And I always bring this argument up too. It's very true. We went in there with a historic at the time paramilitary

Starting point is 01:28:26 operation took control of the situation the one thing we failed to do was actually get bin laden himself we got to that 10 years later and then all the resources started going to iraq that's where afghanistan you talk to everyone who's been there and i haven't asked you about it as much to this point in in our conversation but you talk to everyone who's been there, and I haven't asked you about it as much to this point in our conversation, but you talk to everyone who's been there. That's where it went wrong because it became like the little redheaded stepchild. Oh, yeah, that problem. Right? And then it builds up.

Starting point is 01:28:54 The Taliban never left. Right? It's still there. And then 20 years later, it's the same as it was when we left it. Probably worse, actually. Probably worse. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:29:04 Again, look, you can't blame the military for any of that, okay? You got to blame who? The politicians. Yes, I agree. And the politicians answer to the American people, okay? So why are the American people not holding politicians accountable? Okay, that's what I want to know. Why are we not holding them accountable?

Starting point is 01:29:22 We make a lot of noise, but nothing happens. Why did those officers and Biden who made that call in Kabul not get hung out to dry for that? They cost more lives and more Americans and look where we are today. And by the way, now we've got Taliban offering to go in and help Hamas fight the Israelis with our weapons systems. Like, wow. Wait, what? Can you explain that? Yeah. So I don't know if about a month ago, the Taliban was actually offering to come to fight on behalf of the Hamas with American systems, weapons systems, to fight the Israelis.

Starting point is 01:29:59 So we're at this point now, you know, now we've got Hezbollah, we've got, you know, the whole place is getting ready to boil over in this point now. Now we've got Hezbollah. We've got the whole place is getting ready to boil over any minute now. Have we finished the jobs, both of them? The thing with Iraq, you're right. We never really finished the job. We just languished there. We talked a lot of talk, but nothing ever actually happened. In Afghanistan, you mean?

Starting point is 01:30:22 Both, Iraq and Afghanistan, right? So nothing really got shut down. We still had a presence there and people were still particularly americans are still being targeted same thing with afghanistan um we tried to fight the war and sometimes i think you know again it comes back to politics politicians are afraid um of perceptions right so of course so for example you know one of problems, one of the issues I always had to deal with in Afghanistan is if we rolled up a bad guy, okay, all of a sudden we can't interrogate him. All you can do is interview him, and you can only interview him for three days. And then after three days, you can't do anything bad to him. You have to feed him, give him a bed, you ask him questions.

Starting point is 01:31:04 You don't get the answers you want. You have to release him with all his gear and stuff and let him go. In fact, it got to a point where when I did roll up guys, the first question out of our mouth was, are you arresting me as a terrorist or as a criminal? And what they were hoping you would say is a terrorist because they know, okay, I'm going to get locked up for three days. I just shut my mouth. They're going to feed me, give me a bed to sleep in, take care of me, give me my stuff, and I get to leave. If you arrest them as a criminal, you hand them over to the Afghan National Police, A&P.

Starting point is 01:31:31 That's a different story. That's going to be a bad story there, right? And so they were hoping to God it was terrorism and not a criminal, right? So they started gaming it. I've actually caught guys. I'm like, you again? You know?

Starting point is 01:31:47 Yes, remember, I'm a terrorist. Get it right get it right and they were literally hey how's it going and i'm like you again you know i arrest guys multiple times you know roll them up because we were allowed to shoot them you know you couldn't interrogate them and you know this all started with john mccain and his bullshit about you know interrogations don't work i'm here to tell you right now interrogations work and you don't you're on you're on the you're on the bring your bucket and towel you do not have to do that you do not have to pull fingernails out all that crap there's a different way to do it oh okay yeah there's a night i didn't go the direction i thought yeah so when you say interrogation like good cop bad cop routine yeah pretty much and uh it's psychological psycho men are easy to breed psychologically wait john mccain was against interrogations without torture absolutely the fuck was wrong

Starting point is 01:32:29 with him exactly right and i said he's a sellout that what that's fine if you're not like we can sit here and have an argument about torture but like if you're not torturing them what the fuck is the argument right what do you want you to do well exactly and that's the problem we had was now we can't do anything because of public perception politics you know god forbid you get caught in any way you couldn't even call a guy a name if i had a what by the way we couldn't who's gonna know wait wait we couldn't even call them prisoners pows we had to call them pucks personnel under control so if i had a puck i couldn't go hey motherfucker you stupid son of a bitch right Right there, there was a chargeable offense. Are you recording this, though? Is it on camera?

Starting point is 01:33:08 Here's the problem. Here's the problem. The guy to your left and right now. Can report you. And he will. For calling someone a motherfucker? You have a bunch of weenies. You've got to be kidding me.

Starting point is 01:33:18 I'm not joking, dude. I've been to camps where, I was at a camp one time. There was only, get this right, nine Americans. All right, me and another paramilitary guy. The rest were staffers, okay? And we call them combat tourists. You know, they're at some embassy, you know, in Paris. And it's like, oh, I want to go to Afghanistan, right?

Starting point is 01:33:39 So they get to go to a FOB, a forward operating base, out there in an Indian country. And they're out there, andB, a forward operating base, out there in Indian country. And they're out there, and they're going to do their gear out there in a secure camp, protected by me and my men, my Afghans or whatever. And then they get to go, hey, I was an Afghans. I was in combat. I was in a war zone, right? You didn't do nothing.

Starting point is 01:33:57 I remember I had this one chick walking around without a 9mm, without a pistol. And I go, you know, what we had was we had a camp, and then we had a small contumely area inside where we all stayed right so it's like you know this is the fallback this is alamo things go bad with our own guys if they turn on us which they do sometimes right we have a little alamo we can kind of hold up and defend ourselves and but you never assume that you're safe you have to assume that there's always going to be somebody, because we know we had Taliban in our ranks. We know that, okay, all the time.

Starting point is 01:34:27 You go out and recruit guys, you think he's squared away, but he's actually working for the opposition, right? So you actually had Taliban in the ranks. So you had to be prepared for that. That means you carry your gun. You sleep with your gun. You got your eyes open behind your head. She's walking around, I'm like, where's your firearm?

Starting point is 01:34:42 I'm against firearms. Oh, no. Right? Oh, no. And that was very common, by's your firearm i'm against firearms oh no right it was that it was that and that was very common by the way i'm against firearms i'm only in fucking afghanistan exactly and i told her i said you know what you're supposed you carry the firearm not i don't care if you're against it you carry the firearm to protect me and the rest of the people here you should have given her like a fucking machete or something i should have punched her nose but uh you know um i should have threw her out there with the wolves go here you go see i see how you do without a knife without a gun you know did she bring some pepper spray harsh words you know and a little

Starting point is 01:35:14 attitude you know stay back terrorist freaking caring man that's what you know oh my god uh but yeah you know but that's the reality of it man what's going on out there um man we had it got so bad i can tell you jim diorio definitely didn't follow those interrogation rules that i can assure our guy jim who's special forces and then fbi one of his jobs once he was at fbi was to be an international interrogator in these zones there were no cameras in those cells i'll put it that way yeah and there's not but the problem is it got so political and you've got people like karen who want to carry a gun if she sees or hears that you're doing something she's gonna rat you out yeah i think he locked karen in the closet yeah i'm pretty sure like jim tied up people like that yeah i'm not even kidding we we actually had a guy come

Starting point is 01:36:05 out he was an eo officer right oh what um equal opportunity right sexual harassment he gave us a surrexual thing about this i'm at a camp with about 500 pipe hitters um there's only like nine nine of us right dudes and uh it doesn't mean what you think, Alessi. And Karen, right? And so we're like, okay. Alessi's fucking crying over here. You know what I'm saying? Okay, tonight this guy's going to show up, and he's going to give you guys a class on, you know,

Starting point is 01:36:33 EO and sexual harassment. I'm like, what? You know, and we're literally in Fort Apache, man. We're in the heart of Taliban country all around us. We're getting in firefights every morning. I'm launching mortars at the Taliban who's launching mortars at me. And I'm on combat operations. They're holding up a barricade going, where did he touch you?

Starting point is 01:36:54 Well, you know what? He actually came out and he's like counseling us on, as a group, look, you can't call each other motherfucker. You can't go, hey, bitch. You can't say stuff like that. And I'm like, huh? And I'm like, I can't call each other motherfucker you know you can't go hey bitch you know you can't say stuff like that and i'm like huh and i'm like i can't even say motherfucker i was like you know the other night i had a guy take his night vision goggles off in the middle of a fucking firefight and i yelled at him through through my interpreter put your goggles on and he put it on and two minutes later he took them off and i yell him again he put him back on and if i started calling

Starting point is 01:37:22 names i said i had to call names and i had to threaten the guy because him not wearing goggles puts us all in jeopardy. Right? And so, and then the next day, I said, get that guy's name. Next day, I had him as assistant team leader, team leader, out filling sandbags in broad daylight with their night vision goggles and helmets on the day, like just shoveling sandbags. I go, you want to be dumb? I'll make you strong, you know? But, you know, all that stuff was like foreboding. It's like, you know, you can't do that like what we're in combat we're in combat and yeah and

Starting point is 01:37:49 these guys that's what they you know they don't understand you know hey sir would you please put your night vision goggles on and fight you know no you gotta yell at you gotta put a boot in your ass it's not because you hate them it's actually because you love us and we love each other and we all want to go home together and sometimes i gotta really raise my voice and maybe put hands on you, you know. But, man, we got this whole class on this thing. And I was like, we're doomed, man. We are. There's no way we're winning this war.

Starting point is 01:38:13 Not with this kind of shit going on, you know. Just, you know, it's everywhere, man. And, you know, this whole, I don't know. I don't even know what to tell you about it anymore. This is why, again, I'm like, you know what? Count me out. I'm living in Bali so you know

Starting point is 01:38:29 it's crazy oh my god how long have you been in Bali again I've been in Bali six years all together I've been in Indonesia

Starting point is 01:38:37 about eight eight and a half years I used to live in Jakarta so yeah it's kind of a long story how I got there so backing up so we asked me in the beginning so

Starting point is 01:38:47 man we went alone we're coming back to the beginning so so what happened was 2001 i retired from the military i was in third special forces group i was a green beret a stealth operator retired in 01 yeah what month uh right before 9-11 six weeks before 9-11 yeah six weeks before 9-11. Yeah, July. So, yeah, but at that point, I'd already seen quite a bit of combat. The unit was already in combat long before anybody else had seen any combat. You know, it's just not advertised, but it doesn't even mean nothing. So I get out. I start my own company, and 9-11 happens, and then I get recruited. Business is booming.

Starting point is 01:39:24 Yeah, I get recruited by the government. I'm also doing a lot of consulting in the nuclear security industry, all the commercial nuclear power plants in the United States. I pretty much serviced 42 out of 64 plants. Made a lot of money. 2004 G4S, Wackenhut, bought my company. Why? Because they're getting rid of the competition

Starting point is 01:39:41 because I was basically blocking them at every turn. I reincorporated. I said, yeah, you can buy this basically blocking them at every turn. I reincorporated. I said, yeah, you can buy this company. They took the company. I reincorporated another company doing the same thing. I said, you want to buy this one too? And so, you know, and I built it up until 2011. I sold it to another company.

Starting point is 01:39:58 Concurrently, I'm working for, you know, OGA, the government. OG, what does that stand for? We'll call it Office of Government Affairs. How about that? That's a good one. The Alphabet Company, something like that. Gotcha. All right.

Starting point is 01:40:11 So anyways, I'm still held to certain agreements. But anyways, you can read into it. So then what happened was 2011 came around, and I got in another ambush, and I had this epiphany. So I was talking to a company that said they wanted to buy my company. So I'm kind of concurrently running one company, but I'm still a warfighter down range. And so they said, if you can get us a contract with this particular oil company, and this is what we're looking for, we'll buy your company. And I thought about, you know what, this might be a way out of the war for me because I'm getting a little long in the tooth you know and I'm getting tired of getting ambushed and firefights you know and I got kids and family so what happened was um I was I got

Starting point is 01:40:55 ambushed one night pretty bad and I remember sitting there in the vehicle thinking if I get through this one I said I'm it I'm hanging up the guns. I'm done. I'm going to go home and do my other stuff, security, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, at the same time, I got discovered by Discovery Channel. Imagine that. Another one. How many people walk in there with Discovery Channel stories? Yeah, you know, so I'm on Discovery Channel, and I was on a show called One Man Army.

Starting point is 01:41:24 Apparently, I did pretty well. And I got a call from NBC going, hey, we got another TV, we got a movie, a TV show we're making called Stars Earn Stripes. Would you be interested in trying out? I thought, well, man, I didn't think this would happen again. I just thought it was a one-off, you know? And so next thing you know, out of 2000,000 applicants, I think, I was one of eight selected to be on Stars and Stripes with Terry Crews, Eva Torres, Dean Cain. Oh, wow. Chris Kyle. There's quite a few of us on there.

Starting point is 01:41:53 Wait, like American Sniper, Chris Kyle? Yeah. No shit. Yeah, absolutely. And so anyways, wow, now I'm going to be in Hollywood. So yeah, I ended up being in Hollywood, sold my my company uh the second company and doing pretty well for myself spent a couple years doing movies tv shows would you would you when you say that like actually in the movies yeah yeah no yeah um what were you in you could look it up man i was on i was on fx nbc i was on a legit librarians um

Starting point is 01:42:22 i was with another company called zulu 7. We made a bunch of zombie movies. Anyways, just – You were a zombie in the movies? Actually, one of them I was. I turned into a zombie, right? I was like the good guy who got bit and then turned into this raging lunatic. With the handlebar? I had everything, man.

Starting point is 01:42:36 And the big veins sticking out of their heads. That's it. Bigger than the ones I already have. But anyways, I did that for a few years, and it just didn't feel right, you know, just... I can't see you on movie sets for too long, man. Man, I wanted to kill people, man. It's like, you know, these people are so... Not all of them. There were actually some really good people. I'm not going to say that, but some of them was like, Jesus Christ, Jiminy, you know? And it's hard work.

Starting point is 01:43:05 It really was hard work. I'm not going to lie, you know? And I have a lot of respect for people in that industry. But just for me personally, I felt like, you know, I'm faking the funk. This is not what I do. I do the real thing. I don't pretend to do the real thing, right? Like these guys.

Starting point is 01:43:17 So I got this calling, and I ended up going to Hong Kong and became part of a security detail that ran. I eventually became one of the senior leaders, I guess, if you will, for protection detail for a multi-billionaire investment banker over there. And a very well-known fellow. I won't mention his name. But I did that for a while. And then that's where I met my wife, who's Indonesian. She went back to Indonesia. And then I followed her back to Indonesia. Gotcha then that's where I met my wife, who's Indonesian. She went back to Indonesia. And then I followed her back to Indonesia. The question earlier was, why'd you go to Indonesia?

Starting point is 01:43:51 Because I was following some trim. And so I followed her over there and we started hanging out, running around, just traveling the country, sightseeing. And one thing led to another, I saw some opportunities, business opportunities, and I expanded on that. And then before you know, just traveling the country, sightseeing. And one thing led to another, I saw some opportunities, business opportunities, and I expanded on that. And then before you know it, I'm partners with another billionaire in Jakarta for a little while. That didn't quite work out. Well, is there like a phone book of mercenaries around the world? Like if I'm, you know, dictator X or president Y, can I just like whip out a book and be like, let's go to the, oh yeah, seize Comstock, call them up? Is that how it works?

Starting point is 01:44:27 No, it's a network, right? A network. Certain people – yeah. No, there's no website. Assassins are us. There's nothing like that. It's basically a network and people people you know they come to you to go hey you know i got a job you would you be interested you know and so it kind of it kind of

Starting point is 01:44:50 works like that whose car we taking yeah right whose car we taking exactly that's hilarious um but we we jump we jump forward to that i want to come back to your whole like post-military career and how you got into some of these war zones and stuff but we had been talking a little bit ago now about the beginning of your career and you going through all the schooling and everything and what i wanted to get to was where you ended up first so this is now like i'm guessing like 1983 1984 you go to it to your delta team you get assigned to whatever team that is you're not allowed to say where it was or how big it was for security reasons but is it the kind of thing where you're immediately being deployed on on special missions or how did it work yeah so ramp up so one thing about the unit it's so okay tier one what does that mean everybody goes you know they're tier

Starting point is 01:45:39 one they're tier two whatever nobody really knows what that means i'll tell you what it means tier one means if a unit is designated as tier one, they're always, even in peacetime, in a constant state of warfare and they're being funded as such, right? So Delta is tier one. It's always considered, it always has this war footing. It's always considered in a state of war because they're always running ops, things like that, of different levels, okay? A nuclear-powered submarine is a Tier 1 asset. Certain airplanes are Tier 1 assets, right? And then you have Tier 2. What would be a Tier 2 asset?

Starting point is 01:46:12 Green Berets, Navy SEALs. I call them Vanilla SEALs, right? Not SEAL Team 6. They would be considered black. They would be Tier 1. But the other Vanilla teams that are not special operations if you will um consider tier two uh rangers some of the range battalions are tier one because they support some of the other spec ops units so there's different levels so tier one tier two two three

Starting point is 01:46:35 right um and because i was in that organization we're in a constant state of war so we're doing operations all the time may not always be war fighting but it's something related to that space um and the other thing that you know operator what is a delta force operator right now everybody's hijacked the word operator um what does the operator actually mean well if you're a delta force operator you're not always operating as a soldier sometimes you're operating um under the guise or auspices of another government agency, right? You're batch credentialed through them and,

Starting point is 01:47:11 or you might actually be out working as a civilian, right? And so when it comes down to your evaluation reports, when they're trying to compare you to your peer group, say in special forces, all right, how did it distinguish your mission from what they do, right? And so there it is, right? If I'm doing all kinds of, you know, you're just doing your MOS related job, but I'm over here doing stuff like, you know, whatever, you know, in a suit one day and, you know, tennis shorts the next day and the other day in a military uniform,

Starting point is 01:47:40 you know, how do you quantify and qualify that, right? So that was an issue for a long time. It's like, how do we promote our guys that don't exist, you know, and they do all this other special stuff. So, you know, they sort of worked through all that at this point. But now, you know, Harry Swing and Dick thinks he's an operator. You know, I'm a ranger operator. I'm a SEAL operator.

Starting point is 01:48:02 I'm a police operator. It's like, Jesus Christ, man. It sounds cool. Everybody wants to be an operator, but you know what? You want to be an operator? Go earn it. Take the long walk is what I always say. If you're a SEAL, you're a SEAL. If you're a Green Beret, you're a Green Beret. If you're a ranger, you're a ranger.

Starting point is 01:48:13 You're a Marine, you're a Marine. You're a cop, you're a cop. You're SWAT, you're SWAT. That's it. Just be happy with what you are. Stop trying to be more than what you are. The name doesn't mean nothing. It's the job. Just be proud of what you've done. Nobody you know, the name doesn't mean nothing. It's the job, right?

Starting point is 01:48:25 Just be proud of what you've done. Nobody's judging you. Nobody's looking down on you. You know, if you want to be something better, more elite, then go for it. Go work for it. You know, go earn it. Don't just fucking hijack a name, you know? Right.

Starting point is 01:48:38 But again, it's the human condition, right? Humans are weird. Yeah. So when you get in though what where do you remember your first mission actually my first mission was an 82nd grenada 1983 yeah oh wait is this what movie was that story oh there's what wolf of wall street where he's like you ever hear grenada oh yeah and he's like no and he said it's basically this country we went in we said we could wipe you off the fucking map you're grenada right now he's pointing at jordan belfer

Starting point is 01:49:10 when they got him when they got him to a t so what what was can you just explain the background there and what was happening so again cubans right so the cubans were in grenada you know and and anyways political reasons i love how you said again. Yeah. It's communism, right? It's trying to spread. And so he's in Grenada. And the decision was made that we've got to liberate Grenada from the Cubans, right? The communist Cubans. And I was in the 82nd Airborne Division at the time.

Starting point is 01:49:36 And what we did was, you know, you have the island of Grenada, which is not very big. And then you got surrounding smaller islands. And so what we needed to do is do reconnaissance on the smaller islands, set up what we call OPs, observation positions, observation posts, where we're looking for, listening for, or waiting for Cubans and PRA, which is People's Republic of Grenada, PRG, I believe it's called. It's been a while. Prague, I think is what it's called. Anyways, Grenadian militia that was sympathetic to the Cubans. They had cacheted a lot of weapon systems on these islands. And what they were doing was going out at night on boats and recovering them, you know, guerrilla warfare is what it was. And what we did is we occupied these small islands, waited for them to come.

Starting point is 01:50:19 And then we either call for help or we just go ahead and engage them as they came to the islands. In fact, two of the most decorated soldiers out of as they came to the islands in fact uh two of the most decorated soldiers out of grenada came out of my platoon out of my lure platoon um for combat so um heroism all kinds of stuff but uh interesting story about that i was actually in school i was in a school called recondo school so i happened to be in recondo school at the time and on fort bragg. And I remember one morning, we heard all these airplanes flying around above. It's like, what's going on? We got all these fast movers up there. You know, something was buzzing and something was going on.

Starting point is 01:50:52 And then they had, you know, the cadre pulls together, had a formation. They go, if you hear your name called, report back to unit. So they started naming all these names and like, what is going on here? And by the time I got back to the unit, my unit had already left. They were already in Grenada, right? And I'm like, damn, so I got left behind. And so I'm like, how do I get there to be part of this fun, right? So I managed to get on another logistics flight and escort a bunch of batteries and logistics and radios and stuff on a C-141 flying to Grenada. flying a grenade so i show up uh late in the afternoon almost dark uh you know dusk when i show up and we land and the problem was the airplanes once they land they got to take back

Starting point is 01:51:33 off because there's you know they could get bombed and blown up and targeted on the on the runway so it's still hot so we land unload all this crap you know i'm sitting on this pallet with all these batteries and stuff and i'm expecting somebody from my platoon to be there to pick me up with the truck and haul this stuff off because they knew i was coming or so i thought and so nobody shows up and i'm waiting and waiting and waiting and there's two guys on the drop on the uh on the uh what do you call on the airstrip air force uh safety officer asl i believe I believe he was called, and a commander. And they're like, hey, Sergeant, or Specialist, I was a Spec 4 at the time, hey, Spec 4,

Starting point is 01:52:09 you can't stay here, you gotta leave. And I'm like, yeah, where am I supposed to go? Nobody's here to pick me up, you know? And, well, you can't stay here. And I'm like, I got all these batteries, you can't stay here. I couldn't believe I had this argument with these guys. And I'm like, dude, where am I supposed to go

Starting point is 01:52:20 if I can't stay here, right? And they're like, well, I don't know, but you can't stay here. And pretty much made it clear, it's like, you gotta leave to leave and i'm like i don't know where i'm going i don't know you know this is grenada there's cubans running around in pra and you know they should fight and stuff and i don't know where my platoon's at you know and uh yeah this actually happened so i'm like okay so you're telling me i gotta go yeah i said you can have some ammunition so he gave me some magazines i'll load it up and I literally walked off that night into the, off into the, into the jungle, walking through Grenada. I'm walking for several hours. I ended up downtown.

Starting point is 01:52:53 You're walking into the jungle. I'm walking by myself in Grenada, right? And so literally by myself. And I end up in Georgetown, the capital. And right before I enter, you know, there's a lot going on and I'm like, I don't know if I want to walk in there by myself, you know, with, you know, and hey, anybody know where the Lurper Toon's at? I said, that's probably a bad idea, right? So I turn around, and I'm walking all night, and I'm walking down this dirt road. It's dark, you know, it's spooky, and I don't know where I'm going. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just walking, meandering around the jungle, right? And all of a sudden, I halt who goes there and right away

Starting point is 01:53:26 i recognized the voice a guy named sean he was on my team i go sean sergeant cop stalk you know so that's how i linked up with my platoon but uh yeah i just i want to look back and i was like you can't make that shit up i'm literally walking around grenadaada, don't know where I'm going, looking for my platoon because a couple of officers just kicked me off the freaking airfield because they said I can't stay there. They didn't give me any reason why, just I can't stay there. I'm like, okay, give me some ammo, I'm going to leave.

Starting point is 01:53:55 That's insane. Yeah. But yeah, Grenada was interesting, but that was my first combat deployment. Kind of uneventful for me. We were mostly doing a concert. Uneventful, just bramble through the jungle in fucking Grenada looking for life. Yeah, dodging Cubans.

Starting point is 01:54:14 How many Cubans took a header on that walk? No, no, man. But, yeah, that was actually my first experience. I've actually been in every campaign, literally every campaign from Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Yemen, and a few things in between that are not public. But the last time I've seen combat was year 2015, 2016, so not that long ago. I've always been a combatant. I've always engaged the enemy at close proximity. That was my job, to go out and find, fix, fight, and finish the enemy, whether it was with weapon systems, explosives, mortars.

Starting point is 01:55:02 I was pretty good with mortars too. I had a conversation one time with Chris Kyle, the American sniper, and he killed like 150-something people with a sniper rifle. I said, that's a pretty good body count, man, for a guy with a gun. And I said, but you know what? I said, I'd probably kill more people than you did with a mortar. You were doing Wednesdays and Tuesdays, man. I was doing groupsies with a freaking, you know. Oh, my God.

Starting point is 01:55:29 I had to run a mortar system, man, every 4.30 in the morning in Afghanistan, man. The Taliban on their way to prayer, hey, let's go drop some freaking mortars on these guys, right? And they'd launch the mortars, and they'd come in, you know, and get me out of bed at 4.30 in the morning. I got to run out the mortar pit, you know, spin up my guys. We're always out there already ready to go anyways and uh we'd return fire you know set up 120s and 80s and uh and start lobbing back you know and it became like almost every two to three days you know it was a we did that on a regular basis um i probably did that for about 18 months just that part alone but uh yeah you know so i'm a kind of a weapons of mass destruction guy you know

Starting point is 01:56:08 shooting people's okay but you know like i'm watching them splatter all over the place it's like a different thing you know yeah you you had said earlier you mentioned something about being i'm joking by the way i'm just gonna let it go you. But you mentioned something about being a bomb maker, I think, or teaching bomb making classes. No. Okay. I got a background in explosives. I've been working with explosives for probably close to 40 years. That's a long time.

Starting point is 01:56:37 Yeah. You know, I'm trained to surgically breach, whether it's explosives, ballistic breaching, mechanical breaching, or manual breaching, getting into things, right? So surgical, I know how to use explosives in a surgical, and I also know how to use a bulk explosives, you know, to just do mass destruction if necessary. But so I'm trained in that. I've got a lot of experience working with explosives. Even to this day, my business in Bali, I run a security company, and particularly Explosive Detector Dogs is what I train and deploy for like all the Marriott hotels and local venues and things like that.

Starting point is 01:57:15 Wait, you're training dogs? Yeah. So my company, my security company, we are a canine company. So we train dogs for narcotics, explosives, patrol attack, and that's what we do in Bali. Wow. So actually, my wife runs that company now. Kind of handed it off to her.

Starting point is 01:57:29 But I have a background in that. And so I understand how explosives work. I understand the detection piece of it. I know how to use it surgically. I know how to use it to get into things, get out of things. So yeah, I've got quite a background in that wow yeah so that's that's more than i realized and how long have you been training the dogs in indonesia uh we almost the entire time i say six years six and a half years now what goes into that you know because we take it for granted we see all these dogs that

Starting point is 01:58:03 are like so goddamn smart they come to whatever the war zone is whatever the horrible situation is they either find people or they find where the bombs are they find where the drugs are they can hunt people down like what how do you how do you even what's the first thing about even training that into a dog is is there only specific breeds you're even going to look at in the first place? And then what's the process? Yeah. So it's not always breed specific, but some dogs are better than others, some breeds. But what we really look for is we look for dogs with what's called high prey drive, right? In other words, a hunting drive,

Starting point is 01:58:40 the desire to chase things like a ball, birds, animals, whatever. And a dog that's got some athletic prowess because, you know, like when I came through the airport through Atlanta today, they had a couple of short-haired German pointers that they were using as what we call vapor dogs. Basically, they were, as people, passengers were lining up to go through immigration, they had, you know, a row of three or four. They would walk down this channelized hallway, and then the dog walked across the hall and back behind them. Then they sent four more back and forth.

Starting point is 01:59:14 So the dog was scenting the air because if you have any odor on you, like explosives, the dog will pick it up in the air, and then he'll dial in like a heat-seeking missile on the guy that actually has explosives. So that's called vapor trailing. We do some of that, but really what we focus on is searching vehicles for like car bombs and packages, backpacks, stuff like that. We have to set the thing down. Dog walks up. The dog indicates. Usually he'll sit down if there's something in it. But it's a process. It takes about three months of training. Mike, that's it? Yeah, to get the dog.

Starting point is 01:59:46 If he's good, right? If he's got the drive for it. And if you've got a high drive, like a Malinois. I love Malinois because they have very high drive. But they're also, you know, they call them maligators for a reason. You know, they can be a little snippy too. You've got to be careful because they're very high defense and high fight drive. So like I got a couple of dogs that if you even look at me wrong, they'll bite you. You know,

Starting point is 02:00:09 I mean, they're very defensive and they're not, they're not, they're not fighting out of fear. They're just bold dogs. That's why the police and the military like them so much, you know, but there's limitations when you're working around hotels because you got people walking in and out. You don't really want to dog around people like that. It might bite them. You know, those are issues, right? So you got to know what you're looking for, know what you're doing. But here's the thing about canines. Governments, all the governments have spent billions and billions and billions of dollars trying to develop machines that were as good as a canine when it comes to olfaction, right? Detect explosive. Nothing has beat a dog yet. Why? Well, first of all,

Starting point is 02:00:45 everybody thinks dogs smell like, for example, C4. If you ever smell C4, it smells like Marzipan. I haven't. Yeah, but it smells like Marzipan.

Starting point is 02:00:53 What do you mean you haven't? What's all that stuff? No. What's all that stuff in the room? Shh. Okay, it's a joke. It's a joke out there.

Starting point is 02:01:00 Okay, don't raise, no raise please. I'm going to get swatted in like 10 minutes. We got one. No, but it smells like marzipan in my mind it's got a very distinguished smell to it right and so you smell it and you think oh if the dog smells that smell then anytime he smells it he'll hit on actually what the dog is smelling is the broadband frequency everything has energy everything has frequency everything right so one explosive will have one broadband frequency, another explosive will have a little bit of a different frequency, it's a signature.

Starting point is 02:01:29 And what happens is the dog sees the world through his nose as we see it through our eyes, right? If you think about color, right? Every color has a frequency, every shade, every hue has its own frequency, right? We see that with our eyes. Our eyes are photoreceptors, they're antennas. They're picking up all the colors. And if you think about how many colors we're picking up at a time, right? And we're processing that, okay, through the visual cortex. Man, our brains are like, you know,

Starting point is 02:01:53 a quantum computer like 1,000 times, man. Oh, yeah. Doing a lot of information. The dog actually does more through his nose. He sees the world through his nose because he picks up frequency. You can take a dog that's blind and he'll still find his way around, right? It's like, how does he do that? Because he's using his nose. Now he doesn't see the world necessarily like we see it, but he can sense the energy as he's moving. And for example, there's been several stories in the years where people have taken a family pet, they've traveled across the country, somewhere along the way, they lost the dog. Three months later, they're back at home and the dog shows up. It's like, how did he find his way

Starting point is 02:02:24 back home, right? And so the reason he find his way back home, right? And so the reason he found his way back home was imagine you're driving down the road and you see landmarks, street signs, you know exactly where you are, you know, and if you did break down,

Starting point is 02:02:35 you knew the way to walk back. But the dog is laying in the backseat sleeping half the time or just laying down with his head down. He's not looking out the window. Well, how does he know his way? What's happening is you're traveling, he's picking up all the frequency of the odors along the way,

Starting point is 02:02:48 right? And he's remembering all that. Just like we're remembering it with our eyesight, street signs, he remembers where he's at. Okay. So he gets lost. All he does is backtrack because his memory, he remembers all the odors and frequencies. I mean, the brain, I mean, it's amazing, right? How the brains work, even the animal's brains. And that's how he finds his way back. Otherwise, you know, for example, let's take, you know, birds that migrate south during, you know, the winter. How the hell do they find their way from Canada to Florida? Every year, same track. Or even the new birds, first time out, you know, flying.

Starting point is 02:03:19 And he's finding his way because he's picking up energy, the Earth's frequency, magnetic fields, right? And he's got sensor systems. earth's frequency magnetic fields right and he's he's got sensor systems in we have it in our in our in our blood um we are designed to pick up frequency and that's what the bird is doing so he's right he's navigating off of frequency okay and that's how he's fine it's not because he's actually got a map and a compass and a gps going out we're right he's just flying that's how people like even human beings that tell tell those who live off the land in some of these third world countries, they have this stuff because that's what they trained their whole life. But we, getting to grow up and the opulence of having a roof over our head

Starting point is 02:03:54 and things like that, we lose some of that. Yeah, and that's how animals work, canines particularly. And most animals, they use their nose as pigs. There's a lot of things, right? They rely on their noses more than their eyes. And so, like I said, it takes about three months, sometimes a little less, sometimes a little bit more. It depends on the canine. But it's a very specialized skill.

Starting point is 02:04:13 If you know what you're doing, it's pretty impressive what the dogs are able to do. And here's the thing about a canine. If you pick up an odor with a machine, it's going to process it. It can only process one odor at a time. Whereas a canine can pick up three, four different explosives all at one time. He can walk right down the line and identify all four. He doesn't have to reset him and give him a new swab, you know, clean out his nose and do it again. It's one time.

Starting point is 02:04:36 And also the dog has, in time, has the ability to make android types of decisions, right? He can start to figure things out processing his mind my dogs know that you know what i smell something but i'm not sure it's right here but i smell it's around here so i'll circle around on this side and maybe go back around this side until i find it right so they know how to they start working and start developing a little bit of effective intelligence um but i had before covet I had 45 canines in Bali. I had 65 canine handlers running 24-hour ops, 365. And street value of my dogs were probably close to really about $850 to a million for 45 canines.

Starting point is 02:05:20 When they're trained properly, they're very expensive. Now, do you have clients that you're constantly training dogs for and sending them back to? No, I don't do that. All the dogs I have are trained for my own business. Oh, just for you guys? Yeah, yeah. Whoa. Just for us.

Starting point is 02:05:36 Now, how many, I don't even know if you want to say this, but how many guys do you have working for you? I had 65 at one point. I had to let them go after COVID. Unfortunately, you know, COVID, again, don't get me started. COVID was bad for war? No, no. This is Bali, Indonesia. Security.

Starting point is 02:05:53 I know. Yeah. But, like, you guys are being sent to war zones and shit sometimes. Like, that didn't stop because of COVID, no? Right. Exactly right. But the whole world shut down because of COVID, and all the properties that had our canines were like, hey oh we got to shut down so you take your dogs off the property

Starting point is 02:06:08 like and then now i can't pay my handlers right it's like oh i understand and i gotta let them go i understand and then the canines actually think some like i was misappropriating something else yeah i think some of my canines actually died from covid had some really weird symptoms and by the way covid's been around for at least 20,000 years. I've been inoculating- 20,000 years? Yeah. I've actually been inoculating my dogs for COVID since 1985. For COVID-19 or COVID? For COVID. Yeah, yeah, yeah. COVID-19 is just a variant of it, right? Yes, that's right. But COVID has been around for a long time.

Starting point is 02:06:39 Yes. And so I think some of my dogs actually got COVID because in Indonesia, I don't believe the vaccines have COVID vaccine. There's what's called a seven-way and an eight-way. It's a combination of vaccines, right? But I don't believe in Indonesia we had the vaccine for COVID in the seven or eight ways that we were using. So I had some really weird symptoms, some of my canines. I actually lost, I probably lost 30 dogs. 30?

Starting point is 02:07:06 Yeah, at least for either disease and or just sedentary. These dogs aren't working no more. They're being housed because we can't travel. We can't move. We can't do anything. I mean, literally, there was a point where you couldn't drive down the road without somebody, a police officer or a soldier stopping you, and you go, where's your pass at?

Starting point is 02:07:23 Like Nazi Germany stuff. Like, what are you doing out here where's your pass at you know going to grocery store sir yeah crazy man yeah it's amazing and like even here it's amazing how fast that happened yeah you know like one day shit was normal the next day people were like oh yeah we're just locked inside no problem like don't go to the grocery store you might die yeah it's a it's just like snapping a finger you know you know in indonesia i'll go back to indonesia because that's how i kind of relate to it in indonesia about 45 of the population lives off of day wages whatever they can sell that day in terms of food or parking a car is what they're eating on right you know a couple cents here park a car sell muffin whatever right that's what they're going

Starting point is 02:08:04 to feed their family on. Well, it got to a point where they weren't allowed to be out selling food. They weren't allowed to do anything. They had to hunker down. It's like, how are they going to make money? And people were literally, I mean, I've seen videos of entire families hanging themselves from the rafters because they would rather hang than starve to death because they weren't allowed to work. Think about that for a minute. For a virus with a 99% survival rate, I did the math on on it um you know you did yeah yeah i've done the math and it's i'd take the cdc statistics on all

Starting point is 02:08:31 that and you do you calculate that with the population it's like damn yeah you know and now now it's all coming out like yeah okay yeah it's one it's one of those things where i mean we knew i was around here when it was happening but you, you know, the strike zone that hit hard in America was New York and North Jersey and stuff. And none of us were, none of the average people like me or probably even you were like virologists back then and understood how viruses work. But viruses start, they kill a lot of people. And as they're killing a lot of people, they're like, oh, shit, we don't want to kill the host. So it slows down. It has a curve over time and i think that here you know they just dragged it on for so fucking long you know to such an archaic level that you know putting that

Starting point is 02:09:17 rabbit back in the hat is tough i mean i can see it at the beginning but yeah it was insane how far the measure i don't know if joe told you you on the show, but Joe and four other guys. Ted Eye. Yeah, Joe Ted Eye. They actually scheduled an appointment to go down and get tested for COVID, right? Get tested for COVID. Then they didn't. They canceled.

Starting point is 02:09:38 A week later, they all got letters saying they were positive for COVID. Think about that for a minute. Think about that for a minute, right? How was that? Why was he testing? Why was he testing for COVID? Exactly. He wanted to see if he had COVID. Think about that for a minute. Think about that for a minute, right? How was that? Why was he testing? Why was he testing for COVID? Exactly. He wanted to see if he had COVID.

Starting point is 02:09:48 And so he- Oh, just randomly. Yeah. Oh. Right? And so he scheduled appointments, canceled it for whatever reason or another, and then they got letters saying,

Starting point is 02:09:56 hey, by the way, you're positive for COVID. That's nuts. Yeah. That's the kind of crap that's going on, you know? A lot of people made a lot of money and a lot of people were- Yes. Their livelihood. Mine was, That's the kind of crap that's going on, you know? A lot of people made a lot of money and a lot of people were –

Starting point is 02:10:05 Their livelihood – mine was – my business was wrecked badly because of this, you know? Yeah, I would say – when we were – I'm sorry. When we were talking five minutes ago, I was thinking off the canine. I was thinking about the other stuff, not the canines. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is wild. Yeah, yeah. And we've, you know, we've never really recovered.

Starting point is 02:10:23 Although we're recovering recovering we're actually making more money now than we did pre-covered um with less clients which is kind of weird how that worked out but uh uh we definitely definitely took a beating and the worst part was i had you know of the 65 handlers i had i had to let 55 go i just couldn't support him anymore i just you know we lost him we lost our ass you know I remember, you know, when I felt bad because my guys, my employees are like family, you know, we treat them very fairly and very well, you know, and they are part of family, you know, we know their families and, you know, and the approach that I take to, you know, running a business is, you know, treat my employees with respect. In fact, the first thing I told my wife, I said, you know what? First two things, these are imperatives.

Starting point is 02:11:08 I said, every man gets his check, his full paycheck, every time, on time, no excuse ever, right? He gets paid because there's a tendency not to do that over there, right? And so two, if a guy makes a mistake, we don't fire him the first time, we counsel him. If he makes a second mistake, hey, well, you know what? We'll penalize you a little bit of money. Don't do that again. And when he makes it a third time, then we cut his head off. I say, you know, but we try to be fair about it. Those are my two rules.

Starting point is 02:11:31 And they appreciate that. And I knew their families, and I knew they were depending on this paycheck to feed their families. And by the way, in Indonesia, the average family makes about $260 a month. Think about that for a minute. $260 a month. Now, how far does that go there, though? It goes pretty far because they live a very minimalist life. But also, shit's very inexpensive there, no?

Starting point is 02:11:52 It's inexpensive, but he's been there, and he knows. Yeah, he's been there. He's poor. But they're not eating steaks. I can tell you that. They're not eating a lot of meat. They're eating a lot of rice, a lot of vegetables, a lot of fruit, and a lot of water. That's good. And, yeah, it's actually good, but they don't get the privileges we do, like travel and go do this. Right, right. They don't have a lot of expendable money, you know?

Starting point is 02:12:15 And so, you know, and that was important to me, too, to make sure they're paid well, you know, for their standards anyways and try to keep them handy. But when that happened, I actually had one guy, he came back to us and he told us that his daughter had died a little like two-year-old daughter and i what happened oh yeah she was really sick you know and we had the money for the bills and i'm like i'm like dude you should have called me i didn't give you the money i didn't take i'd have paid for it you know and i wouldn't charge i had to give it to you got you know family but you know that's how they are man it's like you know kids like kids were dying, and guys didn't have the money to take care of their children, their families anymore. And I was so angry, man.

Starting point is 02:12:52 It's like, what a scam, man. And people, and the other thing too, but going back to the canines, canines can pick up viruses. Canines can actually sense and detect a virus. They can detect cancer. They can um seizures before they come on it's amazing what a canine can detect and i had trained dogs and i was working with a group that we've trained dogs to pick up uh covid viruses could actually sense if a person had a virus before they showed symptoms nobody wanted to talk about that nobody wanted to do it you know why they were making all the money off the pcr test and send them to the hospital nobody wanted to talk about let's Nobody wanted to do that. You know why? They were making all the money off the PCR test and send them to the hospital.

Starting point is 02:13:26 Nobody wanted to talk about, let's mitigate this. We put canines at the airports. When you come through, like an explosive detector dog, and we signal out people that might be sick because it was a racket. People made a lot of money over there. Yeah, COVID made some people, man. Made them very rich.

Starting point is 02:13:41 Like the business of COVID. Made them very rich. And it killed a lot of businesses. It killed a lot of families. K killed a lot of families killed a lot of people you know inadvertently so um yeah it's it's man it's just one of those things that uh just aggravating as hell you know the lies are being perpetrated um at our at our expense you know the fear-mongering um i was at the g20 summit last year which happened to be in bali right so i got contract to come and do security for it so like an individual leader or all the g20 all the all of them yeah g20

Starting point is 02:14:12 the whole g20 the whole thing yeah the whole g70 was somewhere right there where i live right so i got contract to come in and provide canines for security so i also got to listen to some of the bullshit that they were they were spewing on the on the podium right and here's just needed i need an image of you in the corner with the dog like that's some bullshit i want to say so bad but man shut the fuck up these people were eating this shit up i'm like are you kidding me here's five things here's the five takeaways from the g20 something that i got five things one yeah we have a water shortage that's bullshit I just swam to this fucking convention this morning because rain so hard in Bali all right there's water all around

Starting point is 02:14:50 the planet we got saline desalination plants where there's no water shortage okay but they're saying oh there's a water shortage there's a food shortage I go bullshit there's no food shortage either there's no food shortage three there's energy shortage yeah guess what that's a that's a self-inflicted gunshot wound there's we have plenty of energy if we just you know turn on the spigots you know um four there's going to be another pandemic but this one's going to be bad and number five was oh yeah the russians are bad they're going to kill us all like what a bunch of shit when was this summit this was last year last november last nove. Last November. A year ago. A year ago.

Starting point is 02:15:27 Just scary shit. You know, when you hear people with power and influence up there and they're literally brainwashed and everybody, look at the World Economic Forum, that freaking shit show, you know? That guy's funny. You know, but these people are manipulators, man. And everybody else is not paying attention, you know? I hate when people say, well, you well, I don't watch the news anymore. It's like you should watch the news because they don't want you to watch the news because they don't want you to watch what they're doing to you. Well, the news – but the news is also all slanted. None of it's real.

Starting point is 02:15:57 Right, and that's why you should watch it because you need to watch the shit show and then do your own critical thinking. Yeah, but like people – that's the problem though. People will watch something like that passively when they do or they'll see the clips on social media. And you got to remember everyone, you know, they got the family and they got the job, they got their life. Yeah, we want to see people that make decisions for themselves and don't just listen to what's said. But if they're already listening passively,

Starting point is 02:16:23 I'm thinking of like smart people out there too, who it's just kind of passive. I see it happen all the time where people are, and I'm guilty of it sometimes too, because I'll hear someone be like, oh yeah, that thing. You know what I mean? Like there's so much going on.

Starting point is 02:16:36 It's like, not everyone is the president. Not everyone's the secretary of state. You know, they're all just normal people. I hear you. But I think that's kind of built into the system that that some of the people, the powers that be, take advantage of that because they know people have priorities that the news isn't paying their bills. That's right. You know? That's right.

Starting point is 02:16:54 It's the human condition, man. There's the leaders, and then there's those that follow. Unfortunately, most people are followers, and they trust everybody else to give them information and expect it to be truthful when it's not, you know, sadly. It's crazy times we're living in, very crazy times. Yeah, for sure. the military in 01 six weeks before 9-11 when you did that like the second you retired was your plan to go into contracting or okay no so then plane hits the buildings right is did that change for you well what happened was um i wanted to start so before i got out the military, I'm like, okay, I'm going to retire. What am I going to do when I get out? Okay. What am I good at pulling triggers?

Starting point is 02:17:50 And there's not a lot of need for that in the civilian world. And I'm thinking, well, what am I good at? What could I do? And I thought, Oh, you know what? I could start a security company, even though security wasn't making a lot of money back then either. You know, an average security manager at a big bank was making maybe $80,000 a year. And that was top money. You know, but I said, well, you know, something's better than nothing a big bank was making maybe $80,000 a year. And that was top money. But I said, well, you know, something's better than nothing.

Starting point is 02:18:07 I want to start my own business. I want to be self-employed. So I started a security company and had a partner. We started campaigning in the nuclear security sector, private sector. And then, anyways, made ourselves known. Nothing was happening. And then 9-11 happened. And bam, the doors opened wide open for us. And before you know it, we were making shitloads of money in the nuclear security sector, basically hardening all the nuclear power plants in the United States.

Starting point is 02:18:35 Whoa. Everything. I mean, all aspects of security, man. Yeah, we did really well. In fact, a lot of the security, security apparatus, edicist constructs that you see in that sector now was derived from my company. So much so that in 2004, GFRS came along and said, hey, we want to buy your company. And I was happy to do that because I didn't think this was going to live very long. But man, I could have never been more wrong.

Starting point is 02:19:02 Here we are. Security is still a big deal. The threat is still evolving. But I was smart enough to start a second company right away, sold it later on, 2011. So my goal was not to get into contracting. My goal was just to run a business and do security consulting. And then I got recruited by the government at the same time. Now, is this ground branch?

Starting point is 02:19:24 It's whatever you want to call it and uh and so anyways i ended up uh doing that almost nine and a half years and uh i wasn't supposed to i was supposed to do it for about a year that was my plan check check the block before you know it nine and a half years went by and i went down you know and then my i mentioned that ambush earlier the last ambush the final ambush i decided it's time to get out and do something different. So that's what brought me back to – Which ambush was that? Number five. It was – I got ambushed one night.

Starting point is 02:19:51 Basically, we got boxed in on this – it was one road down the Kunar River on both sides. Where? Kunar. Yeah, where? Afghanistan. Okay. So on both sides – You didn't talk about this on camera.

Starting point is 02:20:04 I thought I did. No. I started to maybe. I went on a tangent. All right't talk about this on camera. I thought I did. No. I started to maybe. I went on a tangent. All right. I always do. Tell the story. I need more coffee.

Starting point is 02:20:11 You want some more? No, I'm good. Okay. I'm actually getting a headache. I was going to say, I think you're about to fucking blow through that window if I give you more coffee. I know. I drank a gallon of it already. I had to, man.

Starting point is 02:20:19 I haven't had no sleep since Sunday. I've been traveling 32 hours on one flight from man from indonesia to manila anyway god damn i drove drove five hours last night yes and thank you for doing that that's all right there's a whole slip up with with the airport and everything i appreciate you but that ambush uh the one i'm referring to um what happened was we were on a road a river road small dirt road we drove into an area that that's about seven kilometers that the Taliban owned. It was their territory. Who's the way?

Starting point is 02:20:51 My group that we were traveling with. Got it. Small element. And there were mountains on both sides. We were basically on the road running along the river. You can't make a left or right turn. You got to go north or south down this road. And we had to stop.

Starting point is 02:21:07 And in very short order, we heard the Taliban on the radio. They had set up ambushes on both ends of our small convoy. And they were getting ready to hit us. And then I realized, oh, shit, the only way we're getting out of this is we got to run the gauntlet now. And we know they're going to hit us. We know they're going to blow us up IEDs. We knew who they were. And so we made the decision we're going to turn around,

Starting point is 02:21:30 run north again, run the ambush, hopefully fight through it, and then get back to our base camp. And I remember when we turned around that night, there was a total of, we had like 23 vehicles. And we're sped out about 50 meters each. So think about that for a minute. You know, we're over a kilometer long convoy, you know. And on that road, you can only travel maybe five miles an hour max speed.

Starting point is 02:21:53 It's just a really bad dirt road. So we turned around, and we already made contact once. We already had casualties. Guys got shot up. So we're already dealing with that. Got the vehicles turned around. And we had called in an AH-6 Apache attack helicopter. He actually had gone back and he had reloaded, refueled, got more ammunition, came back. And we decided, okay, we're going to let him run out in front of us, strafe the road.

Starting point is 02:22:20 And then once he strafes the road, we're going to start driving. As we're listening to the Taliban on the radio, because we had what's called an ICOM radio. That's what the Taliban use. So it's pretty much an open channel. And we had a couple, and our interpreters were listening to it, and they were telling us what the guys were doing. And they had actually changed their tactics over the years. They used to hear from a distance, long-range ambushes. And now what they were doing is getting right up on the road, right, and then actually getting between the vehicles.

Starting point is 02:22:46 So now we're in a crossfire. And they also knew that, you know, the helicopters, close air support can't engage them either, otherwise they wouldn't engage our vehicles, right? So they got a little smarter as time went on. And so we knew they were near the edge of the road, and we knew what they were going to do. In fact, we heard them say, hey, we're

Starting point is 02:23:04 going to hit this vehicle, this vehicle, and they got this weapon system, this weapon system. We're going to grab that, grab that, grab this. By the way, this goes all the way back to the Mujahideen and the Russians. They used to do that as well. They would usually hit the last vehicle in a Russian convoy and just clean it out because they knew the Russians were going to turn around and come back and help these guys.

Starting point is 02:23:20 They were going to keep on booking. So we knew what they were going to do, and we're sitting there and the helicopters came in, started straight from the road. And then the first vehicle left. I remember watching through my night vision goggles, all the guns open up and the instructions were, as I gave them, I said, shoot at everything and anything a Taliban could hide behind. Open every gun system on your truck and let them shoot, right? We had guns placed in every direction. So the first vehicle takes off at a blazing, like, five miles an hour as you're shooting. And then the second one and then the third one.

Starting point is 02:23:50 It's like March of the Penguins, you know? And I'm like the 15th truck back, and I got all the antennas on mine. It says, command vehicle, blow this one up, right? And I'm actually driving my command vehicle, and I got my Afghan interpreters with me, and I'm telling the same thing. I go, dude, as soon as I started driving, I said, shoot anything where a bad guy can hide behind it. You know, I said, don't relent until we get out of this thing. So as I'm sitting there, I'm watching the vehicles go one by one, the firefight starts.

Starting point is 02:24:18 I got time to watch the show and think about it before it's time for me to start driving my vehicle. Right. And all of a sudden I thought, you know what? I've never? I've been in a lot of ambushes, but I've never actually had to deliberately drive into an ambush to get out of it. But I have no choice this time. And then I started thinking, man, what if I don't make it out of this one? You know, I am driving the one with the antennas. And so I thought about my family. And I took a moment. I said, okay, I want to visualize every one of my children's face, everybody's face, my kids one by one see their face for the last time maybe their face their face their face their face this face and then what I want to do is get that all out of my mind so I'm no longer distracted by that right and knowing that would be maybe the last time I

Starting point is 02:24:58 ever think about them or see them you know now I need to do is be laser focused on how much time do you take to do that? A couple seconds. That's it. I just closed my eyes and thought about it, and I saw their faces, taking a deep breath, and got over that piece of it and then started moving out. And I remember I broke the strut on the front right side of my truck. So now I got the wheel rubbing on the side of the wheel well,

Starting point is 02:25:23 and it catches on fire. So I'm the only truck with its wheels on fire, doing five miles down the road, going, shoot me, shoot me. The wheels are on fire. Yeah, because of stretch, because the roads were so bad, you know? But I lived through it, got through the other side, and we had maybe seven trucks get shot up, a couple more casualties, but we got all the way out on the other side like i said they owned about seven kilometers of this dirt road and i remember we're listening to the radio and the commander's yelling at uh the guy that was had the clacker for the ieds because there was a there was a s turn and he had set the ieds up in the s turn right the apex here when we knew we had

Starting point is 02:26:00 to kind of slow down to come around that corner. And he never fired the IED. And the commander was like yelling, why didn't you blow up the IED? He goes, I couldn't, sir, because they were shooting so many bullets at me, I couldn't get my head up. I go, well, I guess the plan worked, you know. And so we didn't get IED'd. We did take some shots and stuff like that, some casualties. But, you know, we got out of it.

Starting point is 02:26:20 But after I got out of that, I thought, that's it. That's it. I made it. I'm done. That's it. It's all over. That was it for that. That was it for that war. I was out of that, I thought, that's it. That's it. I made it. I'm done. That's it. It's all over. That was it for that. That was it for that war.

Starting point is 02:26:29 I was out of there. Right, right, right. And I came back and started doing all the Hollywood stuff and the corporate stuff and Hong Kong stuff. So, yeah. Yeah, every story I hear about the Middle East during the global war on terror, it just, it almost doesn't feel real because it wasn't long ago. I mean,

Starting point is 02:26:49 it just ended like a year and a half ago or whatever it was. And, you know, the, the, the, it's, it's like,

Starting point is 02:26:56 it's halfway around the world, but you guys saw it. You saw exactly what it was. You saw life in danger at all times, not just your own, but you know, the people who live there and by their own people and in many cases with a place like afghanistan but when you

Starting point is 02:27:11 we touched on a little bit already but when you saw the imagery that looked like leaving saigon basically like a redux of that in 2020 august 2021 with afghanistan falling was there were you one of those guys who was like fuck we, we got to go there. We got to go find the interpreters that helped me over those years or whatever. What was going through your head? Yeah. So, all right. So while I was operating over there, I operated under a pseudonym, right?

Starting point is 02:27:38 I never used my real name. There's a reason for that, obviously. CIA. Well, now everybody knows. Dude, I walk down the street all around the world and people go, hey, are you the American badass? And the first thing I go, depends. Are you a good guy or a bad guy, you know?

Starting point is 02:27:57 I mean, I get that a lot. You know, obviously, I can't escape the mustache. And I don't care. I don't try to be. I'm not trying to. Yeah, that mustache, I can see that fucking thing. Well, I don't know. Everybody thinks I'm Stone Cold Steve Austin, so I take a lot of pictures pretending to be him.

Starting point is 02:28:10 Like, yeah. And sometimes it's the, what's the name of the Hulk? Hulk Hogan. Hulk Hogan. And then sometimes also, what's it, Vin Diesel, right? Not so much. My son actually. You get Vin Diesel?

Starting point is 02:28:21 Actually, my son gets Vin Diesel. He looks just like Vin Diesel. I was going to say. I'm calling bullshit on that one. Yeah i know i have gotten vin diesel i'm like you know those people are fucking blind yeah i don't know so yeah anyways um but to your point you know when that happened when kabul fell i don't know how a lot of my soldiers because they never knew me by my full name. Never. And they never had, but they found me.

Starting point is 02:28:49 They found me on social media, Facebook. Wow. And they called me Commander, because for all intents and purposes, I was their commander. And it was like, Commander, can you help me? Can you save me and my family? Can you come again? And I tried. Actually, I had a couple of guys and their families lined up to go out on a couple of lifts. One was an Australian bird.

Starting point is 02:29:06 And both of them fell through. I actually wrote them letters to get them passage through the gates, you know, so I could show, hey, look, you know, this guy, blah, blah, blah, you know, he's vouching for me. I tried everything I could to get these guys out, and to no avail. It was just very hard to get them out and and there was there even to this day they're still texting me I got a guy three days ago just text me commander commander how are you you know and this how it starts and

Starting point is 02:29:33 I know what they want can you get me can you help me actually part of my unit was killed in a raging firefight protecting our base and uh it was on the news and they all went down they went down blazing man to look to the man so half my unit's gone dead killed oh yeah trying to i'm sorry trying to defend the camp you know the base um and it did make the news i know who they are i know the camp some people know who it is, but those guys are gone. And there was only 42 guys in my platoon. And so I told my guys, I said, man, you're going to have to run for the hills, but there's nowhere to go. He said, as soon as they find out who you are and who you were working for, you're a dead man. In fact, I had one guy text me hiding with his family, literally texting me in hiding.

Starting point is 02:30:21 He said, they're outside right now looking for me. What can I do? I don't know what to even tell you at that point. You're Johnny on the spot. But I just felt so bad because they were pleading with me to help them. I'm the guy that was always there for them, leading them, leading in the combat, making decisions, taking care of their welfare. And I was the daddy, man. And suddenly, daddy can't

Starting point is 02:30:45 help them, you know, and it really made a lot of guys mad. You know, my guys were like, you know, now you just kick us to the curb, you know, the chips are down, you're just going to leave us behind. And unfortunately, I'm sure a lot of them are dead, you know, since then. They can't get out, the roads are blocked. They're contained. You know, it's, yeah, it's pretty irritating, man, when I think about that. These are guys, let me tell you how loyal these Afghans were. You know, I remember I had the same 42 dudes. They were some of the best Afghans over there. And we would go do ops all the time. In fact, we had a two-man rule in Afghanistan.

Starting point is 02:31:26 Two-man rule stated that, you know, as an American, you never go out without another American. You always, at least two Americans, no matter what you do, right? But I broke the rule all the time. I usually went out by myself with my guys. That's how much I trust them. In fact, they would stand there and look at me and go, Mr. Dale, don't you worry. He goes, we'll form a wall around you. We will not let anything happen to you. And I knew they wouldn't. I mean, these guys would freaking get it on, man. And I won their hearts and minds because I'm the guy that, you know, if something didn't go right, you know, hey, take the day off. Here's a bonus, you know. Man, we had tons of money for these guys, you know. And I made sure I took care of them, kept him happy. And every time I rotated out for a vacation before I come back, every time I left, I'm the only guy that I can remember where they would actually have a formation.

Starting point is 02:32:12 And they would lay out all these things like war rugs, women's traditional Afghan dresses, and cheesy jewelry and stuff, you know, all Afghan stuff for me. And they'd bring me out front and center and they want to, you know, thank me for, you know, mentor them and, you know, and they had all these gifts. The war rugs were really cool. I still have those, you know, and they're very famous. So it's a rug, it's got tanks on it and missiles and it's like handmade, you know, and hand drawn. They're kind of cool. And so the guys actually really loved me and took care of me and i knew that i would never have to worry about these guys turning on me i trained them i fed them i paid them you know i was just because that's what you do you you got to be good to your soldiers man you got to treat them like your brothers not like you know cannon fodder and um

Starting point is 02:33:02 and when this happened you know and they're asking for my help, and I'm totally helpless. I can't do anything. I've tried. I almost thought I had someone on an airplane, and that fell through. You know, they couldn't even get through the gates with the documents. Nothing, man. They were just left out hanging, you know, high and dry.

Starting point is 02:33:20 And, you know, I think back to Somalia. You know, so in Mogadishu remember right the big firefight october 3rd october 4th and i remember on 92 yeah yep 92 and i remember um the next morning maybe october 6th or 7th something like that i can't remember the exact day now uh colonel garrison at the time well General Garrison in the movie Black Hawk Down, he was the Delta Force commander, Colonel Garrison. Very good guy, very good officer, very well liked. And he had a formation very early in the morning,

Starting point is 02:33:56 like as soon as the sun came up in front of the hangars, we got all lined up, you know. And I remember he said, I still remember what he said i still remember what he said he goes gentlemen he goes war is nothing more than extension of politics and he goes he goes as of today we are going to redeploy go back to u.s operations are over and we're all standard just dumbfounded going wait a minute we're still missing men we're still missing there just dumbfounded going, wait a minute. We're still missing men. We're still missing people, right? Bodies. You know, these.

Starting point is 02:34:29 Someone's going to lose an election in November, though. You know, and this, remember, it was Bill Clinton in time. And we're all kind of looking at each other going, wait a minute. As a soldier, you're required to complete the mission, right? That's expected. If you have a mission, your job is to complete the mission. Mission and then men. Okay, that's the order. And you have a mission your job is to complete the mission mission and then men okay that's the the order and we have a mission our mission was to come there and basically kill or capture adid right the warlord that mission wasn't complete moreover we've already lost bodies

Starting point is 02:34:57 and we can't find them right and there's people out they need our help americans and so what we expect as soldiers is that our commanders, including the commander-in-chief, the president, Clinton, to have the same resolve to continue the mission and see it to its end. And he didn't. He said, no, we're going to basically, we got to punch the nose. We're going to go home. And I, well, all these men are dead.

Starting point is 02:35:22 For what and why? So you can just quit and go home? You know, we want to continue to campaign, at least get our bodies back, you know? And this guy just wants, he's done. Made no sense, right? And it's one of the few times where I really looked at, started looking at combat and war differently. I started looking at the politics of it all. And sometimes I started questioning, I was like, you know, what is this all about, man?

Starting point is 02:35:45 What do we do? Who am I? Why am I doing this then? You know? And then when Kabul happened, I go, there it is again. You know, we wasted so many lives. You know? Wasted so many lives.

Starting point is 02:35:56 To what end? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Right? So those are two occasions in my military career. You know, I'm 60 years old and I've been in the military since I was 18, you know, or working for the government in this capacity.

Starting point is 02:36:11 And those are two incidents that really stand out. And I'm like, wow, you know, the U.S. government had no problem wasting lives, good men, and putting their families and their children out there, you know, out their fathers. And they didn't have the balls to complete the mission the same thing they expect from us if i didn't complete the mission you know i get hung out to dry you know i'm a shit bird for not doing my job but they don't do their job you know and their excuse is what what what was the excuse there's no excuse you think there's other guys.C. Yeah. They can make decisions from there. Yeah. You know.

Starting point is 02:36:46 Exactly. Right? And so, you know, and, man, that's one of those things in my, you know, that really, really pisses me off when I think about it is I think about the good men like Gary, for example, Gary Gordon now that are gone for what? You know, Mark, a friend of mine. Who was Gary? Gary Gordon, Congressional Medal of Honor winner in Mogadishu oh right right um and others i mean they're dead now you know i

Starting point is 02:37:11 mentioned the seal earlier who died a year after you know is but you adopted a little baby girl you know it's like okay for what why'd all that happen you know um yeah sadly it is what it is um you know we're you, war is a racket. And, you know, when people... How do you stop that? You don't stop it. You know why? I'll quote Gustave Le Bon.

Starting point is 02:37:34 He said, man is a warring ape. We've been, since the dawn of time, since the dawn of man, we've had over 12,000 wars. You know, this is in our nature. War is our nature. This is what we do. You know, why? We our nature. War is our nature. This is what we do. You know, why? We're driven by three things. We're driven by three things, in my estimation.

Starting point is 02:37:50 Power, money, and pussy. At the end of the day, procreation. Those are the three things that drive us, right? And we fight for that shit, right? And we kill for that stuff. It's really what it comes down to. And as long as there's power, there's money, there's pussy, there's going to be conflict. And it's never going to end. And so there's no

Starting point is 02:38:11 utopia. Get over it. So now what we've got to do is if we can, first of all, we don't have to accept it, but just know this is a reality that combat and war is what it is. Prepare for it, but also know that life's not fair. And if you can at least come to terms with that, you know, combat and war is what it is. Prepare for it, but also know that, you know, life's not fair. And if you can at least come to terms with that, your life will be a little bit easier. You know, everybody wants to live in utopia, you know, kumbaya. It's not going to happen. It never happens, okay? Let's be realistic about it. So we're not going to stop it. We're not going to change it. You know, the best we can do is we've got to rein in the decision makers, the politicians. Those are the guys that are doing it.

Starting point is 02:38:49 You know, you and I aren't going out and starting fights. We're not going out and starting wars. But in order to rein them in, we have to rein in the people who really make the decisions on them, which is the people who pay them. Exactly. Exactly. So how do you do that? Because, again, and I'm not calling you out here or anything. We need guys like you in the world yeah but you know you're when you take contracts now like you're taking contracts

Starting point is 02:39:12 from some of these companies or the governments who are backed by those companies and stuff so how do you if if you know you're needed in so many of these situations which i'll agree you are where does the line stop to where you get to the point where guys aren't needed and how do you determine that line yeah this is for me personally this is why i pick and choose what i do this is why you won't find me in ukraine i ain't gonna have i got nothing to do with that you're not gonna find me in israel i got nothing to do with that it doesn't affect my life doesn't affect the American way of life. I pick and choose my fights. The stuff I've done, if I'm going to kill terrorists, I'm okay with that

Starting point is 02:39:51 because they're never going to abate, and all I can do is become a speed bump for them. So I pick and choose what I do. Yes, I want to get paid. I don't do it because the money's good. I make money doing it. Look, I got a security company already. I don't need to go out and do this kind of work. I never did need it because the money's good. I make money doing it. Look, I got a security company already. Right.

Starting point is 02:40:07 I don't need to go out and do this kind of work. I never did need to do this kind of work. But what makes you want to do it? Like when you get a job where you got to go into a dangerous place, because you said you haven't been in a war zone since 2015, but we talked about some other jobs off camera, which you may get into that you do. I mean, you're going into dangerous places for dangerous people sometimes. To help people, to actually help people. That's the thing. Actually, everything I do is to help people. And people sometimes. To help people, to actually help people. That's the thing.

Starting point is 02:40:25 Actually, everything I do is to help people. And I get paid to help them, right? I mean, I've got, you know, I take a lot of risk. I mean, I've done, in the last four weeks, I've done at least four different projects in different countries that are not necessarily friendly countries. In fact, communist countries. And I've had to help people that were in trouble. They weren't criminals. They were just in trouble through no fault of their own. And I show up and I help and I get them out. I don't go out and save criminals. I don't go out and save bad guys. That's not what I do. My job is to help those

Starting point is 02:41:02 that can't help themselves. They find themselves in a place where they're stuck. I have one guy that I won't mention the country because I may need to go back in there. But, yeah, I have to be very careful how I couch this stuff. But I have one guy call me. He goes, hey, man. He goes, I've literally been – I've been locked in this country for five years. They put a travel ban on me. And I said, why?

Starting point is 02:41:26 What happened? He goes, well, he had a girlfriend there. That's how it starts. Yep. He had a baby. She didn't want to marry him. They got joint custody of the kids. She wouldn't let him see the kids.

Starting point is 02:41:38 So he had to go through an enforcement agency there. By the way, this is a communist country. And he's got to pay the enforcement agency to make the arrangements so he can see his kid. He paid them. They didn't make the arrangements. He got mad. Came back and tried it again. He goes, this time I'll pay you after you make the arrangements.

Starting point is 02:41:57 And they're like, no, you'll pay us first. He goes, no, I'll pay you after. They go, oh, yeah, watch this. And they literally put a travel ban on him, called immigration, and locked him down. He was a criminal, didn't do anything wrong. So he he's not allowed to work and he can't leave the country can't do anything so and look this happens a lot of different places okay a lot of southeast asia asia middle east i've done this before um and it sucks and and you know again we talk about you

Starting point is 02:42:20 know our country and you know we need to think about how bad other people have in the world. Imagine being locked in. I call it a velvet cage. You can't get out. And he's like, I've been here long enough, man. He goes, I want to get out. He goes, I want to bring my son out, who's five. And I said, well, that's going to be different. I said, I can get you out.

Starting point is 02:42:39 I'm not sure about the kid yet. How would you go about getting out a guy like that? What are you looking for? It's pretty simple. It's easy.'s easy you know what look you're not going through the airport you're not going through immigration um that's that's never going to happen um you're just going to literally have to go across the borders you know and you got that's that's the tricky part how do you get them across the borders you know and take them out to a friendly country and then work them out of there. So I do that.

Starting point is 02:43:06 That's what I do. What goes in – so let's make up a couple countries here because you don't want to use that example. Fair enough. Let's say you got a guy in – I'm trying to think of my geography here. Let's say you have a guy in Syria and he can't get out. Yeah. And you need to get him into – what's to the east of – Iraq's to the south. What's to the east of Syria?

Starting point is 02:43:31 What touches Syria? Is that Iran? No, no. East of Syria, you have Iraq and you have Turkey. Turkey. Okay. So you want to get someone out. That's perfect.

Starting point is 02:43:50 You want to get someone out of Syria into Turkey, which we some issues with too but you know it's a little better how how are you determining where on the border to take them okay and what to do yeah I'll tell you how it works how I do it is one I start with an intel analysis so I look at the map studies and I look for potential crossover points. I look at border checkpoints. I look at things like trafficability, population densities, a lot of things you have to consider, right? What you're looking for is a hole in the net, in the fence that you can go through undetected, right? And so that requires not just a map reconnaissance. You start with a map reconnaissance

Starting point is 02:44:21 and then you need to do a ground reconnaissance. You need to go put eyes on and confirm, that's this is doable um it starts with that and then it goes to developing a plan right which the plan can be pretty detailed in that you know you got to have a cover story cover for action cover for status why are you here what are you doing oh i just came out here driving around the desert just to hang out you know or you know or i'm in the i'm in the um what's the word i'm looking for i'm in a public park in the jungle just looking at the monkeys that actually happened to me that actually happened one time we were actually being tracked uh we had a tracker on our on our car didn't know it and we're going up north to the border and uh luckily there luckily, there is a park there.

Starting point is 02:45:06 And it's all jungle. And the guy that I have with me is getting a text message. He goes, hey, are you guys going to the border? Oh, shit. How did I know that, right? So yeah, we got a track on us. So now we got to figure out, OK, what's the plan for that? So I do what's called false insertion plan for that so you do we did i

Starting point is 02:45:25 do what's called false insertion so i drive down different roads in different directions do loopy loops turn around park the car for i'll go to a restaurant you know and oh no we're gonna go up here and meet some chicks you know and uh whatever right so everything is so if anybody is tracking you which they are like on a gps and a map then you know it's like these guys are idiots they're all over the place you know what are you a map, then, you know, it's like, these guys are idiots. They're all over the place, you know, what are they doing? Just driving around randomly, you know, but somewhere in that process, you drop off your customer and you point them in the right direction or you take them across, you walk them across, you know, walk them to where he's got to go. And then is it on them at that point? Sometimes. Sometimes it requires more, but usually the goal is to get them free,

Starting point is 02:46:07 get them to where they can get to an embassy, whether it's an American or whatever embassy, whatever national. So they can get to the embassy and go, hey, man, this is what happened to me. Passport's burned, lost, whatever, compromised, and can I get a temporary passport to get out you know and go home so a lot of times people some people are you know they understand that it's like yeah roger that you're american we're helping you actually there's sometimes like and this happened to one of my clients not too long ago he's like karen right there everywhere karen like oh my god that's

Starting point is 02:46:42 illegal what you did you can't do that it bitch, I was locked up for five years in the country. I couldn't get out of for doing nothing wrong, but want to see my son, you know? And you're worried about it being illegal? And she's chewing them up and down, you know? And Jesus Christ, Jiminy, you know? And so I'm the opposite of that. I'm like, dude, I'm going to help you get out of there because I'd hate to be in that situation myself too, you know?

Starting point is 02:47:05 And- Do you talk with a potential client like that on open email? No. I was going to say. How are they contacting you? We use different – there's all kinds of ProtonMail and all kinds of – But how do they know where you are? Is it usually someone that's connected to you? They know.

Starting point is 02:47:20 People watch me. I mean I've been on so many podcasts and people know who I am, right? And they reach out. They find a way to. Yeah, it's easy to find me, right? I don't hide it. In fact, I think you can find my phone number on the internet. But yeah, if you want to find me, I'm easy to find.

Starting point is 02:47:37 Easy peasy. I usually answer most emails anyways. But like I said, I don't do nothing. Yeah, you could call that illegal but you know there's fine line between you know the law and then what's doing what's right you know

Starting point is 02:47:53 and sometimes it's just to me it's a matter of doing what's right and and I've there's been several guys I know that are in this boat in different countries and it's not right they haven't seen their family their children in years you know um not because it was their fault just because of circumstances the way it fell out they got caught in it you know remember when uh in 2010 dubai you know boom man everything was going good and also in the bottom fell out you know there were a lot of guys

Starting point is 02:48:22 a lot of expats that- What happened in 2010? The economy crashed in Dubai, okay? Everything went under badly. And a lot of guys went over and invested, started companies, and then boom, the bottom falls out, and now they're not getting their money, right? And they owe money. And try going to that part of the world and get a speeding ticket and don't even know it.

Starting point is 02:48:45 And you show up at the airport, turn your rental car in, you ain't getting out until you pay that rental car. Right. And they know. And they pop your visa right there, right? So imagine you own a bank $500,000 or you owe a hospital a bunch of money for something. And all of a sudden, you got no money coming in because the economy crashed from under you. And guess what? You're not going nowhere.

Starting point is 02:49:05 They pull your visa, your travel, your passport, and you're locked in until you pay. And you can't work either, by the way. So you'll be walking around aimlessly in a country that's not yours, no way to pay and no way to make money. And you're like, what do I do? So I kind of have an issue with that because, you know what? Why don't you just lock the guy up?

Starting point is 02:49:24 You know, this is kind of stupid, right? It's like having a pet dog. You go, I don't want to feed him no more. Just turn him loose on the side of the road and fend for yourself. What is he supposed to do? He's not trained to hunt. He's just a dog. He's a domestic dog, right?

Starting point is 02:49:38 And you do this to an expat. And it's not Americans either all the time. It's a lot of different nationalities that get caught up in these things. And so now you got to get them out, you know. And there's only limited ways to do it. It's a risky business. I don't do much of it. I'm not – at my age, I'm not prepared to kind of risk that much anymore.

Starting point is 02:49:59 I'm more content with just building my business in Indonesia and doing what I do. You know, I do a lot of coaching. I forgot to mention that the one thing that i really do do the most and i like the most is i do what i call um mind body engineering psychosom engineering and basically it's performance coaching um i really delve into the in the world of um the subconsciousness autogenic conditioning neurolinguistic programming self-meditation um self-hypnosis all these things i go into that and i teach people how to enhance their personal performance as well as their professional performance and future performance um that's what i really focus on how to be successful at anything

Starting point is 02:50:40 that you do in life um i think i have the resume to support that, you know, the success piece of it. That's really what I enjoy doing. That's actually how I meet a lot of people because they see my posts, my videos, and like, I want to talk to this guy a little bit more about this and that and that. Wow. And so I've actually got a lot of connections globally, a lot of clients globally, a lot of connections in different space. So, I mean, I've got friends everywhere if I need them, you know. Yeah. And I've built a lot of business around that as well. I'm into trading commodities, stuff like that. I'm getting into oil trading, stuff like that.

Starting point is 02:51:17 That's out of left field. Yeah. So I wear a lot of hats, man, you know. And I don't just – I'm just not a to use your word in the beginning an assassin or mercenary no um i'm actually a i'm a security consultant advisor um but i'm also that's what they call it these days yeah well yeah in combat i'm an advisor in the civilian world i'm a consultant right it's kind of weird but yeah um but you know i'm a coach a life coach that's kind of what i do primarily i'm an author i'm an actor i'm a stunt

Starting point is 02:51:50 man i do a lot of different things you know i do trainings um you know it's uh i could wear a lot of different hats dog trainer um i had a guy pay me a lot of money just to fly back and forth to singapore to train his dog that's it yeah it's just wow what a nice vacation we go with it for a week they got a lot of money in singapore right yeah they're loaded man i was gonna say it's expensive there too but it's one of those but yeah um isn't that wasn't the thing you were talking about before camera wasn't there that one story wasn't that client from there yeah yeah that was yeah that story that you referencing um yeah i got a call from that particular client, in fact. Said, hey, my daughter's in Guatemala and she's in trouble.

Starting point is 02:52:32 Can you get her out? She's 17 years old. And basically, it was a school trip gone bad. She was going. Yeah, it was. A girl's school trip, too. They were boarding school. I think they all graduated.

Starting point is 02:52:42 She was 17. And all the girls thought hey it's a great idea let's go to guatemala you know for graduation so i don't know who picked the uh the hostel that he stayed at but uh um man it was some spooky shit because i went there i had to go to get her suitcases after i already recovered her and so he basically asked me if i knew anybody could get her out of there and i'm like well i wouldn't trust anybody to get her out because as soon as they know who you are and she is,

Starting point is 02:53:07 she ain't getting out until you pay a lot of money. You know, that's it. So I ended up going and getting her. To make a long story short. Went down there, picked her up. I went on a Monday morning and by Thursday morning I delivered her to Singapore and put her in the hands of a thermometer.

Starting point is 02:53:22 Yeah, you know. But that's actually pretty easy so i you know i put that in the in the recovery category i do recovery repatriation and rescue operations as well um this one was a recovery you know where's the wildest place you ever did one of those man i can't tell you not that i want to i can't i see after that's okay me mentioned guatemala because i didn't do anything over the top right i just flew there picked her up brought her out um but the other stuff i gotta be careful because i mean you go back you know that's fine well we're minus jobs like that or something to that nature without detail of that yeah is have

Starting point is 02:54:09 you ever been somewhere where you're legit spooked being there is there a country that comes to mind with that um yeah saudi arabia why uh, it's a very strange culture. Let me tell you how this, again, talk about freedom and things like that. If you, let's say today, we say something negative about Saudi Arabia, right? Oh, that sucks, whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, and you post it on social media. And five years from now, you go to Saudi Arabia. Do you know they can arrest you oh yeah for something you posted five years ago yeah right uh think about that for a minute so i'm never going to saudi arabia yeah you're literally

Starting point is 02:54:53 walking on eggshells when you go over there and you know you're being watched um what do you mean being watched everybody's watching and they're listening right they're intel everybody you show up as a white guy you know an expat especially an american you know you're gonna people gonna pay attention to you um can they get your can they wire into your iphone when you land probably yeah yeah they got a lot of capabilities you know why they got them because we gave them to them yeah yeah so you know you're not going to escape all that so you got to be very careful what you do over there anything that could be construed as business if you're on their tourist passport and you do anything that could be construed as business um you could end up in jail right away

Starting point is 02:55:36 you know and they can detain you as long as they want until they process it and pass judgment like literally you could you could end up being a detention center for 10 years or two years and nothing's happening. You don't get to talk to anybody and you're waiting for them to make a decision on did you do something wrong or not. It's a very scary place, a very scary place. I do not like being there just because of that. You know, coming out, I remember I was leaving the country and you know they scanned my my bags as i was leaving the country to go into the terminal and i had a key chain in my backpack that had a small um in fact it had a small if you could see this this little metal gun here oh yeah yeah about that size it was a key ring and I had my house keys on it.

Starting point is 02:56:26 It was in my backpack buried. I didn't even know it was still in there. Right. And, uh, anyways, they found that they pulled me in a secondary. They laid it out there and they're like,

Starting point is 02:56:36 this is not allowed. This is illegal. What? Yeah. And I'm not shitting. Right. And I'm almost gotten a pissing contest with the guy. I was like,

Starting point is 02:56:43 are you a freaking, are you an idiot? You know, because who am I going to kill with that thing? You know, and it was illegal. Wow. It was illegal. And he was really starting to, you know, starting to dress me down on this one.

Starting point is 02:56:55 And I'm like trying to have a conversation. I said, no, this is my key chain for my house key. You cannot have this. I'm getting on air. I'm leaving your country. You cannot have this. And it started just i'm getting on air i'm leaving your country you cannot have this and it started getting a little you know a little heated you know and i remember reminding myself comp stock you're not gonna win not in their country yeah you know shut up or you end

Starting point is 02:57:14 up in that detention center you know you know for for for carrying a firearm through an airport that's how they're gonna even though it's this freaking big right so i said can i at least have my key off the damn thing he kind of almost was hesitant to give me my key. I was like, finally got my key, you know, and I gave him the stupid thing, you know. I'm like, oh, God dang, man. I had another thing. It was a little tiny screwdriver set. And the screwdrivers were like maybe an inch long.

Starting point is 02:57:38 Oh, trying to take it on the plane? Yeah, I had my backpack. It's a little, it's not a weapon. You can't do anything with it, you know, unless they thought I was going to take the. I think a guy like you could do something with that. Oh, my backpack. It's a little... It's not a weapon. You can't do anything with it, you know, unless they thought I was going to take the... I think a guy like you could do something with that. Oh, my God. Dude, I could do more with this soup bowl than I can anything else, man.

Starting point is 02:57:52 The screwdriver. You know, let me put this thing together and do something. Drill some guy's head. Drill the doors, the knobs off the cockpit door. Well, we know we can't do that. That we learned. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:58:07 Anyway, it's just... Yeah, a lot of lunacy out there man and uh you just gotta shut your mouth respect the rules and move out you know and sometimes that can be a little tough you know some people can really grate your nerves with some of the crap you know um that was one of the places i was a little uncomfortable with um nah i'd say a little uncomfortable with nah I'd say a lot uncomfortable with I always just felt like I'm always being watched you know and I just there's other places I've been to where I know I was being watched

Starting point is 02:58:33 I know they had cameras in the rooms every time I show up in country I stay in a hotel they put me in the same room I mean I already know that you know so you waving to all of them undressing you don't give me a little show you know oh yeah there's yeah a friend of mine has been going back and forth to saudi arabia a little bit and you know he talks about some of some of the slight outward

Starting point is 02:59:03 shifts in culture. Some women can drive now. They're making some basic steps, I guess. But he talks about also how a lot of it is so beautiful and clean. And the price to that is that the level of strictness and what they do to people, just taking them off the streets, smallest thing wrong. Yeah. Yeah. It's scary. I mean, you j you jaywalk yeah i wouldn't call it clean either honestly um well the places he's been i'm i'll forget the cities he's been in but the places he's been are like some of the more yeah up you know upscale type destination places they're trying to show to people yeah

Starting point is 02:59:43 yeah they're actually inviting a lot of tourists in right because i think what destination places they're trying to show to people yeah yeah they're actually inviting a lot of tourists in right because i think what's happening they're going to the oil thing is starting to dry up and they're trying to what do you mean well i think what's happening is maybe they see the threat in the future of the electric cars um but there's a for whatever reason they're trying to attract more tourism and uh i gotta be honest with you we went there as tourists and we went to all the tourist sites and it was nothing there i'm like what i thought there was something cool here to see but there's actually nothing see it went to one castle it was like it looked like a sand castle on the

Starting point is 03:00:14 beach that a kid built like that's it that's the castle it's like did they just kind of build this thing up real quick you know it's not even a good one you know it's just yeah um i yeah i don't know what there is to see there i didn't see anything worth uh wasting my time is what i did but uh who knows you know maybe i didn't look look hard enough but i've been a lot of bad places i've been a lot of shitty countries i've been to some countries that are actually very surprising like vietnam for example um it's a communist country but i was, man, how well organized it was and people were thriving and, you know, people were, some people were driving really nice cars and, you know, people could do what they kind of want, you know, had a lot of freedom. I was like,

Starting point is 03:00:56 okay, it's not what I imagined, you know. Not at all. You know, I remember one time I was riding a motorcycle and pouring rain and I had to go a long way. I rode this bike for like 16 hours, man. And it was pouring rain. I didn't have a poncho. I pull over to this little whatever, little shop on the outside, little cafe thingy. And I walk in and it's pouring rain.

Starting point is 03:01:17 I asked the lady, I said, hey, you guys sell any ponchos? And she goes, no. I go, ah, it's raining, you know. And she didn't have, okay. She goes, wait, wait, wait. She runs to the back room and she brings out ah, it's raining, you know. And she didn't have, okay. She goes, wait, wait, wait. She runs to the back room and she brings out her own personal poncho, you know. And she gives it to me. She goes, here, here, here.

Starting point is 03:01:31 I said, oh, how much? How much? She goes, no, no, no. You don't have to pay. I said, no, no, really. She said, no, no, no. I said, okay. I said, I'll buy all that stuff.

Starting point is 03:01:38 I want to buy all that right there, you know. And I bought some stuff and I gave her a whole bunch of money, you know, on top of that, you know. But I was actually surprised how nice she was to me. Like, wow. But then there were other places I went to, like especially the men. I go get gas. I'm like, hey, I need gas. I'm like, no, I just want gas.

Starting point is 03:01:54 It's like they had an attitude. I'm like, whoa, just gas. Fill it up. Here's the money. Sounds like the gas station around here. Yeah, it's probably no different. Maybe it was something personal. I don't know.

Starting point is 03:02:04 But overall. Yeah, you pull up. I'm like, can can i get some gas it's like they're fucking they're pissed you pulled up i'm like i'm not paying you gas for what well for what what do you get yeah fuck out of here no actually uh i was actually surprised that was one of the places that really surprised me um my wife wants to go there and i said yeah i'll probably take her back over there one of these days but um i was mentioned in the car, Hong Kong was one of my favorite cities until the Chinese took it over. That was kind of a shit show. I was there in 2015 when the British handed Hong Kong back to China.

Starting point is 03:02:36 And when I lived there, man, it was so cool, man. You know, everybody spoke English, you know. Of course, they spoke Chinese, you know. Of course, he spoke Chinese, you know. Just seemed like a really cool place to live. Very well organized, good infrastructure, transportation system. You know, the Brits had it, you know. So it was pretty squared away. And then I was there when they were protesting, right?

Starting point is 03:02:59 The protest started. Yeah, yeah, 2019. Oh, my God, man. There were thousands and thousands and thousands of people on the streets waving American flags. American flags, right? Were you doing a job there at the time? I was protecting a billionaire bodyguard. I was running a security deal for a multi-billionaire investment banker.

Starting point is 03:03:14 So I lived there downtown. And I watched these parades all day, whatever, just demonstrations. And, you know, it was amazing. They were literally, you know, flying the don't trade on me flags, you know, was amazing they were literally you know um you know flying the don't trade on me flags you know the yellow um 2a you know american flags you know i'm like wow and they're they're asking they wish they had you know the second amendment because they're disarmed and there's going to get taken over or whatever chinese government's going to take over and i knew they're going to be doomed man I felt really bad for them because they were actually really cool people

Starting point is 03:03:47 and good people. And then once all that happened, the transition happened, I went back a few times, and it was so different. They took English out of the schools. A lot of the rural people now came to the city, you know, and they're selling their wares and stuff, and they can't speak English. They don't want to speak English. It just seemed like, yeah,

Starting point is 03:04:10 it just didn't seem like a welcoming place anymore, you know? Well, what do you think of China and all that? And the reason I ask that is because I kind of go, all right, guys, that is the end of part one of two of my sit-down with Dale Comstock. In this next episode, we're going to pick up right where we left off talking all about China and Dale was entertaining as hell for the rest of it as well, going into a whole bunch of new topics. So please hit that subscribe button, hit that like button on the video as well, and also hit that notifications bell so you get notified when the

Starting point is 03:04:39 new episode comes out. If you're not following me over on Instagram, you can check out the podcast at Julian Dory podcast and also on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. Also, don't forget to check out the playlist down in the description below. They'll take you to episodes that covered similar topics to this one that you also might enjoy. See you guys for the next one with Dale.

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Julian Dorey Podcast - [VIDEO] - Ex-Delta Force Mercenary "GRIM REAPER" - Dale Comstock | 188

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